I dream of rain

I love food. Hunting/gathering it, preparing it, or consuming it, Food is at the heart of all human relationships, and is vitally important to me. The kitchen is the subsequent heart of the home. With this in mind, read on...

This weekend Crystal packed up a lot of "her" kitchen stuff. More than anything else so far, this demonstrates that things are over between us....If they were ever really all that there to begin with. What galls me the most is that this stuff is completely wasted on her! She's never even opened some of these cookbooks she's begged me to buy for her. She hasn't baked anything since July, and that was the first real thing she attempted all year. I'm still waiting on my birthday cake, and that was two and half months ago!

Beyond this, good cooking is wasted on her. She eats the blandest of foods, and rarely anything more elaborate than (plain) spaghetti with (plain) marinara sauce, even before her diet devolved to the "chips and soda" staple of recent months. But that's another rant for another time.

It's such a waste. I know this stuff will remain in boxes for months, if it's ever actually unpacked. But in the end, useful or not, it's just stuff and can all be replaced. (I'm looking at you, KitchenAid mixer!) The lost meals, however... are gone forever.

I wonder how I'm going to arrange my kitchen once she's gone. My kitchen. I like the sound of that. My kitchen. I wonder what the first celebratory meal will be... and who I will share it with?

Taken with a LensBaby. I really need to borrow it back, or buy my own..

I had half a dozen or so stale hamburger and hot dog buns to dispose of, so I wandered down to the park to taunt the birds. They were not amused. And by they, I mean the couple hundred seagulls on top of the usual mob of ibises, ducks, and geese! I'm going to need to start wearing a hat -- My gear bag and one of my lens cases took direct hits.

I'm rarely the only one feeding the wildlife. As magic light kicked in, this brave citizen saved me from near-certain peril:

My favorite image of the evening was another silhouette:

An excellent way to end the day. If only my day had ended there...

Yup, last weekend was my semi-annual trek to North Florida for the Paralounge Drum Gathering.

(link takes you to selected images)

Every time I make this journey, I manage to leave something relatively important at home. Once, I left food. Once, I left soap. This time, I forgot my sleeping bags. Unfortunately, I still have too much self-conciousness to pull a "I forgot my sleeping bag, can I share yours?" with a random hottie, but fortunately I'd packed "extra" blankets.

True to form, I hid behind the camera. The campground is a century-old live oak grove just off the Suwanee River. The canopy creates light islands that can result in some truly spectacular portraits. This is, hands-down, the best photo of the weekend:

At night, there were a lot of fire spinners. One of them had a faulty monkey fist which flew off mid-twirl and hit me. Here's a candid that I really liked:

It wasn't all photos though -- on Sunday I finally took out my doumbek and managed to keep up with a couple of amazing players for thirty minutes or so. That, not the nightly fire circle, is what I love about the Paralounge. Small, intimate, with a dancer or two to share the experience with.

On the way home, I dropped in on two sets of old friends, showered, and was promptly covered in dog, cat, and horse hair. Oh, and baby cooties.

Yesterday, I signed a Petition for the Dissolution of Marriage, to be filed with the courts in a couple of days. In approximately six months, it'll be finalized. I'd really have prefered to schedule the final hearing sooner, but this way I can keep her on my employer's medical insurance for a little while. I'm such a nice fool.

The "temporary, non-modifiable, rehabilitative alimony" also terminates in May, or she gets an income/disability, whichever happens first.

With luck, she won't draw out the moving-out process. I'm looking forward to being able to clean the house from top to bottom, and to it actually staying clean when I'm not home. I'm looking forward to two fewer cats, and NO iganas.

I'm looking forward to not dreading coming home. I'm looking forward to not having an emotional vampire of a millstone around my neck. I'm looking forward to the potential of healthy relationships with healthy people that actually like themselves and (at the very least) have some degree of personal responsibility.

This has been in the works since August. Thank you, everyone who's listened to me gripe and complain, given me words of encouragement, and especially supported me through this. I'd forgotten what it was like to have actual adult conversations, to say nothing of relationships.

Perhaps sooner rather than later I'll rediscover just how good sex can be. I can hope and dream, can't I?

I'm finally looking forward to the rest of my life. Anyone want to help me celebrate in a wholly inappropriate debauched manner? Or at least share a sushi boat. Or something.

When he's good, he's really good.

But when he's bad, he makes a Catholic schoolgirl look good.

I wish I could say I got this in the wild, but nope, it was a rescue being rehabilitated at my local zoo.

Development of Photo Organizer has slowed down lately, in part thanks to RealLife(tm) getting in the way, but mostly due to the remaining feature requests becoming increasingly more invasive. This isn't to say that these features aren't a good idea, but rather that due to PO's craptastic code structure, a seemingly "minor feature" would require a major internal overhaul.

Features like replacing the internal permission model with a finer-grained group-based model. Moving to a real templating engine. Better "social" features. Adding an external RPC API. Adding some sort of caching of search results or other complex queries that involve permission tests. And so on.

One deceptively simple feature request is to integrate PostGIS support. While PO currently extracts GPS data out of images and stores it in the database, it doesn't really do anything useful with that data. Integrating PostGIS support would instantly give PO access to a very powerful geospatial backend that can tie in to all sorts of other spatially-aware systems. There is a near-endless list of upsides, even if PO never uses anything more advanced than spatially-aware searching.

The downsides, however, are doozeys -- From an administration perspective rather than from a code perspecitve. First, due to the level of effort it would take to make PostGIS support optional, we'd have to require it across the board. PostGIS is not part of the standard PostgreSQL distribution, and would consequently make setting up a PO installation more difficult. It would greatly complicate upgrading an existing PO installation to a newer version of PostgreSQL and/or PostGIS, and upgrading to newer PO releases could also get more complex.

So all of that said, PostGIS support would be interesting and cool, but is it necessarily the right direction to take? I know PO is already used by at least one municipality to hold photos relating to their tax rolls, but without a better idea of real-world workflows, I don't know what PO can do to better tie in to the rest of their (or anyone else's) systems.

Meanwhile, regardless of PO's support for PostGIS, more user-visible features like "pull up a google map with locations of this set of photos marked" can be implemented, and now that I have a GPS widget for my camera, I'm actually interested in such things. :)

I get nearly no feedback from PO users; indeed aside from the freshmeat subscriber stats I really have no idea how many folks actually use PO. My best efforts with Google show a few dozen public PO installations, including at least two which the admins have independently translated into Russian. Come on folks, send me patches so all users can benefit from this work!

So, peanut gallery, any thoughts?

She definitely has potential -- If she survives the near-inevitable plunge into total stuckup bitchdom that tends to go hand-in-hand with those blessed with physical beauty.