Starting to Understand

In the past, I could never understand why the people around me disliked snow so much. To me, snow was an essential ingredient in making winter the season that it is. After a nearly snowless winter, Denver has finally been seeing its share of crystalline dihydrogen monoxide. Of course, all of it has started to come just as I've started to commute to work. I started my new job a week ago today and in that time I've had 3 commutes of more than an hour one way thanks to Mother Nature. I think I'm starting to understand why the world doesn't necessarily share my sunny outlook for snowy days. I won't say that I'm a complete grump about it yet, but I definitely groan just a little bit any time the weather forecasters start talking about snow, especially when it could affect my commute.

By next winter, I think I'll definitely have to be looking around for a new home someplace closer to the new job. And then I'll be able to enjoy winter to the fullest again.

Also, as a housekeeping note, the weather and my schedule have kept me away from libraries and coffee shops of late, so that's what's driving the lack of posts. I'm working on ways to better manage time right now and hope to have more posts on a regular basis soon.

Mile High Places - Equitable Building and Brown Palace Hotel

Hello All,

Sorry about the lack of posts lately. I'm focusing on getting settled into the new job and the life adjustments related to it. I'll have some thoughts on both in the coming days.

For now, I thought I'd share some shots from one of my ongoing projects. I call this project Mile High Places. It focuses on the art and architecture around the Denver Metro area. Last weekend I was out with KR wandering around downtown. I'm really happy how these two shots from two of Denver's classic buildings turned out:

The first shot is from the Equitable Building which was (and arguable still is) one of Denver's preeminent office buildings. While it's been surpassed in size, it's hard to imagine it being surpassed in grandeur. When was the last time that someone built a new office building in Denver featuring a lobby with 6.1 million hand laid mosaic tiles in the lobby and Tiffany stained glass windows? Yeah, that's what I thought.

I also like the shot of atrium at the Brown Palace Hotel which is featured in my second image. I really liked this angle taken from the fifth floor. The atrium really doesn't seem this perfectly pentagonal. The true pentagon shape can be seen in the design of the rug in the atrium. The wide angle lens and position of the camera that I used exaggerated things a little bit. While it would never make it as a documentary architectural shot, I'd like to think that it's a successful photograph.

I'm really hoping to ramp up this project soon as the days get longer. I'm making notes on buildings that would be easy to photograph on my morning or evening commute. I'll be sure to make some more blog posts as I get more shots.

Endings and Beginnings

I'm in the midst of the two day unemployment period betwixt jobs and it gave me occasion to stop and think about endings and beginnings a little bit. All day Friday I kept thinking of a line from the Semisonic song, Closing Time: "Closing time, every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end." I think it really does a wonderful job of capturing what I was thinking about all day on Friday.

There were a lot of mixed emotions for me Friday, and indeed the whole of my two weeks after I gave notice at my old job. One doesn't just up and leave someplace after spending 12 years of one's life there without stopping and thinking about the past. I have a lot of really good memories there and I know that I'll live in legend at the office for a long time to come (trust me, there are some great stories that really deserve legend status). I think about deciding to move to Colorado 12 years ago to be closer to the mountains that I love so much and the stability that the job provided me. There was excitement at that new beginning and there's some regret to be leaving some of that behind.

Like the line from the song says, though, every new beginning must come at the expense of some other beginning's end. I think that I had gotten into a rut in life at my last job and I really felt that if I intend to grow further it was time for a change. It was a decision that I made with some trepidation. As I mentioned in a previous post, I think we as humans crave the comfort of the known. And yet we're meant to grow and sometimes that growth can only occur by trying something new, sometimes radically new.

And so here I sit at the end of one beginning and the start of a new one. As Monday morning gets closer and closer I feel the excitement at the thought of the new beginning starting to erase some of the fear and regret about leaving the past behind. I will always be grateful to TBCCI for the 12 years of memories that they provided me and I am glad that we were able to part ways amicably. And I look forward to establishing a new set of memories at BBC.

Dust

"Remember, man, that you are dust and unto dust you shall return."

Today is Ash Wednesday, a day when Catholics receive ashes on their foreheads and are reminded of the words above.

I've always liked Ash Wednesday. While some might look on it as a somber beginning to the somber season of Lent, I rather think it's merely an opportunity. No matter what religion you practice, if any, I can assure you of one thing: you are going to die. There's no way out of it. Being cognizant of that fact, however, provides each of us with opportunity to make sure that we make the most of our time here before we shuffle off this mortal coil (thank you, Shakespeare, for that most poetic of phrases describing death).

I utilize every Ash Wednesday to take an introspective look at my life and really question where I'm at and where I'm going. Ideally I should be doing that every day, but there's something about getting ashes on one's forehead that makes one think about it just a little bit more.

Definitely one of my favorite days of the liturgical year.

Mental Training, Too

My training run yesterday was supposed to be 10 miles in length. I did 8 and I've been upset about it ever since. After reflecting on it overnight, I realized that I made a series of bad decisions during the course of the run. Most were pretty minor by themselves. Only the final decision completely shut down the run. However, there was a cascading effect between each of the small decisions that led to the final shut down at 8 miles. It goes something like this:

1.  - I think I was in a pretty grumpy mood. Once again we were supposed to get snow in Denver and once again it was essentially a non-event. I know that I probably shouldn't complain about non snow events, especially after the northeast got hammered, but I'm still a person that really craves 4 separate, definable seasons. Winter hasn't seemed like winter this year. It's just been a non-season between fall and spring. I never really cleared my mind of the grumpiness before the start of the run.
2.  - I built in three extra weeks into my training program to allow for minor injury healing and such. I allowed myself to contemplate using one of those weeks this week after having a less than stellar long run last week, too.
3.  - On my out and back run, I decided to turn around at the 4 mile mark instead of 5 miles. Had I done 5 miles, I would have been forced to make this a 10 mile exercise. Instead, I told myself that I'd see how I felt when I got back to my start point. If I felt good, it'd be easy to go a mile out and back the other direction on the trail.
4.  - I wasn't as careful about pace as I should have been. I started off faster than I should have. Managing pace is KEY!!!!! One would think that I would have learned that by now, but apparently it's easier said than done...
5.  - I walked up a hill at the 7 mile mark. That doesn't sound bad, but there's something odd about me and my second wind. Once I lose it, I can't get it back. The most I will be able to run after taking a walk break is 10 minutes. 5 minutes is far more likely. This has happened on several training runs as well as my 10K with Joey and Lauren and my Half Marathon. I absolutely CANNOT walk in the middle of a run if I plan to keep running.
6.  - I let the weather and body complaints rule my mind. While the weather problem was somewhat real (even with gloves on, I couldn't really feel my fingers at the end of the run), the body complaints weren't. After running 8 miles, of course one's legs are going to be a bit sore. This wasn't catastrophic failure, just soreness. The type of thing that a marathoner has to learn how to push through.
7.  - When my phone informed me that I had crossed 8 miles, I allowed myself to shut down and call this one of the three spare weeks. There was no injury here, so this is a big fail.

I've got two options for this coming week now. The first is to roll with the spare week thing allowing that mental mistakes happen, too, and learn from it. The other is to proceed to the following week. The training runs for the week will either be 3,5,3 and 10 miles or 4,5,4 and 11 miles. I'm a little worried about making the jump from 8 to 11 miles on the long run but I am still going to try that route (generally speaking, one shouldn't do increases of more than about 10% per week but I think my body is capable). My mental toughness definitely jumped a notch this week thanks to this "failure," so in the end it may not be a bad thing.

 All in all, I think it will be an important training lesson. Lesser races -- 5Ks, 10Ks and even Half Marathons -- are about getting the body in shape. Even at this early stage of marathon training, I'm learning that it's as important (or perhaps even more important) to get the mind in shape, too. And honestly, that's one of the driving forces behind this adventure, so all is as it should be, I guess. I just need to make sure that I learn my lessons.

To reinforce that, here's my training quote from George S. Patton again:

"Now if you are going to win any battle you have to do one thing. You have to make the

mind run the body. Never let the body tell the mind what to do. The body will always give

up. It is always tired in the morning, noon, and night. But the body is never tired if the

mind is not tired."

A Life of Its Own

I took this photo of Pugsly last week because I really just wanted to play with my new Nikon AF Nikkor 85mm f1.4D:

When I uploaded it to Flickr along with some other shots, it was immediately pretty popular and started earning a lot of favorites and comments. By that evening it had made it into Explore on Flickr.

A quick word about Explore is probably in order. Every day there are hundreds of thousands, if not millions of uploads to Flickr. There's an algorithm in the Flickr system to chart "interestingness." That algorithm has been nicknamed "The Magic Donkey" in the Flickr-verse. No one knows quite how it's implemented, but the number and source of views, favorites and comments are taken into account. The system finds the 500 most "interesting" shots of the day and features them in the Explore feature of Flickr.

I woke up around 2 AM in the morning (too much coffee before bed...) following my posting of this shot. Lo and behold, the Flickr App on my phone was lit up like a Christmas tree. This shot of Pugsly had climbed to number 2 in Explore! Because of that, it was featured pretty prominently in Explore and web applications linked to Explore. The photo took on a life of its own and started earning me page views, comments and favorites like I've never seen. As of the time of the posting of this blog, the photo has 5600 page views, 531 favorites and 137 comments. I don't see that much activity in a week on all of my photos combined, let alone on one shot in a single day!

The photo has since fallen a little bit in Explore. It's now rated as #12 for 2/8/13. That's still better than my previous best which clocked in at #24.

What's really fun is that this wasn't my only photographic "success" of the weekend, either. A photo editor at Crain's Chicago Business contacted me and asked to use this photo for an article in their magazine:

I agreed and will be getting remunerated for my efforts and will get a copy of the magazine. This will only be the second time I've been published in a magazine, so I'm really excited about it.

Definitely some fun stuff happening this weekend!

Whither?

I think the part that most surprised me about my 366 journey last year was that I really started to figure out who I was and really took hold of my life for the first time in a long time, if ever. Who would have thought that taking a self portrait every day for a year and posting some thoughts in the description block would have enabled such a transformation?

Not far behind on the surprise scale, however, was learning that inertia seems to apply to life as well as mass. A life in motion will tend to stay in motion and a life at rest will stay at rest just as surely as Newton's law applies to objects. The 366th shot of that journey wasn't the finale of the project. Rather, it really was a jumping off point for everything beyond. And after having applied some force to my life to set it in motion, I was ready to continue with that momentum in 2013.

So, where exactly am I headed in 2013? I've set out some goals for myself and will be detailing them more in depth as the year goes along. I'm proud to say that two have already come to fruition.

The first is that I've found a new job. While I'm grateful to my soon to be former employers for the 12 years of my tenure there, it just felt like it was time for a change for me. When I saw an opening at my local blood center I decided to jump on it. Blood donation is something that I truly believe in and it seemed like a natural fit for me. I can't tell you how excited I am about this new prospect in my life and look forward to the challenges and the rewards of a new job.

This blog is the other achievement. I've toyed with the idea of starting a blog for something approaching 4 or 5 years now. The void formed after the ending of the 366 project has left me craving an outlet for some reflections. The time had finally come for the blog idea to flower. And here we are!

A third goal really has me excited (and admittedly a little nervous, too). The object of most of my current efforts is training for the Colfax Marathon in May. I'm sure I'll have a lot of thoughts about that whole process in future blog entries, but it's already been fun to pick up where I left off last year. For those that don't know, I started running early in the course of the 366 last year and managed to work my way up to completing a half marathon in November. Once again I'm finding that there are ups and downs with training and that there are lessons to be learned with every single training session. I look forward to learning more as I go on this particular journey.

And thus it goes for 2013. A life in motion.

Introduction

Welcome to the introductory post of my new blog -- Lux Prima Diei. I'm guessing your first question will be, "What does your blog title mean?" It's Latin for first light of day. While the Latin phrase prima luce is probably a simpler and more elegant way of saying "dawn," I was beaten by several other bloggers who used that particular wording first. So you get my clumsy translation instead. Sorry about that!

So what is the purpose of this blog? It's probably just going to be an outlet for me to ruminate on my interests and hobbies -- photography, running, music, etc. -- or just on life in general. I successfully completed a self portrait 366 project last year (a self portrait every day for a whole leap year). During the course of that project, I noted that putting my thoughts down in ink (or electrons as the case may be) really helped clarify my thinking. Doing so in a public forum (which wasn't always easy) also netted me a wealth of sagacity from my virtual audience. While I entertained the thought of engaging in another photographic project to the same end, I decided that in this instance I'd rather have the emphasis on my words rather than the images I create. A blog seemed like an ideal outlet for that.

The blog title has become something of a personal philosophy for me. As a photographer, I crave the beautiful light that sunrise and sunset bring. Photographers know this time as the blue hour (the hour before sunrise and the hour after sunset) and the golden hour (the hour after sunrise and the hour before sunset). I've always been inclined to be more of a morning person, so I focus a bit more on lux prima diei. Along with the aesthetic benefits for the photographer, the idea of the first light of day also carries a connotation of hope for me. Every day is a new beginning. No matter how sour the previous day turned, the sun will rise again and bring with it the promise of a new beginning.

So I welcome you to the paradox that is my blog. A continuing journey of new days. I look forward to all of your thoughts as I head down this path and hope that you can be as illuminated as I hope to be.

~Chris