Photo of the Day 04/05/10

Three today. There were more I took that I liked but I don't want to bog everyone down with tons of mundane photos that are probably only interesting to me.



This is my shed door. Why? I love textures, and this photo has plenty of them - the paint chips and rust of the galvanized steel outer wall, the rust and pitting on the hinge and the old, weathered wood. Before anyone tells me I need to take better care of my shed - it is very old and was like this when I bought the house. :P

Time of day: 4:23pm
Distance: 2 metres
Focal Length: 120mm
F-stop: f/5.6
Exposure time: 1/160"
ISO: 400
Manual Focus



This is my cat Isis. Yes, she's fat. Yes, we're doing something about that.

Time of day: 4:23pm
Distance: 3 metres
Focal Length: 220mm
F-stop: f/5.6
Exposure time: 1/100"
ISO: 400
Auto Focus
White balance slightly corrected - image rotated and resized.



This one was harder than I thought it would be. I'd never tried to take photos of clouds before and did not expect my standard shutter speed to give me absurdly saturated photos. It took some fiddling to get this.

Time of day: 4:24pm
Distance: Infinity
Focal Length: 140mm
F-stop: f/5.0
Exposure time: 1/4000"
ISO: 400
Auto Focus

Photo of the Day 03/05/10

Hoping to do a photo a day to at least brush up on my photography skills. Today's photo is some night photography I did - not impressive, but working on different settings.



A rose in my front yard. Taken at about 11pm at a distance of perhaps 30cm at a 53mm focal length. f/5.6, 30" exposure - ISO 1600. I'm going to try this one again tonight at f/8 and f/10 and with a 60" and 90" exposure. NO post processing except to resize.

The Joy (Read: Rampant Discomfort) of Pregnancy.

I'm in a group of women with due dates in the same month as me. This sounds fabulous, right? Meh. Mostly it just means I hear the same news over and over and over and over again. First it was declarations of, "It's a....." to which I feigned joy over and over and over again (who cares?) and now it's excited declarations of, "Hello Third Trimester!" or "Less than 100 days left!!!" which actually kind of just makes me want to punch them because I have 2 weeks left until my third trimester and another week until I'm counting down from 100. Bitches.

The part I hate most though - more than anything else - is the weepy ones. The women who cry at every ultrasound, who spend hours rubbing their bellies and who buy sonograms so they can hear their baby's heartbeat every day, their eyes welling with mothering tears. The women who declared at 8 weeks when their baby was basically a poorly developed fish how connected they felt with them! Oh how much love they feel for their tiny, spineless fishbaby.

I'm sorry, I just can't do that shit. I mean, I'm fond of Xander - don't get me wrong. He's like a little uterus pet who I can feel kicking the shit out of my organs at regular intervals and I really think it's cool when I jab him in the head and he punches back. That's pretty sweet. ...I'm less than excited when I play Dixie Chicks and he gets all excited and does a little happy dance, but whatever - it could be worse. ...but I don't tear up at ultrasounds, couldn't give a crap about hearing his heart beat every day and don't feel remotely connected to him - except, you know, physically.

It's not really socially acceptable to feel this way - people look at me funny, like I'm some guaranteed failure of a parent because I'm not just crapping myself with joy at every ache and pain the little shit causes me. I'm well aware that I'm a person - and that people when they give birth to things develop strong, emotional attachments to them, so I'm not in any way worried. Part of me just wonders how many of those weepy women are just weepy because they feel like they're really supposed to be. Women have some scary perceptions on how pregnancy MUST BE and they are so very happy to tell you how it MUST BE. My favourite is the women who imply that if you don't have a completely natural birth in screaming agony - you're a failure as a woman. I think that if I don't take advantage of every option available - I'm a failure as an evolved being. So there. :P

Sanitary pads and factoids go so well together!

(TMI)So I'm pregnant - therefore I use pads because even though I do pelvic floor exercises, when he actually KICKS my bladder - I'm sorry, things happen. ...and that one time I sneezed. Anyway... (/TMI)

Now that we've got that explanation out of the way - the brand I use has little odd factoids on the back of each pad. ...okay, why? ...that's just a little...bizarre.

Anyway, they're mostly completely accurate - excepting the ones that would be accurate given context. For example:

"Koalas are one of the few land animals which do not require water to survive."

Well, no...they do require water to survive - they just get all the water they need from their food source. True, with context - but misleadingly inaccurate.

"Acorns are poisonous to humans. If eaten they will cause kidney damage."

This one's so misleadingly inaccurate it almost counts as a complete lie. Acorns, the fruit of the oak tree, contain large amounts of tannins. Tannins are, very simply put, a plant polyphenol. Know that bitter taste when you drink coffee or tea? How a fruit tastes a little bitter if you eat it underripe? Tannins. What happens when you eat huge amounts of tannins? Ulcerations, kidney damage - death. Acorns have huge amounts of tannins and therefore must be processed before eating. Once they are, though - they're totally edible. In fact, they're quite frequently turned into flours and are a relatively common foodsource in places like South Korea and Japan.

But this isn't my favourite...my favourite...

"On a clear, dark night - a human can see a candle burning from 50km away."

Firstly, that's about 30 miles. ....now...let me just get it out of the way that I don't know if someone could actually, physically SEE a candle burning from 30 miles away. In fact...no one really does. All we can do is speculate.

This is one of my favourite things to think about - call me a nerd. It's SCIENCE TIME.

Now.. say we're on the ocean in a boat. The sea is totally calm - no wind, totally flat water. There's another boat 30 miles away. You can't see it. I don't care how clear it is or how flat that water is - you can't see that boat. Why? Because the earth is round. In fact, you can see about a grand total of 2.9 miles. Don't get me wrong...this changes the higher up you are. Distance of the horizon is equal to the square root of 13 times your height. If a human is standing at sea level and is 5'7" tall - they can see for 2.9 miles before the surface of the earth curves too much for them to see anything else. That's not to say that there are no circumstances in which you can see something 30 miles away. If we use the equation:

We can change that around to:

then:

then:

then:

We know that you must be at a height of 192.31 metres to see 50km away. 192.31 metres is 630.94 feet. Not that high - but there must be no hills, trees, buildings - in fact, nothing but a fairly flat slope between you and the object for you to be able to see it.

The second part of the problem is whether or not a human can perceive the light of a candle from that distance. This is the part that I can't actually find an answer for. Certainly in a vacuum (or in space) you could see a candle 50km away because you'd have no wind/air/dust/pollen blocking your view in the vacuum of space.

So I suppose what that quote should really be saying is, "If the earth were completely flat and were in a vacuum, a human can see a candle burning 50km away."

Call me nitpicky - maybe I just did it for the science!

Can We Really Never Offend Anyone?

I don't want to be that woman who gets bitchy at other parents over things I feel strongly about.
I don't want to be that mother who feels like she's entitled to things just because she squeezed out a baby.

But when a woman asks me a question - asks my opinion - about a fairly loaded topic, then gets offended at my reaction... I have no sympathy for her.

If you don't want to know, don't ask.

She asked if I would circumcise my child if I had a boy and why or why not? Before I answered, she told me that she and her husband had discussed it and had decided that it would be "best for (their) family". Firstly, how is the state of the kid's penis best for the whole family? Seriously.

I replied that I would absolutely not be circumcision my child - that I found the practice barbaric. I likened it to tail docking and ear cropping in dogs or declawing in cats (when it's done to make the penis look "like dad's", "like his classmate's" or "normal" - religious reasons are separate and I won't even touch them). Most Western countries have banned these practices because they've determined that cosmetic alteration of an animal is inhumane. So how do we live in a world where cosmetic alteration of your pets is inhumane - but chopping the foreskin off of a baby is totally acceptable?

I know that circumcision SLIGHTLY lowers the risk of a few conditions - penile cancer, UTIs and erases the risks of things like phimosis. ...call me crazy, but it isn't enough.

It's like Psam's doctor told her when she was pregnant with Burp. Relatively few men end up with penile cancer. Many, many, many more women end up with breast cancer, but we don't chop off their breasts (preemptively, of course).

I hear some women talking about circumcising their boys because it's "too much work" or "too hard" to keep an uncircumcised penis clean. And...I don't think rampant laziness is a good excuse either.

If people I know want to get their kids circumcised - fine. If they want to get their kids circumcised because they want to prevent conditions that probably won't happen - fine. If they want to get their kids circumcised because they're too lazy to keep their kid's penis clean - fine.

But people need to think before asking others "what do you think about this (controversial) topic?". And should expect and accept critical answers. Don't ask if you don't want to know.

Men and Giving Birth

Simon and I got into an argument today when I was reading an article about a male midwife. He told a woman in labour to suck it up because pain meds are for wussbags. I read a part in the article where the woman said that her general rule was, "No uterus. No opinion."

This apparently pissed Simon off. He resents the idea that he can't understand what childbirth feels like simply because he doesn't have a uterus. Well...he can't. End of story, right? He doesn't think so.

He insists that men can have painful experiences that can be roughly the pain equivalent of childbirth. Migraines, he suggests (they'd better be pretty fucking bad migraines), cluster headaches, gallstones, being shot, being stabbed. I'll give him the last two. I'm sure that being shot or being stabbed are probably at least as painful.

When I pointed out that you're unlikely to sit for 18 hours with a stab/gunshot wound without treatment, he pointed out that in a war situation, you are.

Okay fine. So men in war situations who are shot or stabbed have probably felt a rough pain equivalent to giving birth but there are PROBLEMS with this.

1. Not all pain is created equal. I have a headache right now that on generic pain terms is probably roughly equivalent to horrible menstrual cramps - but I'll be damned if it isn't a whole Hell of a lot easier to tolerate. Pain cannot be transferred between situations without changing.

2. It doesn't matter how much pain he's experienced. Without a uterus, without giving birth, he can never understand what giving birth feels like. Period. Ever. Ever, ever, ever. Because he can't experiencing it. You can't understand something like that without the experience.

Either can I, to be fair, because I haven't yet. I understand that it's blindingly painful. I'm sure that I'll find out it was ten times worse than I thought it would be. But I accept that having not given birth, I can't even imagine what it's like.

So this is one time where I felt it was acceptable to end an argument like this.

Simon: It's not acceptable to tell me that I can't understand what something feels like!
Sandra: Okay. You can't. You never will. End of story. No uterus, no opinion.
Simon: That's not fair.
Sandra: That's how it is. Deal with it.

Normally, I'd feel like an asshole. Here, I felt like I was just being honest.

Bleh

I need to get some kind of life. I also need to get more friends. It occurred to me that I won't have a baby shower for this baby - and it is apparently tacky to have a baby shower for any subsequent baby. The problem is a serious lack of friends. I know other pregnant women, sure - but none of them are like me. They're all either button-down, highly religious or in some other way notably conservative. It's not that I don't like them, it's that they look at me like I'm some kind of freak because I play video games, swear a lot, have a twisted sense of humor and a tendency to not keep my mouth shut when something bothers me. I think it, I say it. That tends to alienate a great many people.

I have Bonnie, of course and Carrollyn but they both live in the city and a lot of the time, Bonnie is off doing things like going to clubs or bars or going to Sydney for some event or another. I know that she'd like me to go with her but I frequently can't afford to.

Carrollyn is too busy hanging out with her new boy toy, which is good. She just got out of a relationship with a sickening asshole who actually had her convinced that unless she was thin and beautiful, she was worthless. He held a proposal over her head for years if she would just become exactly what he wanted. Miraculously, I held my tongue the vast majority of the time instead of screaming, "DUMP THE MOTHERFUCKER ALREADY!!" (otherwise known as DTMFA!)

The other pregnant women I know are constantly asking me when I'm going to change myself. What I see as parts of me (the swearing, the video games, having cats, the rock music and the twisted sense of humor), they see as serious problems with parenthood. Can't swear around children, can't play video games and be a grownup, can't have cats and babies (because the cats will smother the baby/make it allergic/generally be dirty/scratch or bite the baby/insert random excuse), can't listen to rock music around babies, must be a sensible, dry parent at all times and cannot laugh at the misfortune of others (yes, I'm talking about you skateboarding guy on YouTube who falls off and smacks his balls on a metal pole. I watch you over and over again because your pain brings me joy), filthy jokes or othersuchnonsense.

All of this makes me feel two things. Very depressed and very isolated. I know that Psam could help because Psam was a very similar type of pregnant woman, but Psam is far away. The same goes for Sarah and Heather.

So the obvious answer - make more friends. Need more friends. ...but it occurs to me that I don't actually remember how to make more friends. I don't have a job, I'm not going to school. ...so...how do we do this again? Oh right. I run up to random person and ask if they want to play with me. ...wait, that sounds a lot less creepy when you're a kid. Why can't things easy again like they were when we were kids and nothing but how well you played tag mattered?