Woodpress

I left a downstairs window open for a whole day under the mistaken assumption that it had a screen in it. Now we’re infested with spiders, mosquitos, and other small wildlife.

Currently I’m not killing or evicting spiders. The spider eviction policy may change when my wife reads this, but I figure I’ll let nature fight it out until we decide to bugnuke the house.

In the meantime, I’m hoping the spiders win. It’s for selfish reasons. I have a lot of mosquito bites, but (so far) the spiders aren’t eating me. They do kinda creep me out though. I think they’re watching me while I sleep.

One benefit of this little ecological experiment is that my son is shedding his fear of spiders.

Recently my son and I saw a spider scurry across the wall. We talked it over, and we both agreed that although spiders can be pretty fast, a speeding bullet is definitely faster.

Obviously we didn’t need to talk about who would win a race between Spiderman and Superman, but I decided to ask him anyway:

Me: “If Spiderman and Superman had a race, who would win?”

Son: “I’m guessing Batman!”

I’m pretty sure Batman is the right answer. The only way to win the race is not to race at all. He must have watched War Games when I wasn’t looking.

Candid superhero photo borrowed without asking from The Mego Museum.

We did fireworks with the kids tonight.

I really like how much stuff is going on in this picture:

Here, our youngest is tossing poppers. I’m not sure if she managed to get any to pop, but she enjoyed herself anyway.

I really like the expressions in this one:

Here’s another spider. This one didn’t make it out alive.

I killed it. I feel bad. Seriously. My son kept asking me **why** I killed this spider. (I’ve been allowing other spiders to live.) I had no good answer… but here it is moments before being flushed:

He was very persistent in asking why I killed it, until I finally said something stupid like “I don’t know, and I don’t want to talk about it.”

Maybe we’ll talk about it later, after I’ve had a chance to think of what to say.

A few minutes after I shut him down regarding my justification for killing the spider, he asked, “Dad, how does it feel to be dead?” Wow. Ugh. My child is empathizing with the spider I just killed, and asking tough questions! So, I told him I didn’t know. He said “oh… right… cuz you’ve never been dead!” I agreed.

Death… yow.

We have a lot of spiders around our house right now. Fortunately, they have been extremely cooperative as models. I’m not sure why — maybe they’re vain. I’ve been able to get surprisingly close to them and take multiple pictures without them seeming to mind. Here’s one I found on the wall:

I was pleased and impressed with the amount of detail captured in this particular shot. Here’s a crop of a leg from the full resolution image:

It’s even got cute little spider toes!

And of course every model needs a current headshot for their portfolio:

I wonder if I should’ve told it about that food (or whatever) stuck to its face.

Saturday we had a birthday party for our six year old son. We saw Madagascar, ate cake and ice cream, and he opened presents. I didn’t take many pictures, which is unusual. I did get some shots of him on his new bicycle though. Here’s one:

On my way out the front door Friday night, I noticed a spider wrapping its dinner. Naturally I stopped and took pictures. This is my favorite:

The idea I had (but abandoned) for fixing the too-dark Silkthread HIPAA advertisement was to use two pictures. The first would’ve been the black background medicine picture, with the words “Finding the HIPAA Security Rule hard to swallow?” and the second image was going to be something like the one below, with the caption “We can help.” The idea being that instead of HIPAA Security Rule compliance being like taking a big spoon full of nasty medicine, with Silkthread it’d be more like getting handed a big tasty lollipop.

He was supposed to look excited about getting a big sucker. Instead I think he looks terrified. (Killer sucker!!!) I didn’t work too hard on coaching him, because I took the picture knowing I wasn’t going to use it in the ad. I’d talked to him about it though, and he was looking forward to the photo shoot… so I went ahead and did it.

I didn’t clean it up as much as I would have for commercial use. I definitely would have done something about the jumble of fingers, for example. I did remove some distractions and clean it up a bit though. Here’s what I started with:

While I’m posting comparison pictures, here’s what I started with for the picture we’re using in the advertisement:

This isn’t the idea I had in mind for fixing the dark advertisement — that idea got shot down (it involved using a second picture, and that detracted from the simplicity — I had to agree), but this is my next proposed advertisement: