Pandamonium Jacket

Pandamonium Jacket
Originally uploaded by Sirelroka

My latest project for Etsy is this adorable Panda jacket by special request. Apparently the woman who requested it has a two year old who wants to be a panda for Halloween. How cute is that going to be? I also made some panda paw mittens to go with it. I added a drawstring to the hoodie, which I think will be a feature of all future hoodies. It's hard because I don't know anyone here with children I can try them on for fit and usefulness etc.

Personalized Crate Tag

Personalized Crate Tag
Originally uploaded by Sirelroka

I sold my first crate tag! I put this up on Etsy a couple of days ago (of course with their choice of breed and name) and I sold one today. I still have to work out with the buyer what colors they want and all that, but yay!

Scallop skewers

Scallop skewers
Originally uploaded by Sirelroka

For some reason I felt like cooking when I was back home so one night I made these Curried Scallop Kebabs. They turned out quite well for a first try.

River Walk

Mom and Bleys
Originally uploaded by Sirelroka

Back in Big Rapids mom and I took a walk on the now completed River Walk. I think its been done for a while, but I haven't seen it so it was new to me. It was a very nice walk and here near the end we saw some brave tubers (it was a little on the chilly side that day) getting into the water. You may not be aware, but Big Rapids is the tubing capital of Michigan. Impressed, aren't you?

Partay

Friends
Originally uploaded by Sirelroka

There was, of course, the obligatory shin-dig at Jason's house. In this case it was a hoppin' fifth of July party. There was good food, melted chocolate, Henry's homebrew, and some guitar hero. Who could ask for more?

Foot prints

After North Muskegon we ventured over to Big Rapids to visit my family. It was nice to bed home and to see their freshly redone bathroom. They installed this cool faux skylight thing called a Sun Tunnel, that lets in a ton of natural light. One of the days we were in Big Rapids we turned right around and went back to the North Muskegon beach with my mom. We had a nice lunch and then walked along the beach for a while. The temperature was on the chilly side so all we really did was get our feet wet. Shortly after we got there the weather turned threatening so we only stayed for a while. Good thing, as just as soon as we got back to the car there was an absolute downpour.

Adventure

We also spent quite a bit of time over at the Wiles' house, hanging out, chatting, and playing some Guitar Hero. Once we took Bleys over...Adventure wasn't sure about that. Although very bold, walking right over and sniffing Bleys nose to nose. There was only one hissing incident, which was warranted because Bleys has a tendency to forget that Adventure is a cat and hence doesn't want to play in a dog type fashion. You may notice in the picture that Adventure has just been shaved. Being a long haired cat, it seems to make a big difference in the summer.

Pool Party

Another evening in North Muskegon we invited people over for a nice afternoon at Roland's parents' house. They have a pool and a grill, so it makes for a fun time, especially now that many of our friends have kids. One of the highlights was when Mila, our niece, discovered Bleys' crate. She decided that it was just about her size. There are some more pictures of her adventures with the crate including one where she tries to get in the crate with Bleys already in it. It was awesome.

Norman Rockwell at Jimmies

Our next stop was North Muskegon to visit Roland's family and many of our friends. It turns out that Erin, Laura's sister just opened an ice cream shop near by. Of course we had to stop by and see what it was all about. I managed to snap this picture, which I think looks like a Norman Rockwell painting. Behind the counter is Laura, who was working in order to give Erin the day off since it was her birthday. Jimmies has all sorts of ice cream options (both hard and soft serve) burgers that are cooked to order, and a cool potato spiral thingy which was good. So if you find yourself in Whitehall stop by for a sweet treat!

Baroo

While in Kalamazoo we stayed with Jason who allowed us to crash his place whenever we needed to. He has a nice big back yard which Bleys really appreciated. He got to run around a lot more than he does down here. There is a fun picture over at Flickr of him running. He's a little blurry, but I just feel like he was having a really good time after two days in the car. Here he discovers that Roland is up on the deck.

For Dr. J

Our first stop in Michigan was Kalamazoo. We took this picture to put Dr. J's mind at rest...there really is a Kalamazoo. :) We got a chance to visit with Jason, take a trip to campus and see all the changes, some good, some sad. They've shut down the awesome old school bowling alley in the Bernhard Center where I took bowling as one of my gym credits (hey, you've got have something fun when your other classes involve biology, chemistry, and physics). It is now "Textbook Alley" where they store all of the textbooks for sale.

Roland and Scotty

It's been a while huh? I've been to Michigan and back and been keeping myself busy since getting back last week. Roland has been super busy presenting at conferences and writing his article. He has finished a draft of the article, which is awesome and is hoping to be able to send it out for the fall submissions to journals.

So lets go back in time to when we left for Michigan. There was a flyball tournament in Orlando so we decided just to use that as a first leg and take off from there.

Roland got to run Scotty at this tournament and did a fantastic job. Scotty is not the easiest dog to run because he's pretty crazy, but I think that made Roland a good match, becuase he is perpetually calm. It was kind of funny to watch Roland standing there all completely calm holding Scotty who was yanking against his harness and generally doing his best to impersonate a rabid dog. Bleys shared a spot with another dog and did very well. He earned his FDX (500 points) and it was generally a good time. One of the other dogs earned her FM (5000 points) and I made her a crate tag to celebrate it. I thought it turned out really well.

Is there anything you can't do with PVC?

Step 1: Get discouraged

Step 2: Get encouragement from great friends (thanks Anne, Dr. J, and Janice)

Step 3: Have a great husband who finds light box plans on the internet (with super-awesome accompanying tutorial)

Step 4: Get crafty

Otter puppy

Otter puppy
Originally uploaded by Sirelroka

After flyball yesterday a couple of us went over to a place not too far from practice that has a dog swim area. We had an awesome time and Bleys really enjoyed cooling off in the water. There are quite a few pictures over at flickr, including some using the series feature of my new camera. Bleys doesn't realize that he can jump into water so he didn't get a series. But Jubilee (black lab) and Jake (rat terrier) both have some fun shots of leaping for toys.

Pudding

Pudding
Originally uploaded by Sirelroka

Roland and I got home yesterday from another trip to Disney. We spent a little time there with his Mom, Dad, sister, niece, and brother-in-law. It was a nice trip, although on the hot side. We don't usually visit this time of year and I had forgotten just how hot it can get out there in the sun. I much prefer the cooler months for waling around so much.

This was taken at the restaurant in Italy. Mila got the chocolate pudding with bananas. At first she didn't realize there were bananas in there, but when she did she ditched the spoon and went face first into the dish. It was awesome.

Spring Fling

We attended another Flyball tournament this past weekend so I've been out of town since Friday. It was a really nice time although the facility just wasn't designed to hold that many people. The air conditioning really struggled to keep up, especially on Saturday when it was very sunny. The building is pretty much a metal box so it acts like an oven. Bleys didn't start racing until almost half-way through the day so he also struggled. He was pretty slow and we ended up spending quite some time out in the car's air conditioning at the end of the day. Sunday was better because at least part of the day was overcast, and Bleys started racing right off the bat. Bleys did very well for himself and I think everyone had a good time. Roland even ran Bleys for a couple of races! Although I'm not really sure how that went because I had to hide. If Bleys saw me, I'm pretty sure he would forget about the racing and try to come over and say hello instead! That's what happens at practice anyway.

Roland and I took quite a few pictures and for the most part they didn't turn out too badly. I'm still unhappy with the noise, but I'll have to experiment some more to see if changing some settings will allow a better result. A few of pictures are over at Flickr (click on the above picture), but most of them are at the Storm Riders website.

Now Bleys is at a new puppy boarding place and Roland and I are preparing to go up to Disney to see his parents, sister, niece, and brother-in-law. We will be back on Friday and then I'm going to just say no to traveling for a few weeks before we start our trek up to Michigan in mid-June.

Something You've Never Photographed Before

Something You've Never Photographed Before
Originally uploaded by Sirelroka

Photogamer: Take a photo of something you've never photographed before. This is a beaded flower I've been working on for some time. But I haven't yet finished the stem and haven't started the pistol/stamen. Then I have to figure out how to stiffen it so it won't droop. One book suggested some Future Acrylic Floor Wax, which I keep forgetting to look for when I'm at the store.

Round

Round
Originally uploaded by Sirelroka

Photogamer from yesterday (almost there!). Take a picture of something round.

Socks

Socks
Originally uploaded by Sirelroka

Photogamer for Saturday: Take a picture of your or someone else's socks. These are my favorite socks. I find that socks are normally way to big for me. The heel ends up at my ankle when I first put them on, never mind after I've worn them all day. It seems silly to get so excited about socks, but I didn't realize how frustrating it was to have to rearrange them all the time.

Choice

P4280001
Originally uploaded by Sirelroka

Photogamer for Friday: Make a decision. I chose to take a picture of my dinner options. The winner? The pizza dough on the bottom shelf. It is currently coming up to room temperature in the kitchen.

Dream

Dream
Originally uploaded by Sirelroka

Photogamer from Thursday: Take a picture of a dream. These are the shoes Anne wore at her wedding. She sent them to me a while later when I was taking a ballroom dance adult education class with Roland. My dream is to take regular lessons and learn how to dance.

Milestone

Milestone
Originally uploaded by Sirelroka

Still playing Photogamer catch-up: 04/21/2008 Take a picture of milestone. For a groan-worthy pic from one of my favorite Photogamers, click here.

Sproing

Sproing
Originally uploaded by Sirelroka

Roland took some really nice pictures at practice today. He also ran Bleys for the first half of practice. We should have left it that way since when I took over Bleys didn't do very well. I worry that we might be starting to see some of the exercise intolerance that accompanies a worsening of his heart murmur. We will just have to wait and see, but I'm trying to prepare myself for the fact that we might not be attending too many more tournaments. We can still play on Sundays, but if he stops enjoying it... There are some more pictures over in my Flickr stream if you're interested.

Surplus

Surplus
Originally uploaded by Sirelroka

April 20th - Take a picture something you don't need. Well here is the pile of stuff I've been collecting for Goodwill. This prompt was appropriate because I've recently started on a bit of cleaning/sorting rampage. Roland and I have been toying with the idea of moving to be closer to his work and that got me thinking about all that goes into moving. So I've been slowly going through some of my stuff to purge. It doesn't feel like I've made much headway at this point, but I'm hoping to keep at it.

Antique

Antique
Originally uploaded by Sirelroka

April 19th: Take a picture of something antique. I don't really have anything antique so this was a tough one. The best I could come up with were these books that belonged to my grand parents.

Band

Band
Originally uploaded by Sirelroka

April 18th - Take a picture of a band. I had to think about this one for a long time before I came up with something. I chose some of my hair bands shown on the shower curtain rings that they live on.

Purchase

Purchase
Originally uploaded by Sirelroka

April 17th: As many of you know I've been training Bleys to play flyball for the last year or so. We've done very well, Bleys has lost the extra weight that caused us to join up in the first place. He is running full runs without errors for the most part. However our major stumbling block has been actually catching the ball from the box. Given that he started out unable to catch a piece of food we're going alright, but I've been getting frustrated with my inability to teach Bleys what to do. At the suggestion of one of the flyball team member I ordered these balls. They are foam and semi-squishy. They are a little smaller than they claimed on the website, so that's a little harder, but overall I'm hopeful that these will help.

Journey

Journey
Originally uploaded by Sirelroka

Photogamer is back! I'm not sure what the issue was, but when I checked today it was up and running. So here are some of the back prompts. April 16th: Journey. This is the Trip Tik that Dave and I used when we drove up to Michigan. Not only does it have the usual map information and they nice AAA lady filled in the known construction zones, but it also gives you a nice description of what you will be driving through on each page. For instance between Chattanooga and Knoxville...leads through rolling farm and dairy country and some wooded hilly terrain with good views. Several lakes are situated only a few miles from this route.

Practice

Shutter Lag
Originally uploaded by Sirelroka

Today we had flyball practice and we took my new camera. I didn't have much time to take pictures but Roland managed to get in a few. Including this one that shows the camera has a little shutter lag. We also found out that Julie and John are engaged! Julie is one of the ladies on the team and John started coming to practice when they started dating. Congratulations John and Julie.

One of our long distance team members drove down for a Disc Dog competition yesterday and practice today, so after practice we all drove our dogs home and then met up for lunch. I took some pictures there, but they weren't very good (you can still check them out at flickr). I still have a lot to learn about my camera and taking good indoor shots appears to be one of them. I think I'm going to have to spend some time with the instruction manual and have a chat with my Dad about how to handle it.

Flurry

Hannah and Kodi
Originally uploaded by Sirelroka

This weekend was a busy one! The flyball team I take classes from had a demo scheduled for Saturday. The SPCA Wildlife Center has a Walk for Wildlife every year to raise money and has a pet fair afterwards in the park. There were many booths of local rescues, pet stores, food vendors, and even Lowe's who brought out a cool project for the kids to build and take home with them. They had a lure course set up and a dog fun area. We also set up a little area and did a demonstration and had a few dogs come in and try it out.

It was a bit of a challenge getting the area fenced in (to prevent dogs from walking through and watering the equipment and because our dogs are off leash when they are running. We got it figured out though and the actual demo went okay. We only had four dogs, so we were just running doubles, but that was fine. Bleys was actually one of those dogs and he did a really great job. He still doesn't really do the catching thing, but he brought the ball back and really seemed to be running fast (for him). He even practiced some passing and didn't do too badly. Roland was super-awesome and ran to the store and then boxloaded for one of the teams. I don't know how I lucked out with such a great guy.

One of the big draws of this event is that Jeff Corwin comes and starts off the walk and this year he did a nice question and answer session with the kids. I thought that was pretty sweet and the kids really seemed to like it. All in all a nice day at the park.

Machine

Photogamer for Monday: Machine. I'm currently unable to access the Photogamer site to find out what each day's cue is. It seems that other people can still get to it though because they are posting for cues I haven't seen. Can any of you get to there?

Time for a fun new game.

Yesterday on my walk I tried out the zoom on my new camera, it has a whopping 20x optical zoom. So take a look at these sets of pictures, they were taken from the same spot only seconds apart. The only difference was the first was taken at full width, the second on full zoom. No digital zoom was used in this experiment.









There are couple more sets on my Flickr and you can really see the difference better at the larger photo sizes available there...So check it out.

Heron

It's been very nice weather here for the past couple of days. Temperatures in the 70's and a brisk breeze. Since I had this camera to try out I've been taking the dog on a long walk the past two mornings to try it out. Unfortunately we are having some internet connectivity issues so it's taken me longer than expected to put them up.

This one I took today. I was passing by a pond and saw the head of this dude poking up over the hill. I was able to walk a little closer to get more of his body in the shot, but since I had the dog with me I really couldn't get much closer without spooking him.

Left

Photogamer for this past Sunday: Left. I chose to take a picture of some of my sewing scissors, which are all left-handed. Both in the handle and more importantly in the blade. A lot of manufacturers will make the handle left-handed without rearranging the blade, which is less useful.

Sign

Sign
Originally uploaded by Sirelroka

Photogamer for this past Saturday: Take a picture of a sign.

Postcard

Postcard
Originally uploaded by Sirelroka

Photogamer for last Friday: Postcard. I though this was appropriate since I just found out that Anne and Karl are going to come down to visit Disney this fall. Woot!

Ball

Ball
Originally uploaded by Sirelroka

Photogamer from last Thursday: Ball. I found this bunch down channel from the tennis facility. There were a lot of waterlogged tennis balls and one big ball with a star on it.

Intro

For my birthday this year I asked for a nice digital camera. I have a really great pocket camera that I got as a hand-me-down from my Mom, but I wanted one that wasn't all about the size. I wanted some more features, increased zoom, better pixel density (my little one is only 3 mp), the ability to manually chance the aperture size and shutter speed. I decided against an DSLR because of the cost and my ability level. Anyway, here is one of the first pictures with my new snazzy camera. Of course the first thing I look to take a picture of is the fuzz-bucket. Isn't he anerable?