January 31, 2010

In the late summer or early fall of 2008, I saw these shirts being modeled by the cast members of the ABC Family show Greek. They instantly caught my eye, and upon each of the dozen broadcasts, I commented to myself that I must buy those shirts from my local American Eagle. I'd never been to an American Eagle before, but if there was ever a reason, these shirts were it.

As I tend to do, I procrastinated. Before I knew it, late October had crept upon me and I still hadn't bought the shirts. Fearing the worst, I logged onto American Eagle's website, found the shirts to be half price and was set to buy them when I had my wallet.

A better idea crept into my mind: buy them in person! I made the drive down to the closest American Eagle store on the night before the election and not surprisingly found no sign of the shirts. By the time I went back to the website, they were gone. "Lesson learned" I thought to myself and figured my only chance to get them now was a thrift store.

On a whim, I looked at the clothing section at a local discount store and not only found both shirts, but found them in my size. Better yet, they were cheaper than in the store or on the website more than a year ago. Since there were more than a dozen copies and I didn't see them being hot sellers, I decided to wait a week or two until they went on sale and ended up with both shirts for less than $10. I was thrilled. It's rare that I luck out like this and certainly wouldn't recommend playing your cards this way, but sometimes it falls in your favor at just the right time. My ability to return the third one before they went on sale? Not so lucky.

January 30, 2010

This is my mail today, and it consisted of two items I'd been anticipating: the wedding invite and the CD. I didn't execute the photo as well as I'd hoped (it was almost midnight), but I was in a bit of a rush and am not as unhappy with it as I'd thought.

January 29, 2010

For the last few days, I've had a problem with computer viruses. Since I'm using basic programs to find the viruses and I'm deleting them by hand, it's taking some time to figure out just how to delete some of the files that aren't easy to find. A quick system restore eliminated many of my problems, but the memory consuming virus lead to my computer crawling to the pace of a snail, which led to these fun designs. I love the ability to achieve Solitare-like results without knowing how to play the game.

January 28, 2010

My first day of training at my new job was today, and as a result, we were hit with a ton of new information, most of which pertained to the company and not our individual job. That green notebook will likely be my best friend for the next few weeks, as it will teach us how to enter our time and how to use the computer.

January 27, 2010

This is my computer, and yet another photo that developed (get it? Developed?!) as a result of having nothing else to photograph.

January 26, 2010

My sister's wedding is less than a month away now, and the invitations are finally hitting the mail. All is finally almost completely in place with the exception of minor things such as shoes and ties for my father and I and clothing for my mother.

This is what today was for. The quest was to locate clothes for her, shoes for me and after an afternoon of searching and dinner, the night concluded with my sister showing off her newly cleaned wedding dress to us. If you'd believe it, the dress cost her just $25 and was found when we were shopping at a thrift store. She lucked out in finding a nearly identical dress to those she wanted online. After cleaning and minor touches, she was out a grand total of less than a prom dress.

January 25, 2010

These wrappers of basketball cards fell off of my bookshelf and onto my DVD player recently, and I decided not to disturb them. In the photo, you can see they reside beside a poor quality and old DVD-RW that I don't believe can be used anymore, prompting me to buy replacements late last year.

January 24, 2010

As a high schooler, one of my favorite television shows was Daria. I usually missed the original broadcasts on Monday night, but due to this being MTV, catching reruns wasn't at all difficult. When you include the numerous marathons throughout its five year run, and I had no excuse not to catch them.

After the show ended its run in the days before YouTube (and in the early days of file sharing), I decided to save the episodes that I had to VHS tapes and also maintained recording the episodes that I didn't have that were being broadcast on The N, a teen network that also aired Degrassi. Despite heavily (and sometimes cluelessly) editing the episodes of Daria for broadcast, I recorded these episodes in a higher quality than those I owned at the cost of edits. When it was said and done, I was only missing a handful of episodes from the first season that The N had decided not to rebroadcast.

Those three tapes in which the episodes are contained upon are such a favorite of my video collection. Fortunately, I won't have to live on these bootlegs much longer, as it has been announced that the series will be released on DVD later this year. Of course, much of (if not all) of the music will be lost if the handful of Daria releases are any indication but for a favorite show, that won't matter greatly.

January 23, 2010

Hal is a family cat of a friend of mine's family. As sweet as he looks in this photo, he can be a real terror much of the time. Moving in any way while he sits on your lap instantly gets you a fiesty growl, which is why I consider myself fortunate that his rival (who is as sweet as can be at all times) prefers my lap.

January 22, 2010

Oh, Conan. We hardly knew ye as host of the Tonight Show. I had plans of seeing you in your new position at some point and to make up for the 5 1/2 months of your 7 1/2 month run that I didn't watch, I was going to watch your show more often.

None of that will ever get to happen, as I've just never been in the habit of watching the Tonight Show or any late night talk television. Still, I'm glad that I caught the first and the last episodes (with the same group of people) which each had the same magical feeling. There's a bitter side of me which will look back and wish that this transition to a new host were happening when I was in my forties and not when I'm still the age that I was when his tenure as host began.

January 21, 2010

Remotes. I have remotes. In all, I use five on a regular basis, and six overall. Two of them are essentially the same remote, as many of the buttons on the previous remote stopped responding, leading me to the thrift store to pick up a similar remote that operates many of the same function.

As you can imagine, my current setup is quite a mess, but I hope it'll all change when I get a better DVD player, eliminating the need for multiple atop my television.

January 20, 2010

Within this bag is the first fitted suit I've ever owned. It's for my sister's wedding, and since her fiance has a connection at a local suit store, she decided that for the same price as renting a suit, she could buy.

They were great in that they allowed us to pick something that *we* wanted and didn't require us to match. That wouldn't have mattered much to me anyway, but I do enjoy the choice. With that, I'm very grateful that she did this for us and am very excited for her wedding a week from the date of this photo.

January 19, 2010

My mom is a big reader of Consumer Reports, and as such, we have a stack of old guides in a closet near the computers. Nothing in that cabinet has been touched in a good 10-15 years, (partly due to its inconvenient location) but when the air vent is on, the somewhat light wooden door blows one of the doors open.

January 18, 2010

The two items in this photo are my modem and my external hard drive, which glows with that bright yellow hue when the USB port is plugged into a computer. Both are part of the massive mess of wires on my desktop that I should one day photograph.

January 17, 2010

This is a closeup of a hole in one of the few pair of jeans that hasn't been rendered completely unwearable by a giant tear on the back or a wearable but uncomfortable large tear at the knees. Before my jeans suddenly all decided to destroy themselves at the same time, I'd been talking about buying new clothing when I could afford to. This has become the number one priority, as this pair of jeans is far from my favorite.

January, 16, 2010

After a trip to get fast food yesterday, my car registered 99,995 miles. I knew that the next time I drove it, it'd eclipse 100,000 miles. What I didn't know was that this trip was just slightly under five miles, leaving my car resting on 99,999 and probably 5/10 miles.

I've owned three cars that have hit six digits while I've owned them, but this will probably be the first that I watch as it hits the magical number.

January 15, 2010

Many, many months ago the wooden door to my room finally broke after sustaining more pressure than should have ever been put upon it. Last night, it deteriorated further until it became nothing more than a piece of wood attached to a frame via two hinges. Fortunately (for me) the home across the street burned down and we rescued a door from it before they threw it away. With me with no door, I set about the task of removing the old one and installing the new. This took much longer than I'd thought, and it probably wasn't the smartest decision to do it at 4 in the morning when the rest of the house was sleeping. Once I figured out the best way to get the hinges off of the old door (the bottom one was a real pain) and a way to get the new door in, I thought success had been achieved until I saw that the hinges on the new door were slightly lower than on the old. This will likely mean more work, but I can say I'm proud of my effort in all of this.

January 14, 2010

This is a photo of my hand on my ancient computer mouse, which rest atop an even older mousepad. It didn't come out as nicely as I'd wanted, but this is only further motivation for me to work more on adjusting the camera settings.

January 13, 2010

At my feet and on a table near my computer sits a fair amount of "junk." By "junk" I mean everything from old CD-R's and software to the stereo from my Chrysler and the manual to my scooter. See? Junk.

The items in this picture currently reside near the floor. The book is a presidential history book that I got as a kid and in the basket sits various DVD sets and my bowling notebook from 2008 that was used to calculate my average when I bowled once a week.

One of these days I'll need to clean this stuff up, but I'm not looking forward to do so. If I haven't done it by spring, I swear I'll just throw it all in a garbage can and out the window.

Well, all but that scooter manual. Best. $30 spent. Ever.

January 12, 2010

My original photo today turned out too dark to use, so on my drive home, I snapped a photo of my radio and climate control. The heat and air conditioning currently do not work (making winter driving a real pain) and the stereo is a temporary replacement purchased at a thrift store for the one stolen from me while my car was being repaired.

The long term plan is to replace the stereo and to figure out what's wrong with the climate control, because being without heat and without the ability to use my mp3 player have been a real downer over the last four or so months.

January 11, 2010

Macaroni and cheese has been the biggest staple of my diet over the course of the last decade, but with the loss of my job and the lack of money, it's become my sole meal many days, leading me to finally grow a bit sick of it.

As you have probably guessed, it's not the cheap Kraft stuff from a box. I grate the cheese myself and make it all from scratch. It tastes great, but is more than a bit time consuming.

This photo is an example of having seen the grated cheese on the plate and thinking, "that could make for an interesting photograph."

January 10, 2010

In 1996, I watched a lot of pro wrestling and read a lot of wrestling magazines. That summer, I purchased a wrestling simulation game that allowed one to add wrestlers, put on their own matches and to essentially create their own federation.

This is what I did for exactly five years.

In a file cabinet in my room, a full drawer is dedicated to notebooks containing information from this. Every once in awhile I attempt the task of compiling this information into a centralized notebook or series of notebooks, but often give up. This time, I'm determined to complete the task.

At a local store, I stumbled across a fancy 500 page ledger record book at an incredible price. Due to it being sturdy, containing a high number of pages and a high number of lines on each page, I instantly realized that this would be the best item for this task.

With that, I've spent the last day or two (and will probably spend the next half of the year) on this project that will primarily be just for me. When I finish compiling this book (entirely handwritten) it'll be one of my greatest accomplishments and a way to eliminate hundreds of pages of clutter from my cabinet.

January 9, 2010

My friend Erin had a birthday on Monday, and we commemorated it by celebrating it this evening. As usual with these people, I had a lot of fun and enjoyed the conversation and people immensely, even though the party broke up into three separate parties early on and I had a hard time finding my way into a conversation since I didn't get the eye contact that I took as a signal to allow me in. It felt like I was a jump roper waiting to jump in while two people twirled the rope.

I really like this photo, and it made this whole project worth it thus far. Had it not been for the photo a day project, I likely would have left my camera behind.

January 8, 2010

I'm only a week into this project, and I'm having difficulty. Though I can think of many things to photograph, my eye still isn't good enough that the photos are coming out how I want them. This means I need to a) practice and b) save up for that better camera.

In any case, this is the contents of a living room bookshelf in all its glory. The bug spray hasn't been used in a ridiculous number of years, and the Coke bottle in the distance is actually a true authentic old Coke bottle from when that was the only way to drink the tasty drink. The camera is an old, cheap camera that my family waited in the cold for on a hectic Black Friday in 2003 because it was just $88. I laughed at the horrible quality even then, but that laughter came back to haunt me when I had to borrow it to take photos at my first Tilly And The Wall concert the next year on a Friday the 13th in which my camera died. Nearly all of my photos feature the band with their head chopped off.

There's so much else on this shelf...a fish tank pump, a certificate from my museum internship, a photo of my sister and I from her graduation and even a second discarde camera, only slightly better than the one mentioned above.

January 7, 2010

I hit my first, 'what am I going to take a picture of?' day today, and ended up doing this a little more than an hour before midnight. No real explanation other than it was the only thing with any amount of light in the poorly lit living room.

January 6, 2010

As you enter my room, you see two large speakers to the left and on the right, a large tower of electronics sitting atop a metal file cabinet. These are some of those electronics.

All of these have been purchased by me in the last few years at various thrift stores to not only save money but to also find items that'd be difficult to find in stores. For example, when's the last time you saw a dual tape deck in a store? And a digital one at that? Below that sits my MiniDisc deck (my one and only experience with Craigslist) and finally, the component that makes all of the others possible, the receiver. Below it sits a 300 disc changer to replace my somewhat broken 400 disc changer.

These cheap thrift store finds (along with my record player that isn't pictured) allowed me to get back into listening to music in an environment other than my mp3 player and my computer.

January 5, 2010

This is a closeup of the strap of my sister's wedding dress. The dress is currently carelessly draped across the living room couch that we never use, probably as a hiding place so that her fiancé doesn't stumble across it. In fact, I think he knows everything about the dress except for what it actually looks like.

My sister stumbled across this dress at a local thrift store while looking for medical scrubs for her fiancé. At the second store she found a dress, which not only fit her but was in the style that she'd wanted. Impressed at the low price, she bought it and commented that even if it didn't fit her or she changed her mind, it wasn't too expensive. At the register, she received another surprise: the cashier reduced the price by half.

Even with the potential alterations and cleanings which will add to the overall price of the dress, she should still come out at a small fraction of what she expected and planned to pay. None of that has been done yet, but with the wedding in six weeks from today, there's not much time left to do so.

January 4, 2010

I spent the early afternoon primarily doing two things: sorting through old discs to find one with enough space to record something that I've needed to record for weeks and jotting down notes on a television show that I watch each weekday afternoon. (An eagle-eyed person may even be able to tell what show it was and what I was doing.) More than eight hours later, the notebook and the stack of carelessly discarded discs still litter my bed, leaving me a small amount to clean up when I head for bed in the next hour or so.

January 3, 2010

This is my Omnichord. It is currently my favorite instrument to compose music on. They were made by Suzuki in the early 80's and have some similarity to auto harps. After learning more about their existance and how they work, I purchased one on eBay in May of last year, and have loved it ever since.

The easiest way to describe how it works is it's similar to a chord organ in that you press one of the 27 major, minor or seventh buttons and then strum the strum plate like a guitar. It's easy to use and to replicate songs on and as an added benefit, the battery life is amazing. I've been using it consistantly for more than seven months now and they're still good.

January 2, 2010

From mid-November until a few days before Christmas, I helped a friend of mine by giving him a ride home from work after his car was totaled in a wreck. Since the power supply in my computer had failed (leaving me essentially musicless) I took advantage of this opportunity to listen to many of my favorite albums on the car ride each day.

I realized that the round trip of each ride was approx. the length of an album, give or take five minutes. This gave me a chance to listen to at least two albums each day.

I'd expected the rides to last a week or two, so I set out about grabbing albums that not only I enjoyed but that he may like and that may be new to him too. When two weeks turned to three, four and beyond, I began running out of options and finding something that fit those criteria began to become tougher. Eventually, I threw caution to the wind and by Christmas week, I began throwing indie Christmas compilations into the mix, most of which I listened to when I was in the car alone.

After more than a month of this, the discs began to pile up in the car and though I could have taken them inside and placed them back on the shelf, I did have the idea of taking a photo of the large collection (which numbered about sixty discs) for the project. Finally, I'm able to put these away.

January 1, 2010

A tradition that I have had for quite a number of years (since I haven't been doing much in the way of new year's kissin') has been to photograph my phone to ring in the new year. It's always exciting for me to see the new date displayed for the first time, an event that has continued since my childhood.

As usual, my new year's eve was busy, but not so busy for me to commit to the photo a day project promptly at the stroke of midnight.