bobmacliberty

It’s a standard part of the Hibachi experience in the US.

Kittens are exhausting! Merlin is out cold half the day, and goes 100 mph the other half of the day. If he hears me open the bedroom door at night, it’s a race to the bathroom. I can hear his bell collar running at me. If he gets there before I can close the bathroom door, he goes straight for my feet. No matter what I put down or what surface I put it on, he’s there in 2 seconds to check it out. I really need to be careful with dangerous stuff…I think he lacks the instincts not to do something stupid. I’ve tried squirting him with a spray gun. He doesn’t like that and it makes him stop whatever he’s doing, but as Ted Lasso would say, he’s a goldfish. Ten seconds later he’s doing the same thing again. As I’ve said before though, he sure is cute.

I agree with OB. Your camera is trying to find a happy medium between the very bright sun and the very dark condo/foreground. It ends up doing neither one well. The human eye is much better than a camera at seeing “dynamic range”…the big difference between dark and light areas. The camera can’t capture what your eyes can see. Modern cameras, including just about any phone camera, have a setting called high dynamic range, or HDR for short. The camera takes multiple pictures back to back very quickly at different exposure levels. One picture may show the sky properly exposed but the foreground will be completely black. Another picture may show the foreground exposed well but the sky will be completely white (aka “blown out”). The HDR setting blends the best of several such different pictures together into a single picture. On an iPhone 13 or newer, HDR is used automatically whenever it’s needed in a high contrast shot with both very bright areas and very dark areas. It can’t be turned off. If you have between an iPhone Xs and an iPhone 12, it’s possible that HDR is turned off. If you have one of these older models, go to Settings > Camera and see if Smart HDR is off. Anything older than an iPhone Xs won’t have HDR capability. Try getting very close to the screen so that none of your condo is in the picture…just the outside view is in the frame. Your camera then won’t have to worry about the darker interior and should be able to give you a better exterior exposure. That won’t help though with the screen being in the way. ☹️

You might not need a new camera. Do your windows open? If so, open them up and take your sunrise pic without the windows and railing in the foreground. Just water, land, and sun. With no glass to shoot through, and no dark railing in the foreground (which will make the entire picture darker and lose some color in the sunrise), your camera phone should take a good photo. if you want to get fancy, it’s easy to adjust a photo after. On an iPhone, go to the Photos app and find the picture that you took. It should be right at the top. Then touch Edit in the upper right corner. Touching the Auto magic wand button in the bottom center should do a pretty good one touch set of adjustments to the exposure, colors, contrast, etc. Or, touch filters at the bottom and see how different preset filters make your picture look. The vivid and vivid warm filters may work well for a sunrise pic. You can also manually tweak many settings. For sunrises (and sunsets), I like to crank up the saturation and/or vibrance settings. This makes the colors pop more. Switch back to adjust at the bottom. Slide your finger to the left on the Auto magic wand and you will move through different types of settings. When you get to the Saturation setting, use your finger to slide the scale below the buttons to see what increases or decreases to saturation do to the picture. Do the same with vibrance and even with exposure to an extent. You can even reduce contrast a little to give the picture a softer look. When you’re happy with any changes, click the Done button. You can’t really screw anything up. If you don’t like what you’ve done, click Cancel instead of Done and you’ll leave editing mode without making any changes. Even if you click Done, you can go back into Edit and then touch Revert. That will reset everything back to the way it was originally. Choose any pic already on your camera and start playing around. See how changes to the various settings impact different types of pictures. I use Lightroom Mobile to tweak my photos, which is just a more powerful version of what the built in Photos app can do. I rarely post anything without doing at least a little tweaking. But that’s probably the perfectionist in me. If you have a Samsung phone (or any Android phone), you’ll have a photo editing app with similar capabilities. Someone else would need to give you guidance for that.

Outstanding Live review Mark! You made some great memories for your grand kids. I’ve asked this before but…will you adopt me? 😁

Good advice. I’d add to strive for experiences rather than things. Wish I had that perspective when I was younger.

MCO is always the worst airport for security lines, with Vegas a close second. They both must have a lot of flights leaving at 7:00am because they lines at 5:00am are crazy

The Disney Plaid experience, at $500 per hour for 7 hours, is still cheaper than a CocoCay over the water cabana for my upcoming cruise. 🙄 Edit: Just checked my cruise planner and the overwater cabana price has been reduced from $4099 to $2804. A bargain!

4 months old. We question his intelligence, but he sure is cute.

Where in Florida will part 3 happen?

I’m exhausted just reading this! Does Disney have the equivalent of Star class, where a “Genie” walks you right to the front of the line? Not sure what that would cost but might be worth it.

Made it to my daughter’s house in Cincinnati safely. Had a few rough miles thru the Debby rain in South Carolina Wednesday afternoon but otherwise non-eventful. I forgot what it’s like being in a house with a kitten. Everything is a toy, including bare feet. No matter you go or what you do, Merlin is there. You can practically hear him saying, “whatcha doin?” Every morning is wrestle time with my daughter’s other 4 year old cat Onyxia (aka Stinky, aka The Stink). Stinky always runs out of gas first. IMG_1424.mp4

Head to Cincinnati for a couple of weeks to visit our daughters and to work on my older daughter's 130 year old house. Lots of manual labor in my near future. I'm getting too old for this...

You've either not been to Epcot, or you didn't do it right. 😜 Do a Google search for "Epcot drinking around the world". When my daughter was doing competitive dance, The Dance Worlds competition was in the World Showplace Pavilion at Epcot, between Canada (Moosehead beer stand) and the United Kingdom (Rose and Crown Pub). When we had downtime between performances, which was a lot, we'd find a bar at one of the "countries". One year, one of the parents made drinking around the world passports. You had to do two things at each country...get a drink and get a picture taken with something from the gift shop like a Mexican sombrero or a Norwegian Viking helmet. One of the cast members at each country had to sign or stamp your passport as proof. It's a good thing that we had buses back to our hotel. 🤪

This is amazing Greg! You guys had some talent. You would have made an excellent cruise ship cover band. Did you play any original songs? I kept looking for a close-up of you, but you were mostly in wide shots or behind one of the singers. No love for the drummer! I finally got a clear screen capture. Some of your facial characteristics are clearly the same BUT I CAN'T GET PAST THE HAIR. Makes you look so different to me. Then again, the pictures of me with 70s hair also makes me look completely different from now (with MUCH less hair). 🤣

Let me add my thanks also Dani. Very caring of you. Not much happening here either. It was raining early but hasn't rained for a couple of hours. It's a little windy at about 30 mph, but that's not even enough to bring down any significant branches...just some twigs and spanish moss in the street. I think the Georgia and Carolina coasts will get it worse than us.

Disney has just become insane...both the complexity and the cost. I can't imagine a family of 4 now spending a week vacation there.

Enjoy the Mouse. Hopefully Debbie is out of your way by tomorrow and leaves some slightly cooler temps in her wake.

Our first Royal ship was Liberty of the Seas, hence my screen name.

Ding. Ding. Ding. Winners! Micheline had to take her car in for routine service, about 45 minutes south of us in Jacksonville. It was going to take nearly all day, so we decided to drive another 45 minutes south to St. Augustine and kill some time. We've been there a few times but never visited the lighthouse. I highly recommend it. In addition to the lighthouse itself, there are several other buildings on the property that are set up as a museum area. More info here. The $15 entrance fee ($13 for 60+) is well worth it. The star attraction though is the 165 foot tall lighthouse and the 219 steps that you can climb to the top. It's a long climb up but the steps are wide and well spaced, and there's a landing where you can pause every 20 or so steps, so you can take your time. It's worth it for the view from the top. The now obligatory place to take an Instagram shot. It's a long way up! Almost halfway there... The top...picture taken from the website. Sorry for the quick pan in the video but my fear of heights was starting to kick in a little. Looking at my phone while taking the video meant that I couldn't see the railing. 🥴 I think I was trying to get the video done quickly. The wind wasn't helping. Untitled video (2).mp4 Edit: Factoid that I learned when visiting the Amelia Island lighthouse...lighthouses are often painted differently so that sailors could identify which lighthouse they were seeing just by looking at it. The spiraling stripe going up the St. Augustine lighthouse makes it easily identifiable.

For @Ocean Boy and anyone else who wants to play...name this lighthouse.

Last night was "Sounds on Centre", where they close down part of Centre Street in our downtown area and have a live band play. Happens the first Friday of the month throughout the summer. Beautiful sunset from the marina after.

He did call shotgun though. Rules are rules. Happy to see an Ohio State shirt in Pennsylvania. 😁

It's been a long time since I've seen Witness. Thanks...I just added it to my IMDB watchlist so that I'll remember it when looking for something to watch. Our first date was to see Silence of the Lambs. Not sure what I was thinking but Micheline did practically end up in my lap by the end of the movie. 😜

Have a great flight today. I hope everything goes smoothly with the airlines.