About a month ago, I had surgery on my foot.  When I was a child my feet were usually too big for my shoes, which caused my big toe to bend inward.  Where the joint bent, a bone deposit grew and kept growing. Last winter, I went skiing and since the boots don’t give like shoes do, my foot was basically crushed in the boot.  After a night of skiing, blisters formed and popped leaving a sock caked in blood.  Two weeks later, I tried to go ice skating and it hurt so bad I took the boots off after about 5 minutes.

After talking to the doctor, he said that he could fix it and if I didn’t get it fixed, it would likely get worse.  Fixing it involved cutting the bone growth out, breaking the toe, removing all the ligaments and cartilage from the knuckle, drilling a pin from the outside into the bone, and putting a screw in there to help fuse the bones and keep it all together.

The first week after the surgery was hell.  I slept most of the time with the help of some pain pills, and it was mostly a blur except I remember it being really uncomfortable to sleep with a surgical boot, which acts like a caste.  After the first week, I started taking the boot off to sleep and actually got a good night’s sleep.  Since then it has progressively healed.  I have two more weeks to go with this boot and my right foot will be healed.  After that, I need to have the left foot done, which will start the whole thing over again.

What an ordeal… but it’ll make it possible for me to do the things that I like to do, namely hiking & skiing.  Anything that requires the use of any type of boot will now be a lot easier to deal with.  Hopefully, this will help make it easier to meet some of my other health goals.

One of my goals is to fix up the yard.  It looks horrible right now, and I want to make it nice and hospitable.  Each year, I try and add a few plants around the house, and most of the time, I forget what I planted, how big they are supposed to get, etc.

This year, I’m going to write down what I’ve planted and their care instructions.

In the flowerbed below our front window, I planted 3 Fold Coin Asteriscus plants. They are yellow perennial flowers that are supposed to end up 3′ wide and 1′ tall.  They are full sun, require low amounts of water, and will survive at 30 degrees F or above.  The card states that it is a compact matting to mounding evergreen perennial that has dark yellow, wide-disked, daisy-like flowers that rest atop elliptical, silky, green leaves.  Blooms winter to spring and blooms with some flowers all year.  The minimum temperature of 30 degrees might make it so it dies this next winter, so we’ll have to see.

I also bought 3 purple/mauve wallflowers for the same flower garden as the Asteriscus plants.  The wallflower is a full sun plant, requires a medium amount of water, flowers in the spring, will get 30 inches tall and 18 inches wide and is hearty up to -40 degrees F.  The card states that it has fragrant flowers that are great in the rock gardens, cut, or planted with spring-flowering bulbs.

We also planted a rose bush in the same area with redish-orange blooms.  It sort of sticks out because of the contrasting colors, so if the yellow flowers die this year, we may change it up with more red flowers next year.

In the back yard, we planted 2 flowering pear trees.  One of them is supposed to get 30′ tall and 40′ wide, while the other one will get 30′ tall and 20′ wide.  We positioned them so that they’ll eventually block some of the sun on our house in the late summer evenings to help cool down the house.

I also have a 20′ tall blue spruce in the back yard, and a 8′ tall apple tree.

All of the new plants received a dose of root starter fertilizer, the existing trees got some tree spike fertilizer that’s supposed to be slow acting so that the tree will get it’s food all year long.  Everything also got a dose of insect repellent, which is poured into the ground and sucked up through the roots.  The apple tree was especially bad with earwigs last year, so hopefully this will help.

I’m pleased to announce that the 3rd revision of The Lens Flare is now live. The Lens Flare is a large friendly community of artists and photographers who use the site to upload images, share ideas, and learn from each other. It’s located at http://www.thelensflare.com

To quickly recap the new features, they include:

• More Images: Up to 500 images on the basic free account, 1000 images for silver, and unlimited for the gold account.
• Less expensive to upgrade your account.
• Multiple Image Sizes: 150px thumbnail, 500px standard image, 900px large image, and 2 250px detail images.
• Dashboard - to quickly get to important links.
• Albums - to organize your pictures however you want.
• Videos - updated art and photography videos from YouTube.
• Camera Reviews - to help you decide on which camera to purchase.
• Search - the search page has been improved.
• Image Categories - categories are formed automatically based on the pictures on the site.
• Member Profile - customize your homepage with the profile fields.
• Stat Counter - view traffic to your pages, where in the world they come from, etc by integrating your statcounter.com account with your pages on The Lens Flare. To do this, add your stat counter codes on your profile page.
• Image Management - easier management of your images, with stats showing traffic trends over the last 7 and 30 days to your pictures.
• Less Spam - spam registrations and crude comments will be far fewer with the addition of several features to hinder automated programs from submitting information to the site.
• New Look and Feel - the site’s look and feel has been completely redone to promote a more professional appearance.

Thank you and I look forward to seeing you on the website.

–
http://www.thelensflare.com - Art and Photography Community Gallery

One of my goals is to have a million visitors combined for all of my websites in a year.  In 2007, 412,425 people visited my websites, with the majority of them going to The Lens Flare, my photography and art community.  I’ve been working on a new version of that site for several months and have just released a beta version to the members of that community.  In about two weeks, I plan on making the beta version live.  The new site is so much better, I’m hoping that it will attract a million visitors in 2008. 

I’ve been using my Lucasi pool cue for about a month or so now and love it.  The shaft is slightly smaller in diameter from the typical house cue, which helps me put more English on the ball. It has a really smooth wood feel. I don’t like shafts with a luster finish such as a typical Cuetec cue because it tends to skid along my bridge hand, and I’m constantly buffing it with a piece of leather.  Not so, with the Lucasi maple shaft. 

The tip is pretty soft which grips the ball for even more control. Soft tips probably don’t last as long as a hard tip, but I feel that it really helps my game, so it’s worth it.

It hits the ball really solid, and this might be all in my head, but I feel that my game has improved since getting the stick.

The Canadian dollar is now worth more than the US dollar.

Today, Nov. 27, 2007, the US dollar is trading at about 99 cents of the Canadian Dollar.  In November of 2003, the US dollar was worth approximately $1.57 Canadian dollars.

Is it any wonder though when you look at our national debt? The national debt was pretty much flat for 40 years until 1983. From 1983 to now, the debt has been increasing except for 2000 and 2001, and over the past 5 years, the debt has increased from roughly 6 trillion to over 9 trillion. Somehow, we’ve managed to spend an extra 50% of our total debt in 5 years.

Every time I go to the grocery store, I’m surprised by how many items cost more from week to week. 2 liter bottles of cola were regularly 89 cents not too long ago, and now they’re $1.29. Oreo cookies were regularly $2.50 a bag a few months ago, and now they’re $3.69. When every item at the grocery store that costs under a dollar is increased by 10 or 15 cents, it adds up very quickly.

Supposedly our inflation rate isn’t out of the norm and has been floating between 1-3% for the past 7 years, but the value of our dollar is dropping fast, and we’re compounding the problem by spending way too much money. Our government can’t afford to spend another 50% of our debt over the next 5 years.

We need to make some hard choices soon or we’re all going to be in a world of hurt. If we continue on this way, we’re going to end up with another great depression or worse, a bankrupt country. We have a war going on in Iraq, which doesn’t look like it’s going to end any time soon. If we pull out now, we’re going to be in a worse situation because Iraq will fall apart. I’m not sure it’s the wisest thing in the world though to take the financial burden of starting a new country when we have so many problems in our own country to deal with.

Now we have politicians saying that we should have universal health care. How on Earth can we justify the expense when we’re 9 trillion dollars in debt and have a dollar that’s worth 63% of its value 4 years ago?

How can we justify any new expenses? Building a wall to stop immigrants? Are we serious? Let’s pay off our debt first otherwise we may not have a country to put a wall around.

The US has the strongest military in the world, but wars can be won without firing a single shot. All they have to do is buy us, and that’s exactly what they’re doing.

The US people need to come together. We need to think more about “we” instead of “I”. Rather than farming work out to India or China, we should hire people from the US. The more people we can get off of welfare and out of poverty, the better our economy will become and the less our government will be burdened with the expense of supporting people. The more we buy products made in the US, the better off our economy will be. If we can’t buy US Products or hire US citizens, then at least we should support friendly countries. I don’t know how many times lately that I’ve heard about cheap Chinese products causing health problems such as lead paint on Thomas the Tank Engine trains. There has been recall after recall of toys and other Chinese products because in all honesty, they aren’t our friends, and they don’t care if we get sick or die from their unsafe products.

The other side of the coin is that we need to get out of debt as individuals. We need to make the hard decision of cutting back and paying off those credit cards and other high interest loans. I heard recently that the average American spends 20 dollars for every 19 he or she earns. With spending habits like that, is it any wonder that our government is in the same boat?

We can’t keep going on like this, and we can’t rely on our government any longer to bail us out of financial burdens. If we’re on welfare, we need to do everything we can to get off of welfare. If we have a dispute, we need to resolve it ourselves before wasting time and money in the courts. There are a million ways we all can make a difference, and if we don’t now, it’s all going to come crashing down around us in the not too distant future.

Sources:

Inflation Rates: http://www.inflationdata.com/Inflation/Inflation_Rate/CurrentInflation.asp
National Debt: http://www.brillig.com/debt_clock/faq.html
USD to CAD Value Trend: http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=USDCAD=X&t=5y&l=on&z=m&q=l&c=

At work, the president of the company is very good at pool, specifically 9-ball.  We have a pool table in the center of the office and there’s a standing challenge that if we can beat him 5 out of 9 games, he’ll buy us a pool cue.  I’ve been working here for 10 months and after about 20 matches, I finally won.  I feel really good about that match because I didn’t win by shear luck - no easy 9 ball combos, 9 ball breaks, etc.  Every win was earned and I came close to running several of the tables.

For my prize, I’m getting a Lucasi L-P70 Pool Cue.  The butt and forearm is ebony with crimson inlays surrounded by micara.  The wrap is black Irish linen with red specs, and it features three crimson rings surrounded by silver set in black phenolic. 

One of the reasons I went with Lucasi is the uniloc quick release pin so that I can take it apart quickly.  It came with a hard rock maple shaft and Le Pro leather tip.

I’ve heard nothing but good things about this cue, and can’t wait for it to arrive (it’s being shipped UPS Ground).

One of my goals is to attract a million people in a year to my websites collectively.  From January 1 to September 30 of 2007, there have been 312k visitors to my various websites (averaged out to 416k in a year).  The Lens Flare, my art and photography community, has received the majority of visitors for good reason.  There are over 30,000 images on there.  However, my fantasy & science fiction site, Desert Realm, still gets a fair amount of traffic even though I haven’t done much with that site recently.  I’ve recently added 2 blogs to the mix.  This blog and my tech blog, Ask Some Geeks, is starting to get a little traffic, which should increase as more postings are written.

A few weeks ago, we stayed with my wife’s sister in a small town in eastern Idaho called Victor near the  Grand Tetons.  While we were there, we visited the Upper and Lower Mesa Falls and Cave Falls inside Yellowstone National Park.   We were there during the middle of the day, which is probably the worst time to shoot a waterfall because the amount of light needs to be really small to keep the shutter open long enough to capture the motion of the water. 

I used a special filter called an ND2 (neutral density) filter.  This is like putting a pair of sunglasses on your camera, and set up the camera so that it would limit the amount of light getting inside by using the smallest aperture the lens would allow and setting the ISO to the lowest number the camera will go.  For my Nikon D50 and 28-80mm lens, the smallest aperture is f/32 and the ISO is 200.  I also used a tripod to make sure the camera didn’t shake while the shutter was open.

One thing I learned is that the white water tricks the camera into thinking it’s getting overexposed even though it’s not, so I could have increased the shutter time even further.  I’d also like to try shooting these (or other falls) either at dawn or dusk, or during a dark cloudy day because the camera’s shutter could be open far longer than it was.

At any rate, I believe these pictures turned out reasonably well: (click on the pictures for larger versions):
 

Even though I plan to continue to shoot waterfalls wherever and whenever I can, this fulfills one of my goals to take a slow motion picture of a huge waterfall.

I finally made it to the pool yesterday morning.  It was a nice feeling to get off my butt and start doing something about my weight.  I only swam about 150 yards because I wanted to take it easy and see how my shoulder would hold up.  I injured it a few years ago and don’t want to injure it again.    Yesterday, we went fishing and I probably walked 4 miles taking kids from the lake to the bathroom, so that’s got to help a little in the exercise department.

So as of July 27, 2007, my weight is 275 pounds, and my goal is to get to 200 pounds. 

On the food front, I’m working on limiting how much soda I drink.   This is a big factor to my weight because I average about 120-150 ounces of soda a day.  I don’t trust ‘diets’ because I believe that 99% of them are frauds.  Instead, I’m just trying to eat healthier and cut out or reduce stuff that’s obviously bad for me.   Gatorade is my new best friend because it has about 1/3 the calories of Coke and no bubbles, but it has enough sugar in it to help trick my brain into thinking it’s having enough soda.  Of course, I’m starting to drink water more often, but I can’t stand the taste of it unless it’s ice cold.  I think that I’ve trained my brain to expect Coke or Pepsi instead of water.  It’s going to take some rewiring to get that one straightened out.

I’m totally addicted to caffeine, so my plan is to keep drinking caffeinated beverages along with Gatorade to keep the headaches and other withdrawal symptoms to a minimum while slowly weaning myself off of them completely.  It’ll be a great day when I’m able to go a full day without a Coke and not suffer from a headache or drowsiness because of it.