We’re at the parents’ farm this weekend. I’d like to do some photography, but it’s windy. It’s the kind of sustained, howling gale that gives me an instant and sustained earache (well, aches) and I can’t be out in it for more than a few minutes at a time. Not much photography is happening because of this, and it is what I most looked forward to from this visit.
The high wind also means that if I try to fly a drone I likely will never find it again, it will get carried away so far and so fast. If I do find it, it will be a mangled mess from the crash landing. It’s particularly frustrating to me because for the decade I lived in this area, I always dreamed of being able to do aerial photography here. The few times I make it here now the nearly constant wind we have in Alberta these days renders my drones unusable.
The wind itself is also freezing and is chilling me through my new windbreaker. I lost enough weight to go down a jacket size and purchased myself a new one that I rather like ($18 on Temu – yay!).
I’m celebrating the fact that I have gone from size XXXL jackets to size LG jackets over the past five years. As you can see from the image below, depression got the best of me and I plumped up bigly courtesy of stress eating.
I was over 340 lbs when I quit weighing myself and I know I went up a pant size after that, so I may have been even larger than shows at above left. The pic on the right is me last summer. The picture of me in my new yellow jacket is me now 15 lbs lighter than I was in my orange shirt, so I’m getting there. 60 lbs to go. All of which is to say I like my new windbreaker, but I wish it had a bit more insulation for this colder wind. Being skinny is always best when you have an SD card that is phat with pixels.
The wind slowed a bit last night, so I managed to get a single sunset panoramic, but it took three tries as the drone was getting tossed around with constant high wind warnings up popping up on my screen. I’m lucky I didn’t crash it, but I wanted the sunset that badly. It wasn’t the bucket of pixels I wanted to harvest last night, but it was better than nothing.
There were some interesting skies on the drive out to the farm and I’ll process those photos I snagged and put them in a separate post when I can, but it was nice to have a camera out a couple of times on a trip and to get the drone up once, briefly. It’s important to remind yourself of the things that are going right even in the times when it feels like more is going wrong. Like big health successes and the odd, good image snuck in throughout the day. Attitude of gratitude, right?
DJI Mini 3 drone for top image, and for the win. Middle and bottom right images are from a Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra. Fatso image was from my wife’s Motorola at the time and I can’t remember the model number.