Tabula Rasa—05.02.12

So here’s a thing that I am doing at this moment. http://flymoore.com/tabularasa/0001.html

It doesn’t really have a name, but if I had to call it something I’d call it “Tabula Rasa”. I don’t really want to talk terribly much about what I’m planning to do with this, but the name and first page should make it abundantly clear where this is headed.

I do hope I can actually craft a compelling story out of the elements that I’m going to have to work with here.

Paper Beads—03.25.12

Firstly, I would like to recognize that I suck at keeping any kind of promise.

With that out of the way let’s look at something pretty. My mom likes to take color paper, taken out of magazines and the like, cut them into wedges and roll them up into beads. You then varnish them so they hold together and you end up with neat little colorful beads. My mom spends an enormous amount of time doing this, and I think we might complain about it more if they didn’t look cool. She’s always said she’d like to sell them on Etsy too so maybe I can convince her to actually follow through by putting cool pictures of the beads on the internet.

Without further delay:

Tropical Beads!

Safety Pin Beads!

Beads in a bowl.

Bead Can

Pink Beads

Pink Beads on a field.

Too Much Story Not Enough Art—03.01.12

I seem to post in spurts on this website. I suppose that’s alright in its own way, I’d rather post more frequently. Part of my problem is that I’m beat-tired most days, but most of my problem is that I try too hard. I have to have some kind of coherent story holding my post together, and that is sometimes quite difficult to figure out. I don’t do a whole lot of coherent story photography sessions, so I have a lot of very disjointed art.

So now, Project: “Post some pictures, with some frequency.” begins.

What is it? Can you figure it out?

How about now?

Or how about this? (Don't even think about clicking on the image to see the description that's cheating.)

I have no standards.

New Chair—01.23.12

For those of you not in the know, we got a new chair at the Moore household recently. It came for free from our generous neighbor, and finally fills out the seating arrangement in our living room. Finally after some 15 years of living here we can all sit down around the TV at once (not that we ever will of course).

We quickly discovered that as much as we like the chair (it really is comfortable) the cats, who probably have immeasurably more time with which to enjoy it, also like it quite a bit.

A forceful takeover...

It turns out that this chair is a POÄNG, a chair from Ikea. I found this out because I had these photos up on my screen during a Study Hall period at school, and one of my friends walked by and happened to glance at the pictures. Somehow in less than about 10 seconds she was able to figure out that this was in fact a POÄNG (although didn’t know the spelling so my first search was for a “Pawang”)

It turns out that this chair renders cats rather immobile, so you can hover over them all day with a camera and they will lazily submit. This seems like the complete opposite of the way cats usually react to cameras, which is to start moving around as much as possible so as to make your 1/30th of a second shutter speed completely useless.

Lazy cats...

I actually took pictures spanning over multiple days of cats on this chair, and they started to get progressively more “artsy”

The "Artsy" nature of this is lost when you find out this cat's name is 'Tails.'

2012 Racing Season—01.22.12

The 2012 Racing Season is upon me. I got out today for my first race of the year, race number one of the CBR (now renamed “SoCal Cup”) Criterium series. It was my first race as a Category 4 Road Racer, and even in this ‘tougher’ field I placed in exactly the same place as I did in Category 5, 13th place…

The actual race is not what I want to write about though. There are plenty of “race reports” and you can try to explain how a race feels, but anyone that doesn’t race just won’t get it. What I want to write about is race preparation.

The day before your race you take note of when you have to get up. Today I had to get up at 5am so I could get out of the house at 5:30 so my dad would have time to warm-up for his race at 7am. Knowing you don’t want to have to get all your stuff together in 30 minutes you get ready the night before. In the middle of January this means working at 9pm to get yourself ready. Even in California this means it’s cold. Really uncomfortably cold.

Cleaning bikes at 9pm is a joy.

I don’t claim to know how my dad was able to stand being out cleaning his bike in the cold with just a t-shirt on (I cleaned my bike too, you have to before a race! but I did it with 3 shirts and a sweater on.) For reference, this is what it looks like when its slightly more bearable to work on a bicycle.

I was working on my dad's shifting the same day I had my own derailleur problems I talked about yesterday... [taken by my dad on an iPhone]

Once I’ve got my bike ready, I have to get all the clothes I need for a race together. There are quite a lot:

What's most exciting about this is my new team Jersey!

Of course this all has to get packed up to, and that ends up looking like this:

And now I'm all ready.

I’m all good to go. All this stuff goes in the car and I all I have to do the morning of the race is wake up and eat… Except that in reality I forgot to bring my Garmin with me. All this effort and preparation and I forgot one of my most important training tools. Oh well. That’s what all this practice is for. Hopefully I don’t make the same mistakes for my weekend of fun next week, with Poor College Kids and two races at Mothballs…

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