yes, it’s june and The Neverending Hockey Season just keeps going and going and going.
odin’s having a great time. i’m not sure where he got his love of running drills but he likes them as much as playing games which are still plenty fun too ( he’s in the red socks ).
we’re all going to be a little bummed when the the heat hockey club season ends in a few weeks even though it’ll mean i get to spend a little less time in the omnicenter in shivering in my shorts.
i mentioned i was interested in getting into kite aerial photography with odin so first things first, we needed to build a rig and test it out. as i mentioned in previous post “kite aerial photography 101” rig seemed about my speed – not too complicated and not too expensive and looks like it takes great pictures.
so we built a simple rig out of an 18″ bookshelf bracket, some large clips, a few key rings and string and decided to beta test the setup to see if the kite could generate enough lift with a test camera that didn’t actually work so we wouldn’t feel too bad if we crashed the kite.
but first, we wanted to test the kite with the bracket attached to the kite via about 50 feet of string but without a camera attached.
much to my surprise even with out little 4 foot delta kite – it worked !
i highlighted the bracket with a red rectangle to make it a little easier to see.
here’s another view of the maiden flight sans camera. letting the bracket swing 50 feet from the kite ( highlighted in red ) i think helps dampen the vibration down the string which is how you’re able to get such good images without complicated set-up but it does make it a little more difficult to get the camera really high up the air when you only have 150 feet of kite string! clearly we need more kite string 🙂
then we attached the non-functional camera and shortened the distance between the kite and the camera to around 30 feet to see if the camera/bracket swayed any more erratically than with 50 feet ( it didn’t ). i’m sure when we start taking photos we’ll need to do some experimentation to get the an optimal distance for clear images.
even with the added weight of the camera, the little delta kite generated enough lift to take the camera up in a relatively tame wind. i think the rig we have will be fine for similar sized point and shoot cameras but we’d definitely want a larger kite if we were going to send up a dslr.
we used a simple key ring to attach the rig to the kite. easy peasy to put on and take off!
the other end of the string that is connected to the kite is attached to a simple hanger fashioned from metal wire with another key ring.
and here’s the business end of the rig which is attached to the hanger. it’s simply a bookshelf bracket with oversized clips attached with a some metal wire twisted through the bracket slots and a few key rings. very, very easy to put together and quite affordable for a test rig.
the camera is attached via the tripod mount on the bottom of most cameras with an appropriately sized screw. as you can see, the nice think about the book shelf bracket is that it already comes with slots or attached more cameras 🙂
as i mentioned the beta test was with a non-functional camera so we wouldn’t feel too badly if we crashed the kite and ruined the camera. next, i need to find a functioning camera that cheap enough that i still won’t feel too bad about wrecking if we have a crash but that has the ability to take interval shots ( e.g. take a shot every 30 seconds ) which is normally a feature reserved for higher end cameras.
it turns out the canon hack development kit lets you add that feature to just about any canon camera, even an aging point and shoot.
so who has and old canon point and shoot sitting around gathering dust that they’d like to donate to our kite aerial photography adventures?
some of you might be asking why on earth we’re doing this? here’s a great gallery of spectacular kite aerial photos that gives a good flavor of the types of images we’re hoping to capture.
yes, we’re still in The Neverending Hockey Season which means we spend a few nights at a local hockey arena, but odin still wanted to practice his relatively rusty baseball skills before starting a summer baseball program.
and so, we found ourselves at a baseball camp put on by the local parks and rec program.
the kids practiced their throwing form. over. and over. and over again. i have to say odin’s doesn’t look too shabby!
and then it was time to try throwing it over the plate from the pitcher’s mound. i was surprised that odin did it on his first try ( though he can work a bit on his accuracy but that will no doubt come in time ). the plate is always a little farther than you think it is!
they even brought out the radar gun to clock the speed of the ball. odin was throwing 1/3rd the speed of a hundred mile an hour fastball, which seems pretty good given the fact that he has never practiced trying to throw over the plate.
“poppi. can i go up on the flat roof and throw down this parachute i made? i want to test how many marbles i put in cup before it doesn’t float anymore.”
of course! because even if he doesn’t know he’s empirically testing the physics of free fall and drag with parachutes, i can still understand the fun of standing on the edge of a roof and throwing stuff off the edge.
and, amusingly, i remember being his very age and wondering how many garbage bags i would have to put together to safely carry me down from the top of a tree.
it floats!
he could put a few marbles in the cup before it became too heavy for the size of the parachute. it’ll be interesting to see if he figures out how to plot various surface areas against max weight carried.
after the race it was time to head off for a fun birthday day in madison, wisconsin. we started at the awesome dane county farmer’s market which is on the capitol square so we got to peruse the approximately 300 vendors and go in the capitol and hit the observation deck which offers an excellent view of the city.
the perfect time for a gratuitous ( and rare ) family portrait!
as you can see i was wearing an organic valley coat so i got lots of questions about the fire at organic valley headquarters from concerned folks. lots of love and support in madison!
the rotunda in the capitol building is pretty awesome. odin thought it was mighty impressive. i wish i could have figured out a way to take a better picture. i tried to take a panorama of the entire thing but it wouldn’t stitch together nicely, so you only get to see a small bit 🙂
i’d be lying if i said at this point odin wasn’t really ready to head out and see something other than statues and elaborate rotundas. see that smile? it’s a carefully crafted fake 🙂
so, off to the madison children’s museum we went because while i might be getting old, i’m not too old to hang out with odin at a children’s museum where they have fun stuff like a giant hampster wheel that generates electricity for lights!
and some sort of crazy facial real time facial recognition exhibit…
and pinball, which take a lot of concentration especially when your poppi is taking pictures from funny angles…
and a green rooftop with a chicken coop with a great quote from frank lloyd wright that i might have to steal and put on our own chicken coop for The Girls…
they even had little chicks to pet. of course, odin has lots of practice calming baby chickens and grown hens thanks to tending to The Girls…
the baby chick was so content it eventually fell asleep in odin’s hands! the museum staff ladies were super impressed with his Chicken Calming Powers.
then, alas, it was time to go and we headed to a photography exhibit at madison museum of contemporary art but there was no cameras allowed. at a photography exhibit! boo!
after the exhibit we went to pizza brutta for some of the best pizza in madison. i had the prosciutto with asiago cheese and arugula. highly recommended! kris and odin are more traditional in their pizza tastes and had pepperoni. odin said it was the best pizza he’d ever had which is very high praise indeed.
for some reason, i felt compelled to take a picture of the table sign instead of the food because i liked the colors, fonts, shadows and lines?!
and to cap off The Best Birthday, we went to chocolate shoppe ice cream for a scoop of butter pecan ice cream before heading home very full and very content.
’twas a fine day. odin said it was the best birthday he’d been to even though it wasn’t his birthday 🙂
in addition to getting me some clams to celebrate my first birthday after running over 2,400 miles and losing 110 pounds ( i lost 4 more since writing that post ), kris organized a surprise trip to madison so i could run in the 10K “bratfest” which is the first race i’ve ran since running in the chicago marathon last october.
i’ve slowed down running over the past few months and have “only” been averaging 10-20 miles a week so i thought i’d take it easy and enjoy myself. the way i see it, it’s a “personal best” just to get up at 6:30a.m. on my birthday to make sure i register for the race on time and i didn’t need to go and try to break any personal records. but, hey, the best laid plans and all that. i felt so good running that it almost didn’t feel like i was pushing very hard to run a faster 10K than i’ve ever run before.
What an awesome way to start my birthday.Crushed personal record & ran 8’45” miles. Could have run faster.Next up,madison farmer’s market!
— Eric C. Snowdeal III (@snowdeal) May 25, 2013
i ran the first 5K at around 9 minute miles which is, in and of itself, a record setting pace for my former clydesdale self. but when it became clear that i was going to have plenty of gas in the tank i picked up the pace and ran the second 5K at an 8’30” pace to finish with an 8’45” average time per mile. i probably could have even pushed it a bit and harder if i paced myself better over the entire race and hit just over 8 minute miles. and the great part? i felt awesome at the end. i’m pretty sure i could have kept an 8’30” pace through a half marathon.
i couldn’t be happier that after a year i’m still kicking 30 year old me’s ass ( and running almost 2 minutes per mile faster than i was just a year ago when i wrote that post ).
it’ll be interesting a year from now to see if i can shave another minute off my times and get close to a 7’30” per mile pace which is about a 3 hour and 16 minute marathon pace and close to what i’d need to run for a boston marathon qualifying time. i’m not saying i’m going to be able to keep that pace through a marathon but who knows!
i do think running a race on or very close to my birthday is going to be a new tradition. next year i might give the spring madison half marathon a whirl.
the super bestest part was having kris and odin standing right by the finish line so odin could give me a high-five before i crossed the line 🙂
the day after the fire at organic valley headquarters some emplyees who had work areas that weren’t destroyed or in structurally unsound areas were let back into the building for a few minutes to gather “critical” documents.
not wanting to be in the building for too long since there was a line of people waiting to get in after me, i gathered a few things that i needed for work and left a lot of other stuff thinking that i’d get another chance to get it. that chance never came since later that day officials announced that employees were not allowed back into the building and i was really bummed out because i left a painting that odin made for me when he was six that’s been hanging near my desk for several years.
i am so thankful that good samaritan who was allowed into the building grabbed the painting from my desk a day later!