I dream of rain

As twenty-oh-five draws to a close, I find myself wondering just what I accomplished this past year. At first it seems fairly depressing, but upon a little bit of reflection, a lot has happened during these past 525,600 minutes.

Financially, I'm now cash-flow positive for the first time since I bought my house. On top of that, I have some degree of savings once again, and it's increasing. It'll take some time (12-18 months) to wipe out my debt, but it's quite a reversal from how things used to be. Unfortunately, in the new year my mortgage payment is going up by 20%, which wipes out 2/3rds of the money I was putting into savings. Yup, I finally got the insurance bill from the hurricanes. Plus my taxes doubled. Ouch. At least I'll be able to write some of it off my federal taxes.

On the home front, I laid down hardwood floors in the master bedroom. This project probably ran three months late, and cost about $1200 for the materials alone... but the room looks amazing now.

We've also been slowly rearranging the house and generally making it feel more like a home and less like a collection of stuff thrown into each room. One room is full of nothing but bookshelves. We have a real guest bedroom now. We're down to just one room full of junk, and even that's been cleaned up considerably. Yay!

I'm officially engaged, which is a very scary prospect. No, not because of the possiblities of me breeding, but it does open up the whole "future of possibilities" thing. I've lived in a bubble of unchanging-present for far too long, and our dreams give us a future to work towards.

On the photographic front, I've acquired a real flash unit, a medium zoom, and a long telephoto lens, as well as getting my original wide zoom back from Nikon. Armed with these tools, I've been more serious in my work, and have done a few gigs, learning the technical aspects of the trade as I go along. I'm also paying more attention to post-processing, and the final "product" as opposed to simply taking pictures. It requires a radical change in approach, and I must say it is quite interesting.

I moved all of my pictures to a new online organizer/gallery, powered by a FOSS solution called Photo Organizer. It has helped me scale, and instantly publish pictures, as well as simply find stuff I already have. At last count, it's keeping track of 15,102 photos taking up some 38.5 gigs of disk space. It doens't do everything I want, so I've been hacking on the underlying codebase, and it's slowly becomming a less-imperfect tool. Once my current phase of work is complete, I'll be re-doing the UI layout and color scheme to make the whole thing a lot more visually appealing.

And that's it for now. I'll probably write more in a day or two, but for now, enjoy this: