Category Archives: Adventures

A Heartwarming Moment at DCA

I was at the end of more than a week of travel — two separate trips, one frantic day of laundry and work in between, flying, driving, more driving, new people, familiar people, introvert-stressing PEOPLE all over the damn place. Finally back at DCA ready to fly home, tired, grungy, grumpy … when I started hearing applause across the terminal. Sustained, widespread applause. Turns out a planeload of World War II veterans were flying in for some sort of ceremony. The airline had announced this, and all of my fellow frazzled Friday-afternoon flyers had lined up on each side of the path the vets traveled from the gate all the way to security and were enthusiastically applauding.

Some of the wildest applause came for the handful of female veterans.

And they had a lone musician — a French horn player — playing in each group of vets with a patriotic — or at least jaunty — tune.

After he had exhausted military and patriotic classics like High Flying Flag, that Marine tune that always comes through in my head as “Be Kind To Your Web-Footed Friends,” Battle Hymn of the Republic and — to my extreme joy — This Land is Your Land, he turned to random jauntiness: She’ll be Comin’ Round the Mountain; I’m a Little Teapot; Oh Susanna!

It was a truly wonderful thing. The vets were beaming, the crowd was smiling and — here and there — tearing up. It took all of us out of our various travel modes (grumpy; hostile; exhausted) and brought us together for a few minutes, appreciating the hard work and real sacrifice of these amazing people.

Like renting a Ferrari to a teenager.

Santa Fe photos, part tres (with cat photos!)

Santa Fe photos, part deux

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Happy New Year!

As promised, the photos from the Santa Fe part of the road trip. Got up early Friday to try to catch good light in downtown Santa Fe . . . starting with the store next to my hotel:

Next to the gun shop and the hotel was a sculpture gallery. (Welcome to Santa Fe!) I liked this piece against the excruciatingly blue Santa Fe sky:

Then had some fun with it in Lightroom:

Then spent two hours walking around downtown Santa Fe, first with the 14-42mm:

Photoshopped an electrical wire out of this one! Progress!

I just loved this statue of St. Francis of Assisi dancing on water. He’s dancing so joyously his toes are curled!

Getting set up to sell jewelry to tourists:

Pause for hot coffee and cheese danish and a switch to the Nifty Fifty — at the Burro Alley Café.

The eye of the aforesaid burro:

The rare white buffalo:

Fun with HDR and Photomatix.

Loved these ladies – in a store window (also HDR):

More adobe and blue sky:

And my favorite, though I’m not even Christian:

To be continued… with photos of my step-brother, his gorgeous office, and his cat. Yes, this very very dog-oriented blog is about to host its first cat photo. Be sure to tune in!

On the road again!

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Road trip to Cañon City, then on to Santa Fe. Here are some photos from the road. Santa Fe photos coming soon.

I’ve made the trip to Cañon City with co-counsel a number of times to visit clients at one of its correctional facilities. The cool thing about driving alone is that I finally got to stop and take a picture of this, Route 115 between Colorado Springs and Cañon City.

Did they find the giant insect while exploring space? Unfortunately, as you can see from the sign, the museum is currently closed, so that question will have to be answered some other day.

I spent much of the drive on back roads, which provided constant reminders why I love the West. This is from Route 50 heading out of Cañon City.

This from Route 522 in northern New Mexico.

This from I-25 north of Pueblo heading back to Denver.

From a grocery store in Fort Garland, CO

I loved the drive and the quality time with my brother in Santa Fe. Good to be back home in front of the Broncos game now.

Nifty fifty!

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While this could easily be a reference to my brother, who will soon be joining me on the other side of the half-century mark, it is in fact a reference to the lens that our photo teacher recommended as a great all-around lens: the 50 mm with a wide aperture for interesting shallow depth of field photos. He confidently asserted that it would not be expensive and would be a good addition to our camera bags.

Not sure what his definition of “not expensive” is but this did not gibe with mine:

At the same time I was pondering this advice, I was puttering around in our basement looking for the lenses from my ca. 1984* film camera — which, like my dslr camera, is an Olympus — and found that I was already the proud owner of a 50 mm (ok, ok 49 mm) f/1.8 lens.

I started trying to figure out how to use it with my current dslr camera. It didn’t fit directly, and the first two calls I made to photography stores that will remain anonymous resulted in the advice that (1) this was impossible and (2) that it would cost me $150 for an adapter. Seriously: just that contradictory. But I went on ebay, ordered the adapter in the (blurry; damn!) foreground of the photo above — for $14 — and voila! I have a nifty fifty!

Clearly I need to learn more about how to use it, but damn it’s going to be fun!

BTW, I actually grew this pepper. But that is for yet another blog post.

*****************

* Faithful readers who are paying close attention and/or are related to me will say, “ca. 1984? but didn’t you say you got your 35 mm camera for high school graduation? And you graduated high school in 1978, so what gives?” The full answer to that will have to await another post that I’ve been meaning to write about having my backpack stolen in Singapore with my camera, money, and passport from the lobby of the Sheraton, putting my frantic mother** on a plane back to the States, contacting the law firm I was working for in Taiwan,*** being put in touch with a Chinese pop star who happened to be a friend of one of the partners, who loaned me money and took me out to dinner****, which allowed me to scramble around Singapore in a taxi getting a new passport, visa and plane ticket. I was cameraless until that summer when, back in the States and visiting friends in New York, I bought a new one almost identical to the graduation gift, and carried on with my untutored but enjoyable photographic career.

** You think I could have afforded the Sheraton on my own at that point??[UPDATE: ******]

*** And that is one of the other reasons for this post. Just the other day, I found myself trying to explain what a telex was. It was sort of 1984’s email in a way. You typed into a teletype machine in (say) the Sheraton in Singapore and it would print out momentarily at (say) a law firm in Taipei.

**** If you think the style disparity between me and Miss South Africa was vast, I only wish I had a photo of my dinner with Theresa Teng.***** But, alas, the thief had my camera.

***** Only when I googled her for this post did I learn that she passed in 1995 at a very young age. RIP, Theresa. You did a very good deed for a very lost and scruffy Waigwo student at the height of your stardom. Above and beyond.

UPDATE: ****** For the record — see Comment #1 — this was not my mother’s fault. I violated Travel Rule #1: Always Keep Your Backpack With You At All Times. I’ve also violated Travel Rule #2: Don’t Stay In A Hotel With A Preying Mantis on the Bed. And #3: Always Wear Sunscreen when Lying on A Beach Below the Tropic of Cancer, even in February. And many more, I’m sure. Live & learn!

“Cooking” with Amy

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I’m a recovering picky eater. From the time I started eating solid food until I was 16, I rarely strayed from the following list of foods:

Pop-Tarts (brown sugar cinnamon)
Orange juice
Peanut butter and apple butter sandwiches (white bread; crusts cut off)
Hard boiled eggs
White rice
Chicken
Flank steak
Junk food

Note that this list does not contain any vegetables or fruits beyond orange juice. This is not a typo.

During the summer after my junior year in high school, I was lucky enough to spend a couple of weeks in France, first living with a French family

La Famille Gardey: brother; fellow visiting American dweeb; mother.

and then biking around with a group of American students.

It’s possible that I don’t like camping because this early camping experience involved cows.

I went from picky eater to omnivore in the nanosecond after the mother in the French family put the first dinner in front of me and it became clear that not eating was not an option. She also tried to convert me to Catholicism and to convince me that I showered too often. I won the former; the latter was a draw — I was permitted approximately three hard-fought-for showers per week.

Still, I loved being an omnivore, and spent the rest of the trip enjoying my newly-expanded food vocabulary — especially in the bread, cheese, and pastry categories — which was causally connected to my newly-expanded waistline. If memory serves, my mother had to meet me at the airport in New York with a larger pair of pants.

I was even more of an omnivore during my travel in Asia. The food in Taiwan is spectacular — from banquets to road-side stands — and saying no to a dish is a major insult to the host[ess], so I ate almost anything. Highlights: turtle; sea slug; thousand-year-old egg.

I still eat almost everything — with the startling exception of fruit — but given that I never learned to cook, my day-to-day diet is just the grown-up version of my childhood menu. In other words, I don’t cook; I permutate.

The list:

Buitoni cheese tortelinni
Butter lettuce
Black olives
Grilled red peppers
Near East curry couscous
Steak
Chicken
Annie’s Shiitake Sesame Salad Dressing
Fresh basil
Olive oil
Pesto

These ingredients yield a number of permutations which constitute dinner most nights of the week. For example:

Pasta: tortellini, olive oil or pesto

Pasta couscous:* tortellini, coucous, olive oil.

Pasta salad: lettuce, tortelinni, olives, peppers, coucous, dressing.

Steak salad: lettuce, steak, olives, peppers, coucous, dressing.

Steak fajitas: tortilla, steak, lettuce, olives, peppers, basil, dressing.

Steak sandwich: bread, steak, lettuce, peppers, basil, mustard.

Chicken curry stir-fry: chicken, curry sauce, peppers.

Chicken salad, fajitas, or sandwich: you get the picture.

My mother is prone to quote her favorite cookbook that it’s easier to get new friends than to learn new dishes. I’m at least blessed with friends who are comfortable with predictability . . . and carry-out!

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* Yes, I know couscous is technically a pasta. I’m a big fan of carb combos like this. For example, one of my favorite foods in the world is shao-biing you-tyau, a/k/a shao-bing yu-tiao** a Chinese breakfast that consists of a strip of deep-fried dough inside a baked sesame roll.

** I first learned Chinese at the Middlebury language school in the summer of 1979, when for whatever reason they used a romanization system called Gwoyeu Romatzyh. GR has two notable features: it makes more sense than any other romanization system; and it doesn’t appear to have been taught anywhere else in the US besides Middlebury in the late 70s. I have tried to learn Pinyin, the system that both Chinese school children and American students of Chinese have been using since about 1979, but it just blends with GR in my head into an idiosyncratic romanization that makes sense to absolutely no one but me.

Does this make me an Illuminati?

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As will soon be tediously clear, I have started taking photography classes. Not for the first time, either. I got a serious 35mm camera* for high school graduation, took a class at the local rec center, and somehow convinced myself I knew what I was doing. There ensued some deeply meaningful but thoroughly awful photographs, including a few that got published in the Swarthmore college newspaper after I beat out a highly competitive field of approximately zero other people for the title of Assistant Photo Editor. So not kidding.

Herewith an example of my deeply artistic but pathetically incompetent college photography and dark room skills:

I carried the camera around campus for four non-contiguous years and then around Taiwan and other parts of Asia for the next three non-contiguous years, taking the occasional brilliant photograph, and boatloads of expensive-to-develop 35mm crap. Actually, one of my funniest sets of travel photos was from a cross-country drive I took somewhere in the middle of law school, in which I guess I discovered real mountains for the first time, because I have close to an entire roll of slides devoted to distance shots of fields, lakes or — most commonly — the road with mountains in the background. I now call that “the view from my morning commute.”

A few years ago, Tim gave me a seriously good DSLR camera and after spending too long using it on “auto” while trying to remember what the eff an f-stop was, I decided earlier this year to take a class. I’m having a blast! The first round of classes — Digital 101 at Illuminate Workshops — reacquainted me with f-stops, shutter speeds, and ISO, introduced me for the first time to the majority of the buttons and data on my camera, and then moved on to a long-overdue introduction to composition.

We had homework, which like a good little student nerd, I did. For the first class, the instructor asked us to experiment with shutter speed and aperture:

For the second class, we were supposed to take a portrait and a “macro.” Oh, and I forgot to mention, the instructor displays and critiques our photos. My classmate Gabriela went first. Her macro was a stunning photo of a jade bracelet on a mirror. Her portraits looked like this:

The reason her portraits looked like this is because SHE TOOK THIS PORTRAIT! Why, might you ask, is Gabriela in Digital Photography 101? No clue, but she is hilarious and asks great questions, so I’m glad she’s there. For example, had we not reviewed Gabriela’s boudoir photo of a shapely — mostly naked — woman photographed from behind, I would not have learned that to get good photos of a naked tuchis, you have to request the owner of the tuchis to, um, clench. The class discussed this in a professional manner, while I exerted superhuman effort not to snicker.

But then it was my turn. Here is my macro homework .

Seriously. We went from jade bracelets and naked tuchii to, um, a rock. Luckily my portrait homework was of my mother-in-law, so I held my own in that division! (Though, for the record, she was fully clothed.) The instructor was very kind to my rock, but did use it to start to teach us how Photoshop can be used to make photos more interesting.

So I’m planning to use the blog to post my photography practice from time to time, and I’m putting all of what I think of as my more interesting practice photos on Flickr, so if you’re really bored, you can hop over there and take a look. I’m partial to architecture and abstract and averse to portraits, so there will be lots of stuff that looks like this:

Which likely only I find interesting. Still, the occasional “ooh” or “ahh” in the comments would make me smile!

**************

* My photography instructor – and most of the world, I gather – would now call it a “film camera,” because of course in 1978, we didn’t have digital cameras. If I recall correctly, this is called – in the linguistics biz – a “back formation.” I love back formations. Think about it: acoustic guitar; snail mail; chicken fried chicken. I’m not sure about the last, but I love it just the same.

Adventures in Trial Technology

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We recently went to trial against a big-ass nationwide law firm. To prepare for this trial, in addition to mastering the law and facts, we decided to take the additional step of freaking out about trial technology. I’m hoping you can learn from our experience.

What I hope you’ll learn is: most trial technology is expensive bullshit. All you really need is a projector and Adobe Acrobat Standard.

We started our legal technology project as we start most projects: by procrastinating. After an appropriate period of procrastination, our project began with an email to opposing counsel at the big-ass firm, asking if he’d be willing to work together to share in-court technology. He did what he usually does with our attempts to cooperate: ignored it. So we set off to acquire an arsenal of legal tech that could outshine anything a big-ass firm could put together.

The first thing we did was to update our document management software. As I’ve previously blogged, this immediately hung up on the fact that the software vendor wanted us to pay several years in arrears before they were willing to update us. More from stubbornness than cheapness — though let’s be honest, from a great deal of cheapness, too — we refused. But we’re so clever we figured out a work-around. The old version of the software would run on an old laptop with a giant external hard drive attached. If this were a horror movie, the camera would now focus in on the old laptop, and ominous music would play ominously in the background.

We next decided that we needed trial software, and invested in three licenses for Trial Director, which promises that you’ll be able to do ALL KINDS OF INCREDIBLY COOL AND POWERFUL STUFF IN TRIAL like, you know, pop-outs. And, um, …. well, pop-outs. Which as near as I can tell are when you use your mouse to select some piece of text on the screen and it … you guessed it… pops out. It was also supposed to have all sorts of amazing organizational features. Notice the use of the past-disappointed tense. After investing a couple thousand dollars in Trial Director, we spent the next week or so (and we didn’t, at that point, have a lot of weeks before trial) trying to get it to load, and then another week or so getting error messages. Never! Mind! Our talented and persuasive paralegal called, returned our licenses, and got our money back.

But we did invest in a projector and screen. You know, the sort of sophisticated equipment you’d expect from people who live less than a mile from a Best Buy and who are too cheap to upgrade their software. More ominous music.

So that left us, on the eve of trial, with an ancient laptop, two new laptops (I forgot to mention how I was trying to master Windows 7 two weeks before trial — brilliant!), a projector, a screen, and Adobe Acrobat Standard 8. And me, a lawyer with aspirations to graphic design, playing with PowerPoint and Publisher much like Stuart Little played with his little car. (“Hey, what does this button do? Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhh shit.”)

We figured we’d just take the documents we wanted to display during trial, compile them into a pdf and then flip from page to page, occasionally using Acrobat’s editing features (highlighting, box-drawing) to draw attention to some significant piece of text. And — spoiler alert — this is what we did and it worked fabulously. If you’re here for the trial tech lesson, you can stop reading: so long as you don’t need to show video, which we didn’t, Acrobat — plus the occasional pdf’d PowerPoint slide or Publisher graphic — is all you need.

But the road to our pdf nirvana was still a bit bumpy. For example, confident as we were in our minimalist approach, it was still a shock to the system when Tim, our paralegal Caitlin, and our co-counsel Mari showed up at the courtroom the Friday before trial to set up. We had our Best Buy projector — which we had purchased and tried out in our conference room in Denver — and a screen that we had ordered online and had delivered to Mari, which she had learned to assemble in her home office in Berkeley. Crucially, prior to that Friday, the projector and screen had never before interacted with one another.

The big-ass law firm had:

a real projector;
a real screen;
an Elmo*;
extra monitors for the witness and the judge;
an extra table for their technology hub, staffed by a specially-trained technology dude; and
extra tables for all this fancy technology; with
table skirts.

I think that could be a new item in my growing Jeff Foxworthy imitation: If the skirts on the tables supporting the courtroom technology of your opposing counsel are nicer than the skirt you’re wearing, you could be a plaintiffs’ lawyer!

I really should let Tim tell this part of the story, because I wasn’t there. I was just receiving frantic updates on my cell phone. Apparently the mail-order screen and the Best Buy projector were a match made in hell, the upshot of which was the courtroom was not big enough to give the projector enough distance to project an image of the proper size onto the screen. Even more exciting, in attempting to find the proper distance and angle, Tim and Mari apparently projected into the security cameras, causing the court security officers to charge worriedly into the courtroom.

Meanwhile the big-ass law firm’s team of technology professionals (the firm, of course, just sent its technology team; no lawyers were present) were busy assembling equipment and putting skirts on tables when the judge’s deputy came in an announced that only one screen would be permitted — we’d have to share. This was fine with our team and with their technology team — who were sweet and helpful — but we wondered how the news would go over with the big-ass law firm lawyers. With a word on the side to the clerk to please back us up on Monday when we requested a link to their projector to project our pdfs onto their screen, Tim and Mari packed up our equipment and tucked it away in the back of the courtroom. For those of you keeping score at home, the amount of fancy new hardware and software we brought to trial was precisely: zero.

The weekend brought even more technology adventures and heroic last-minute repairs, which I have to tell in bullet point format lest this post last longer than the trial:

A motor in Tim’s wheelchair failed.
We found a wheelchair tech who made a house call (hotel call?). (Thanks, John!)
The old laptop screen failed — remember the ominous music?
We found a computer tech who made a house call . . . on Sunday. (Thanks, Dean!)
Just in case, we borrowed our co-counsel’s daughter’s monitor. (Thanks, Miya!)
The old laptop screen started working again.
Tim’s new laptop screen failed. He spent the rest of the trial tethered to the borrowed monitor.

By this time, the case was starting to bear more than a passing resemblance to My Cousin Vinny:

My suits were only slightly less heinous than Joe Pesci’s:

My partner was much better versed in the rules of evidence than I was.

And we had train tracks right outside our hotel window.** So not kidding:

But this is all building to the inevitable moment when the big-ass law firm lawyer learned he’d have to share his technology. And let me assure you, [DESCRIPTION DELETED BY TIM’S BETTER JUDGMENT, AND MY BETTER JUDGMENT TO ASK HIM ABOUT HIS BETTER JUDGMENT]. The Court told the parties to work it out, and we figured it was worth it to pay half of his technology bill to be able to project our pdfs on a big screen and on monitors in front of the judge and witness. I do think that our trial team owns one-half of a bunch of monitors and table skirts sitting in a storage room in a big-ass law firm somewhere.

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* Not the doll. It’s like a modern-day overhead projector, taking the document or object you place on the illuminated surface and projecting it onto a screen. I.e., ways in which we have not progressed much beyond my 8th grade geometry class.

**I have to add that we love the Hyatt Summerville Suites in Emeryville. It’s perfect for our needs. The staff knows us and is outstanding and friendly. And we’re walking distance to both the Bay — for a relaxing stroll after a day in court — and a Trader Joe’s, which still doesn’t exist in Denver. Most of our trips west are like some sort of ancient trading caravan: we arrive laden with binders of legal documents and depart laden with Trader Joe’s condiments.

Nerds in South Beach

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Tim and I spent three lazy days in South Beach, defrosting after a long, cold Denver winter. This is sort of a photoblog of our trip. Enjoy — and at least have the decency to be a little jealous!

We stayed at a hotel right on Ocean Avenue.

with a very hip lobby

The first day brought a very unusual event: Tim and Amy eating breakfast at 10:30.

Tim chose the restaurant. Wonder why?

The great thing about breakfast at 10:30 is that there is very little elapsed time between breakfast and happy hour. Say, 20 minutes.

After our first night, when we had the pleasure of finally meeting Matt and Debbie Dietz for dinner, but the misfortune of sitting in causeway traffic to get there, we decided to ditch the van and just goof around South Beach. This mostly involved rolling/roller blading around, soaking up sun, and people watching.

We connected with some great food, including the famous Joe’s Stone Crab. Mmmm! Curry aioli, where have you been all my life?

While New York may have the Met and Washington, the Smithsonian, South Beach apparently has its own intellectual life.

So sorry Laura Hershey is not around to see this, though I would have had to confess to her — and she would have gotten to make fun of us for — the fact that we didn’t, um, take a tour.

I’m not at all sure what this museum is about:

or these excellent public murals: