I’m Not In Love

6FPS V7#12: December 8, 2025

E-mail: chuqvr@gmail.com • Site: https://chuq.me

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Welcome to the new issue of 6FPS.

This is a continuing theme for me, but I’m amazed at how time in flying by. It’s December, Thanksgiving is past and I’m about to start pulling Christmas out of storage and setting up the tree. We’re soon going to hit the equinox and the official start of winter — and the beginning of the end of this latest Big Dark here in the Northwest.

It has been a cool and damp winter so far, but I was surprised that when I checked the rain data from our station, while we’ve had more rainy days the last two months than last year, the total rainfall was significantly less, because last year we had a couple of massive storms roll through, and this year, everything has been fairly light. That said, the current forecast is for at least seven days of continuing rain as the first atmospheric river is going to hit us with extended weather — current forecast is to expect 3-4” or more in the next seven days.

That’s going to delay any serious birding, but otherwise, I don’t mind a bit.

I’m happy to say the weight loss continues, and I’m now well under 320 pounds and well over 15 down since I started working on this in September. I have, in fact, passed the “5% of body weight” drop marker, a nice minor achievement and I may even hit my first goal — at 312 I hit the spot where I’ll have lost a full 100 pounds from my all-time high. At my current weight, I’m down to where I haven’t been since I was 35-40 — a solid 30 years ago. It’s a nice start but still just a start: my long term goal right now is to get down to 280, the weight I was at when I turned 30. With a bit of luck and some persistence, I should hit that before my next birthday.

280 also happen to be the weight where I can become a good candidate for knee replacement, which I may or may not pursue when I get there, but with the weight loss, the knees have been somewhat less grumpy of late. That said, I have to remind myself that I’m in about year 15 of “you may need to have knee replacements in five years” and while they’re less grump, they’re still limiting me in what I can do in my birding — mile walks is still about as much as I can do, and not always that.

Accepting Limitations

I’ve been in a reflective mood recently, in part because I spent some time pondering what kind of changes to make to my camera gear (see below for details) but also it’s the time of year to start thinking about what I accomplished this year, and what I want my priorities and plans are for next year.

Overall, I’m happy with 2025; with the migraines and vertigo pretty well controlled, I was able to do more and enjoy doing it more reliably. I did a lot more birding, and after almost four years here in the Northwest, I finally am starting to feel like I know how to bird the region and what to look for.

That said, there are things I need to improve on. I’ve fallen into a habit of starting projects but not actually finishing them — and the woodshop is a good example. I’d make progress, do a few things and then it’d stall again. I’ve also got a couple of writing projects that I’ve started and let lapse, and, of course, I keep telling myself I need to get back in the habit of writing for my blog (but, well, that an wait another week, right?)

So one goal for the next year is to commit to finishing projects, not just planning them. With things like the workshop, I’ve also gotten into the habit of deferring things I’d rather not do — the current holdup in the workshop is a task that’ll take me maybe 2 hours to complete, but it’s not a fun task, so I keep going “nah, I’ll do it later” — but I can’t really start working IN the workshop until I finish a few more needed tasks ON the workshop

So another goal for next year is to set some deadlines on things that need to be done, but which I keep, putting off because hey, I’m retired, and I really enjoy not being on deadline very much these days. But to keep moving things in my life forward, I need more deadlines (and to keep them)

Diving into Science Fiction and Fantasy

One other goal for next year is to read more. It may seem strange to say I didn’t spend enough time reading last year when my Goodreads list for 2025 stands at 44 books, but there’s a big chunk of time I spent kind of idling my way though various casual computer games, and I do think I need to shift more of that time back into books.

For those curious, the game currently filling up my idle time include Nonograms Katana, a Picross-style game, Solitaire Match is match-3 type games, Rogue Words, which is an interesting mix of Scrabble and various rogue like features, and Slay the Spire, very much a rogue like game that I’ve really enjoyed getting beaten by. Currently out of the rotation for now are Balatro, which is kind poker but not really, and Monster Train, another interesting rogue like.

But I think it’s time to push back into reading more (at one point, the vertigo tended to make extended reading uncomfortable, so I got out of the habit, but that’s not really a problem any more), so I think I’ll set my 2026 goal at 50 books and see what happens.

I haven’t read nearly enough Science Fiction and Fantasy the last few years, and I haven’t really had a good sense of what books to try to dive back in. Most of what I’ve read is by authors I’ve been reading for a long time but there’s so much out there it’s hard to know what new authors to explore and enjoy.

I mentioned this to Jason Snell, who hosts the Incomparable podcast, thinking that doing an episode about the books they would recommend to someone new to the genres. Jason liked the idea, and from that we have Deep Books In A Trenchcoat, which I think is a great listen, and in the notes is a list of recommended books that will keep me, and all of you, happy and busy for a good period of time exposing and discovering authors you aren’t already reading.

New Project

Even thought I have various projects in stages of unfinished-ness, I have identified one new project I want to do in 2026: As someone who’s limited in the amount of walking I can do, I tend to end up birding close to the car. I’ve identified the places where I can productively bird without doing much (if any) hiking, and I think it would be nice to write this up and share it for everyone here in the region, so my plan is to build out a guide to Car Birding Kitsap, with a second phase expanding that into nearby counties — my core birding area now is anything within an hour’s drive, with an extended drive up to 90 minutes, and that covers parts ofat least six other counties in the region.

As I develop this info and write the guide, I also plan on sharing it to the Birdability web site, which is all about accessible birding for people with limitations.

I think this will be a fun project and it touches on my goals for next year quite well.

Author Clock

I wanted to point out a fun product I found and gave to Laurie on our Anniversary. It’s called Author Clock and it’s a fun little thing that does one thing well: It’s a clock that tells time by showing you bits out of books that describe the time. The screen is e-ink, and you can set it up to refresh ever minute, or less frequently as you prefer. It is on WIFI (what isn’t these days) allowing it to phone home for updates — we’ve already seen one.

We have it set up near the front door, where we pass going in and out of the bedroom, and it’s fun to pick it up and see what the current quote and author is.

As a nerd, I had to try to figure out how I’d build a system to find and catalog all of these fragments into a database I could use for this toy. It’s definitely do-able, and ten years ago, I’m not sure you could put this product together, but now, with so much online, with a bunch of searching and some serious QA, I think you can build something like this. Legally, each fragment is clearly fair use, but I’m curious about whether the 10,000 or so fragments together stretches the definition, but I expect their lawyers vetted this, and, of course, a lot of the source material is public domain now.

It’s to going to change the world, but it can put a smile on my face, and that’s

Racoons

We’ve been having increasing problems with the raccoons, who have gotten greedy about the bird seed. When they were only eating some of the ground feeder seed, I was willing to kind of ignore the problem, but this year we have two groups who have gotten heavily into feeding, and have come to expect breakfast to be served every morning, leaving nothing for the birds.

They’ve been doing well around here. One group is a mom with her two almost-her-size kids from this year (so they’ll be sent out on their own soon), and the other group is four younger animals, probably last year’s kids.

So I finally decided it was time to push back. We’ve stopped putting out peanuts, and to be honest, they were mostly for the Stellar’s Jays, and they seem to have moved out of the property for now, and we are supplying the small seed in small batches across the day, enough to keep the juncos happy but not enough to satisfy a raccoon, much less seven.

Not sure where they picked up the begging behavior, that’s not from this place, as we always delayed putting things out if they begged, so we assume there are other folks feeding them in the neighborhood. We have just started this fight, and some of them are now staking out the feeders from the trees or bushes and waiting for us to put out the seed, and they are shifting from showing up in the morning to visiting on and off during the day. Hopefully they’ll ultimately decide it’s not worth the hassle and move on, but I expect solving this will take some time. And yes, it’s a problem of my own creation by not grappling it sooner…

See you next issue!

Last month I mentioned I was considering changes to my camera setup, because I’d come to the realization it wasn’t working for me. Change one was to replace me relatively new (but manual focus only) macro lens with one that had autofocus, because you need AF to do focus stacking in any practical way. Change 2 was realizing my wide angle lenses did not cover the ranges I wanted for some of the work I want to do.

I ended up considering, researching and pondering a few different options for replacing this gear:

Use the iPhone: I do use the iPhone for all my ‘casual’ imaging, and I have used it with success with both macro and mide angle work — but I’m not yet comfortable feeling like I can the quality images I want with it reliably (I need to work at this more, especially macro), and there are some gaps, notable focus stacking and the 150+mm range. And I can add things (like Moment lenses) to overcome some of this, but… if I’m starting to kit out the iPhone, it’s no longer the “in the pocket when I want it” casual device. So while I continue to use it and will likely use it more over time, it’s not the full solution to what I want.

Point and Shoot: Do I shift my street/wide angle work over to a point and shoot like, oh, a Nikon P950? It’s tempting — it’s a simple setup, with good images in a compact form. It’d need a macro lens for the Sony for that work, but that’s fine. Ultimately, though, I decided that it wasn’t as convenient as the iPhone and not as quality as the Sony, so I was filling the gap that compromised in all directions.

Build a Fujifilm wide angle kit: I considered this for a while, looking at something like the new XT30 III ($1150) and the Sigma 16-300 ($750). That would be a sweet setup for street and landscape work, and I’d need a macro lens on either this or the Sony.

Revamp the Sony kit: This would entail replacing the three non-birding lenses with a good AF macro and a super zoom that covers from wide angle to at least 200mm.

I ended up going with this last choice, but first, pondering these last two choices led me to a bit of an epiphany. I’m not in love with the Sony.

I found the idea of bringing a Fuji camera back into fold because I loved those cameras. They did what I needed to do, in ways that made it easy to work with them, and I just had a lot of fun working with them. The Sony is a really good — technically better than the Fuji in some ways (especially Autofocus) — but it is to me a utilitarian device. It’s kind of like the difference between driving around in a fun, zippy car, and driving a delivery van. One makes you happy, one gets the job done. And some jobs you can get the job done in the car while having fun, but ultimately, I chose getting it done, even if it’s not a fun.

Bringing a Fuji camera in for street and landscape work would have totally worked, but it’d cost, not just for the camera and lenses, but for batteries, and all the little extras cameras need. And it’d add complexity to my setup — and when your mindset is “should I bring the camera? Nah, too much hassle”, then complexity is your enemy.

I’ve been a fan of Adam Savage (Mythbusters and now tested.com) for a long time, and he talks a lot in his videos about the philosophy of making and creation. He puts a lot of thought and effort into reducing what he calls friction, which is, essentially, the amount of work and hassle between the task you want to accomplish and ticking it off on the list as complete. The goal is to get into what he calls a flow state, where the creativity is happening and things are moving forward well — and anything that interrupts that flow state and pulls you out of that mood is friction. Even if that thing is “only” having to cross the shop to pick up a screwdriver. By the time you have, the flow state is diminished and you have to spent time and energy getting it back. So he’s built out his workspace with a heavy emphasis on feeding the flow state, not disrupting it.

So for me, figuring out what to do here was finding the right tradeoff between simplicity and complexity, cost, usability and fun. There was no perfect solution (is there ever?) but ultimately I ended up sending off my three lenses to KEH, and buying myself the Tamron 100mm macro lens, and the Sigma 20-200 superzoom. Selling the lenses covered about 2/3 of the cost of the new ones.

While I haven’t done extensive testing/shooting with either yet (they just arrived), I’m really happy with both at first glance: the Tamron has AF, but is also smaller and lighter than the Laowa was. The Sigma covers the range I want almost perfectly, since I’m a lot more likely to be shooting in the 150-200mm range to pull in detail than I am in the 15-25mm range going for super wide shots, and it’s about the same size and weight as the two wide lenses I sold off.

In working with all this, I came to a somewhat reluctant admission that my primary camera back (a Tenba 20 liter) was simply too small to hold my birding gear, and by trying to stuff in that AND the other lenses, I was constantly fighting to make everything fit without layering in on top of other things. It was a constant mess. So in came a Think Tank 30 liter bag, which seems to fit everything quite nicely. I have my Shimoda 40 liter bag for extended trips, but it’s hefty enough I don’t want to use it any more as my every day haul it around bag.

And this seems to be a much better kit for what I’m hoping to do in 2025, but it turns out I wasn’t quite done. Once again, in thinking about doing a kit around the Fuji, I kept thinking it’d be really nice to have TWO kits, one built our around the birding gear, and one for the street/wide angle work, in two bags, so when I’m headed out so explore this area with the 20-200 lens, I can do it with a smaller, lighter bag and kit — because to be honest, the Sony A7 and 100-400 is a big, heavy beast. And in looking at KEH, I found a Sony A6700 body at a nice price, and not it’s in a box and on its way to join my family, so I can dedicate a small bag to my 20-200 range work and my 30 liter bag for my long range (300-500mm) setup. And for short trips, combine everything into that 30liter bag, and for extended into the Shimoda. This seems to be the sweet spot between usefulness and complexity and fighting the “Grab the bag? Nah, too much hassle” factor.

But maybe even more important, these changes make me happy with the kit again, and even though I didn’t unerstand WHY for a long time, having a kit that didn’t really do what I wanted to do with it was a big bit of friction on my even wanting to grab the bag and see what I could find. Maybe I’ve solved that problem, maybe I haven’t — ask me in six months, but right now, I feel like I have the setup that works best for me as the photographer I am today, with as few distractions and hassles as possible.

And now we’ll see what happens.

As I create new images and re-process older ones, I post them on my site in the Recent Work area.

One outing of note this month: I heard that there was activity at the Bald Eagle nest I started monitoring last year before it failed, so I went out to see it for myself. Sure enough, here you can see what I think is the female sitting on the nest, doing absolutely nothing. Which is exactly what happened for a full 45 minutes before I put my stuff away and left. Nothing, except, as you can see, a visit from a flock of European Starlings that came in, landed on various places around the tree, and hung out for ten minutes. Why? Who knows! I sure don’t.

I have eight e-books available. All are free for you to download and read with no obligation. You can download them from my e-book page on the web site.

These are the books that are available:

  • Birding 101: Hints and Tips for the New Birder

  • Merced National Wildlife Refuge

  • And the Geese Exploded: A Life With Birds

  • Birds of Santa Clara County

  • 2021.1: A Year of Transitions

  • 2020.1: Images from the year when Covid changed everything

  • 2019 (1)

  • 2019 (2)

Free Wallpapers just for Subscribers

New Wallpapers (August, 2025). A new set of 12 wallpapers are now available.

You can download this new set from the 6FPS Secret Wallpaper. The previous set of wallpapers are now with the full public set at Public Wallpaper page.

These are available only to you, my favorite people who happen to be subscribers to 6FPS. The previous set of images I released here are now available to the general public.

This is a small gift to you to thank you for being a subscriber. You are welcome to use any or all of them if you wish, but please: don't share the private hangout link with others, encourage them to subscribe via https://www.chuq.me/6fps instead. Thanks.

And with that, see you next issue!

6FPS (Six Frames Per Second) is a newsletter of interesting things and commentary from Chuq Von Rospach (chuqvr@gmail.com). 6FPS is Copyright © 2025 by Chuq Von Rospach. All Rights Reserved.

Coming out monthly on the 2nd Monday of the month, I will place in your inbox a few things I hope will inform and delight you. There is too much mediocre, forgettable stuff attacking your eyeballs every day you're online; this is my little way to help you cut through the noise to some interesting things you might otherwise not find.

Some links in this newsletter may point to products at Amazon; these are affiliate links and if you use them to buy a product, I get a small cut of the sale. This doesn't make me rich, but it does help pay my web site bills. If you use the link to buy something, thank you. If you prefer not to, that's perfectly okay, also.

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And with that, I'll see you in the next issue. I'd love feedback on this, what you like, what you want more of, what you want less of. And if you have something interesting you think I might want to talk about, please pass it along. Until then, take care, and have fun.