My mom and stepdad had a whole bunch of photos and paintings of doors when I was growing up. I think that must be why I like to take pictures of doors so much. Juliette took one look at this one and said, "I bet your mom will like that."

I was walking through the cemetary during Saturday's group shoot when a bit of yellow caught my eye. I looked, and then looked again, then again, and then I was fighting back tears.

It's startlingly easy for me to imagine this boy's parents, and to imagine myself in their shoes. To know what it's like to hold an angel in my arms, and to realize that, yes, I would still be bringing him toys to play with, eleven years after he died.

Is it selfish of me to have taken this picture? Is it wrong? I've been wrestling with these questions for the past couple of days, and I don't really have an answer. All I know is that the moment was profoundly affecting for me, and I hope that by capturing it and sharing it I might be doing something good.

Me: Come on, Jay! Time to put your shoes on.

Jason: No! (laughs, runs into the kitchen and starts spinning in circles)

Me: Come on, it's better to have shoes on if you're going to spin. (Jason's sock-clad foot slips on the tile.) See? Shoes on.

Cooper: (sees the shoes in my hand and runs into the kitchen, jumping in circles)

Juliette: (laughing) It's like the orcas from yesterday. I bet if Jason worked at SeaWorld he could get the orcas to spin after he did that.

Jason: Orcas, orcas! (stops spinning) See Shamu?

Me: Oh, brother...

Jason: See Shamu? That way! (points)

Me: Not right now, buddy. But you can see your friends at school. After you put your shoes on.

Jason: Yeah! (runs to the garage door)

Shortly thereafter Jason had his shoes on and we were in the car. The garbage truck drove by and picked up our can just as we were leaving.

Jason: What that?

Me: That was the garbage truck.

Jason: See garbage truck again?

Me: OK, let's follow it.

Jason: Garbage truck! Garbage truck, garbage truck, garbage truck! (We pass the truck as it stops at a neighbor's house.) All done, garbage truck!

Me: Yeah, all done. Bye bye, garbage truck.

Jason: Bye bye! (pause) See Shamu? That way!

Yesterday was a rare day without any plans or chores to do, so to make the most of it we decided to head over to SeaWorld. Juliette has been trying to get me to go there or Legoland for months but I've been dragging my feet.

"Jason will love it!" she'd say.

"Yeah, but he loves the park, too, and that's free," I'd reply.

"They're still running 'buy one day, get the whole year free' deal!" she'd say.

"That's only a deal if we actually go back," I'd counter. "Why not wait until he's likely to remember it?"

That argument continued, off and on, for about a year, and I finally caved yesterday. I'm still not convinced that my points weren't good ones, but we did have a lot of fun.

To begin with, there's a gigantic, Sesame Street-themed playground there, complete with bouncy floors, fountains, and a huge net climb. Jason, of course, loved that. He also loved getting a chance to meet Elmo, Ernie, Bert, Zoe, and Cookie Monster, who have a dance show about every hour, followed by a photo op. At $13, the photos are kind of a rip, but Jason could hardly contain himself and we constantly had to remind him how to wait in line.

And then, of course, there are the animal shows. We saw the dolphin show first, and although Jason was a little intimidated by the loud music at first, he warmed up after a few minutes. And since no trip to SeaWorld would be complete without seeing the orcas, we went to the Shamu show in the afternoon.

"Jason," we asked, "do you want to see Shamu?"

"Yeah!" he shouted. "Yeah yeah! Shamu!" I have no idea where he would have heard of Shamu before, since this was our first trip to the park and he doesn't watch commercials. He did know, though, because he was shouting "Shamu!" and pointing as soon as the whales came out.

After the show, Jason passed out in his stroller while we walked around. Juliette and I used the opportunity to sit down and eat some funnel cake. He didn't sleep long—only about twenty or thirty minutes—and the first thing he did upon waking was look around and shout "Shamu? Shamu?" So I guess the experience left an impression.

It'll be a lot of fun once Jason gets older. The roller coaster caught his eye on the way in, and he was quite upset that he didn't get a chance to ride it. A lot of the things he wanted to do had height requirements of at least three feet, though since we sprang for the two-year passes (on sale for the price of a one-year pass), he may actually be tall enough before they expire. I'm looking forward to it.

Saturday morning I was in Oceanside at the Mission San Luis Rey for the SDDSLR monthly group shoot. Unfortunately, it was overcast the whole morning, which meant no wide or landscape shots. On the other hand, it was pretty good lighting for close-in work.

Shortly before I took this picture, my friend James was laughing at me because I was lying on my belly in the dirt to try to get a good angle on another shot. I stood up, brushed myself off and said, "You think that's funny, just wait. I'm about to go lie down on the train tracks."

Juliette, aghast, cried "No you're not! You're going to get hit by a train!"

I pointed out that I'd be right by the train crossing, and the bells would give me plenty of warning, aside from which I'd be able to hear the train from a ways off. James said something like "Won't you feel dumb when this is like the one time out of a million that the arm doesn't come down? Well, not for very long, I guess." Which helped a lot. (Thanks, James.)

"I'm just going to take a few snaps. It'll only take a minute or two, and besides, a train just went by like ten minutes ago so there probably won't be another one for a while."

Juliette relented, and about a minute later I was down on my belly next to the crossing, trying to get a good angle on the shot. As I was lining up this one, I heard a little boy behind me ask "Daddy, why is that man lying on the train tracks?"

"I don't know," the dad responded, "but leave him alone."

So I guess I'm the weirdo that lies down on train tracks now.

Along with an old notebook and assorted random crap, my foray into the office closet also turned up a matched set of Cross pens that were given to me by a friend for being in his wedding. Juliette and I usually acquire pens the usual way, from hotel desk sets and in promotional brochures, so these Cross pens were a significant step up from the other writing implements we had lying around the house. Figuring that they were better used than sitting in a box collecting dust, I brought them out to the kitchen and put them in the pen cup that sits on our counter.

A few days later I was getting ready to write some thank-you notes to my grandmothers for the birthday money they sent me, and it occurred to me that it was as good an occasion as any to break out the good pen. And damn me if they weren't a lot nicer to write with than the cheapo ballpoints I usually use. pen was comfortable in my hand, with a nice, solid weight to it, and the ink flowed smoothly, neither puddling nor thinning despite having been sitting unused for nine years. (My goodness, has it really been nine years?)

Of course, the effect was kind of ruined by the chicken-scratch quality of my handwriting.

I practically never write anything by hand these days. Grocery lists, credit card receipts, Post-It reminders, and the occasional greeting card are about it. I suppose I do use paper and pen for calculations and schematic sketches at work, but that hardly counts in my mind. I do all of my longer writing with a keyboard, and these days even my notes are mostly done on my laptop or phone.

My thoughts tend to move pretty quickly, and the fact that I can type at 100 words per minute helps my words keep up with my brain. By contrast, using a pen feels like trying to run in a swimming pool, and often by the time I finish a sentence I've lost the beginning of the next one. I really don't think I'd be able to get anything done if I had to write it all out longhand.

Still, I can't help feeling like we've lost something by moving away from the analog world of handwritten letters. There's something undeniably special about getting a real letter in the mail, even if the only people that ever send me letters anymore are my grandmothers, and occasionally my father-in-law. There's a certain weight to it, some extra connection granted by being able to hold in my hands the same piece of paper that their hands touched.

My grandmother's script feels a little antiquated, I suppose, but it's also both elegant and familiar. I can't see it without seeing her. Seeing the loops and curves of her letters makes me think of her hands, her hair, the smell of her perfume, the feel of her dining table, where she probably sat while she wrote. I don't get that from an email.

My own handwriting is a jumbled and sloppy print. Letters lean this way and that, drifting away from the lines on the page until finally forced back on track, and the ink tends to drag between strokes. It's all over the place, which I guess isn't too far off the mark, considering the mind that produces it. I sometimes wonder if it would still look that way if I hadn't abandoned pens for computers. Most likely it would, and anyway, typing is simply too convenient for me to regret the change. I do wonder, though.

Will my son learn to write neatly? Will he look forward to handwritten notes from his grandparents? Will his children do the same for notes from me? I hope so. And, fortunately, Juliette's printing is much nicer and more legible than mine.

I recently got myself a new flash with my birthday money; a Nikon SB-400. It's not a very big or powerful flash unit, and it doesn't have a lot of the nice features and manual controls that the more expensive units have, but it does have the advantage of being very lightweight. The main reason I got it was to learn more about on-camera lighting, especially fill flash and bounce flash.

This image is an example of the latter. You tilt the camera head up, and instead of the light directly illuminating the subject, it bounces off a nearby surface, creating a more diffuse light. Here I've bounced it off a wall that's just out of frame, which also provides a nice directional light.

From a composition standpoint, this isn't a fantastic picture. There are a number of distracting elements in the background, especially the reflection in the window, though I bet most people wouldn't notice any of that. The reason I'm showing it, though, is that it makes a great example of how much difference lighting makes in photography. (And, of course, I'll take any excuse to show you how cute my kid is.)

I'm really excited about getting to learn this stuff. Hopefully, my photos will continue to get better.

I mentioned that a couple of weekends ago, Juliette and I spent some time cleaning out our office closet. Archaeologists will tell you that one of the best ways to learn about a culture is to look through their garbage, and so it is with the pile of junk I unearthed from that closet.

One of the items I discovered was a partitioned notebook from my sophomore year of college, containing notes from several classes I took that year. I think it's pretty illustrative.

From my Electricity and Magnetism class:

ρ creates divergence in an E field.

spherical conductor w/ cavity outside sphere: looks like point chage.

charge in cavity induces a – charge along cavity walls which induces a + charge uniformly around outside of sphere.

From my Intro to Biology class:

Population Regulation

Density-Dependent Factors:

• overcrowding
• lack of resources
• increased predation
• disease
• # offspring/female decreases since less females survive to breed.

From my Intro to Systems Engineering class:

II-order Systems:

I-order systems ( x′ + 1/τ x = f(t) ) have 1 descriptor (τ) & exponential behavior, step-response

II-order systems look like x′′ + a₀x′ + a₁x = f(t) but we can write them as x′′ + 2ζωx′ + ω_nx = f(t)

2 descriptors: ζ and ω_n

And, finally, from my 18th-Century Western Philosophy class:

My comment is not terribly pertinent to the discussion, but...

TALK FASTER GOD DAMNIT!!!!!!

HA HA HA! Not THIS swan!

Are you saying it's a waste of horse not to eat old horses?

It's called schizophrenia.

You better not piss off the sun god.

Get your fuckin' hand off my mother-fuckin' taco!

That last sentence was on a page with what appears to be a shopping list for the communal bar my roommates and I kept stocked.

I guess the takeaway here is that it's a good thing I wasn't a philosophy major.

This little guy was very excited to be part of the 4th of July parade in Del Mar. He was also very interested in my camera. Fortunately, I managed to avoid getting noseprints on my lens.