wheels

reason #2 (reason #1) not to park on the street:

(thankfully not our car!)

SNOW

its been snowing for a few days, so Dave and I hit the slopes at les 7 laux, a smaller local resort. I managed to take one of chloes gloves and one of my own (both right hands of course), but luckily Dave had a spare wool mitten. If you have ever snowboarded before, you know that a wool mitten is not a particularly good supstitute for a gore tex glove! It was a perfect day: just overcast enough to drive away the sun seekers, enough fogginess to hide the best untracked off-piste, and tons of fresh powder.
Looking south:

Looking at the fog (Grenoble is somewhere underneath)

Dave (little tiny blue speck under the central finger of rock) after taking a wrong turn and ending up on the top of rocky outcrop

double OOOF

went to the high tech dentist here in town who showed me how basically all of my amalgam fillings have cracked my teeth and caused cavities under them. Three cheers for U.S. dentistry! We're the best in the world at everything! yay! Its going to
take a lot of visits to fix everything, which is awesome because I love going to the dentist.

In other news, I met with the gallery manager today, who seemed very interested in my photos! Were going to throw
a big party if I get a show, but I wont know until feb 20. While I was showing my photos, some random guy came in and started complimenting my pics, which probably helped.

OOOF

I've had a little writers block recently, which is a little silly considering that this a BLOG after all. anyway, last week, I treated myself to some nice oysters, and a day later was sick for a day and a half. I'm actually very picky about my oysters, and inspect and sniff them scrupulously. I usually buy more than I think I'll eat specifically because I always end up throwing one or two of them away. Anyway, I found out that there is in fact another way to get sick off oysters besides eating spoiled oysters, and that is Norwalk Virus (as a funny aside, I could hear my moms heart stop from across the planet when Chloe told her that it was a virus). You can distinguish between plain old food poisoning and Norwalk by the time of onset. In my case, I ate them on tuesday night, and got sick about 40 hours later, about an hour after climbing in the gym. I had been feeling crappy all day, but that afternoon I asked chloe to drive me home because I felt awful. Anyway, because I love you, the reader so much, I'll spare you the details about how I was crapping water and simultaneously puking into a bucket, but suffice it to say that it wasn't pretty. I stayed at home on friday, and by saturday morning I was basically healthy again, but white as a sheet and a few pounds lighter.

norwalk virus comes from raw sewage dumped overboard by fishermen who deserve to be kicked in the groin for a week while being force fed infected oysters. Oysters are filter feeders which concentrate the virus from the excrement into handy bite sized packages for innocent oyster lovers such as myself. From now on I'm going to pay close attention to the provenance of the oysters. even so, no more oysters for a while.

market

we went to the market near Place de Gordes on a freezing morning. There was a trail of either bloody or strawberry coated footprints out of the jardin de ville.

where we bought some wonderful walnuts and ugly knobbly potatoes (that tasted great)

swans

on my way to work. Thank you mom and dad for the sony T3 which I carry everywhere now!

laxness

Okay so I've been a bit lax in my postings recently, but what can I say; there simply aren't very many interesting things going on, and I've been working hard on writing a paper.

This Sunday we went to Ombleze to climb with Mark, Amy, Dave, Sandy and Dylan (Dave and Sandy's son). It was a beautiful day, made more interesting by the fact that I did a beautiful and scary Piola route and by the fact that the car we were in had the low gas light on for most of the day. After a failed attempt at syphoning gas from the other car, we ended up coasting down towards St. Jean en Royans (the nearest gas) in a stressful and brakeless 20 minute run.

zoom

I've been getting ~300 MB 24bit scans off of 6x6 negatives, and I'm pretty happy with the detail; here are some examples of the max resolution from the Venasque photo below:


Impressive quality for such an inexpensive scanner!

The Strange Things People Do

On the way back to work today we pulled up to the neighborhood gas station. We waited for a woman in a white Fiat Panda to drive away, since she had been sitting in her car for a little while. We assumed that she would pull her seatbelt on at any moment and drive away, seeing as she was blocking the pumps. After a few more minutes, we gave up and pulled into the adjacent pump and pulled the fueling hose to the gas tank over the car, onto the opposite side. We looked over at her, and to both of our amazement, she was casually turning the pages of a newspaper on her lap while smoking! As I finished fueling, she rolled down her window, flicked the lit cigarette into the station, folded up the newspaper, took off her seatbelt, and.... opened the door and began fueling.

I found this experience to be remarkable not solely because it reminded me how singularly, amazingly, fantastically inconsiderate people can be, but also because it showed me how much we want to believe that people aren't sociopaths. When we pulled up and she wasn't moving, I wanted to believe that she was about to pull away. When she didn't, I assumed that it was because her friend or husband was inside paying. When I saw her reading her paper and smoking, I assumed the same thing. I had a little twinge of doubt when the only other person at the cashiers desk came out, got into a delivery van and drove away. Watching her draw long drags on that cigarette, it really never occured to me that she hadn't even started fueling up yet.

Venasque

A medium format shot from Venasque on our last trip to provence

St. Eynard

We walked up the snow covered road

to the Fort St. Eynard

enjoyed some tea

And some nice views of Grenoble

and the Chamchaude

I was using my hassy/gitzo 1228 legs/arca head, and on the way down I realized just how light my camera bag is without the damn tripod. Most of the weight is from the head, so now I'm looking for a lighter one. The arca is a fantastic head, but I originally bought it to hold a much heavier camera (Toyo 45AII view camera), and I think its kind of overkill for the cameras I use right now.

We also managed to get our car stuck trying to get out of the parking area.