blog of kaiyen

open land

Originally uploaded by kaiyen

This is the view from the back porch of the apartment where my wife stays in Paso Robles, while she is there working at a local hospital as a nurse. I personally wanted to go trekking around all the land there, but everything belongs to someone and everyone owns guns so I figured I shouldn’t do that. But this, from a back porch, is astounding. I could not get over it.

I wanted a better view of the sunlight as it set on that vineyard that is dead center but all of the roads are much lower than the actual cultivated land so I couldn’t get up there. But it’s still beautiful.

3 stop graduated ND filter plus a polarizer. Allowed the foreground to come out with good detail while making the sky nice and controlled.

The truly amazing thing is that, again, this is from her patio.  This incredible view, right there.  And at night, I can see more stars than I did while I was in Death Valley.  I could almost make out the entire Big Dipper and could find the North Star almost immediately.

I am a big proponent of not just GPS, but add-on systems rather than built-in ones.  They are simply far more affordable.

Anyway, California law says these cannot be mounted on the windshield (did you know that?  I didn’t for about a year of use!).  So all kinds of other mounts are used.  I personally use a vent mount, which goes through an A/C vent.  Works great.

There is one type of mount that scares me – it’s a “bean bag dashboard mount.”  This is basically a really heavy (I think I’ve seen 25-30 pounds specified..?) pedestal that sits on your dashboard onto which you then use your normal suction-cup mount for the GPS.  Now, it claims to have a nice “non-skid” surface on the bottom, but it is not otherwise adhered to the dash.  Which means that is could just go flying with enough G-forces.  30 pounds flying through the air in any direction is scary as heck.

Anyway, I saw one on the way to work today…

Every year, I either make resolutions that I will never keep over the term of the year, ranging from the usual “I will lose X pounds” (only ever kept 1 year, really) to something more esoteric and/or personal.

I think I can manage this one, though, which took until this morning to really figure out.

I am going to say “hello” more often.

That’s it. Plain and simple. I walk by people everyday and just am not friendly enough. Sometimes I have reasons – stuff on my mind, I’m just cold, whatever. But this is too small a community at work and I need to make more connections.

So I’ve developed a policy:

• If I’m sure I don’t know the person:  smile and say hello if eye contact is made
• If I am not sure if I know the person:  say hello
• If I think I know the person:  say hello with some energy and enthusiasm
• If I know the person:  say hello and make sure to ask how they are doing.  

Obviously I don’t literally mean just “hello.”  It covers all kinds of greetings.  But the point is that I need to be more friendly at first meeting.