Texas Independence Day

174 years ago, Texas declared independence from Mexico. If you’re curious about it, I found this to be an interesting read.

Last month marked the 5-year anniversary of my blog and, just like last year, I completely missed it. Anyway, Happy Blogiversary to me! 🙂

(OK, so perhaps not totally unrelated, as they’re both anniversaries.)

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A Year in Photos

Today marks the completion of a full year of pictures on Glass Renagerie, my photoblog. What a year it has been. I’m happy to be at the end of it, because it ended up being more stressful than I had expected. From the beginning, I didn’t require myself to actually take a picture each day, so I figured it wouldn’t be a problem coming up with pictures from my archives. However, a quick scan shows that a large majority of the images were taken in 2009:

2000 – 1 (In Rememberance, for 9/11)
2002 – 3 (A few shots from our Hawaii trip of that year)
2006 – 1 (Today’s UT Tower image)
2007 – 11 (Some from my Australia trip and a few others)
2008 – 12 (various)
2009 – 333 (see what I mean?)
2010 – 4 (likewise)

This is probably a significant source of the stress I’ve felt with coming up with an image for each day, so now that I’ve completed a full year, I’m going to back off and just post images there haphazardly. After all, I still have Macro Monday and the new Diptych project.

Here is some more information about the year’s worth of photos. Trusting my tags, which probably aren’t completely consistent, my most popular subjects are:

Flowers – 66
Clouds – 41
Sky – 19
Sunset – 17
Bird – 15
Food – 13
Building – 13
Tree – 11
Waterfall – 11
Water – 10

Just for fun, here’s a clickable montage of the entire set: (due to some technical difficulties combined with having already spent way too much time on this, there may be a few that do not link correctly)

Hectic

I never seem to make time to blog. I think about it often, but I just don’t do it. I have a number of things I want to write about, but I just never set aside the time to do it. I’ve also thought of several short topics (like this one), but I always feel like they’ll be too lame.

The truth is, I just haven’t made blogging a priority. Here are some things that I’ve been prioritizing above this blog:

• Work (including some weekend work)
• Kids’ activities (soccer, swim team, etc.)
• Kids’ school work (assisting or just pestering them to get it done)
• Netflix (I always feel pressure to watch and return what I have.)
• TV (particularly now that the fall season is underway)
• glass.renagerie.com (my daily photo blog)
• Macro Monday (technically part of this blog, but gets its own priority)
• Twitter (I’m embarrassed to admit that I rarely miss any updates in my stream, which is probably an indication that I’m overly attached.)
• Travel (We’ve done quite a bit of travel over the last couple of years, and I don’t regret it at all. That’s another reason I need to update the budget, though: to include the fact that we’re simply going to spend more on travel than we previously budgeted.)

Of course, blogging isn’t the only thing that suffers neglect. Here are some other things I want or need to do but never seem to accomplish:

• Tag and rate my photos from previous years (I did most of the tagging a couple of years ago, but I never quite finished so there is a gap of about 12-18 months from 2006 to 2007. Rating is easier, but further behind. I believe I’ve done 1999-2003 and 2008-April, 2009.)
• Tag, rate and publish my current photos (I’ve yet to do the TequilaCon pics from April, or any since then.)
• Update our budget (This has been pending for a few months now, though in retrospect, it would have been a waste several months ago due to a lot of unexpected changes when school started. But it does need to be done.)
• Run (Though, this is also lacking simply because it’s dark in the morning when I would like to run. The extended Daylight Saving Time really puts a damper on my morning runs.)
• Process video (would be a bigger issue if I hadn’t misplaced our camcorder (HD, about a year old, I think) back in February)
• Reading (As my aNobii profile shows, I’ve been reading my two current books since April and May, though I’m finally near the end of each of them.)

Wow, that turned out to be a much meatier post than I had expected. Nice. 🙂

RenYC 2009

I put the word out yesterday on Twitter that I’ll be in New York City on October 10th and would love to get together with some fellow bloggers and tweeters. The wonderful Poppy was quick to volunteer for the task of organizing a dinner meet-up dubbed RenYC. Thank you, Poppy!

If you are interested in attending (please, please, please!), please leave a comment either here or at Poppy’s blog entry linked above. Better yet, leave a comment both places. 🙂

By my reckoning, this will be my fourth trip to the Big Apple, having previously visited in 2000, 2001 and 2008. The first trip was in the summer and pretty hot, though coming from Texas it wasn’t too bad. The other two trips (March and December) were a bit cold for my taste. I wonder how October will be?

To be clear, I’ve enjoyed each one of my trips regardless of the weather. I love visiting New York City. To be honest, I enjoy visiting most places, but New York City has a special draw for me. It’s the energy level I almost always encounter there that appeals to me. The only energy level I’ve experienced that consistently surpases it is Mardi Gras in New Orleans — another city I love to visit.

Anyway, back to RenYC. The venue is not yet determined but it will be somewhere in Manhattan at around 6pm, October 10, 2009. Hope to see you there!

Santa Fe Trip: Day 2 – BeerHer

Saturday summary, photo-bullet style.

	On our way from Lubbock to Santa Fe, we passed a number of establishments named after various people we know (well, not really, but you know what I mean). Our favorite was this sign in honor of Dave2.
	We took highway 285 to get to Santa Fe, which turned out to be a big mistake. A portion of the road was down to a single lane shared by the traffic going each way. So we spent quite a while just sitting and waiting for our turn. My guess is at least 20 minutes, but I’m not really sure.
	When we finally did get to go, we soon discovered that for a large portion of the supposed single lane road, there was really no lane at all. It seemed very odd to be driving on a highway and have it become basically a dirt road for a good stretch.
	While we were stopped waiting for our turn, we decided to take the top down on the convertible. Wow was the weather perfect for this. It was so nice — definitely one of the best convertible rides I’ve ever had, right up there with driving around Kawaii in a convertible a number of years ago.
	We finally arrived at our destination, the Santa Fe Sage Inn. One of the nice features is a complimentary shuttle to and from anywhere in downtown Santa Fe (probably a 4 square mile area, I would guess). We took advantage of this to head to where we had last heard Karl was, but he was no longer there.
	Eventually, we met up with Karl, Geeky Tai-Tai, bellaventa and Libragirl at the Hilton. We got some food and drinks and hung out at the Hilton pool for a while. Eventually, it was time to go get ready for BeerHer.  The order in the picture, from left to right, is: Libragirl, Geeky Tai-Tai, me (in back), Karl, Wayne and bellaventa.
	We all met up again at the Santa Fe Brewing Company for BeerHer, along with NYC Watchdog and Poppycede, as well as…
	… Sarah!  It was great to get to meet and hang out with all these new people, though I felt like I already knew several of them. It’s a strange sensation meeting for the first time, someone you already know. The Santa Fe Brewing Compony turned out to be a perfect venue for the inaugural BeerHer, and we found an S-shaped table that was just right for the number of people we had.
	Later on, Marty and his wife Reba joined us for the tail end of BeerHer. It was wonderful to meet them as well as Marty is another one of those people whom I felt like I already knew.

After BeerHer ended, Wayne and I decided to head for a casino for a little while. We wound up at the Camel Rock Casino, about 15 minutes north of Santa Fe. We arrived too late for Craps, and there were just a few BlackJack tables open. We played BlackJack for a while and then hit the slots. We both made reasonable donations to the casino so that we can have good luck tomorrow.

Next up, probably some more casino time, some photo tourism and the main event, TequilaCon 2009!

(I’m staying up later each night of this trip. At this rate, I may not sleep at all tomorrow night.)

Brief Hiatus

We’re headed to Houston today and then off on our cruise on Monday. I’ve decided not to take my laptop, so I will most likely not post anything over the next week.

Although, I do have a new weekly series of posts starting on Monday, which is already scheduled.

Also, I hope to load up some pictures on Glass Renagerie for the week, though they will not be cruise pictures — those will have to wait until the following week.

Oh, and Happy Pi Day!

Glass Renagerie

Glass Renagerie screen capture

I’ve been thinking of starting a photo blog for a while, but just never got around to it. Today, when I saw that Finn had her new photo blog up and running with WordPress, I decided to take action.

I asked Wayne about setting it up on his server (better bandwidth) and he said no problem. A short time later and it was up and running. Thanks Wayne!!

I’m going to try to post a photo per day, but not necessarily a new photo. In fact, I expect that most will be photos I’ve taken in the past and just want to share. I would appreciate any feedback, suggestions, etc.

And thanks, Finn, for the unknowing push and for the theme inspiration.

Hiatus and Our Disney World Trip

It’s been over two weeks since we left for Orlando and 11 days since we got home and had Thanksgiving. Before leaving, I had gotten much better about blogging more regularly. In fact, November was my most prolific blogging month since 2005, and back then I used to post a blog entry for each new set of photos on my album page as well as an entry for each time I went for a run.

Well, lack of (free) internet access from the Disney resort (Pop Century), resulted in no blogging during the trip. After we got home, there was a lot to deal with (sadly, mostly a lot of TV recorded on the TiVo to watch), and I just never got around to blogging. I thought about it, but an old problem reared its ugly head again.

Speaking of Disney, we had a wonderful time. It turned out that Marci’s sister and her family were able to be there at the same time, which was very nice. We had 5-day tickets and were thus able to allocate a full day to each of the four parks, with an extra day to spend as we wished. We had park-hopper tickets, but did not make use of that fact this time. When we went two years ago, we only had 3-day tickets and we spent each day divided between two of the parks.

We based our schedule on Disney’s Magic Hours, which put us at Hollywood Studios (formerly MGM) on Saturday. We had arrived at our hotel pretty late the night before, so when we woke up early in the morning, Marci decided we should just sleep in for a while and not worry about getting to the park early. I decided not to go along with this and went ahead to the park on my own. This started what ended up being our pattern for several of the days — though Brittney came along for the other days, leaving just Marci and McKenzie getting extra sleep.

Next up was Magic Kingdom, the one day when everyone was up early to enjoy some morning park time. Magic Kingdom certainly offers the most variety of activities (discounting Epcot’s World Showcase). The fact that my two nieces were with us also helped make this park the highlight. I had expected us to go back to the hotel for a while, but the way things worked out we just stayed straight through the fireworks. We had planned to stay for some of the three Magic Hours from 11pm to 2am, but we were simply too tired and headed back to the hotel at around 11:30.

The weather cooperated for Monday as it ended up being the warmest day of our trip while also being the day we planned to go to Animal Kingdom. Animal Kingdom is almost completely an outdoor park, and much of it is shady, so having it be the warmest day was very convenient. As I’ve seen mentioned elsewhere, there isn’t really that much to do at Animal Kingdom. There aren’t very many rides, though they do have on of my family’s (excluding me) favorites, Primeval Whirl. Unfortunately, it was closed. I’d probably appreciate Animal Kingdom more if it weren’t for our periodic trips to the San Antonio Zoo.We did have a very nice buffet lunch in the Africa section, though I don’t recall the name of the restaurant. Coming to each park early caught up with me this day and I decided to head back to the hotel early, though it ended up being only an hour or so earlier than the rest of the group. I didn’t even fall asleep before the rest of the family got back to the hotel.

Tuesday took us to Epcot, which has been my favorite since childhood (though, of course, it was just Magic Kingdom and Epcot then). We didn’t end up staying as long as I expected, partly because they ran out of FastPass tickets for Test Track and I thought we’d return on our final day. I think I need to plan to have some adults only time to more leisurely tour of Word Showcase.

Our final day ended up being spent back at Magic Kingdom, which I suppose is appropriate. Somehow, I ended up choosing the two days we spent at Magic Kingdom as the days without my camera. Luckily, I have lots and lots of pictures from 2006.

All-in-all, we had a fabulous time, and it was really nice to come home to Thanksgiving break so we didn’t have to go straight back to work and school. Looking forward to Christmas break….