so i had to break out the camera this morning, perch it on a file cabinet or two, and take pretentious, thoroughly awkward headshots of myself posing like an idiot.

not exactly my favorite part of the first week, needless to say.

a couple months ago, the lady and i were looking for photographs of mount pleasant to hang on our walls when i realized that i hadn’t taken any — like none in the four years i’ve been here, outside of a couple batches from snowstorms.

so, during my flex days this year i’m going to spend some time wandering around the neighborhood.

this week i knocked off all of ingleside, 18th and 19th streets, most of lamont street and half of newton. map of the route here, and photos below.

i don’t think i would recommend it — just sayin’ it’s possible.

The maid of honor (not ours, but theirs) mentioned it in passing to the lady sparkler and my beloved volunteered me for the job — not that I wouldn’t have offered myself, but it’s awesome that my bride came up to me at the pool bar and said:

Hey, I just told someone you could be the wedding photographer tonight — hope that’s okay.

UPDATE: I’ve collected my thoughts and all my gear, and i’m actually feeling pretty legit — I’ve got the same camera a wedding photographer friend of mine uses for her weddings, four memory cards which can hold about 1200 photos, two batteries, and two pretty serious-grade lenses (both normal, and wide angle).

That said, I’m seriously freaking out shot two things — well, three actually: 1) I’m shooting a wedding; 2) I’m going to blow through 1200 photos before the reception even starts which means I’m going to have to empty memory cards onto my computer while I’m still shooting and my laptop doesn’t have a battery; 3) I don’t have a legitimate flash, so shooting the outdoors-afterdark reception is going to suck something fierce.

UPDATE 2: The “shoot” is over, and I have to say that wasn’t nearly as stressful as I thought it would be — though through no part of my own:

• one of the bridesmaides had a professional grade flash (not to mention my exact same camera) which is the only reason we have photos from the reception.
• that same bridesmaid was able to shoot the bride getting ready, so we got pictures from both halves of the preparations without it getting awkward or me being on two places at once.
• friends jumped in several times throughout the night, dumping photos onto the computer and picking the camera themselves. and at one point we had amassed enough equipment that we had all three of us all shooting at once.
• the bride and the groom were both incredibly flexible and were eager to line up the shots themselves, so all we had to do was point and shoot.

I haven’t run through them all yet, but between the four of us we amassed over 3,000 pictures, and they all look pretty good considering.

I promised the couple I would post everything by Christmas, but here are a few of the ceremony in the meantime.

putting aside the fact that we can afford to come to costa rica, that we both work with such awesome people that we can just dissappear for 10 days during the run up to year end, and that we have a (mostly) happy, healthy and charming little girl …

… during the roughly 108 hours that we’ve been in Arenal, we’ve been able to see the very top of the volcano for exactly six hours — and three of those hours happend to be when we were hiking around the base of the volcano.

i don’t want to run the statistical odd of this ever happening again, but i do feel like i should buy a lottery ticket.

the main hike in the parque is about 2km from the primary parking lot to a (now fully cooled) lava flow from the 1993 eruption, which goes through a whole series of overlooks of both the volcano and the lake beneath.

we knew nothing about how strenuous the hike was, but started feeling good when we saw two Russian grandmothers hobbling off the mountain as we made our way to the trail head.

sparklet was a happy (and well fed) camper in throughout — and even hiked a bit herself on the way back.

she’s a good egg.

the costa rican weather service says it’s going to rain, but gives out it’s forcasts by thirds of the country — which is a bit like saying that it’s going to rain somewhere between michigan and maine today.

all of this appears to have made the costa ricans into weather philosophers. when we asked for the weather outlook, the nice young lady at the front desk said:

it looks rainy today, but it was beautiful yesterday. it could be beautiful tomorrow, too. who can say?

awesome.

i don’t think the lady sparkler or i really thought we were leaving the country until we landed in costa rica, looked around and saw a whole bunch of costa ricans.

even then, only the temperature — 80 degrees, sunny — made me think that we weren’t just in some undiscovered part of our neighborhood in d.c.

sparklet’s been quite the trooper during our day of travel. a three hour flight to miami, a two hour layover, a three hour flight to costa rica, and then a three hour car ride to arenal — all without anything approximating a meltdown.

we rented a big honking land-rover-type monstrosity, which i was thinking was a comical level of overkill on the part of my beautiful wife, untill we drove through half a dozen landslides in the last 20 km to the hotel.

aquariums, by and large, are nasty/brutish places, over-stuffed with parents desparately trying to ignore their shrieking kids — a chaos that is the exact antithesis of the peace you see underwater.

so, while i love beautiful collections of fish in large tanks and could sit in front of just one exhibit for hours on end, at an aquarium if you stand in one place too long you are invariably jacked up against a wall by marauding tourists.

tonight, however, the conference i’m attending rented out the national aquarium in baltimore after hours for all it’s attendees. so, instead of the building being overstuffed with nasty-brutish families … it was overstuffed with nasty-brutish drunk marketers.

oy.

deflated, i trudged my way through the aquarium with some friends at a brisk page — looking at the fish here and there, but moving pretty quickly to avoid the drunken pre-hookup marketer rituals.

i fell behind my friends at one of the last exhibits and, as i finally made my way by the front entrance on my way out of the aquarium, an official looking woman with a yellow coat hurriedly waved me over.

we’re shutting down the exhibit — you better get in there if you haven’t already been through. you haven’t been through yet, have you?

“um, no … i just got here.”

i skittered on past, she pulled the rope across behind me, and for the next forty-five minutes i basically had the entire national aquarium to myself.

joyous.

i will say that, living in DC, i don’t “get” to wander around the streets of baltimore at night often, but that sounds an awful lot like something to be avoided — especially considering the only reason i was out was because i had forgotten contact solution and was desperately searching for a 24-hour pharmacy.