Searching for Pumpkins

When we drove to Santa Barbara on Friday, we encountered horrific traffic.  Fortunately most of it was going the opposite way, but we did hit a really bad patch a few miles from Gilroy (the garlic capital of the world).

This happens to be a part of California that Walt is quite familiar with because in the days when he used to go out on field trips to work with farmers on water projects, this was an area he visited often.  So, being the smart, resourceful person that he is, he got off the freeway at Morgan Hill and drove into town so he could drive the city streets until we could see that traffic on the freeway had loosened up a bit.

Unfortunately, a lot of other people seemed to have that same idea so it was heavy traffic here too, with the additional slow-down of stop signs on every corner.  But going through an old farm town area, with its quaint shops and interesting theater marquee....

...was kind of fun.  Morgan Hill is near Salinas, where John Steinbeck lived and set some of his stories, particularly "East of Eden" which is set right where we were driving (it was less developed then, of course), hence the outdated movie playing today!

One of the things we passed by too quickly for me to get my camera out and pointed in the right direction was this cool pumpkin pyramid at a pumpkin farm that is about to open for business next week.  I was disappointed not to have the photo, but it was not the end of the world.  However, when we got to Santa Barbara, I told Walt that on the way home, I would like him to drive through Gilroy and Morgan Hill again so I could get the picture then.

We left Santa Barbara around noon, after a late lunch and more visiting with Alice Nan and then on up the road.  My friend Kari takes wonderful photos with her iPhone from a moving car (some really lovely ones from their recent trip to Europe) and so I was practicing to see if I could also do that.  Many turned out blurry, as my iPhone photos almost always do, but I did like this picture of the Gabilan Mountains, of which Steinbeck wrote to eloquently,

and this wall of trees that I really like, just out of King City.  I've always wanted to photograph it, and today I did.

Walt got off the freeway in Gilroy, as I had asked him to, and we drove through town.  I thought I remembered the pumpkin patch being on a corner lot, but we got all the way through Gilroy and no pumpkins.  It had been a huge pyramid and as this isn't even October yet, I couldn't imagine they had sold them all over the weekend.  

We kept driving and driving and eventually, I just put my camera away and was going to tell Walt that he could turn at the next stop and head back up to the freeway, when suddenly there it was:  my pumpkin pyramid!

I got out to take a photo and that's when I discovered that the disc for the camera was still in the laptop, which meant that all those photos I took at V's restaurant that I was so thrilled to get, I didn't get at all. If I hadn't been trying to be surreptitious, so that I just took the photo quickly and then hid the camera, I would have noticed the warning that there was no disc in the camera. 

Walt parked, unloaded the trunk, got out the laptop and I retrieved the disk and took my pumpkin photo.  I was very happy with it, after all.  We came home, collapsed and watched the two Jeopardy episodes we had missed, and I watched the Emmy broadcast from last night.  (I realized with great guilt that when Alice Nan turned the show on about 2/3 of the way through it, after Joe had finished watching golf and football, I asked if we could turn it off because I wanted to watch it from the beginning.  How selfish of me!  I knew I had it recorded at home, but I deprived her of seeing any of it without even thinking about what I was doing.  Sorry, Alice Nan!)

The dogs are very happy to see us again, and I'm glad to be home.

A Lifetime of Memories

I remember Christmas of my 10th year when I got a Brownie box camera from Santa.  I was so incredibly excited and I began recording anything and everything--and haven't changed since.  It was very important to me to "save memories."  I don't know why it was so important to me to save memories, but I remember saying that to myself whenever I took a roll of film into the corner drug store to be printed.  My camera was before cartridges and rolls of film were about three inches wide and had to be threaded onto the empty spool on the other side of the box.   I was always uncomfortable, fearing that I would expose the film during the threading...and I think once or twice I did expose the edges of the first photo on the roll.

Over my lifetime I have saved memories up the wazoo.  At 70, I now wonder who is going to care about the room full of scrapbooks of now-fading photos.   I keep saying I am some day going to scan them and put them on line, but that really is a project of a lifetime.

 

Today at Atria there was a "Residents' Showcase" in the lobby.  They have these things every now and then, giving residents a chance to show off their quilts or crochet items, or collections of this and that. The theme this time was "Albums, Scrapbooks, Writings and Poems."  I had an e-mail from my friend Peggy saying that she and five others, including our mutual friend Nancy, would have displays, and inviting me to come.

Walt needed the car to go to San Francisco and had to leave town between 2:30 and 3, but I could get up to the showcase for half an hour, at least.  

What I had time to skim through was impressive.  Peggy had the largest collection.

I was so impressed with how organized it was...this one of two or three tables of books.  She has books going back to her grandparents, and the book of family stories she has been writing all the while I knew her from the writing group (and before that, long before I joined).  She ended with "the future of scrapbooking," two books printed with Shutterfly.

Seeing a display like this always makes me want to go back to all of those memories I made over the last 60 years and do something with them, but the prospect of tackling all of those scrapbooks and photo albums is so overwhelming I feel as incapacitated as my mother did when thinking about packing up "all this crap" and moving out of her house.

When I got to Atria today, there was a friend of my mother's from Marin county there, visiting with her.  Apparently her kids live in Davis and she had come up for Thanksgiving.  I was very happy to see my mother interacting with someone other than myself.

So...tomorrow is Thanksgiving, the first since 1966 that we will see NONE of our children.  Jeri is in Boston, Tom in Santa Barbara, and Ned recuperating from his surgery and unable to leave the house.  

We are going to the Atria thanksgiving buffet at noontime.  My mother seems unconnected to the holiday and has asked me several times what we are doing tomorrow.  But we'll eat with her.

In the late afternoon we will go to Ned's in-laws' house.  Marta will be there without Ned.  I am making pumpkin pies.  I've already done one.   They asked for a gluten free pie.  I'm not sure if what I made qualifies, but I hope it will be OK.

I still have the regular pumpkin pie to make in the morning.   There is not enough refrigerator space to put it and I didn't want to leave it out overnight, so I'll make it when I get up in the morning.

It's going to be a strange Thanksgiving.

 

My mother and Nancy, whom she says is her

"best friend at Atria."

Compression. Not.

How to compress this very. full. day. into one illustrated journal entry.  Can't be done, so I apologize in advance for the super long entry.

It started when I left at 10 to meet Susan from Texas in Old Sacramento.  We were actually meeting at noon and I thought I could stop at SuperCuts on the way and get a much overdue haircut.  But when I got to SuperCuts, there was an hour wait, so I just headed on over to Old Sac anyway.

We were meeting at the Delta King paddle wheeler and I was nearly an hour early, so I took a picture... 

(I love this boat!)

...and then settled down to wait with what turned out to be a homeless woman, who, among other things, told me she hadn't trusted boats since she learned about the Titanic.

A train was arriving by where I was sitting and as I took this picture...

...I realized that Susan was on the opposite side of tracks, just out of the frame of this picture, also taking a picture of the train arriving.   We walked down to Joe's Crab Shack (of course) for lunch, where we shivered on the porch watching boats go up and down the river under the Tower Bridge.  It's supposed to be in the 90s, for Pete's sake, and it was freezing (which *I* didn't mind, but Susan was not dressed for cold weather (remember, I said she is fromTexas).

I ordered a crabcake sandwich and was disappointed in it, but the "onion strings" that came with it were fabulous.

We then took the grand tour of Old Sac (which pretty much means going into lots of gift and tsatske shops.   I bought lots of postcards to replenish my supply.

I took this picture of Susan, as a tourist shot, but I really was taking a picture of the guy in the jacket behind her.  Old Sacramento has become a big biker hot spot and there were bikers all over the place today.

This one I meant to take.  This is the statue of a Pony Express rider.  Sacramento was one end of the Pony Express (I think St. Joseph, MO was the other).  They hired young riders who had no families, because they assumed many would be killed.  The Pony Express only lasted 18 months, until the transcontinental railroad was completed.

After the statue, we wandered around the Train Museum Shop (deciding NOT to pay the $9 admission to the museum itself.  I found a fascinating book about which I will report when I have finished it.  It is another tale of American History about which I was woefully ignorant.  We then gradually made our way back to the parking lot and garage where we had left our cars and we headed off in our separate directions to take a nap before Part 2 of our big day.

I went to sleep at 3, fully expecting to be awake at 4, but was shocked to realize it was 5 when I woke up.  I was being picked up at 5:15, so I had just 15 minutes to get ready to go.  Fortunately, other than changing my shirt, I didn't really have anything to do.

Beth arrived in the carport at 5:15, in a car with herself, her daughter Katie and our friend Anne (whom I have known forever; I had never met Beth or Katie before).  We drove to get Cindi, who has been Buddy's foster Mom ever since he left our house (he was adopted today!!!).  Cindi's roommate's dog was in the window of the house when we drove up and Anne and Beth leaped out to take its picture, since they see pictures of him on Facebook all the time.  I think I got the best picture, though!

The five of us (minus the dog) drove to West Sacramento, where we were meeting Susan to begin our River Train ride. The train was kind of out in the middle of nowhere, next to a water treatment plant.   Trying to figure out where to park was a challenge, but we finally did.  We stood around with the other passengers waiting to be told what to do.

We finally boarded...

...and were taken to the car where we would have our dinner.  We were seated four on one side and two on the other and there were 3 courses for our dinner, so we switched seating arrangements for each course, so we could each get a chance to visit with everyone by the end of the evening. And since this is a photography group and we are all geeks, we all had our cameras, cell phones and iPods out for the whole trip

.

Dinner was ok -- nothing to write home (or a journal entry) about   -- but the best part was just getting to know each other.  Beth and Susan discovered they had practically their whole lives in common and had been at the same place at either the same time or very near the same time all over the place and all over the country.  The coincidences started being a bit creepy.

Anne and I were on the opposite side, enjoying the view of the fields as they passed by.

(she had to squint because we were heading into the full sunset)

Between the salad and main course, we went up to the observation cars

(there were 3 observation cars; Katie was the only one in any of them!)

On the way back to our main course, we stopped to listen to the guy entertaining in the dancing car.  He was alone, except for us (but a small crowd did come to listen to him after the main course.)

Time to change seats

When we arrived back at our starting point, the crew gave Katie a little Train Bear.

It was such a fun time.  We didn't go where we thought we were going to go, it probably wasn't worth the money we paid for it, but the friendships forged made it all worthwhile.  (And as Cindi said when we were leaving, "this was the most fun I've ever had at a water treatment plant.")

Tomorrow we are all going to tour the UCD Arboretum and have lunch together before Susan has to head to the airport and back to Dallas.

What a really great day!

Accomplishing Absolutely Nothing

Dontcha love it when you spend an entire afternoon working on a project and realize that it was a total bust. That was just before I dropped the sugar container on the floor and spilled half of it...but let's not talk about that.

The project started back 2 years ago. Sorta. It began with my mother's 90th birthday party. I bought one of those photo frames for her and filled it with photos from all of her life, starting with her childhood on up to her great grandchildren and everything in between.

She enjoyed it, for the few minutes she watched it, but when it was over, she packed it neatly in the box it came in and that was the last she paid attention to it. A few years before that, I had given her another photo frame, which she watched. Once in awhile. But then she decided she didn't want to leave it turned on, so she put it on the floor, where it has been gathering dust ever since.

I left the dusty photo frame there and took the birthday photo frame home, where it has been sitting there gathering dusts ever since.

HOWEVER, now we cleared and then returned stuff to the living room and in the stuff that was moved about was the photo frame. I decided it would be fun to make a separate slide show, of all Christmas photos. I worked on that for a few days earlier this week and had something like 190 pictures on it. Today I decided I wanted to add more, so I went hunting through CDs and the photo albums I could get to and I spent the entire afternoon (after going and giving blood this morning) working on finding photos, scanning them, correcting the color balance (love that PhotoShop!).

When I gave blood this morning, they told me "no strenuous exercise," and while doing all I did this afternoon certainly doesn't qualify as "strenuous exercise" it was certainly much, much more than I do during a normal day.

Up and down, back and forth, carrying stacks of books, delighting in finding photos I had forgotten about. I was so pleased that I got as much done as I did. To really do a good job, I should go up and downstairs and get photos from scrapbooks stored upstairs, but I decided not to do that.

Thank GOODNESS!!!

Finally, around 3 p.m., my slide show was ready. I put it in the photo frame and turned the thing on. It seems to choose the pictures at random, not in the order I arranged them, but...ok. It appeared I was going to have to see all 190 of the photos I had uploaded first before I could see the new pictures.

Then error slides started showing up. Pictures of a disk with a big red x through it. I paid attention to where they appeared, between which slides and I went back and looked at the disk on my computer...and where the error messages appeared, there were no photos. Photo A was followed by an error and then by Photo B. WTF? In several spots the error messages lasted as long as 30 seconds (I counted).

Finally I thought I had fixed it, put the slide show back in again, and again had to watch the entire thing to where it cycled back to the start...and I realized not one single picture I had added today had been displayed. Damn! There didn't seem to be anything wrong with the photos and, in fact, my mother's slide show was almost entirely made of scanned pictures and that had played just fine, so it couldn't be the scanning.

I decided to try a test and put all of the scanned photos on a separate disk and added that to the photo frame and not one of them showed. Not a single one.

I had spent 3 hours or more working on a project that was useless.

Well, there's more than one way to skin a cat. I removed all of the scanned photos from the disk and left it just filled with pictures of Brianna's first three Christmases and lots of cute dog Christmas pictures. But I took all those scanned photos and made a slide show out of it, which I have posted on YouTube and Vimeo.

Christmas Through the Years from Bev Sykes on Vimeo.

The background music is Lawsuit's Christmas song, which I mentioned in the entry about musical Christmas memories.

I guess I'll keep the photo frame disk and add pictures from this Christmas and just keep adding them each year until the frame stops working. But in the meantime, at least I have the best of our kids' first 6 years, or at least what I chose today.

Bah Humbug.

Like Pulling Teeth

Sigh. I swear photos are going to be the bane of my existence. No, not MY photos, though with all the ones I take, you certainly might think so.

(aside: I finished sorting through photos and posted the ones from Moscow to Flickr today).

No, I'm talking about publicity photos. I was up at 5 a.m. this morning finishing an article for this guy who has a film opening next week at the Sacramento Film Festival. We had a lovely interview on Friday (the one I sat in the heat of the day to conduct) and I think the story didn't turn out too badly.

When I left him, I realized I had forgotten to ask him to submit a photo to Derrick. I wrote to him immediately and he said he would.

On Friday.

It is now Monday and I'm feeling all virtuous because I got the article to Derrick before he arrived at the office this morning and now I discover that the guy never sent in a photo.

(Later update: Within minutes of my leaving a voice mail message for him, he did send some excellent photos to Derrick, apparently)

Oh, I'm not surprised. 9 times out of 10, when it is up to the person who wants the publicity to provide the photo, we have problems.

Now tell me honestly. If you are an unknown and you're doing this thing that you think is pretty cool and you want to tell the world about it so they'll come and see your play or movie or dance recital or whatever it is, wouldn't you think you'd expend just a little effort to make sure that there is a photo that conforms to the needs of the newspaper? Or would you just ignore requests for photos and assume that we will just magically find something to sell your event for you?

There are a few theatre companies in the area which are excellent about complying. They submit photos in plenty of time. The photos are high resolution (give me a snapshot and I'll give you an unusable postage stamp size photo!), have interesting action in them, and are in color. I love companies like that (yes, I mean you, Davis Musical Theatre Company. High marks!)

There are other companies which make excellent photos available for download on the internet (California Musical Theater) or give me a DVD with photos on them (Sacramento Theater Company).

ok. The kudos stop here and I won't name names any more, because everybody else gets anywhere from a grade of C to an outright F

Everybody else either is always or can be sometimes a problem. Some need reminders, but are pretty good at following through once a call has been made. Some need more than one call. Some can't really tell you who you should call and you have to go through several people before finding someone who knows something about photos. You are just supposed to know that stuff intuitively.

Some give you static poses, with two actors standing there like "American Gothic" staring blankly at the camera...and what fun is that? You have to call them back and explain that you want something that shows their show, not just head shots of the actors. One group shuffles through a stack of blurry snapshots, and hands me one to ask if this will do (in a word: no!)

Some just have nothing. You're a THEATER company, for God's sake. You're supposed to be the epitome of vanity. Why would you have NO PHOTOS of the show you want people to come to?

Now, I realize that what the theatre company is focusing on is the rehearsal, the costumes, the technical aspects of the show, and publicity may be the furthest thing from their minds.

But think about it, people. How does somebody find out about your production? What goes in the newspaper.

And think about your own newspaper reading. You're skimming the paper and you see a headline that says something like "young filmmaker to participate in film festival." There is no photo. Unless you are into young film makers, or the kind of person who reads everything in the newspaper (like my mother), is this headline likely to make you want to read all those wonderful words I have worked so hard at crafting?

BUT if there is a picture of a cute kid, or a funny situation, aren't you likely to at least stop for a moment and look at the photo and maybe at least start reading the article? And, if all goes well, won't that make you intrigued enough to perhaps attend an event that you may not have known about before?

So why is it so much like pulling teeth with so many people who are begging for publicity to actually get cooperation in the form of a photo for the article they want us to put in the newspaper for them?

Grumblegrumblegrumblegrumble.

Do You Lick the Bowl?

My Photo Safari

I spent a delightful day today. Peggy recently sent me (after a year of my begging, cajoling and teasing her about it), a collection of DVDs which contained most of the photos that she took on her trip to Africa and to Scotland last year (she visited a friend in So. Africa, then flew to Scotland to meet her family and attend the Tattoo in Edinburgh, and then back to Africa for more photo taking). I told her before she left that I would have to take the trip vicariously through her photos and today I finally made my trip to Africa.

In truth, though I've had these DVDs for awhile, I had only watched some of them. And I'm glad that I hadn't watched more. The difference in how the photos look now, post-surgery, and how they looked when I first got them is the difference of night and day. Where they were nice photos before, now many of them just pop with color, even in the fairly homogenous African landscape.

Peggy and I share a love for animals and those who have been reading this journal for awhile may remember that we first became friends through our mutual love of watching the animals through Africam. Peggy's favorites were always the zebras.

(She actually won an award in a photo contest for this one)

But I loved the elephants. When I first asked her to send me all of her photos rather than waiting to make a slide show (I'm still "going to make a slide show someday" of my pictures from Australia!), she asked "how many pictures of elephants can you see?" Well, as it turns out--I couldn't get enough of 'em. She had lots and lots of elephant encounters and I loved looking at all the photos of every single one of them.

I remembered when the two of us had gone riding camels in Australia and I wished I had been with her in Africa so we could have laughed about riding elephants.

I even posted one of her elephant videos for today's video of the day.

But there were hippos and rhinos and cheetas and giraffes and hyenas and warthogs. Heck, even the water buffalo were great. And the birds! What wonderful bird photos she managed to get!

(I can't see this photo without wanting to burst
into a chorus of "3 Little Birds...")

So I feel like I've had my own little mini photo safari to Africa today. Without the expense, the bumpy ride, the heat and the dust. And without the excitement. But taking the trip vicariously was better than not taking the trip at all.

Believe it or Not

I'm not writing a journal entry tonight. I just feel too rotten and I'm going to sleep instead. I'll leave you with some photos of Scrappy's (Max/Winston) last morning here. His new Mom picked him up this morning...and if you want to know how the morning went, check the video of the day--it's quite a story!

Freddie learned how to chase his tail

I put Scrappy/Max/Winston's leash on him early, so
I wouldn't have to deal with catch him when his "mom" came.

"Mouth wrestling" always looks so fierce!

Most Poignant moment

In the three-day long continuing tribute to Tim Russert, this, to me, was the most poignant moment--his son Luke at his father's chair on the set to "Meet the Press."

Fathers Day

Bri shows off her pink Converse high tops (a gift from Uncle Ned) for Father's Day

The Year in Review

A year ago, I did something amazing, for me. I decided to participate in Flickr's self-portrait a day for 365 days. It was extraordinary for me because I'm always the person behind the camera. I hate having my photo taken. I hate the way I look in pictures, especially when I weigh this much. So to voluntarily post a photo of myself on line for 365 days was pretty incredible.

I ended the project today with what may be my favorite picture. It's a perfect photo for ME to end the 365 project. I got bolder as the year progressed and started making fun of myself--that was fun.

There aren't 365 pictures of my face in this project. Occasionally you only see my hands.

At some point I started doing "FUTABs," which stands for "It's Friday, so put your feet up and take a break." My FUTABs would have been more interesting if I had a large collection of cute shoes, but I did them anyway, even though in most I was wearing Birkinstocks. This was my favorite FUTAB.

I had fun putting myself in famous works of art. I think this was my favorite.

This photo also includes James (whose handle is "gaymay"), who had put himself in this Edward Hopper painting. I took his version and added to it by putting myself at the counter of the diner. It took a long time to do and was a great way to work with PhotoShop.

The project also became my diary, recording the happy times...

(Of COURSE I'm in this...see my thumb in the lower left?)

...and the sad times.

Taken at Michele's funeral

And it also helped me keep track of when was the last time I donated blood!

Naturally, the year's photos include lots and lots and lots of dogs!

Mabel

But one of the best things about the project was joining the community of people who were doing it as well. There was the aforementioned "gaymay" who had such amazingly creative ideas. His "Snow White and Her Dwarves" set gave us all a lot of laughs.

Then there was "lrayholly," who continues to inspire me so much with her constant striving to do better photographically (she is in her second year of the project now). We also were "expectant grandmothers" together and worked to create a collaborative photo for each of our sites.

Cool Ice Blue started the project when his terminally ill young son was in the hospital and the project took him through the boy's last days, his funeral, and working through the grief. His raw emotion permeated his photos and it was good to see him begin to emerge from the black cloud.

Old Shoe Woman is on day 100 of her second year. She's a teacher and shares a lot of her classroom projects.

NanaJ and her husband Tojosan became friends, and Tojosan became a Scrabble partner on Facebook.

FossilFreak was someone I had actually met before, lives nearby and actually I ran into recently at a show I was reviewing.

So many people...so many friends...so many ideas. It was sad to think of it all coming to the end, so I've decided to do the only logical thing: I start the 365 project, year 2 tomorrow! After all in the coming year I'll have a new grandchild, a new treadmill, and be working on getting in shape for our big trip next year, so there should be lots of new photo opportunities.

---

COUSINS DAY TOMORROW!!! Yay! We have all been missing it. Tomorrow's entry will be late.

Smiles

Ever had one of those days that just makes you smile? I started the day smiling, and by the end of it I was grinning.

The day started late, thank you puppies. By the time I woke up the sky was actually light, which meant it was after 7 a.m. Unheard of for me, and the puppies were still sleeping.

Good puppies.

We had a brief cuddle and then I went back to finish my review of the magnificent production of Vivien, which we saw Saturday night. What a fabulous performance by actress Janis Stevens, as Vivien Leigh. I had finished most of the review before going to sleep on Sunday and had to just finish off the last couple of paragraphs and tweak it. I was working steadily when I glanced at the clock and realized it was 8 minutes to 9 -- and I had a dentist appointment at 9.

I love my dentist. I actually didn't see her much, but had a good session with the hygienist. I love it when they tell me I'm doing a good job. I didn't even mind that I was told I had a bit of decay in one tooth. I've been complaining about that tooth for awhile now -- the gum has been tender. It already has a crown and a root canal, so the decay isn't a big deal and it will be fixed next month. I left the office with shiny teeth and a big smile.

Walt went off to take the car in for an oil change (yes, he's driving short distances now). When he came back, he handed me a package which was addressed to Peggy c/o of me.

Now, Peggy still works at the Uralla Roo Haven, a sanctuary for orphaned kangaroo babies and as she has been giving more and more time to the joeys, she has been using the computer less and less. In fact, e-mail conversations are pretty much a thing of the past and now she calls once a month or so instead. It's actually a better way because it's fun to laugh with her again.

But I was a bit miffed that she hadn't warned me about the expected package. Our friendship flourished, before she ever came to the U.S., because I was willing to be the recipient of the camera equipment she bought on eBay, which couldn't be shipped to Australia. So I would get the packages and then mail them on to her and she would refund me for the postage.

It's been kind of fun, actually, but I had already made my big once-a-year Christmas trip to the post office to get stamps and didn't relish going back to the post office to send off a package to Australia, knowing how horrendous lines are at this time of year.

I sent off an e-mail saying "who is XX XX?" (the name of the sender) and told her that a package arrived and what did she want me to do with it.

Within minutes, the phone rang and it was Peggy. She told me that the package wasn't for her, it was my combination Christmas/Birthday present and she told me I could open it. I said I'd wait for Christmas, but of course I couldn't wait. After we'd spoken, I opened the box and this is what I found:

She has sent me a new camera. I haven't actually sat down to read the manual and familiarize myself with the new stuff (my current camera is also a Panasonic, so it was easy to operate right out of the box), but what I've tried I've loved. It's small enough that I could mount it on the dashboard of the car and make a test video....and the micro shot I did of my eye turned out amazingly clear.

This evening I'm going to settle myself in the recliner with camera and manual and play.

So I'm ending the day with a big smile on my face. I have clean teeth, the puppies were adorable today, I got a wonderful gift, and best of all, I got to catch up with Peggy, whom I miss very much. It continually saddens me to know that the chance of our seeing each other again is slim to nonexistent, but I'm glad that the friendship continues, despite the distance between California and Western Australia and our increasingly complex lives.