jonathan’s photos |
one per day, from my cellular telephone. |
hopefully, it's clear what i have done here: i have begun to chip away at the hillside, using the freed dirt to fill and level behind the first wall. next will come the landscape fabric and gravel for wall #2, but not before a couple more days with the pickaxe and shovel. (there is a good and honest feeling i get from doing this project entirely with hand tools, but it does take a while...)
a year or so ago i started shooting in RAW format, which basically means that instead of producing a finished image that you can upload, the camera produces a sort of digital negative that has to be processed on the computer and developed into an actual picture. the advantage of this method is that you can fix and adjust things that cannot be fixed or adjusted on the finished shot, and the quality is higher. it is worth the extra trouble for pictures that you care about, but it is not worth it for the average snapshot because it takes a lot of time. you should try it if your camera supports it; the software shown here is called "raw therapee" and it is free.
this weekend we stayed in chelan for a couple of nights in order to attend a wedding! photos: (1) kelly tries on a hat at a windy pre-wedding fiesta, in order to reinforce her theory that the "hat" was designed only to contain tortilla chips; (2) the wedding on saturday, from my vantage point as pianist; (3) sunday brunch at blueberry hills farm in chelan, where rolling hills of blueberries soothed the diner--this was the view from our table--and a waiter brought us a pie to give to the couple ("and tell them congratulations from blueberry hills farm!").
i have a confession: sometimes after the company-provided dinners (bestowed upon a team of employees in exchange for working late) have been retired to the kitchen, i will fill a tupperware container with leftovers before the janitor thows them away. it seems like a harmless practice, and last night i was delighted with my luck: an almost entirely untouched polystyrene container of "veggie kung pao" beckoned, and i ignored the ominous red chilies and pepper seeds as i filled an orange plastic mug with a microwave-venting lid. when i sat down at the lunch table today with the reheated dish, i soon realized that someone had ordered the thing with about twenty stars of spice and then drowned it in chili oil. my sinuses cleared, my eyes watered, and my poor taste buds wouldn't speak to me until i gave them some goat cheese this evening. i have learned my lesson.
my brother-in-law erik came over to help and we finished phase 1 of the retaining wall! the outer wall is now complete. the next step is a bit of excavation to level the ground behind the wall to the height of the wall and reduce the face of the hill to a near-vertical slope, which begins phase 2 of the project; this slope will eventually be covered with a second wall.
i forgot to send the picture of the day yesterday! but i did take one, of my co-worker matthew's 5-year anniversary m&ms. he put them into cups with van halen-themed names. one of the cups had only brown m&ms and i wondered silently who had separated them (matthew? one of his small children?), or if they had merely been purchased together in a bag of "assorted brown m&ms", an item i have never seen for dale but may still exist. and the blackberries? anyone who buys backberries in seattle at this time of year is a fool or lives in the inner city. they are an aggressive, thorny weed that grows a foot a day and produces huge numbers of sweet berries in the late summer. every sufficiently unmaintained public lot is automatically a u-pick blackberry farm. the berries in this photo are right next to our mailbox.
"who is this extremely studly fellow?" he is my brother rusty and he came over to help me with the retaining wall. we got the first three courses (layers) down. it's good to see the thing actually taking shape after so much prep work! afterward kelly and i had date night and we saw "the proposal", which was pretty hilarious and made us forget that we were in a weird theater with a floor shaped like a U.
this morning, kelly ran a 5K in snoqualmie, and i came along to cheer and take pictures. it was much less crowded than the rock-and-roll half-marathon event she completed earlier this year, so i was able to secure a spot near the starting line to capture this image for you. kelly did magnificently, finishing the race in about half an hour, and some of our friends and family ran too; brunch afterward at pomegranate was a welcome event.
this morning i dropped our friends off at a hotel in seattle before heading to work. the iconic space needle hardly towers over the city when you are driving from the waterfront towards the highway and just looks, to me, like nothing more than an especially round and pointy building. after work today i started laying the first course of the retaining wall, which was very exciting--pictures soon. have a swell weekend!
tonight some of kelly's friends are staying the night at our place, en route to a cruise that departs later this week. i had never met them. in photo (1), kelly and sarah are carefully preparing their respective cameras for group shots; in photo (2) you see the sunset at alki, which was lovely.
hi, i'm jonathan! i am a software engineer and amateur photographer living in redmond, washington (you may, correctly, guess the large corporation that pays my mortgage).
i post one photo here every day, which documents my life, or my friends' lives, or what i ate for lunch. these photos are taken with an aging cellular telephone and completely untouched.
think of it as a stream-of-consciousness sort of thing.
