| Ice Skating | |
I enjoy Ice Skating. I've skated for about 10 years now. I went through ISI pre-alpha and alpha before I started playing hockey at age 12. I just play pick-up now.
I've recently started figure skating. The transition from hockey skates to figure skates wasn't as difficult as I thought it would be. I haven't taken any lessons, but I skate around a ISI freestyle 2 level. |
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| The Ice Skating Institute is a group founded in 1949 to promote all aspects of ice skating. The I.S.I. site has a lot of information on learning to skate. | The United States Figure Skating Association is the organiztion that hosts the U.S. nationals. The site is loaded with technical information on skating. |
| The Figure Skater's Website is a great place to learn all about the different jumps, spins, and steps. The prefect place to go when you can't remember how to do that toe walley. | The r.s.skating.ice.recreational FAQ has lots of good information on skills and equipment. |
| Oenology (Wine Making) | |
I enjoy making wine in home. I will use the wine kits if I want alot of a particular variety, but more often I try to make it myself from scratch. I current have three batches fermenting -- a raspberry wine, a blueberry wine, and a Concord wine -- all from fresh fruit.
Last summer, I made a decent Chianti from a kit. It wasn't too harsh, which is a problem with alot of Chiantis, but it didn't have much of a bouquet. I also made a wonderful clover (yes, like the four-leaf kind) flower wine. In the future I may post a full inventory of the wines I have made, and how each turned out. (In case you didn't realize it, that pic is a clover flower.) |
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| Maryland Wine was a good starting point for me. It has links to all of the wineries in Maryland as well as home oenology and viniculture (grape growing) links. | Annapolis Home Brew is a supplier close to Annapolis, Maryland of wine and beer making equipment. |
| Maryland Home Brew is another supplier of wine and beer making equipment. MHB is located in Columbia, Maryland. | WineMaker Magazine is a nice bimonthly publication of hints and tips to make that perfect wine in your basement. |
| Writing | |
I enjoy writing poetry and prose sometimes. Most of my "normal" poetry become rock songs, but the poetry I really like is much too complicated for that. T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound were big influences on my style of poetry, so many of my poems begin to look like The Wasteland, with broken stanzas, chang of voice, multiple languages, and historical allusions. Even simple stuff of mine tends to turn "ugly", especially over time as feelings change, as "breaking points" or "turns" find there way in.
My prose is very different. I've never finished anything, but I'm writing two short novels. One is a sci-fi story about man setting off into deep space with FTL technology for the first time, and the other is an action/adventure story about a man recalled to the Army for a special mission. |
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| Sad Steps by Philip Larkin is a great poem that illustrates the "turn" I mentioned at the "No." at the end of the fourth stanza. | The Wasteland, by T.S. Eliot, with full Eliot's original notes and supplemental annotations. |
| I will post some of my stuff here when I get it transcribed | |
| Photography | |
Photography is great. I shoot with a Minolta 35mm SRL camera, with shutter speeds from infinity to 1/2500s. I have three lenses -- a 45mm, a 150mm, and a 100-200mm. I'd like to get a 500mm telephoto and a 20mm macroscoping lens. I also use a simple Kodak Advantix to get "the whole picture" if I'm shooting close-ups of something afar or I just want "quick pix". I've done two weddings to date, both of which came out good despite far-from-perfect lighting conditions at both of them. (The pics I took of other people's weddings came out better than the pics of my own wedding. How unfair is that!)
I don't have any of my pictures scanned, you'll just half to wait. |
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| Minolta, makes of fine optical equipment around the world. | |
