www.ryangwillim.com

Yesterday I framed my first print. The one you see here is a simple 8'x10' print in a wooden frame. The photo is one of my favourites and was taken at my friend Scott's backyard while I was waiting for him to get off the phone ;)

Anyhow, I am really excited about finally framing a print, and hope to start doing so more and more as gifts and eventually maybe making a bit of $$ with it. The first print went to Scott since he has told me numerous times that he liked the photo, and he is the one that reared the beautiful plant.

I should have my photoblog, which I am co-producing with my friend Justin, up in a couple days. It's a project I have been planning in my head for about six months and it is about to come into fruition, so that will be yet another milestone.

So, here's to milestones!

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I was talking with a couple of my good friends last night and they invited me to go to a concert with them. I had bible study last night and told them that I would love to go, but that I'd prefer to go to my bible study. This brought on the discussion of my bible study. "So, what is it?" my friend asked. After rambling for a bit about how the bible study functions and such, the conversation led to the question, "What is prayer?".

One of my friends brought up the scripture, "pray without ceasing" in regards to a comment I made. Neither of my friends are Christians, and it was fun to be able to talk about my faith without feeling that I was being judged, or judging them. It was just curiosity giving way to discussion, hopefully feeding respect (on both ends). Anyhow, the "pray without ceasing" reference made me state that without understanding what "prayer" was, the statement "pray without ceasing" is useless. I shared with them that a lot of Christians often use the idea of prayer as a cop-out to avoid real questions, or responsiblity, and that "prayer" needs to be defined before we choose what we will do with the word. This made me think of what I believe prayer to be, and I couldn't answer it outside of a generic answer at that time, so I didn't. I am the type that will think long and hard about things that I deem very important, rather than say the first thing that comes to my head. I am worried that I will cloud truth with my own agenda (which I do at times). So after thinking about it long and hard, I have come up with something fragile, something possibly wrong, but honest, nonetheless.

Prayer is a mindset

Not saying you shouldn't pray to God intentionally in form of conversation, but when I am closest to God, he is at the forefront of my mind in everything. He is the filter which I choose to see and experience everything in my life. I am not there as often as I should be, but often enough to know what it feels like even in times when I have not allowed God to be there.

Prayer, in it's most basic form, constant communion with God, is a state of mind

This is the only thing right now that I would feel comfortable saying to describe prayer to a friend of mine who does not believe in the God I believe in. And I love how my friends, Christian and non-Christian, enrich my life in such amazing ways, even through 15 minute conversations.

Link: http://www.pdga.com/tournament/tournament_results.php?TournID=5544

This weekend is the Southern California Ice Bowl. Ice Bowl events in disc golf are charity events that happen in January/February each year to raise money for various charitable organizations. Each region in the states has their own Ice Bowl, and there are even Ice Bowls that happen in Europe and Japan.

For the most part, Ice Bowls are just fun tournaments where your entry fee goes to charity, so there are no payouts, just a good time, and maybe a t-shirt.

In Southern California, we have one of the few Ice Bowls that is also a sanctioned event, so our results are tied to our player ratings and profile. So even though we don't get any payouts for our performance, we still get compensated by having the results counting as a true tournament, with player points and ratings.

This year the Ice Bowl is being held at Whittier Narrows Disc Golf Course. It is the only sanctioned event played at this course all year long, so I decided to sign up and make the drive along with a couple other San Diegans up to compete, and donate to charity.

Here is the list of people competing in my division:

Advanced
Name	PDGA#	Current	Rating	City	State	Country
Ron Brawley	15958		944	Temple City	CA	USA
Justin Bruner
Lino Camacho	25165	Yes	919	San Diego	CA	USA
Steve Civitak \Bama\	15556		937	Temple City	CA	USA
Ryan Eber	28454	Yes		Huntington Beach	CA	USA
Roddy Flocken	17498		896	Whittier	CA	USA
Jon Follingstad	13903	Yes	909	North Hollywood	CA	USA
Ryan Gwillim	24321		960	San Diego	CA	USA
Lawrence Halili	19261	Yes	932	Santa Maria	CA	USA
Steven Hines	23876	Yes	936	San Luis Obispo	CA	USA
Chris Lindgren	19951		931	Irvine	CA	USA
Paul McBeth	27523	Yes	917	Huntington Beach	CA	USA
Jason McEwen	19828	Yes	916	Yorba Linda	CA	USA
Adam Nash	28304	Yes	962	San Diego	CA	USA
Tan Nguyen
Jeffrey Roberts	22854		858	Fountain Valley	CA	USA
Noah Rodriguez	21215		916	Whittier	CA	USA
Christopher Sandoval	28490	Yes		Whittier	CA	USA

All this is taking place on saturday. This is the first tournament of the year, and I'd love to start out with a win! Wish me luck (or skill preferably).

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Photos from office lawn. Taken with Canon EOS 20D.

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Found on walkway at Orangevale disc golf course. Photo courtesy of Justin, a friendly local of Orangevale, taken with camera phone.

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As I write this I am sitting in the Reno airport at Gate B5 waiting for my flight home to get here from Boise, where it is, of course, delayed. I don't believe I have had a flight in the last two years that hasn't been delayed. It's all this stupid security, they are busy checking my shoes for lexan knives and harassing me about wearing my jacket through the metal detector, my cotton hooded sweatshirt that is. Anyhow, that's enough complaining about the horrific state of our airfare industry, I could make a completely different essay about that, but I'll spare you all for now.

Reno/Tahoe. I will start by saying that I did not expect this place to be so beautiful. At least in terms of the natural surroundings. Reno is on the edge of the Sierras, and right now it is surrounded by beautiful snowy mountains. My reason for coming here is to help my girlfriend, Chris, move to her new home for the next 3 or 4 years. She has moved here to continue her education and obtain her Ph.D from UNR in Environmental Engineering.

We left San Diego wednesday night and drove all the way to Fresno, and stopped there for the night. The next morning we drove up to Sacramento and decided to play a disc golf course there. The course is named Rocklin Disc Golf Course, or something to that effect. It was a very enjoyable course with a fairly modern course design. The holes were challenging, but not difficult, and there were some decently long holes on the course. We only had time for one round because we wanted to get over Donner Pass and into Reno before the manager of Chris's new apartment complex left for the evening (we didn't have a key to the place yet). So, yeah, the course was great, if I find out about any major tournaments happening there, I might come up for one.

After that we drove to Reno, there is another course in a mountain town called Truckee that we were thinking of coming back to play, but when we got to Truckee, there was about 6 feet of snow, we didn't play the course.

Eventually we arrived at the apartment, a bit of snow on the ground, tempurature around 28 degrees or so. We unloaded the rental van, and took it back to the rental company.

Friday morning we planned to go snow shoeing, so after waking up, and falling back to sleep, then waking up again, we finally made our way to REI to rent my snowshoes. Then we made the 40 minute drive to Lake Tahoe and did some snowshoeing. I had no idea how fun and exhaustive this was. At first we broke trail into about 6 feet of snow, and hiked around a bit. I took a couple pictures which I will share when I get them developed. Then we headed to one of the little mountain towns along the lake for some lunch.

I can't remember what all else we did that day, but I think we watched a movie at some point, along with driving around Reno trying to find out where things were. The city is layed out in a bit of a confusing manner with the main street and the main freeway criss crossing 3 or 4 times, it's like a DNA spiral, so when you are on either the freeway or the street, you aren't quite sure where the other is, right or left? We drove the wrong way probably 10 or more times throughout the 4 days we've been here, and the worst part is that we were using a map.

Reno does not have even one disc golf course. So on saturday we decided to go back to Sacramento (2 hour drive) and play more golf. This time we chose Shady Oaks Park, which is located in Orangevale just east of Sacramento. This was one of the most fun courses I have played in a long time. The course was very wooded, but there were plenty of long shots, and the fairways were spectacular. Also there was an indoor pro shop, which for disc golf is a HUGE thing. They had a great selection of discs and equipment, of which I purchased a few things that I've needed for a while. We were able to play a little over two rounds before nightfall. I would definitely put that course in my top 5 for California!

Today, which is sunday, we finally started organizing and setting up Chris's apartment, we went to a couple supermarkets and other stores buying the necessities; soap, detergent, trash bags, etc. <----I know I didn't use that semicolon correctly, and I don't care :p After shopping we went back and started assembling furniture etc. Then went and had lunch.

After lunch, we spent about an hour wardriving trying to find internet access so I could check-in for my flight, and do a few other things. We never found access that would work for more than a couple minutes. So we finally broke down and went to Starbucks, which I HATE. They have WiFi there so, running out of time, we folded and went in. Evidently, Starbucks has a deal with T-Mobile to steal everyone's money. In order to use the Interweb at Starbucks, you have to sign-up for a T-Mobile WiFi account, which costs $6 everytime you log on. Now I am boycotting T-Mobile along with Starbucks. Boo for greed.

Which brings me to my next point. I paid $8 to get a WiFi connection in the airport right now in order to entertain YOU. I'm expecting anyone who actually read this entire post to donate 50 cents to my interweb fund. Email me and I'll hook you up with my paypal information.

I just sent out the email about the site re-release and I'm wondering how many people will actually follow the link and look at my blog (I sent the email to about 60 people).

If you are here and reading this, please leave a comment to say so.

You don't have to sign up for anything to leave comments and they can be completely anonymous if you like. But I'd love to see who all stops by to take a peak.

Link: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0381980375/sr=1-2/qid=1137591907/ref=pd_bbs_2/002-0216520-1460049?%5Fencoding=UTF8

I am reading a book right now called Imperial Woman by Pearl S. Buck. The book is about one of China's Empresses in the late 1800s. I am really enjoying the book and there are a few things that have made me laugh. It is intriguing to read about other cultures, especially when the other culture is over a century old.

Anyhow, the thing that caught my attention and that I wanted to share was one of the terms of endearment that the Emperor uses with his Empress. He has called her, "My heart and liver" a few times. This is hilarious to me. I know that different cultures place different values on different body organs and such, by why the liver? What is so lovely about a liver that is needs to be used to articulate how much you love someone? Maybe they know something we don't? I think I'm going to do an experiment and start saying things like, "I love you with all my liver!". Somehow I don't think it will be recieved too well, but if it can work for the Emperor of China, it oughta work for me, too.

So to all my readers, I love you guys with all my liver!

As you can see if you have ever visited my blog before, I have a new look. I have been wanting to redo the style for a couple of months and just haven't had the time. It all started with the hosting of this blog switching from one place to another. The hosting change caused my other custom skin to be lost somewhere, which was fine because I was bored with it anyhow and wanted to change some things. So I had to use one of the generic skins that comes with the b2Evolution software. Then when I had time to do some stuff, I found out that I didn't have access to change anything because I lost a password from the server that I needed. So after getting the password and changing one little thing, I have been sitting here on the couch for about four hours installing, customizing, graphic editing, and such getting this baby to look sweeter than I was hoping. There are still a few issues that I will be working on as I get time, namely the lack of a header graphic. Such things take time, but I love the direction that it has taken, and the current look is very much improved. Hope you like it.

Evening Sky at Jtree


Joshua Tree

I spent this past weekend camping in Joshua Tree National Park. I took three rolls of film and came out with about 10 photos that I like. I will try to get the good ones up for your enjoyment as soon as possible, however I will be very busy for the next week or so. 'Til then, here's a teaser...

This is a tree I found in JTNP (not a Joshua tree, though).

Here are four different views of the same tree.

(1)	(2)
(3)	(4)

(1) Edited: Removed color to create grayscale. Added signature and border. (2) Edited: Performed Line Extraction. Added signature and border. (3) Edited: None, All orginal photo w/color. Just added border and signature. (4) Edited: Removed color, converted photo to alpha transparency, added bg color. Which one do you like most? Lemme know.

Link: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/4605202.stm

Here is a link to an article I found where scientists in Taiwan have bred pigs that are green and glow vibrantly in the dark...

"The scientists...say that although the pigs glow, they are otherwise no different from any others."

So they glow? No biggie, there just pigs, whatever! HA

Moss, self-explanatory.


Here is a mudslide that I came across while trying to get to a waterfall hike. Didn't make it to the waterfall, but took some good pictures of the mudfall!


I have told numerous Californians about this little creature here, and I'm usually met in disbelief. So here it is, the Oregon Spotted Banana Slug. He's about five inches long and busy working his way up a glass door.


This is a view of the bars on an old town jail from Port Orford, Oregon, a small coastal fishing town along highway 101.