My Photographs - Hot Rod Cafe

I haven't posted about a photo in a while, so here's one I did recently: Hot Rod Cafe.

We went downtown to get some lunch at a place that we hadn't tried before. On our way in from where we parked we crossed in front of this hot rod car parked across the street from it. I wanted to take some shots out there, but the traffic was a bit heavy and we were hungry so we scooted on across. While we waited for our food I got a few shots, framing the window & car in different ways, which took a few extra tries with the other traffic driving by.

Lunch was good. I had a fried shrimp po-boy. It wasn't made with proper crispy crusted New Orleans style French bread, but it had been so long since I'd had one at all it did just fine. We also tried French fried sweet potatoes for the first time. Good? Let's just say we've been back a couple times since.

After downloading the images I went over them and picked this one out as the best. I tweaked it a bit to bring out the darker areas, and applied a sepia tone to all but the car to make it pop out a bit and emphasize the age of the cafe. I think it came out pretty good, though since doing it I have learned a different method for masking the sepia which would be easier to edit later if I found any flaws.

Prints and other items featuring this photo are available for purchase.
Hot Rod Cafe Custom Framed Prints and Greeting Cards at imagekind.com
Hot Rod Cafe Posters and Greeting Cards at zazzle.com

Gonna Need An Ocean Of Calomine Lotion

Got a little poison ivy, or poison something, on my legs this week.

I was power washing the deck, and the yard does need a little work around it. The grass needs cutting and several bushes need some big-time trimming. Also there were mosquitoes, though I did manage to get rid a few with well-aimed 1550-psi blasts of water. As often happens in such case, I foolishly did the work while wearing shorts and came in rather itchy. I have allergies, so that's par for me. This time things went a bit worse.

Over the next couple days it got worse, with the skin turning red, firm, and bumpy. Oh, and itchy, though if you've ever had poison ivy, etc., that goes without saying. That's bad enough, but here's where that bandage in the photo comes in. When I went out to do the deck washing I already had scratch right there. Well, evidently when you get poison ivy on an existing scratch it itches worse. I resisted scratching though, and put on some neosporin with an analgesic. The overall itch persisted, though, so I gave that leg a good scrub-down. In doing so I scrubbed away the scab. That may have been the big mistake because it immediately started weeping clear yellow fluid. I ran around looking for the bandages & tape (why we don't keep them in a handy kit is beyond me) with the fluid running down onto my foot. Nasty.

I put together a makeshift bandage with a couple gauze sponges held together with three bandaids instead of the tape I never found. My wife went out and got some calomine, gauze pads, and some rubber stretchy tape that will breathe and won't stick to my hairs. Only problem is it won't restick if you unstick it, so you have to make sure it's at the right tightness the first time.

It was still weeping the next day, even after a saline compress, so we tried to get an appointment to see a doctor. It was the 4th so they were closed, so we decided to give it another day. This morning it was still weeping (though perhaps slightly less so) so we called again. Still closed. We went to a nearby walk-in clinic we've used before and the doctor there looked it over. He said it looked like poison ivy, and that the sore looked to be just becoming infected. He squeezed on a glob of neosporin the size of a pecan half and put a large stick-on bandaid on it. He also gave me a shot of cortisone to speed the poison ivy clearing and gave me a prescription for an antibiotic and an oral steroid.

A couple hours later I noticed the weeping was passing through a wrinkle in the bandaid and soaking into my sock so I changed to the dressing I have on in the picture. (The dark part is the stretchy rubber tape overlapping.) It's much more comfortable and should absorb much better. I globbed on a bit of neosporin myself, as well.

Hopefully I will be able to report some good news about this soon.

Another Dip In The IVF Roller Coaster

A couple days ago my wife and I ran into a bit of a conflict.

After a conference call between us and an adoption agency rep that didn't go so well she indicated she was having second thoughts about going through with the upcoming IVF cycle. I think the call may have only brought this to a head, but that her doubts may have been mostly stoked by an orientation meeting we had with another adoption agency with a local branch. At the meeting one of the things they mentioned was embryo adoption. (One of the couples there is older than us and is planning on doing that.)

She said she wasn't entirely comfortable with creating embryos without their being able to survive. We've discussed this before. My view is that this is what happens when people conceive naturally, or us at least. A naturally fertilized embryo has little more chance to implant and carry to term than an artificially fertilized one - less if the protocol includes measures to stimulate the growth of a better, more hospitable, lining in the uterus. All we are doing in IVF is accelerating the process so that we get to the one that survives sooner. Her problem, though, is in knowing that's going on.

She also is frustrated with going through all the pain of the injections with nothing to show for it. The expense is a factor too. Adoption would be much more expensive, and would bring in outsiders with a say in things, but is much more of a sure thing.

As for myself, I really want us to have our own child. I'm an atheist, if I haven't mentioned that before. I don't believe in any kind of afterlife. I believe that the only way we live on after we die is through our biological descendants, and I don't want to disappear when I'm gone. I'm ready to accept that when we've tried everything we can it will be time to move on. I'm just not ready to accept it before we've done everything, and this cycle with her sister as the carrier would be our best chance yet for a child of our own.

She's gone through such doubt before, and it was also around this time in her cycles. She does get very emotional when she is premenstrual. I'm not dismissing her feelings. I'm just saying they are hormonally amplified at the moment. I think that ultimately we will go through with the IVF. We have a consult with the doctor coming up this week, with my sister in law present, so we can go over the protocol and know what to expect. (There is some extra testing, for STDs mainly, beyond what was done already for our earlier attempts.) My wife hasn't indicated she was canceling that, so I think we will likely ride through this dip.

It's still very frustrating and depressing. I didn't anticipate this kind of thing when we started. But I think that ultimately we can get through it.

UPDATE: My wife was out this morning and came back to pick me up to get lunch and bring it to Secret Headquarters. Over lunch she mentioned the appointment we have Friday and how we should go about convoying or carpooling with her sister. (I suggested that we carpool in her sister's car since she has the GPS and we've only been to the doctor's office once before, and that we should pay for the gas.) She said she hoped it worked. We also talked about what to do after if it doesn't, like maybe trying out doing interim care (short-term foster parenting) for infants and/or small children in the process of being adopted. It could be a foot in the door if we decide adoption is right for us, and would help us decide and get ready.

Another IVF Back On The Table

My wife's sister called last night and said she was up for carrying our baby for us. My wife was trembling while she was on the phone with her. I talked her down, a little, since we want to keep our expectations realistic: though this may well be our best shot at our own baby yet, the odds are still against us. We're hoping, though, that the big factor was my wife's health and the conditions in her uterus. We're also hoping we get some extra embryos to freeze again this time. Oh heck, we're hoping for a baby.

Meanwhile, we have an adoption orientation meeting/class coming up. We're going to be laying what groundwork we can for that, particularly researching adoption agencies. (Any tips, recommendations, or warnings are welcome. Please comment.)

Infertility Endgame

It looks like we're going into the final stages of our fight with infertility. Our plan was to do a couple IUIs with my sperm supplemented with a donor's, then if that didn't work (and odds are it wouldn't) we'd try one last IVF with my wife's sister as the carrier. After a bit of delay, I looked over the info we had on donors and picked one I thought matched me best. (Redheads are scarce among sperm donors, by the way, so if you're a healthy male redhead who wants to make a few extra bucks, head on over to your local sperm bank.) It was a bit late to catch that cycle, so we waited until the next month.

The next month is here. In the mean time my wife has gone back and forth on whether she could do another IVF, so that's still technically up in the air, but I think if it comes to that she'll come to a point sooner or later where she's up for it. Her sister has also been having second thoughts. It seems their mother has been pressuring her to do it. I think we should tell their mother we've decided not to do it that way, for some sort of medical reason, just to take the pressure off. It's possible whatever reticence she's feeling is from an instinct to resist the pressure.

As I said, the next month is here and today my wife expressed some doubts about doing the IUI. It's a more expensive proposition with donor sperm in the mix (so to speak,) not likely to work, and with her health issues it would be a high-risk pregnancy if it did work (even though her health has improved with better diet & exercise habits.) I told her we shouldn't do anything unless and until she is comfortable with it. She went off on an errand, saying she'd think about it while she was out, and order sperm when she got back if she thought she was ready.

After she left I realized I had felt a bit of relief when she talked about not doing the IUI. As the time went by the thought of ordering that sperm, and having my wife pregnant by another man got me sicker and sicker. I realized I couldn't handle it, at least not yet, and, with the doubts she was having, maybe this approach just wasn't right for us.

When she got back I told her what I thought. She says she agrees.

I guess the plan now is to see what happens with her sister. If she and my wife sync up on the IVF we'll try that once. Beyond that, there's adoption which we may start looking into soon regardless.

This infertility thing is not for sissies.

Thoughts On Iron Man, Spiderman, And ILM

I saw the trailer for Iron Man recently, and I have to say it reminds me of the recent Spiderman movies. By that I mean I'm seeing the same stilted motions in the CGI characters. ILM did the work on all the films, from what I gather, but they also did the work in the Star Wars prequils. The stormtroopers were completely convincing, even with so many of them on screen at once. If I hadn't heard otherwise I would have thought at least some were live actors. But both Spiderman and now Iron Man look like they're computer generated. There is never a moment's doubt watching them. Why is this?

I can think of three possible explanations...

A: ILM is perfectly capable of producing convincing animation of human characters, but only does so for Lucas.

B: ILM is perfectly capable of producing convincing animation of human characters, but will only give their clients what they're willing to pay for, and Sony and Marvel were only willing to pay so much.

C: ILM is perfectly capable of producing convincing animation of human characters, but only if basing them on the movements of a living model. They had live actor stormtroopers from the original Star Wars trilogy to work from, but for the Marvel superheroes only had still images from comic books. And let's face it: those comic book drawings evoke some very dramatic motion, but they are not realistic poses by any stretch of the imagination.

So what do you think? Is it A, B, C, or something else?

My Photographs - Bistro Blues

We were eating at a local Italian bistro the other day, and a man was sitting outside playing an electric guitar. I took a few shots, but felt the cars parked on the near side of the street detracted from the scene. A couple shots had stray pedestrians looking in right at the camera. Later after we ate the nearby cars had driven off and I got up and moved over a bit to get this shot. It was the last shot I could get for the day as my memory card was full. Fortunately it was pretty much the shot I was hoping for.

It's a bit modified, obviously. I cropped the top down a bit to deemphasize the cars across the street, edited out the soft drink logo on the cup, adjusted the contrast a bit, and colored it a low-saturation blue. Came out nice, I think. I tipped him on the way out.

Prints and other items featuring this photo are available for purchase.
Bistro Blues Custom Framed Prints and Greeting Cards at imagekind.com
Bistro Blues Prints and Greeting Cards at redbubble.com