All these were shot on my Sony DSC-WX9, which is a point-and-shoot, in various modes, including Sweep Panorama.

Since then a BIOS update appears to have fixed some issues I was having with Bluetooth® and my Microsoft® wireless keyboard and mouse so I’m back on my Microsoft Wedge Keyboard and Bluetooth Notebook Mouse 5000, but the setup is otherwise the same.

At home my machine is a late 2012 Mac mini with a Windows 8 virtual machine.

I stop at the airport on the way home to check our PO Box (which is located on airport property) and to take advantage of the free hour of parking above the landside terminal to take a break and watch people and flights come and go. It helps switch from “work” mode to “home and family” mode. I also have somewhat of a fascination with machinery (I guess that’s just the geekiness coming out).

As mentioned before, moving meant we had to surrender our “furry” children back to the rescue, so it’s rather quiet except for the sound of traffic passing within a dozen yards of us here on the corner of the building. V. misses Pudge the guinea pig; I miss Daisy the ferret. Fortunately all five have found new homes in the small animal equivalent of foster care until they can be relocated to more permanent living situations. Eventually once things are fully settled and everything is unpacked we will look at adopting a tuxedo cat (V.’s favorite) to call our own.

A little something from Twitter before calling it a night:

@WashArchdiocese Almighty God, whose love surpasses all that we deserve, forgive our failings and grant us more even than we dare to ask. #eveningprayer 10/6/13 10:05 PM

]]> https://stevenwb.com/?feed=rss2&p=5 0 https://stevenwb.com/?p=6 https://stevenwb.com/?p=6#comments Tue, 24 Sep 2013 20:01:00 +0000 https://stevenwb.com/2013/09/24/updates/ Read more]]> It’s been well over a month, I noticed, since last posting anything up here. Things have been taken down, put back up, taken back down, then put back up again. There’s just so much going on that it’s hard to keep up at times.

• We finally found a new place in the Town & Country area of Tampa Bay and are in the process of moving. The computer and multimedia equipment are already there, and we should be completely moved out of Plant City by the end of the month.
• Because of the move, we ended up having to surrender our small animals back to Pigs ‘n’ Buns. So as of a couple of weekends ago we are “furry-childless” (we’re looking at adopting a cat, though, in the near future once we’re settled in).
• The P.O. box is officially moved from Plant City to Tampa (see the Contact page). It’s actually a much more convenient location just outside the Tampa airport that stays open until near midnight.

I’ve been shuttling back and forth between Tampa and Plant City the last couple of weeks moving the small stuff and the equipment and getting used to being in Tampa traffic (much heavier than Plant City, but still nowhere near growing up in So. Cal.).

I’ve also been reducing my spending on online things and slowly returning to free services like Blogger for writing and Outlook.com for email (much cleaner than Gmail) and giving up my expensive iPhone for a lower-cost Windows Phone device (Nokia’s Lumia 521 on T-Mobile prepaid, if you’re wondering). I still use a Mac mini at home but my mobile world has gone to Windows 8 (an Acer W3-810 replaced the iPad).

I guess the good news from this is that I now have the motivation to finally look for that larger place that we need.

I’ve been on email and phones with all the apartment communities here in Plant City, and am finding that nobody wants to let us bring our brood of animals into their communities, so we’ve had to give up on apartments and look for a house to rent in order to keep our little darlings that we adopted over the past few years.

We found a three-bedroom house to rent just outside of historic downtown, and the monthly rent is within our budget, but they also want a full month’s rent for a deposit plus a $200 pet deposit to cover The Three Caballeros™ and the Crazed Ferret Duo™. It’s not much unlike the home I once owned in Lakeland (before the layoff and divorce took all that away), and the floors are ceramic tile (easy to clean!). The extra room will allow me to set up a separate office/studio to record vlogs and videos for the S.Y.S.C. YouTube channel and take things to the next level.

So far, so good, until we were told that if our credit check comes back denied, we’ll have to put down two months’ rent for a deposit.

To put it mildly, our credit sucks (welcome to the Great Recession). And I hate begging.

So I decided that if I was going to “pass the hat around,” I was going to do it not just for us, but for a cause that my wife and I both hold dear.

Indiegogo Campaign

Today a new fundraising campaign has launched on Indiegogo to raise funds to help us make the move to midtown Plant City, but we’re also going to set aside a portion of what we raise to support the 4 Lil’ Pigs ‘n’ Buns small animal rescue here in Tampa Bay. They rescue small animals like bunnies, guinea pigs, hamsters, mice, rats, and ferrets from situations like hoarding and homes that can no longer keep them and place them in adoptive homes. The rescue is run by volunteers throughout Florida who contribute and provide “foster homes” while these pets are awaiting adoptions. Vee and I have adopted all but one of our furry family from the rescue and we’d love to return the chance to support them financially through this Indiegogo campaign.

• The part of the Defense of Marriage Act which denies federal benefits to same-sex couples whose marriage is properly recognized by states is unconstitutional. Therefore same-sex marriages recognized by the states must also be recognized by the Federal government. However, no decision is made about whether states that do not recognize same-sex marriages have to recognize same-sex marriages from other states (although I’d assume the “full faith and credit” clause applies here). 
• Rules that the proponents of Prop 8 did not have standing to continue the appeals process on behalf of the state government when the state decided to drop out, sending it back to the Ninth Circuit to dismiss, effectively allowing the previous appeals ruling to stand that struck it down as unconstitutional. The court declines to make any ruling on whether a ban on gay marriage itself is right or wrong on a national level. 

So, #DOMA and #Prop8 are effectively gutted.

To me, it means two things:

• When it comes to making laws, morals of any kind no longer apply. This actually doesn’t surprise me—morality could never be successfully legislated; it has to come from the grassroots. 
• The entire idea of marriage as the institution of society we once knew it to be is effectively destroyed. 

As preposterous as it may sound at a moral level, on a legal level there’s nothing in the way technically of striking down laws banning such things as polygamy—after all, why deny polygamists “equal protection”? if all the participants in such a marriage are consenting adults? How far does the rabbit hole go? Marriage no longer has to be just between a man and a woman; why not let it be between any two (or more) consenting parties?

One final note: I’ve opened this up to comment, but be civil. Address the message and not the messenger. Everyone is entitled to their opinion whether you like it or not; this just happens to be mine.