Squirrel

It's been almost three months since I made a non-photographic blog post, and even that one was essentially me pimping a website I'd just made. Prior to that was a blog post about CSS and before that a somewhat more popular post entitled Seven Seas of Bullshit. And before that there is only really one other text-based post in this blog.

Back in the early early Gridrunner days I'd regularly bore my audience of none with the minutiae of the day's mood swings, dietary habits and failed attempts at attracting the opposite sex at parties. Nowadays picture posts are just a hell of a lot easier for all of us: two clicks on Flickr and it's done.

But right now I'm actually starting to run out of decent images to post. The last two sets I posted to Flickr are basically just holiday snaps - and nice as they are - they have limited appeal to those outside of my family.

I've not literally run out of shots to post, of course. I've got hundreds of RAW files waiting to be processed, some of which will (I hope) make nice images, but I've not had time recently to go back and browse through them, nor have I taken anything particularly portfolio-worthy of late... apart from the squirrel shot above, of course. Maybe I should do an urban squirrel series?

So, I thought I'd write an actual blog post. And for all intents and purposes it's a "what Ade has been up to" one, so feel free to switch off now if that's not your thing. Normal service will be resumed...

Anyway let's start with Today. The Olympics are happening. In Beijing. This afternoon I watched some of the synchronised diving, which struck me as a slightly strange and rather abitrary thing to become really good at. Impressive in its own right though. And a couple of our guys did OK at the swimming, though I don't think they made it to the final, sadly.

On Friday my friend Will's first child was born. All I know is that it's a boy, he's very cute and that they haven't named him yet. Congratulations and best of luck to them! I'm looking forward to meeting the li'l fella.

On the work front: Over the past few weeks I've been busy doing lots of varied jobs for various clients, while waiting for a couple of bigger projects to emerge from meeting room and actually start happening.

Last Wednesday I finally started on one of those - a pretty big Flash project that'll take me the best part of a month to create. So that's a month of head-down programming for me. It's a lot more techy than it used to be, what with ActionScript 3 and all that entails. It takes longer to set up, but is more rewarding and you generally end up with a more solid product at the end. The (not-so-hidden) geek in me finds it really satisfying when it all starts coming together.

And it pays the bills too, which is very handy at the moment. Rachael and I are in the process of remortgaging the house, which is fairly costly. And that's straight after paying for some expensive roof repairs, a weekend in the Lake District, a honeymoon in New York and Toronto, oh and a wedding.

Oh yes, so Rachael and I got married. Hurrah! Months of wedding planning stress paid off and the wedding - in Lincoln at the end of June - went really well. It was a fantastic day.

Afterwards we went straight off to New York where we spent a week, and then we went on to Toronto for a few days too. We basically did most of the obvious touristy things, along with lots of eating, drinking and sleeping. And as a result I put on over half a stone in weight. I think if I lived in New York those big cooked breakfasts would be the end of me.

And suddenly I'm back and it's already more than six weeks since the wedding. There are over 2500 wedding photos still to sort through, which is slightly daunting. Maybe at this rate there'll be an album for the parents by christmas. Time seems to be marching on at an exponential rate.

Anyway I'm afraid to say there's no tidy point or conclusion to this blog post. I seem to be a little out of touch at writing. Or maybe it's all the programming - I keep wanting to put odd arrangements of brackets around the paragraphs, and end the sentences with semicolons;

I've still got plenty of projects in the pipeline, though I sometimes wonder whether I'm starting too many things to ever finish any of them. Right now, as soon as I can afford to take a few weeks off from the 'pays the bills' Flash work there'll be some fresh photography to post. Meanwhile I'll try to dig out some older images and polish them up so you don't have to read any more of these wordy posts for a while.