Author Archives: scorellis

How to Pet a Hedgehog

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Yttrium, sleeping on my lap on her first night at home.

We had taken very good care of her.  One night, after staying with us for almost two weeks, our little pet hedgehog, Yttrium, became very listless and unresponsive. We feared a hibernation, so we warmed her up by holding her and we made sure the house was 72 degrees – I even started up the furnace.  And she perked up. She was running around and seemed fine, even up to a couple of hours before….well, before the next evening.

Friday night: Et. brings her downstairs; he is distraught. Yttrium lifts her head just a little bit, weakly. Then she becomes all slack again and can hardly lift her head. I tell Et. that she is fine, she just needs to be warmed up.  An hour later, she dies while I am holding her. I feel something terrible and unexpected – my heartwrenches. Perhaps the soul of a hedgehog is equally prickly–it tears through me.

I don’t think I had become so close to an animal in a very long time! and I am no beginner at this. I have rarely been without 10 – 12 pets in my house.  Nevertheless, this one caught me completely off-guard. Perhaps it was because she was so young – still a baby, really.  Maybe, I saw so much of myself in her.  The way she would roll up into a ball when scared, but would so easily unroll, and just, well, let you connect to her.  As I held her, I kept thinking, Maybe she is just hibernating….Maybe she is just hibernating.  I kept holding her, hoping the warmth would wake her.

Finally, I knew she was truly gone. I cried for an entire hour. My boy, Et,, he wept too.   In the middle of the night, he awakened, and woke his sister with his crying.  You are thinking, “This is ridiculous.  It’s just a little rodent thing. Does this guy know what a sap he is?”  Funny, that’s exactly what I am saying to myself, too, as I write this, with tears streaming down my face.

The next day, Saturday, I sent an email to the vendor at the reptile and animal expo that sold her to me. I explained what happened:  “I am not sure if there is even anything that can or should be done or said. We loved Yttrium. I’ve never been this upset about a pet. I just wanted you to know this happened.”  I hoped his other hedgehogs were OK.

He replied with, “Call me.” and his number.  He answered on the second ring and immediately apologized, and said that this hadn’t happened in a few years? As i spoke to him, I was trying so hard not to cry on the phone with this guy. And you know what?  He got it, and understood.  This man loves hedgehogs as much as I do and told me I should have another one.  Frankly, I didn’t want another hedgehog.  How could any creature compare to Yttrium?  I decided to follow my own advice.  “Giving up” is failure. Don’t fail.

He told me to come see him at the expo, and he would let us take home another hedgie, no problem.  So we drove there and of course we got lost three times on the way there due to too much emotion in the car, but we got there eventually and we brought home a new bundle of prickly joy; an albino hedgehog we named Sodium.

This is, of course, a very unplanned side-affect to naming our animals after elements on the periodic table.  Yes, Et. will know many of the elements, but if any professor should mention Yttrium, I guarantee a tear fest.  I can see it now…

“Ethan, why are you crying” asks the chemistry professor.

“It’s just, I loved Yttrium so much!” He’ll answer.

“Well, maybe we should talk about copper or nickel instead?”

“Waaaaaaaaah!!!!! My cats!”

Hopefully this won’t happen, hopefully he will be able to compartmentalize actual element names from pets names.  I digress….I was talking about my crazy love for a hedgehog.

How did this happen?  How did I fall so hopelessly in love with that beautiful creature?  I don’t know.  The new hedgehog, named Sodium, is just another animal to me. The spark that Yttrium had, it just isn’t there. I haven’t bonded with her like I did with Yttrium.  She is less friendly, and less interesting to hang out with.  More prickly. Regardless, I am making the effort.   Sunday night, we left Sodium alone.  We wanted her to get used to her new home.  Happily, she is eating and drinking healthily.  We are measuring her food and water intake, weighing her, and holding her for an hour a day.

It aggravates me that Sodium curls up into a very tight ball whenever we try to handle her.  Monday night, I sat with her on my lap for an hour, simply pondering how to deal with her.  I then began to gently prod at her prickles.  Ah-hah! a reaction! she uncurled just a little bit when I pet her in a certain way.  Sure enough, 15 minutes later, she uncurled completely and said hello to me.  It was very rewarding, and I felt a little closer to her.  Still, she wasn’t Yttrium.  Et. and I would both give the world to have Yttrium back (you have no idea the power this creature held in her little paws!!).

Do you know what the worst part of this whole thing is?  I roll a lot of video around here. I video everything. But the only video I have of Yttrium is of our cat, Copper, sniffing her while she slept on me and then Copper giving me a funny look.  I don’t understand my inaction.  It’s like, now I can’t even show you how wonderful she was to us.  Perhaps therein lay the answer….finally, I had something that was all mine and Et’s–something that just I and my boy would share.  She was OUR pet.  How unimaginably sad you know I must be when Et. told me on Sunday morning that he didn’t want another hedgie.  That the new hedgie would be mine.

Saturday afternoon, when the sun was low in the sky, we laid Yttrium to rest in the garden in a Hamilton watch box, under a nice stone. Sunday, we planted a flowering shrub by her marker. I hope she will find comfort here, and I hope that, if hedgies have souls, that she is hanging around, and watching over our garden, and my prickly little soul, too.

Aside

Big oil.  Exactly how much gas does a “Big Oil” oil company have to produce before a “Big Oil” oil company can be called “Big Oil”?

How to Shoot a Halfway Decent Photo

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There are volumes and volumes of books on how to take pictures.  The best one I ever read can be summed up to a few basic rules, plus a couple of extra that I have picked up along the way.

First off, you are right! (you always are!) The photos above in the blog today don’t look as good as they should (as good as they do when I view them in photoshop).  I suggest you right click, and then view the header on your local PC in a different software program.  Web browsers…they clip the color depth and gamut of photos, and I didn’t optimize these for web; hey, I will do it later, OK? 🙂

Now, here are the rules,  There are only nine. But first, READ this definition:

Definition “Nonant”: One of the nine pieces of an area that is divided into nine sections is called a “nonant.”

These are the rules I follow. I like to think it makes my photography consistent, and knowable. Use these 3 sets of 3 rules as a guideline for creating your own set of rules.

I. Super basic stuff:
  1. It needs to tell a story that is interesting
  2. It needs to be clear, and focused
  3. It needs to be well composed and simple. It should have clean lines, be free of distractions, and should have appeal.
II. Composition:
  1. Objects of interest should be placed on one of the intersections of thirds, and the perceived motion of any objects should be along the diagonal(s) of the photo or of the nonant(s). If there are people and objects in the background that are not part of the story; remove them or circle your prey until the distractions are eliminated or can at least be easily removed in Photoshop.
  2. If the Rule of Thirds can’t be followed , and following them just seems like following them for the sake of following them, and it ruins the story, then consider balancing the weight and size of the interplay of movement, direction, and objects so that they play, or pivot, about and around the interstices.  Literally, think of a set of scales, with an intersection as the fulcrum. Bigger objects should be closer to the fulcrum, smaller objects further. Motion gives items more force and weight than static items.
  3. Love your subject matter. Be passionate about it. If you don’t love it, and aren’t interested in it, don’t shoot it.  If it can’t captivate you, then why would it captivate anyone else?
III. More on Rules of Three:
  1. The rule of thirds can be broken down even further: Within a single nonant, so too should the subject matter fall into thirds, and so on, infinitely (or to pixel resolution), or for as long as each point of interest anchors into its master nonant. This is the closest approximation we have to nature’s golden mean. It’s everywhere. It pervades down into the very structure of many things in nature;  you either see it when it happens and you take the shot, or you need more practice framing.  When you see something visually appealing, it is because it has structure. If you’ve spent a great deal of time drawing and studying geometry and mathematics, this may come completely naturally to you.
  2. Depth: the rule of thirds as it applies to depth of field is non-linear. It is subject matter dependent, too. In other words, a photo of three people at 3 ft, 9 ft, and 12 feet will not appear to be separated by thirds.  The conversion factor of 3 dimensional light to 2 dimensional light will flatten everything and bring more lines and objects to the forefront of a scene.  This ruins most photos.  Bear this in mind in composition and in focusing your depth of field.  If you can’t control depth of field with your camera, use the smart blur tool in Photoshop and feather, a lot! Here is a little tip on how to set the auto-focus (AF) on your camera.  Your camera will be different, but this at least gives you a starting point:
  3. There should only be three, dominant, dynamic ranges. You should be able to pick them out by eye.  This may mean three colors, three light levels, three subjects, three things happening, etc. Color photos that don’t accomplish this are great candidates for black and white. For example, if you have a horrible orange cone in the background of a perfect, three toned photo, get rid of it by getting rid of color.
One final note:  Lighting is easy. As in, it can very easily destroy a photo.  But, it also creates lines and shape and gives dimension to your photo.  In the photography toolbox, lighting is both a precision laser scalpel AND a chainsaw. I was gonna say nuke, there….So, while the photo on the left half in my header graphic may look OK, to me it looks horrible. Lighting is the chainsaw in that photo.  I shot it in full on, noon sun.  I took the shot on the right 2 seconds later with a sun screen.
On that same day, at the Chicago Botanic Gardens, I saw a professional photographer taking wedding party pictures in full blast sun.  I felt sorry for the bride.  A good photographer would have either assisted in planning the time of the wedding party shoot, the time of the wedding, or picked a better location, or refused the job. Note the below photo of my friend taking a picture of a Mallard duck.  This location, where the light was fantastic, would have been a perfect place for a bride and groom shot. Yet, the “professional” blew right past it. To her credit, she probably had a nagging bride insisting on controlling the shoot…if you are a bride, don’t do that. That’s bad.

Photo: “Woman Shooting a Mallard Duck”

Well, that is all I have on shooting halfway decent pictures.  Let me know if you have any questions? You are the best! It is your friends about whom I worry.  Please direct them to this article so that they will stop posting those horrible pictures of you on facebook!
These 9 rules are deliberately broken into groups of three because they relate to one another. All 9 work together, like the nonants, and all may also be further broken down into thirds, ad infinitum. Finally, don’t ever forget that people read from left to right.  Exit, stage left…

How To be Yourself

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Greetings – I am Scorellis,  AKA Scott.  Are you listening?

My friend Brent Ozar (this entire blog is his fault, BTW) once told me that you should never post your blog posts at unusual times; people that are subscribed to your blog won’t ever see it, it will get lost in the scroll.   Since this blog doesn’t have any subscribers, I feel OK breaking this rule.  What I do want to do is explain (quickly!) why I am doing this and why you should read it.

I know how to fix things that are broken.  (you can stop reading now if you like.) I began breaking things as soon as I could hold a screwdriver.  I think I was 5 when I took apart my Dad’s camera.  Sometime in my early to mid-twenties, I started to get the hang of putting things back together.  That was twenty years ago; I have been fixing broken things almost every day since then. What is the most complicated thing I ever fixed? I once yanked the action out of a piano (it made me mad) on a Friday afternoon and completely rebuilt it and got it back into the school’s piano in time for music class Monday morning.  That was actually more repetitious than anything…complex…hmmm. I’ll have to think about that. Right now, what I want to do, is make this information about how to fix things available to everyone.

First things last, though.  There are some rules here.  You have to be yourself.  I have observed that some people aren’t quite certain how to do this (not you! You are awesome,. just the way you are! But those friends of yours??…).  Here is a short list of things that help to remind me that I am Scorellis, and not anyone else:

  1. Today I am marching to the beat of my own drum..
  2. I will be enthusiastic about being “here,” wherever “here” may be.
  3. Rather than thinking outside the box, I am simply throwing the box away.
  4. I will sing out loud whenever the acoustics of a room, or my mood, requires it.
  5. I am cutting my loaves of bread lengthwise.
  6. I’m going to plant “weeds.”
  7.  I’m going to let my waiter pick my entree.
  8. I’m going to send people birthday cards when it is not their birthday.
  9. I’m going to carve paths through my yard and build the treasure map my son drew when he was 5.
  10. I won’t “inch forward” at traffic lights just because the person in front of me did.
  11. I no longer have a kitchen, a living room, a dining room, and a family room; I have a roasting room, a work room, a music room, and a learning room. All my house is my stage.
  12. Spontaneity will be the cornerstone to my reality.
  13. I will eat dessert and coffee for lunch.
  14. I will drive 45mph in the work zone when everyone else is going 60.
  15. I’m not going to live life by the numbers. I am going to forget how to count.
  16. I’m grabbing for the scissors, and making my own template.
  17. I am breaking change.

Some posts will be long, some will be short.  There will be how-to’s posted here that you wouldn’t give a rat’s ass in a cat storm to read. All I ask is that you stay tuned, and let me know what is bothering you, how can I help?  I don’t give relationship advice…that is my wife’s job.  She knows everything I need to know about being in a relationship; and what I don’t know, she’ll tell me. If I am listening  >:[=]

One final note:  Just about everything posted here will be original work.  For example, you will never, ever see a photo on this site that I  or someone (credited) that I know didn’t personally shoot.  In any project I show you, I will also (almost)  always try to use tools that are simple and easy to use. SO please refrain from comments like “Why don’t you just use a jigsaw?” or “Dude, just hit it with the Dremel.”  Not everyone has those things.  However, sometimes you will be right, and I will do that, but mostly I am just doing that because I am impatient, and have a lot to do!

~s