daily slice-of-life photo blog of a Gen-X dad
Today was the first day of spring training for the 2021 MLB season and we watched the 2020 champions win in the 7-inning game. 💙⚾
After the Dodgers (my hometown team) finally won the World Series last year, a weight has been lifted and I can now enjoy watching games more. Maybe I’ll even be able to watch the playoffs with less stress this year knowing that they got it done last year! Maybe… 😂
This afternoon I took advantage of the warm weather to go for a long bicycle ride along Brushy Creek Regional Trail. When I ride on this busy path, I wear my mask 95% of the time. Of course I want to be safe during this COVID-19 pandemic, but also, it helps with allergies (as my brother reminded me). Besides wearing my mask, I also held my breath most of the times I passed by people. By riding on the relatively busy trail, I’m taking a risk, but I think wearing a mask, wearing glasses (yes, there’s a study that says this helps with safety), keeping socially distant when possible, and also holding my breath when passing people, I think the chance of catching COVID-19 is very small.
That being said, it was nice to see a lot of bicycles on the trail, from little kids to older folks. I even saw some teens cosplaying and wearing elf ears! The weather was very nice: low 70s, cloudy, with a gentle breeze. It was really cool to see kites flying above the park! By the way, it wasn’t as ominous as the photo above looks – but it’s just too fun to play with the post-processing in Adobe Lightroom. 😄
I’m happy that I live close enough to this trail that I can bicycle from my house and be there in 10 minutes or so. But even if I didn’t live close, it’s easy to access the trail by car at many points along the route.
At the eastern terminus of the trail I took a photo with my bike. Several years ago, I took a photo at the same place, so I thought it might be nice to do so again.
I recorded this ride on my GoPro, so please join me (virtually) on the trail if you have time:
I hope you had a great day!
🍆❤
Last night we watched the film Minari / 미나리. I was really looking forward to this movie because of all the glowing reviews, and although I enjoyed it, I didn’t connect with it on the level that many others did, mainly because my childhood experience was much different than any of the characters in the movie. It also makes sense because there are probably many nuances in the film that only people of Korean descent would identify with (Korea is not part of my multi-ethnic background).
I thought the family dynamic was interesting and realistic – not over-the-top, but typical of a slice-of-life story, which I enjoy. My favorite character was grandma, and I would have liked to learn more about her story. The rest of the family seemed one-dimensional compared to her. It felt like her age and history shaped her character to a greater extent and there was a lot of mystery to her motivations, whereas the others’ motivations seemed straightforward.
In short, I thought Minari was a good, but unremarkable, movie. As always, YMMV.
My rating of Minari / 미나리 is 7.5 out of 10.
Shout out to the JACL for making tickets to Minari available to members!
This evening I went to pick up dinner from Halal Bros and decided to make a TimeWarp video using my GoPro Hero9 Black camera.
Halfway through the drive there, I hit the button with the intention to activate the screen and check on the position, but I didn’t realize that doing this drops the camera out of TimeWarp mode and back to regular recording. This meant that I had to manually speed up the video at that point using Adobe Premiere Pro. It’s easy enough to do, except I didn’t know how much to accelerate the normal video to match the TimeWarp part. After some trial and error, I decided that speeding it up 1800% worked well, so there you go!
By the way, the food from Halal Bros was great!
