Some of this is stuff I’ve already said on social media, but I like to say it here too, so:
:: Yesterday at work, a friend of mine who is a Mets fan brought up the Mets season opener on the Peacock app on his phone. As the Mets were hosting my Pittsburgh Pirates, I decided to watch along for a bit. I watched until 2/3 of the way through the bottom of the 1st. This is more Pirates baseball than I have watched in quite a few years…and yet, watching that single 2/3 of an inning feels like a total microcosm of most of the last 30+ years of the Pirates. Paul Skenes, the super-human pitcher who is the reigning Cy Young winner (and who will NEVER finish his career with the Pirates, let’s be realistic), proceeded to pitch very badly, and he was not helped at all by not one but two godawful defensive plays by Oneil Cruz, a guy who is in center field who should not be in center field.
A deeply rare shot of a baseball and Oneil Cruz’s glove being in the same place at the same time.
So, that was fun. I got to see the Pirates’ best pitcher get pulled in the 1st inning of the season opener, and some predictably terrible play by a guy who is only playing center field because…well, I’m a bit fuzzy on that, actually.
:: Here’s another WNY sunrise. We don’t get to see many of them this time of year, but when we do….
:: Anybody watching High Potential on ABC? It’s the show that’s currently giving us our needed “Murder mystery procedural with quirky characters” fix. This sort of thing has been in pretty short supply since Castle went away. This show is a lot of fun, though I do wish it was able to dispense with the “long mystery arc” storyline that is glacially unfolding underneath the week-to-week stories. I do recommend it, though.
Also, a recent episode’s murder method was a poisoned pie in the face! So that was amusing. I was hoping that lead character Morgan, who has a photographic memory and knows everything, would give her cop friends one of her impromptu lectures on the pie in the face, but no such luck. Alas.
:: And finally, in the Four-Legged Friend department:
Even though it’s only 31 degrees out, proper care of your House Hippo is important. Let her get some sun.
Of COURSE it’s a trap. Don’t stick your hand down there.
OK, everyone! Comment as follows: On a scale of 1 to 10, 1 meaning “a gentle No, Carla” and 10 meaning “getting swatted with a rolled-up Sunday New York Times and being sent to bed without dinner”, what level of scolding do you think Carla actually received to react like this?
Spoiler: It was no more than 2. Carla can bring the drama when she wants to.
It was a good year for photography. Wow, that was easy! Next post!
OK, I’ll go into it a little more. I don’t want to do a long boring thing here, but I noticed a number of things as the year progressed that I take to mean I did, in fact, get better at photography. I “leveled up”, as the kids say.
First, I started getting a lot more confident about just taking the picture. I used to hem and haw and wonder if it was the right shot or if I should or shouldn’t be taking that person’s picture or if I had my composition exactly right or if my settings were right because what if they weren’t and I took the right photo but with the wrong settings so it would end up looking bad and what if…you know the drill. I used to feel a lot of indecision when taking photos, and the result of this was, oddly, taking more photos than I needed, because I find that this lack of knowledge and confidence leads to what photographers call “spray and pray”. That’s when you take a ton of photos in hopes that a few of them might, if you’re lucky enough, turn out to actually be good. And hey, doing that usually gets you something usable. After all, as Ian Fleming wrote, “You cannot sow a million seeds without reaping one potato.” (From Russia, With Love.)
In 2025 I noticed that I was seeing the photo more before I snapped the shutter. Did I always get the photo? Well, no. But I saw it! And that’s definitely an improvement. And a lot of the time, I did get the photo. Yes, there were a bunch of times where I found myself saying to myself, “Ach, ye screwed up the settings and couldnae fix them ‘ere you snapped yon shutter!” (Yes, when scolding myself, it’s in a weird Doohan-esque Scottish brogue.) But I also found myself starting to understand my settings better and being able to adjust them more quickly. Again, that’s huge.
I also felt my eye developing. It’s one thing to be able to competently grab the photo, but it’s quite another to see the compelling composition unfolding before you, to note the leading lines that have presented themselves, and to quickly decide on where to place your subject or where to wait for them to be for the best photo. So, did photography become easier for me in 2025? I’m not sure I’d say that…but it became less of a challenge. Less of a mystery. And that makes me happy.
I also became more aware of what my preferred genres and styles of photography are: streetscapes, infrastructure, nature, floral, and festivals. This is by no means permanent, obviously; you never know how these things will develop, and who knows…when I upgrade my camera set-up to include changeable lenses with some wide-aperture options, maybe I’ll find myself gravitating to portraits.
The balance of this post is a selection of photos of mine from 2025 that I particularly like. As always, all of my best photo work can be found on my Flickr stream. I was going to group this series of posts by photo genre, but you know what? That feels a bit too much like work. So instead, we’ll just randomly hop through my photographic year over a series of posts. (By the way, I’m hoping to have my full 2025 Quiz post up on Saturday.)
Carla has been trying to get Daisy to like her and play with her. The results have not been terribly encouraging, but Carla can be relentless, so we’re not giving up!
Hold on, let’s start here: one of my favorite paintings at the Buffalo AKG Museum.
Giacomo Balla, “Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash”
Nice, huh? I like the suggested motion in the dog’s figure and in the leash. I always linger on this one when I get to where it hangs in the museum.
Now, where was I? Oh yeah, flashlights.
(Yes, the painting is relevant. Bear with me.)
The flashlight company is called OLight, and my coworker likes to tell me–rather mischievously–when they’re running sales. Whenever he says this, my response is always the same: “Oh lord, don’t tell me that!” Because if there’s one thing that’s almost guaranteed to get me to part with money, it’s a flashlight. (By the way, that old post of mine, linked above? All but two of those flashlights are now distant memories, and I don’t even remember the little red keylight that was apparently two bucks at Home Depot whenever I got that.)
But anyway, back to OLight. I do not visit that site with any regularity at all, because they’ll get a lot more of my money if I go too often. Heck, I just looked up the URL to link it above and I almost clicked four things to put in my cart! Dangerous, it is! However, sometimes there is necessity, and thus I have to discuss my one time (thus far) purchasing from OLight.
Enter the dogs.
Specifically, Hobbes.
When we adopted him last year, it was late in the summer when the nights were starting to settle earlier. Cane, you’ll remember, was mostly white with a few brindle spots, so we could see him in the back yard even when it was totally dark; we knew where he was and could corral him to bring him in when we let him out there to do his business either at night or in early morning. Hobbes, however, is completely brindle, so The Wife realized pretty quickly that it was going to a problem seeing him when he was let loose into the yard when it was dark.
She brought this concern up, and then I visited the OLight site…and saw this item here:
Now, was this a case of my phone listening to me and making sometime appear? I don’t know, but I do know that based on what I read, this is what the doctor ordered: a small light, with a multi-colored LED set-up on each end, about the size of one of those small McCormick spice containers, with a carabiner-style clip for attaching to stuff…like a backpack, or a belt loop, or somewhere on one’s person or on a dog’s leash.
Yup, this appeared to be just what the doctor ordered. Or rather, it’s what “the doctor” suggested and what I ordered. I got two of them, one for Hobbes and one for Carla. And then we proceeded to not use them for almost a year because Hobbes got injured and to this day he hasn’t been released into the yard on his own recognizance. But as our night-time dog walks are increasingly happening when it’s dark out, we have started using them even though the dogs are leashed. Hobbes doesn’t wear his yet, but on a lark I threw one on Carla’s collar one night. We wondered how she would react…and she didn’t. At all. She just does all her normal walk stuff with this light hanging from her collar. It barely weighs an ounce, so I’m not sure she even physically notices it, aside from seeing light.
And this is where our painting above comes into play, because a few times I’ve snapped Carla’s picture while walking, and the results put me immediately in mind of my favorite painting at the Buffalo AKG!
On the lower pic, it may appear that Carla has somehow red-shifted, because note the blue on her backside! That blue glow is actually coming from Hobbes’s light behind her. These lights can be set on each end to red, green, blue, or white, or flashing between all of those–and the ends can be set independent of the others, so I can set it to red and blue (on Bills game days!) or maybe red and green once we’re into the holidays. Visibility for one’s dogs is always a good idea, and I like having these for safety reasons.
Is that all I bought on that first OLight order? Why, no! I got a small flashlight for The Wife to carry in her purse or bag, and I got a small pen light to hang on my keychain because I’ve been in want of such a thing since my last keychain light died. Currently that’s all I have from OLight. But I’m sure that will change at some point, as I am highly impressed with what I’ve seen of their products thus far.
(Note to self: It’s probably time to update the “Flashlights I own” post….)
