Devauld.ca

The City of Calgary has released the 2007 assessments for the city. I know I should be happy about all this new found equity, but it is always harder to swallow a bigger tax bill. Particularly when the apparent value of my home increased 56.6%.

The city has provided nifty searches by address and map, that allow you to home into any plot of land inside the limits and see what homes are worth. I'm $20k behind my neighbour, and we hold the top 2 until down by the 80s on Bermuda Dr.

I also had to check out Pump Hill, and I'm sure glad that I don't have to foot the bill on some of those homes. Although, if the city is assessing your residence at over 20 million, then I'm sure you have enough equity that you annual bill isn't really a concern.

Since the New Year, my daily routine no longer involves following the herd out for lunch, and instead eating a lunch prepared at home, and read for a while during my break.

Through my internet wandering, I came across this wonderful article about Nutritionism. The author, Michael Pollan makes a great deal of excellent points about the Western Diet, and has a great deal of history of how we ended up this way. I particularly liked:

...fat doesn’t make you fat; carbs do. (Why this should have come as news is a mystery: as long as people have been raising animals for food, they have fattened them on carbs.)

I have put myself through more than my share of crazy diets. From the Anabolic Bursting through the Cycling of Diet and Excersize (ABCDE) and the 1 gram of protein per pound of lean body mass (You try eating 160 grams of protein a day), to the macronutrient balanced plans and the Body-for-LIFE program, I would like to say I've seen and done a lot of silly things to my diet. I even gave the old Canada Food Guide a shot (it's pretty good); although I was never stupid enough to try Atkins. A few of the programs make good sense and are very healthy for you, but Michael makes sense.

If you don't have the patience to read through his 12 page dissertation, skip ahead to page 11 where he covers his nine points to a healthier lifestyle.

The weekend was a blur of activity, as Sonja's folks were in town. We had a whirlwind of sightseeing, shopping and general play time, that seemed to suck up the entire weekend. This week is already looking packed, and I'm sure that it too will fly by entirely too fast for my liking.

Photo Friday sent out a Sister challenge around the new year, and I didn't really have any pictures of my own family that would fit the bill. I do have a half sister, but I haven't seen her in many years. When this week's challenge came up, I finally had some material to work with.

This picture was taken around Thanksgiving at the dinning room table. My precious little niece was rarely set down, and passed from one warm embrace to another. Following grandmothers, uncles and aunts finally it was turn for Rod, my brother, to hold his daughter. No flash was to be used, less it disturbed the baby, so this is shot wide open at F1.4 on my 50mm. I'm quite impressed with the warm dinning room lighting contrasting the cool window light.

One of my favorite parts of Photo Friday is improving my craft by looking over the note worthy photos from each week. The challenge from a fortnight ago had this photo submitted, and I can say I love absolutely everything about it. From the tack sharp wood grain to the noisy clouds along with the contrast, color and composition all make this an amazing photograph. I'd better keep on practicing!

This past weekend, I was able to partake in an adventure entitled: The Freezening. We've been doing a lot of high speed stuff recently, and we've seem to overcome a good deal of our technical hurdles to be confronted with problems of artistic merit. It seems that we are always trying to find new, and more dangerous appealing methods of capturing the moment of action. This time wasn't any different.

The basis of this trip through high speed photography was that anything will shatter if you get it cold enough. Through some magic, Jeff somehow managed to get a hold of a Dewar flask and even managed to convince some people that all vacuum flasks are created equal. The end result was a group of destructive minded photographers managed to get their hands on about three liters of liquid nitrogen (LN₂). Since we managed to get a cooling source that be maintained at about two hundred degrees below zero (That's Celsius Ma), we had opened the door to a whole new realm of smashenings.

We did have plans of breaking some cheaper tools, but the patience required to get metal that brittle was not with us when we had science to perform. It wasn't long and we turned our attention to flowers; carefully dipping them into the LN₂, plunging them into darkness then taking a picture when the projectile hit it's mark.

The Flickr slide show can be found here, but I would still like to bring a few to your attention. This photo is what happens when you both hit your target and use a bigger projectile. That poor flower never had a chance. This photo has a rather funny story behind it. It was simply a pepper that we had submersed into boiling LN₂ for a considerable time. We then hit the frozen pepper with the pellet gun and smashed it. Afterwards, there was still a good chunk of the pepper remaining, so we once again dipped it in the LN₂ and shot it. It wasn't until afterwards that we realized that we were releasing fine particulate matter from the frozen pepper into the air. Our air. It wasn't long and everyone had an opportunity to inhale a great deal of this dust and spend some time hacking and coughing on what is basically a mild, frozen pepper spray.

I think next time we should revisit the colored water, and cheap glassware days to see how much we have improved. All I need to do is convince my peers that they want to do it as well.