daily slice-of-life photo blog of a Gen-X dad
こんばんは！ Hello!
I’m pretty tired tonight, so I’ll just leave you guys with this video of Anko-chan jumping and falling… as kittens do. Enjoy, and see you on Friday!
おやすみなさい！
– B 
こんばんは！ Hi, how’s it going?
We’ve been having some dreary weather here the past few days. As you can see from the photo above it was a wet drive into the office this morning, and unfortunately Koa’s baseball game was rained out this evening. So, I took him to the batting cages so he could keep sharp.
Today I did a few photography-related activities. First, at work I bought a new 50 mm F/1.8 lens for our company camera. 📷 My friend recommended this new nifty-fifty and I used it to take an employee head-shot this afternoon, which turned out pretty good. I’m very pleased with the lens!
Secondly, I tried something kind of fun, which was to smear Vaseline on a filter to simulate a blurry glamour-type photo. I was really trying to go for a dreamy, abstract type of image but I don’t think the Vaseline distorted the sharpness as much as I would have liked. Well, I did get a couple of fun kitty photos, as you can see below:
And the third thing I did was to make a few prints using our Canon inkjet printer. I’ve never been able to figure out how to print photos… my whole life, things like edges, margins, and general printer errors have left a sour taste in my mouth when it came to home printing. This evening started out with more of the same… but after a couple failed attempts, I think I am getting closer to figuring out how the Lightroom print module works. I’ve been trying to make a print with a nice 1 cm white border around it, and I was able to tweak the settings a bit to get fairly close. With minimal trimming with our paper-cutter, the results were quite nice!
I’ll post a photo of the prints later, but I think I am satisfied for now… pics of the pics will have to wait. 😛
Well, that’s it for today. Have a great Tuesday!
おやすみなさい！
– B
こんばんは！ It’s Friday!
I’m not sure when it happened, but Friday nights changed from a time to celebrate and go out for dinner and drinks, to a time to just relax at home. It’s kind of a different celebration I guess… 😊
But I enjoy it nonetheless! Spending the evening reading a good book… it’s very cliché, right? But I look forward to it! 📔
Today’s photo is of our black and white cat, Anko. Kittens play so much, but they tire out easily. It’s part of their charm. 🐱
Time to read! おやすみなさい！
– B
こんばんは！ Good evening!
Tonight’s post is about our aquarium that we’ve had for several years now. It’s a plain 10-gallon glass tank, simply decorated with some rocks, a nice piece of driftwood, and a “Pirates Cove” skeleton accompanied by his jug of rum. You know, the classic!
For fish, we currently have three tiger barbs, although one of them wasn’t looking too well this afternoon, I wouldn’t be surprised if we lose him the next couple of days. We also have several live plants, which are relatively new. I always had plastic plants in my aquariums, but thought I would give some live plants a try. I really like them! They are easy to take care of, and look nice.
But lately our tank has been overcome with some brown algae. In order to combat this, I picked up several Malaysian Trumpet Snails which are supposed to be great tank cleaners – eating algae, dead leaves, and even fish poop. 🐌 We only have about 8 so far (our local fish store gave us some of theirs free of charge) but they are working hard! You can really see a difference on the parts of the tank they have been active in. But what I am looking forward to is for them to have baby snails (it should take a month or two) and then we’ll have a snail army to clean the tank! Apparently they all come out in the middle of the night and do their work. 🌛
I’ve had an aquarium of one size or another for most of my life… all fresh water type. I have fun watching the fish and taking care of them, but the new snails are by far the most fun things to watch. It sounds funny, right? But they are fascinating!
Anyways, that is tonight’s aquarium report! Have a good evening and we’ll see you tomorrow.
おやすみなさい！
– B
こんばんは！ Hello, how’s it going?
We’ve been enjoying having the two kittens in our house. So far, they are staying in our “sun room” which is next to our TV room. We are keeping them separated from our dog, Lani, for a while… Lani is so excitable and whines and growls a lot. The kittens were really scared at first, but now are slowly getting used to the dog, although they have only briefly been in the same room together. We’ll give it a couple weeks I think before we introduce them fully. But, they do look at each-other through the French doors.
In other news, the rain has been pretty heavy. This morning the kids’ schools were delayed by two hours… of course they were so happy about that. Koa just said to me a few minutes ago that he’s hoping for a short day tomorrow as well. There’s a good chance he will get his wish! ☔
I hope you had a nice Monday, and we’ll see you tomorrow! Meow or Nyan!
おやすみなさい！ – バロン
