morrowlife

How about another piece of Great Art from Monte Carlo? And barring that, how about a giant cat statue? Yes sir, we know what our Loyal Readers like. Photo courtesy of my friend Doug, in all likelihood.

No post last Friday. Sorry about that – I got busy. And the strange thing is, I’m not quite sure what I accomplished. Sure, Loyal Reader Number Four and I jacuzzified while Loyal Readers Numbers One and Two had some friends over to watch Nacho Libre (again). LRN1 told me he’s been invited over to another friend’s house on Friday night to watch . . . Nacho Libre (again). It’s a pretty good movie, of course, but is it that good?

No work on any of the websites over the weekend. It was just a non-electronic weekend. Except that my Palm crashed hard on Sunday. I had to do a hard reset, which wipes out all the data. I was a little worried about losing data forever, but the nice folks at Palm really do backups well. When I synced with my laptop after the crash, it restored literally everything, except for the few appointments I had entered since my last sync and my bookmark in the current Wodehouse book, which was easy to restore. Pretty cool.

Did a little work on the Miata on Saturday. Got the windshield washers working, the headlights aimed, and the ugly attempted repair on the passenger’s door cleaned up. Improvements, all. We also started digging the koi pond in the backyard! LRN1 worked some more on it today too. I got home after dark, as usual, but they tell me it’s looking reasonably deep by now. With a little joint effort and the judicious application of some money, I think we’ll have a nice pond before long. That ought to go along with the nice yard we’ll also have.

LRN2 and LRN4 went to a city council meeting tonight to help LRN2 finish up a merit badge. I hear it was interesting and pretty fast-moving.

Finally got around to reading the “advanced” manual for my new camera last night. Wow! That camera can do everything! The exposure control goes from totally automatic to manual shutter speed to manual aperture to manual shutter speed and aperture to automatic control based on the type of scene you’re shooting. It can do raw format, which can be edited in the camera or out. Jpeg pictures can be edited in the camera too. It can adjust white balance, color saturation, cropping, orientation, and a bunch of other things. It can print directly from the camera or via computer. Photos can be arranged into albums. Slide shows with various visual effects can be done by hooking the camera directly up to a TV. It can do nearly-infinitely adjustable time-lapse photos. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I love that camera.

But I need to go to bed now. Sorry about missing Friday and thanks for your continued loyalty. See you tomorrow.

I couldn’t resist this one. It’s Timur again, of course, with one of his many friends. Kind of leaves you speechless, no? Photo courtesy of somebody at Baikonur.

Nothing much going on today. I got up, got ready, drove to work, worked, drove home, ate, took out the trash, finished reading an interesting article on the art of programming, and sat down to write. After that, I’ll probably read another article or two and go to bed. Same old same old.

There was an anomaly on Tuesday:

Gotta hate it when that happens. The word is the launch pad wasn’t damaged too badly, which is amazing. It’ll be interesting to hear what the failure investigation turns up.

Another week staggers towards the finish line. See you on Friday.

Now there’s the way a campfire ought to be. Nice and tall. This picture is from a few years ago, somewhere in the east. We sure loved all that green. But we sure didn’t love all that humidity.

Reason for yet another old camping picture: we’re finally planning a family campout. It’s not until April, but it will last the better part of a week. We’d love to go towards Yosemite and the mountains east of here, but it appears that everything worth visiting is snow-covered in April and thus uncampable. Instead, we’re looking into Big Sur and its surrounding area. Giant redwoods, the Pacific Ocean, and other such landscape stuff. Sounds great. We’ll hit Yosemite a little later in the year.l

Nothing else tonight. I didn’t have my church meeting today because it’s the fifth Wednesday, and we don’t meet on the fifth Wednesday, so there was no church meeting. I remembered this on my way to the meeting, of course, but I made the trip useful by gassing up. There was no time for blogging, though, because Loyal Reader Number Four wanted my opinion on campgrounds. If we’re going to go, we need to make a decision and get a reservation pronto, I suspect. Even though April is definitely not prime camping season around here, we’re talking about going during spring break week, so it may well be busy.

Didn’t feel well this afternoon and evening. It must be something I ate. So, I’m heading for bed. See you tomorrow.

Here’s a shot of Loyal Readers Numbers One and Two from a campout many moons ago in Virginia. The Loyal Readers are engaging in the typical outdoorsy activity of playing games on their Palms. Good Loyal Readers. This picture was definitely taken with my original lousy digital camera. Very poor quality, yet outstanding content, I think we’ll all agree.

I believe that campout was at Jellystone Park up in the Virginia mountains near Luray. It was a beautiful area. We went to see the caverns, which were okay but not on the scale of Carlsbad or Timpanogos. They were the only caverns I’ve ever seen with their own stalacpipe organ.

The thing I remember most about that trip, though, is that the campground wasn’t far from a restaurant called Cooter’s Place. It was owned and operated by Ben Jones, who played Cooter on The Dukes of Hazzard. That particular weekend there was some kind of General Lee-fest. There must have been fifty General Lees in the parking lot. Very impressive.

Short post tonight, as it’s already late. I just got back from my new member discussion with my friend Danny. Danny’s a relatively young guy – probably about 21 – who is very pleasant and really likes to talk. He’s just beginning to get a grasp on what we believe in. We had a really nice talk.

Drove the Miata to work, as scheduled. I did a little bit (well, seventy miles) of top-down motoring on the way home. It was just a little cool. My leather jacket does a great job of keeping me warm, but my head was just slightly uncomfortable. I kept the heater vents blowing on my hands, so they were fine. I drove the old Miata top-down in much colder weather than this, so I can’t complain. It’s supposed to be a little cooler tomorrow, so I’ll probably keep the top up. Either way, the car’s turning out to be a pleasure to drive. Not as comfortable and luxurious as the Sable, certainly, but a pleasure nonetheless.

Not much else to report. I was pretty busy at work today and accomplished very few things from my list. I need to drag out of bed early for a few days and get there at 7:00 or so if I want to avoid the workload getting overwhelming. Sigh.

So, I’m off to bed. See you tomorrow.

In keeping with the spirit of last Friday’s post, here’s another one of those strange statues from Monaco. I have more. And I’m not afraid to use them, so don’t cross me.

And by the way, I just checked and discovered that yesterday’s and today’s pictures were actually taken by my friend Doug with his very nice Olympus camera. He just set the file sizes way too small. Sorry for the confusion.

Good weekend, all things considered. I got a few things done, strangely. Saturday, I tore the Sable’s brakes back apart and put anti-squeak goo and high-temperature lubricant on, as discussed previously. They still squeak, but not nearly as badly. I have no idea what else to do other than buy different brake pads. These were Napa’s best, though, so anything else would be a step backwards, at least in theory. Sigh.

I also – dum, dum, de dum! – got the HRVA website up. Have a look! Register if so inclined. Sadly, formerly registered members will once again have to re-register. I really think this will be the last time, though. And tell me what you think about it, especially design-wise. There are all kinds of things I can do, and it’s quite plain now, so ideas are most welcome.

Made a little more progress on the Gardenville website too. It’s fully operational. Now it’s time to start adding content. It’s getting a little hard to maintain all these websites, and I haven’t even started on Spinfo. I don’t even know what its topic will be. Any ideas?

Early Sunday morning, I attended my first Stake mission correlation meeting. Actually, it was the first one to which they’ve invited the Ward Mission Leaders. It was a pretty useful meeting and helped me focus on a few administrative things I need to keep up with. I managed to get our Ward clerk to give me the correct permissions on the ward’s computer on Sunday afternoon, so now I can do what I need to do.

Add three home teaching visits, an hour of jacuzzifying on Saturday evening while Loyal Readers Numbers One and Two had a few friends over to watch Nacho Libre, and that about covers my weekend.

Drove the Sable to work today, but the Miata’s going tomorrow and probably the day after. I really like having the choice. Call me strange, but I find the Sable comfortable, powerful, quiet, and reasonably luxurious. It handles surprisingly well too. I really like driving it. As a contrast, there’s the noisy, windy, great-handling, relatively primitive, cool, fun Miata. Life’s good right now.

And I need to go to bed now. Thanks for reading and I’ll see you tomorrow.