• Use manual focus, as auto focus will have problems in between each shot.  You don’t have the time to wait!

• I used an aperture of f/9.0.  Sharp, clean lines from the fireworks, and the right blend of fireworks/black sky.

• I had the camera on a tripod aimed at a portion of the display.  I should have used a slightly wider lens, about 30-40mm on my XSI would’ve been perfect.

• Then I just sat back, enjoyed the show, and snapped away using my remote control (camera set on bulb mode), randomly changing the length of the exposure.

See the full set of Flickr!

Anyway, I’ve got a bunch of photos to sort though, and a ton of recipes to get up here, and now I have the mental space to do so! Lots more coming soon!

• Get to work at a reasonable hour ( i.e. 8am or so) — Better, but not totally successful so far.
• Cook more meals at home to save money and calories. Doing amazing at this part! Saved money, losing weight, and amazing food!
• Try to cook new foods for these meals, and keep good records. Yep.  Cooked a lot of new things, and have too many photos.
• Save up enough money for at least one nice long vacation later this year (NY with Erin or England with family, or both). No England, but Monterey in two weeks, and hopefully New York in October.
• Spend money wiser. I’ve saved what for me is a fairly substantial amount of money.  Just need to keep it up!
• Try and see my “out-of-town” friends more often. I feel like this has been good too, given how busy I’ve been.
• Keep organized enough to maintain my current studio, and possible increase it. Up to 12 students now, with some room to grow
• Keep work moving at a faster pace, and get enough progress to earn more money! Been working much more efficiently at work.  Got a promotion a few weeks ago, and the company’s general income is slowly increasing!

And once again, this site’s layout has changed.  Hopefully for the last time for a while.  Lot’s of customizing to do now on the current theme, but I think this layout works perfectly.  Clean, easy, simple.  And now that I have a laptop I can actually use, I hope to update more often.  I have lots to update with!

My adventures in food have been mostly successful.  I have a lot of updates for this site to do, plus a lot of design work to go.  I’ve been stuck either working from home in the evenings, too exhausted, or cooking late, which makes me not want to start working/writing for this site.  Not to mean I’m going to stop, I just need to find the time!

Hope to get more up in February!  I’ve got a lot of food posts to do, but almost less time.

1/4 of the way to my vacation money!

In hopes of saving vast amounts of money, a New Year’s resolution of mine is to cook much more food at home for all meals (see my New Year’s post!).  This will lead to a few good things, but my main drive for being super cheap for the next few months is to hopefully make enough to pay for this trip.  Meals out average about $6-7 I’m guessing.  I’m hoping to bring my cooked meals down to about $3-4 per meal.  Obviously, this won’t be the only way I’m going to make it up to affording this trip quickly, but it’s a good start.

Also, this will lead to more adventurous cooking, more food photography, more blog updates on food, eating better, learning lots, etc.  So really it is a good thing all around, but for some reason I’m extremely focused on saving money for this trip.  This hit me suddenly about a week ago, that the trip was coming in six months, and I couldn’t rely on my parents for help.

At the least, I’ll have a good amount of money saved.  Nothing wrong with that!

And then — no.  One things lead to another, and I’m stressed out to the point of losing hair faster than a Rogaine side effect, things are getting pushed back, my days get later and earlier, and I spend most of my day cranky.  Really, the last two months are a blur.  My three-week vacation?  I blinked and it was over from being so spaced in recovery mode after the previous weeks.  I barely remember what happened on most days.

And now, it’s like everything has been hit with a giant reset button.  The last three weeks was me sticking a paperclip into one of those annoying tiny holes, and now everything has mostly calmed down.  It is kind of freaking me out after the previous amount of crazy there was.  And it’s not just me.  It was described to me today by a coworker that it felt like a giant hangover, and he felt both over and under caffeinated at the same time.  I can agree with this.  I have the foggy-brained feeling that only the morning after a fun night of aimless chat and horribly bad jokes can bring out, combined with a few left over feelings of “IMustGetThisDoneNow!AndWhatElseIsThereToDo?IHaveSoMuchEnergy,IMustBeProductive!Go!Go!Go!”, mixed with “ZZZZZZZzzzzzzz”.

So, with that, I am off to bed to prepare for the first Friday of the new year at work.  It should be a good weekend, and no better way to start that than with a good Friday!

But, for my first panini, it wasn’t bad.  I might need to try with some focaccia or ciabatta bread though.  I used some sliced french bread from the supermarket deli.  The recipe I had was simple, just tomatoes, basil leaves, and cheese, with some vinegar, and oil on the outside of the bread. This would be great as a breakfast though.  Fast, easy, portable (for those like me that like to eat in the car on the drive to work)

Some things different for next time: Cut the tomato slices in half, find a better deal on basil leaves (instead of organic ones from a box, seemed a little pricy), add some garlic, and for a heavier meal, add some meat, like bacon or chicken, or maybe even sausage.

Click here for a PDF of the recipe

Things at work are much different than last year.  This time last year, we were just about to set off for Las Vegas for CES 2009, a little uncertain and wary of our approach for the new Mutant brand.  Now, with our products in at least some stores, we (or at least me!) are much more certain of our direction and have some solid ground to build off of.  This is going to be a tough year, harder than the last, hopefully though there is much more to come of it.

I’m sure everyone else has their resolutions, but here’s some of mine.  I hope airing them out will keep me reminded of them.

• Get to work at a reasonable hour ( i.e. 8am or so)
• Cook more meals at home to save money and calories.
• Try to cook new foods for these meals, and keep good records.
• Save up enough money for at least one nice long vacation later this year (NY with Erin or England with family, or both).
• Spend money wiser.
• Try and see my “out-of-town” friends more often.
• Keep organized enough to maintain my current studio, and possible increase it.
• Keep work moving at a faster pace, and get enough progress to earn more money!

This post will be up for a while as a sticky, and I’ll update this list as necessary.  But, there it is!  Should be an exciting year!

This will be a long work in progress, and probably will never get done in a reasonable amount of time.

UPDATE ON 1/10/10:

The layout of the theme I liked, which is why I got it.  However the colors were not quite right.  I like plain sites, with some color accents, and simple layouts.  This is why currently the colors are all sorts of messed up.  Hopefully this will be done soon, and things will make sense again.