Tooting my own horn

I have always considered myself, with great hubris, to be a renaissance man. I am in constant search of physical, intellectual, and artistic pursuits to please my insatiable palate for humanities. I am ever the athlete competing in running and cycling races, i like to consider myself an intelligent guy as I am pursuing my bachelors degree and read constantly, and my artistic pursuits have included playing the guitar and most recently photography. Well I have one more to add to the list of the arts. For a long time I have wanted to learn how to paint... since i was a kid actually. I always thought i would need to take a class to learn how to handle the brush and know what to buy. I got tired of waiting to find a decent local class and decided to just go for it. I finally got myself a cheap set of watercolor paints, a set of brushes, and some watercolor paper. Over the last two days I have been playing with different techniques and getting to know my brushes and different strokes. I have used some of the bird photos that I have taken as models for my new found hobby. The pictures I am posting are of pictures I have painted so far. There should be plenty more to follow the few I have painted already. The first is my first painting since the finger paintings and paint by numbers I did as a kid, it is a yellow crowned night heron. The second is a brown pelican near the Skyway bridge, and the last there is a tricolored heron. I am getting better with the brush strokes and details such as feather definition and shading. We'll see how things progress as i learn to paint more. :)

Going native

Few of you may know this about me, but I am part Penobscot. The Penobscot native Americans are a canoeing people from what is now Maine and parts of Canada. I really dont know how much of me is native or really who it was in my family that was but I have been told by my family that the herritage is there. And though it may be very little, I still take pride in my canoeing bretheren of the north. Recently I borrowed, with eventual intent to buy (and restore) an Old Town Camper from a friend. I have been out on the canoe 4 times in the last couple of weeks and it has proven to be an adventurous endeavor. I have gotten some great photo opportunites that I would never have imagined on foot, and getting into those tight spots has been quite fun. Nothing beats getting up before the sun and silently paddling out into the reeds or mangroves searching for nesting egrets, roosting night herons, and other wading birds. But as I have AADD (Adventure Attention Deficit Disorder) I am constantly in need of new things to do to have fun, and a vessel such as my canoe is a great platform for adventuring and camping and photography... I think my Penobscot blood is coursing through my veins happier then before i had the canoe and it is certainly a nice addition to the adventure quiver which I use to constantly seek new means of outdoor fun. These are some pictures I have taken on some of my trips on the Camper so far.

Summer SAD

With the end of a very stressful summer semester looming I am hoping to be able to get out and do something worthy of posting here in my blog. I have been out and taken a few pictures in the last couple weeks but for the most part I have been locked inside trying to keep up with classwork.



I am planning a trip to JB Starkey Wilderness Park in New Port Richey for some riding and some hiking and some photography. I will hopefully go within the next couple weeks. I want to try to take it easy along the route there so as not to upset my knee as it has been some time since I have taken a longer trip. well in the mean time... here are some pics ove taken locally recently.

The adventure of life (perhaps a note to self)

Adventure and the pursuit of happiness isnt always full of fantastic views and smooth trails. A lot of preparation goes into backpacking and bicycle touring, and a lot of training and equipment is dedicated to the "what if" factor of adventuring. You dont always expect to use it but things such as first aid and emergency survival techniques are sometimes used. And beyond that even, things that dont make your event an emergency, but just add to a level of discomfort. These are all things that can really get to your head. A persistant rain that causes mud to get all over everything, a headwind that puts your mileage below your average mark, a cold front that brings unexpected low temperatures when you figured a summer bag would do for the trip, noticing an unusually large amount of unused gear that is weighing you down, mosquitoes... do these things take away from the enjoyment of the trip? Perhaps in the moment, but when remembered these things add to the stories you tell your friends. We wear those hardships as a badge of courage, and though while possibly slightly annoyeddurring the trip, in retrospect the story often makes it sound worse than it actually was. My point is that no adventure is ever perfect, sometimes things go wrong, sometimes things just arent perfect, sometimes things can be a little annoying. But we learn to recognize these trailside hardships and love them for what they will become. I have hiked through the mountains of Georgia, backpacked across the Florida Prairies, bicycle toured through most of central Florida's rail trails over hundreds of miles, and have done some canoe camping through out the area as well. What I remember about those trips are the suprises, and way in which I handled them. I am proud of my triumphs, though they came out of diversity. In this same token, I cannot help but look at life in the same light. I am getting to the point where I can recognize a crisis in real life and conquer those challenges with the same perspicacity as I would reaching an unexpected river crossing or a flat tire on the road. We have our doldrums in adventure and life is the greatest adventure of them all. If we can learn how to truely tackle these annoyances with fervor and tenacity instead of beat down by the lack of scenery we can come to truely appreciate this adventure we call life.
(In the spirit of its motivational poster like bantering i figured I would include some of my own motivational scenery shots to go along with the blog post... :) call me a geek if you will )