Mondays and tripods
By Megan Goodacre
Charles and I have a classic Rabbit/Tigger thing going on. We should teach a seminar.
Sunday night conversation:
[Evening. Wife enters, stage right]
Wife: Urf, it's Monday tomorrow. So much work to do.
Him: Yup. Mondays are... bad.
Wife: The kids went to bed too late, they will probably be tired.
Him: You betcha. Mondays sure do... suck.
Wife: Wait a minute, you sound weird.
Him: I don't know what you mean.
Wife: You sound like you're... pretending. Do you secretly like Mondays?
Him: [guilty silence]
Wife: Admit it.
Him: Okay! I like Mondays! I like work! I like everything!
He's such a cheerful bastard, someone should take him out in the woods and lose him to teach him a lesson. Then he would be a Grateful Tigger.
How was your weekend? Mine was quite good. I seem to be back in knitting stride. And jogging stride. I'm on Week 5 of my C25K. (I have done Couch to 5K so many times, I feel like I should rename it Deja 5K or something.) The weather is finally turning, so jogging feels a little less extreme. But don't get too excited, it DID snow during my Saturday run.
Last week, I finally took the time to do some blocking. I've been putting it off and putting it off. It takes so much room to pin everything out, and I couldn't find my pins, and it was so cold, blah blah blah. No fewer than...4 big projects got wet blocked on Friday. So that's good. And I have two projects on the needles that are working up really quickly.
And, I took time to try out my new tripod. I had been using the same old broken tripod for about 7 years. It wasn't seriously broken, just one of the little plastic bits had snapped off, and the parts were getting loose. Then, when the photographer came (months ago) to take pictures for the article about me in the Citizen, I noticed he had a really cool tripod. Metal fittings, adaptable leg angles. And he told me that it was a Manfrotto. (Charles says the name sounds vaguely dirty.) If you're in the photography biz, Manfrotto is old news, but it was new to me; Manfrotto is an Italian company that makes kickass tripods. So I requested one for Christmas. A lot more money than my cheap (broken) tripod, but really worth it. That's my old tripod on the right, new one on the left.
All Manfrotto tripods now come with an adaptable center post. If you take pictures for a blog, you'll love this. The center post can be pivoted to become HORIZONTAL. That means taking pictures straight down without the legs of the tripod getting in the shot.
It has a lot of other really nice features besides that. The legs can be set at different angles. The head has rock solid construction. My old tripod had a mostly plastic head, and it could not support the weight of my new camera. You had to take the shot very quickly if the camera was pointing down at all because it would slowly sink, like a heavy sunflower.
Here it is, in action. Look at that center post, horizontal and supporting my giant camera. A little bit of kitchener stitch on the table, more on that later.
Sunday night conversation:
[Evening. Wife enters, stage right]
Wife: Urf, it's Monday tomorrow. So much work to do.
Him: Yup. Mondays are... bad.
Wife: The kids went to bed too late, they will probably be tired.
Him: You betcha. Mondays sure do... suck.
Wife: Wait a minute, you sound weird.
Him: I don't know what you mean.
Wife: You sound like you're... pretending. Do you secretly like Mondays?
Him: [guilty silence]
Wife: Admit it.
Him: Okay! I like Mondays! I like work! I like everything!
He's such a cheerful bastard, someone should take him out in the woods and lose him to teach him a lesson. Then he would be a Grateful Tigger.
How was your weekend? Mine was quite good. I seem to be back in knitting stride. And jogging stride. I'm on Week 5 of my C25K. (I have done Couch to 5K so many times, I feel like I should rename it Deja 5K or something.) The weather is finally turning, so jogging feels a little less extreme. But don't get too excited, it DID snow during my Saturday run.
Last week, I finally took the time to do some blocking. I've been putting it off and putting it off. It takes so much room to pin everything out, and I couldn't find my pins, and it was so cold, blah blah blah. No fewer than...4 big projects got wet blocked on Friday. So that's good. And I have two projects on the needles that are working up really quickly.
And, I took time to try out my new tripod. I had been using the same old broken tripod for about 7 years. It wasn't seriously broken, just one of the little plastic bits had snapped off, and the parts were getting loose. Then, when the photographer came (months ago) to take pictures for the article about me in the Citizen, I noticed he had a really cool tripod. Metal fittings, adaptable leg angles. And he told me that it was a Manfrotto. (Charles says the name sounds vaguely dirty.) If you're in the photography biz, Manfrotto is old news, but it was new to me; Manfrotto is an Italian company that makes kickass tripods. So I requested one for Christmas. A lot more money than my cheap (broken) tripod, but really worth it. That's my old tripod on the right, new one on the left.
All Manfrotto tripods now come with an adaptable center post. If you take pictures for a blog, you'll love this. The center post can be pivoted to become HORIZONTAL. That means taking pictures straight down without the legs of the tripod getting in the shot.
It has a lot of other really nice features besides that. The legs can be set at different angles. The head has rock solid construction. My old tripod had a mostly plastic head, and it could not support the weight of my new camera. You had to take the shot very quickly if the camera was pointing down at all because it would slowly sink, like a heavy sunflower.
Here it is, in action. Look at that center post, horizontal and supporting my giant camera. A little bit of kitchener stitch on the table, more on that later.
