War Memorial, Syracuse, NY. April 2011. Canon S95.

My wife recently purchased a Groupon for 50% off tickets to our local AHL team, the Syracuse Crunch against her hometown Binghamton Senators. Two ice-level seats, two hot dogs, a shared soda, parking, and a free Jon “Nasty” Mirasty bobble-head for only $26.50; what can I say, I’m a cheap date.

Our wonderful evening was full of life lessons, such as:

- Sometimes the drunken hockey hooligans sitting behind you aren’t actually drunken hockey hooligans; sometimes they’re just Australian tourists.

-When you & your wife are featured on the ‘kiss cam,’ the police sergeant in your section won’t be impressed unless there’s tongue involved.

-All of Syracuse’s goals were brought to you by bread.

-The “Hanson Brothers” impersonators should prolly lose some weight to be more believable; especially in a building where parts of ‘Slapshot‘ where filmed.

-It isn’t awkward at all to have a bobble-head night for a fan-favorite player that your NHL affiliate unceremoniously demoted and then traded away.

But it was refreshing to see, on a night that the Crunch were celebrating perhaps their most beloved enforcer ever, the current team remembered how to toss the gloves and play some Syracuse style hockey.

Spring comes, Summer waits in Syracuse. Canon s95.

Update: The trestle is part of a larger mural project “A Love Letter to Syracuse.” by Steven Powers.

Icicle. Shot with a Canon S95

So my delayed/back-ordered Christmas present finally arrived from Best Buy this afternoon! My wife decided I needed a Canon Powershot S95, as I often told her that I would like one.

In essence, it’s the pocket camera I’ve always wanted. Small, compact, yet capable; or so I’ve read.

I haven’t quite had the chance to put it through any paces yet, but I anticipate it becoming a constant companion, joining the ranks with my cellphone, Moleskine & spacepen in my pants pockets.

Therein lies its charm. Too often I find myself without a camera when I suddenly want/need a camera; or conversely, lugging my Canon 40D and backpack full of lenses around without taking a single frame.

For awhile there, my beloved fBHF filled the niche of a constant “on hand” camera, both literally & figuratively; but its bulk, lack of versatility, and the need to carry spare spools, not to mention the cost of film, lead to its retirement from daily use. (I also took a chunk out of her film advance knob this summer, when I accidentally clipped a cement fence post outside of Fordham. So I had been carrying her with a tad more careful trepidation than I had in the past, lest I cause any further irreparable damage).

A digicam that fits comfortably in my pocket, shoots both RAW & 720p video and has an added ADH warranty to boot sounds pretty good to me.

Maybe this will help snap me out of my creative funk; maybe it won’t; it can’t hurt.

Knee high by the Fourth of July.

Or an example of the relative height of maize as compared to the lower extremities of able bodied human beings on the fourth day of the seventh month of the Gregorian calendar.

The wife & I, trying to remember any semblance of normalcy, drove all around the area farms yesterday looking for knee high corn, given the titular colloquialism. To our surprise, we discovered most of the corn was already way past chest height.

After almost giving up on the concept, we found this comparatively stunted crop in a nearby community garden.

The image itself is kind of an inside joke. I have a habit of butchering colloquialisms. Such as “six of one; half dozen of another” in regards to equal quantities, becomes “half of one; six dozen of another,” but still used in the original capacity in a manner of attempted ironic humor.

“Knee high by the Fourth of July” entered our lexicon as “ankle deep on a rainy Thursday in the third week of April” or “hip length on the 17th of June” or “up to your armpits in August” and other such variations of nonsensical meaning.

My wife & I often bat these pseudo-sayings around without regard for our audience, sometimes leading to semi-awkward explanations, akin to the one you’ve just read.