This was my Friday and Saturday night. I don't know why the ladies aren't jumping all over me.

Yes, I am that weird eccentric friend everyone has.

This one is Ceiling Kitten.

Hot glue is a pretty tough medium to work with. Screwed up a few Ceiling Cats in the final gluing step.

Watching me while I sleep.

Closer...

Ceiling Cat says, "I've been watching you! You will die alone!"

Here are some more random dog pictures from the past weekend or two.

Uno gets pretty excited when he gets to go to his grandma's house. Here he is vibrating out of control.

Here is Milo also being all HAY GUYS.

I think Jeannie once asked me, "Man, you really like dogs, huh?" I mean, how can you NOT like them? They look endlessly optimistic and are a pretty good source of entertainment. But to be fair, I enjoy all animals in general. And babies.

Here is Milo looking like he just got a summons for an audit of his form 1080A.

At the new dog park near Sugarland.

Uno at the beach.

Pepper looking like she is chomping on a cigar/sweet potato fry.

Pepper whispering sweet nothings to her treat. And so, the lion lays with the lamb.

Uno looking gross in general.

But he is pretty earnest about everything.

Uno on the car ride to other grandma's house yesterday.

ARGLBARGL

Pretty cute, Uno.

Uno being a shoeface

Handheld, f/1.8, 1/8 second, ISO 6400 in near pitch black conditions. Brown dog sighting.

Tu's sister Stephanie got him and Tramanh a 3 lb cinnamon roll from San Antonio. Apparently it had been featured in Man vs Food. It is a quite sizable hunk of dough.

Eating only one slice. We barely made a dent in it. It was surprisingly good for being so large. Usually taste gets messed up in the process of supersizing things.

Somehow, I was able to convince my friends to go to the rodeo while we were all at Yen's crawfish boil on Thursday. I thought it was all the "sure, sure, sure, I'll go" but not show up routine, but on Friday night, there they all were. I hadn't been to the rodeo this year for my annual "Eat Bad Things" adventure tour, and being that it was already closing out this week, Friday would be my last chance to eat bad things.

After trying to get the large group together, we made a stop off for brand new deep fried food items.

Melissa and Thomas tried out the deep fried frog legs and deep fried avocados. The frog legs were a bit of a disappointment- sure they were deep fried, but they lacked flavor, tasting only a hint of amphibian (and, we argued, lent friendly because it was like seafood, right?). The avocados were a little strange- they had a flavored/seasoned batter to it (or else it was a plain batter but deep frying it in oil that everything else had been fried in gave it a distinctive taste). It was not bad and came with some dipping sauces, but not that great. It was a good thing it was chilly that evening, because eating deep fried salty things in hot weather is kind of gross.

Phong's lil sis Josephine gave the deep fried White Castle cheeseburger a try. It was heavily battered, so you couldn't taste the meat much at all. And also super salty. Quite a disappointment.

I gave the deep fried pop tarts a try- it's a pop tart battered and deep fried, and they add some jelly and sprinkles on top to mimic itself. Overall, it's not bad- pretty much what you'd expect. Tastes like a pop tart with batter. If you like pop tarts, you'll like this. I had a few bites, but it's a bit rich/sweet.

I spent 10 minutes waiting for a deep fried oatmeal cream pie. 8 minutes into the wait, I asked where mine was and it turned out the worker didn't even know I ordered one. She gave me three fried oreos which I gave to the group (fried oreos are some of the best deep fried items, but I had them in previous years so forewent it this year). Deep fried oatmeal cream pie is good- a bit sweet, but it's a battered oatmeal cream pie, a little gooier, but if you like oatmeal cream pies as much as I do, it am not disappoint.

Yen with her garbage bag of deep fried turkey legs to go.

Phong is not impressed.

Siblings.

No one looks at my camera anymore. Either I have achieved ninja paparazzi status, or Melissa has overtaken me as photographer now

Marriage sure has changed these two.

After eating many disgusting unhealthy things, we wandered around the midway.

Melissa was shooting video the whole night. I took a picture of what she was videoing at one time, and it was of course of cute things.

No one actually played any games though. It was a pretty nice night overall. Another year, another rodeo adventure checked off the list.

A question I get frequently usually goes something along the lines of "What do you do all day?" I know it is a perfectly valid question phrased with just normal curiosity, but a small part of me bristles at the question. What do I do? I am slightly indignant, as though I would waste the precious minutes and hours of my life rather than improving them.

So, granted, some of the "projects" I have been working on no one will ever see the light of day (backing up 7 years' worth of cds and categorizing them, as my cds have already started disc rot). In fact, for the cd backup project, the sad part of it is that my newer computer can't read them so I have to turn to my 8 year old computer which apparently has a stronger optical drive to try to salvage the data (sometimes which is not salvageable).

A lot of my free time- aside from coming across amusing links to send to friends- is research. Learning. Editing photos takes a lot of time, but after you're done editing, there's still personal research. Most of it doesn't stick, but sometimes it does. I'll look at fashion magazines for posing/styling ideas. I'll sit in bookstores looking at photography books. I'll look at articles online. There's a wealth of information out there, it's just a matter of learning it.

It's tough to concentrate on any one area of photography. There's the actual looking up technique. I'm obsessed with trying to figure out lighting right now. There's methods on post-processing. Then there's the whole "setting up your website" thing. And there's the tangible product part. What good is taking all these photos if at the end of the day, they're just ending up on an external hard drive, the equivalent of a digital crypt?

So when I shot Tu and Tramanh's engagement last November, their parents had wanted a photo album done. I could easily have popped out a book in two or three hours, but I wanted to get a more "pro" look to it. I spent 3 days researching where to get a nice photo album made, scouring photography forums for website recommendations. Reading reviews for various websites. Sure, you can get an album made for $20 (and sometimes even less) on snapfish, dotphoto, etc, but if you want something that'll make a much more lasting impression, you've got to put in the footwork to find it.

Now, wedding albums run for a few hundred (and photographers will mark it up to nearly a thousand). Most professional websites don't show their pricing unless you sign up as a "professional" photographer. The three I signed up for, I had to fill out a questionnaire, one asked for my website. The checking process isn't very stringent at all though, but it's enough to deter the random consumer from viewing pricing. Obscuring the pricing, of course, is for the photographer's sake, so that their customers won't see what the photographer is paying versus what they're paying. You might think this is a deceptive practice- that man, photographers are just ripping people off. But until you've designed a photo album, you'll understand why there's so much markup in these products- these things take a lot of time to design.

This album, for instance. I had well over 700 photos to choose from. To organize into a cohesive story of the day. You can't just splash photos all willy nilly over the page. In fact, I spent 2 full days designing the album. The free software that comes with it allows for an infinite number of configurations, but you could easily use their templates.

I was going, however, for the panoramic spreads across pages, so I was going to set up the photos exactly how I wanted them. As Gordon Ramsey once said in an interview, it's not enough to cook a good steak. You have to have it served excellently. The plates have to be warmed. Every little detail has to be perfect, or else it's not a great steak. Which is why someone has to care enough to decide why a 2 degree head tilt between two nearly identical photos makes one better than the other. Or adjusting saturation by 5%. Or, when implanting photos into an album, making sure pictures aren't off by even 1 pixel. All these nearly imperceptible things. Someone has to care about these little details, and that's what makes something memorable. That last 1% of effort to bridge the gap between a nice album and a great one.

So what is it that I do all day? This is what I do.

10x10 leather bound album

For a few extra bucks, you can get silver or gold foil stamping on the leather cover.

Nicely textured interior cover binding.

The program lets you crop/size photos any way you want, letting you put as many photos as you want so that you can properly tell a story. I crammed it full of photos to give a better feel of the day's events. (sorry, I should have put it on a table or something flat, but I didn't have time). There's a reason for the placement of every photo in this album.

These are known as lay flat pages with nice thick pages that don't bend, printed on photographic paper.

The good thing about this album is that there's almost no gutter, and you can print photos across the gutter with no loss in image quality. A bit pricier than the photo books you get at walmart/snapfish/costco/etc, but well worth it for big events.

As you know, food does not get better proportionately with price. Some of the best food I've had is from hole in the wall joints and off of trucks. Here're this week's eating adventures:

Out in the middle of Greater fifth ward is a you-buy-we-fry fish joint. Amid all the beauty and hair salons surrounding this area is Hank's. The online reviews said it was owned by Vietnamese people, but sounded like they were speaking something other than Vietnamese when I heard them talking.

A meal that could feed four runs for only $12- ridiculously cheap. As with most you-buy-we-fry joints, there's barely any seating- most people get it to go. There were maybe 6 booths in the place, but a huge area just for ordering.

The appetizers we got were standard. Crab sticks- deepfried imitation crab meat (never had that before, but it tastes just like you'd expect). 2 egg rolls for $1- meh, tastes like something from costco. Cream puffs- deep fried wonton skin stuffed with cream cheese- you know, what they call "crab rangoons". Nothing spectacular.

9 deep fried shrimp (for like, $3.79)- not the crispy battered shrimp, mind you, but cornmeal fried shrimp. Not bad, just different. Each order comes with fries and "salad".

3 pieces of deep fried sea trout (something like $3.79 too). Fantastic stuff- light and fall-apart flaky, not like at restaurants like Pappadeaux where it's a little tough and saltier and a little heavier tasting. If you're gonna go, skip all that other stuff (but maybe get a small order of the shrimp) and get the fish. A++++ would do business with again.

Afterwards, we ventured out to El Canino, the mexican farmer's market off of 610 and Airline. The taco truck is located allllllll the way in the back past all the produce. Ask for the mollejas. The sweetbreads are cooked and have a slightly crispy texture to the exterior, but are wonderfully delicious with the onions and cilantro. One order of these tacos, they give you enough sweetbreads to turn it into two tacos (you're supposed to eat the two tortillas as one thing, but I converted it to two). Also, the fruits they sell at the farmer's market look pretty awesome.

Wednesday, we had an excursion to Ohmypocketpies.com, located behind the George R. Brown convention center in the old Chinatown. It's a single truck in a parking lot.

The pocket pies run for $3 a pop, about the size of your fist. I was expecting something more like a pate chaud or chicken pot pie-type shell, but this was more like an empanada with a harder, crispy exterior. The salisbury steak one was not bad, but the chicken pot pie one left much to be desired (not as stewy as I would have liked, but I suppose difficult to pull off given the pocket concept). The smores pocket pie was pretty marshmallowy. Overall, I probably wouldn't drive out of my way to get some, but if it were parked in front of the house, I might go buy some once in a while.

I saw an article recently about the Mc 10:35, something that should technically never exist. I was intrigued. I will eat anything.

An excerpt from an article in Esquire by Chuck Klosterman:

It would be imprecise to claim that texting has changed the way I communicate, because it didn't replace any existing method of communication in my life. Texting has created a completely new genre of personal expression: the postextraneous sentiment. Sometimes I text sentences I wouldn't waste my time saying aloud, even if the recipient were standing right next to me. I can't text complex thoughts because it's too time-consuming to push the little buttons, and I can't figure out how to generate apostrophes. (I text the way Data talks on Star Trek: The Next Generation- no contractions.) Nonetheless, nobody ever minds getting a text message, regardless of how frivolous the content may be. For some reason, texting feels substantially less intrusive than e-mail; it doesn't have much upside, but it's wholly devoid of downside.

Here are some dog photos I haven't gotten around to posting for a while.

Ever since last fall, I decided I'd give oysters another chance. The last time I had raw oysters was at Old Alligator Grill in Austin (where they filmed a scene from Office Space) back in 2002 or so. I've always found oysters to be cold, slimy, and chewy in consistency, like trying to swallow a cold loogie drenched in cocktail sauce. This past fall, I said screw it, I'm going to give it another try. While I never got the chance to try it while I was out on the road in Seattle, I did have it once or twice again at Captain Tom's Oyster House in Houston. I still wasn't too impressed, but it wasn't as bad as I remembered it to be.

Then Seo brings up Gilhooly's, an oyster bar in San Leon, some 10 minutes past Kemah, about a 45 minute drive from Houston on the way to Galveston. I like the idea of food adventures to local hole-in-the-walls, so with her friend Joanna in tow, we headed off.

The ol' roomie Donny asked if I could shoot Roz's family celebration this past Saturday. Being that Donny and Roz hated getting their pictures taken ever since I've lived with them, I jumped at the chance to shoot it. Of course, one always likes to help old friends and I don't have many talents to which I can lend people. As an added bonus, it would be one of the first filipino events I'd ever been to (the other being an event at Roz's parents' house last year).

The party was still going on after I left that night, my duties done. Roz's mom, like many of my friends' moms, was very momly. She told me I'd be a part of their family and they'd invite me to more events like these in the future. It's one of the best parts of being a photographer- being a part of the lives of the people you keep in your life.