July 28 @ 12:04 amNo Pick Four or Saturday Photo Scavenger Hunt this week! Things should be back to normal for next weekend. I’ll try to drop a few photos in via moblog over the weekend if signal permits. Now to grab a few hours of sleep and then get ready to hit the road! Hope you all have a great weekend, I certainly plan to! 
July 27 @ 1:18 pm
We plan to hit the road in just about 24 hours. You should see the pile of gear in my entryway! The tent is set up out in the yard airing out and I’m working on a list of groceries and a few last odds n’ ends I need to pickup tonight. I also need to go get a hair cut!
A last minute decision was to rent an SUV for the trip instead of trying to cram all this crap into my little Dodge Neon. My car works ok for a weekend trip but we’re taking extra stuff this time out and I’d just as soon not have to sweat the details. Plus there are a few gravel trails I’d like to explore up near Mount St. Helens that I’d be reluctant to take my low slung car on. I’ll be picking the truck up tomorrow morning. From what they tell me, it will either be a Chevy Blazer or a Jeep Grand Cherokee. Guess we’ll see! Should be fun either way…
July 25 @ 11:30 amI haven’t done a meme for a while, so I stole this from Leesa.
1. If you had to set your own work schedule; 8 hours per day; 5 days per week. Which days and hours would you choose? I work at home, so I don’t really have a carved in stone schedule. I generally work an 8 hour day but apart from commitments like teleconferences, my hours are really flexible.
July 24 @ 10:23 pm
The kids and I are in the final throes of planning and preparation for this year’s camping trip. This week I’ll be dragging out the gear and picking up a few new pieces of kit. We’ve upgraded to a larger tent that we’ll be testing out in the yard before we leave and I’m still shopping for a new cooler. We car camp, so everything has to pack into the trunk and backseat with room for both kids and myself left over!
We’ll be staying at three campgrounds:
- Cougar Rock in Mount Rainer National Park
- Iron Creek in the Gifford Pinchot National Forest
- and Moss Creek which is also in Gifford Pinchot National Forest but much further south along the Oregon border
Our last day our we’ll dip across the border into Oregon and stay at my favorite place, Cousins Country Inn. This will be my third visit there this year! I’ve got a suite reserved by the pool. I suspect we’ll be ready for it after our time in the woods!
Our main purpose is a photo safari of course. I’ll be shooting my Olympus E-500, Matt has his own Olympus FE-120 and Lindsey now has her own Olympus FE-115. You noticing any trend here? 
Apart from the camping and scenery, we’re tentatively planning to visit the Mount Rainier Scenic Railroad and the Northwest Trek Wildlife Park. We’ll see how that goes!
We’ll be heading out this Friday and return sometime mid-week next week. Wish us luck!
July 22 @ 9:04 pmBeneath the placid exterior of this blog, deep in the dark under-belly of the Internet, a secret war has been raging. I’ve been getting tons of comment spam. You don’t see it because comments from first time writers get shunted into a moderation queue for me to manually review and approve. You may have noticed the first time you commented here that it took a while for your comment to appear. That’s why.
This has worked fine until recently… now I’m getting daily deluges of automated comment spam that I have to wade through to find the few legitimate new commenters. It’s too much work!
To combat this plague, I’ve enabled a new anti-spam tool called Akismet. I *think* this will be fairly transparent to you. There may be a small delay when commenting as your post is checked but apart from that I hope for no impact to real people and a marked decrease in the spam I have to wade through. We’ll see… I’m sure this war isn’t over yet.
Dirty, stinkin’ spammers…
July 17 @ 8:14 am
The photo-safari to Woodland Park Zoo went great! Shooting through some of the glass partitions proved to be a challenge but I managed to get most of the shots I wanted. Unfortunately most of the big cats were holed up out of the heat. I’ll have to plan a return trip with the kids in the near future to try again!
July 16 @ 7:40 amNo really, it is a zoo… photo-safari today. I’ll no doubt force you to look at the results later so brace yourself!
July 14 @ 8:33 pm
This week’s Saturday Photo Scavenger Hunt theme is Doors. I have to admit, I struggled with this one a bit, pawing through my collection looking for photos that featured doors, thinking about photos I could take that would include doors. Finally I decided to go with a couple of photos my my kids from a few years ago. Older photos yes, but at least an attempt at a creative spin on the theme! Hey, it’s all I have this week! I just couldn’t figure out a good way to work the motorcycle in on this one!
Are you wondering what this has to do with doors yet? I’ll tell you! These photos were taken at the 2003 Gathering of Warbirds airshow. I have a friend that’s part of a historical recreation group and at this event they normally setup a complete Vietnam-era firebase, complete with vehicles and helicopters. This is a photo of each of the kids sitting in the door gunner position on a UH-1 Huey helicopter. See how that fits?
You’ll be getting more airshow photos in August, Matt and I will be trekking up to Canada to visit the Abbotsford International Airshow.
July 12 @ 6:23 pm
I’m going to ramble a bit… brace yourselves. I’ve been reading through my personal library a lot lately. I do that. I’m a huge collector of books, I have shelves and shelves of paperbacks. Several hundreds of them at least. Mostly science fiction and fantasy. I like to read new stuff but occasionally nothing catches my interest and at those times I turn to my old favorites and devour them all over again. I can read the same book over and over, it doesn’t bother me. I find something new to like about it every time.
July 11 @ 12:33 am
I started eating these while recovering from my accident. I don’t know why, one day I just decided to try them. Now, I can’t stop.
“Hit” cookies… made in Poland, imported from Germany. “Hit”… like crack, but in a delicious vanilla sandwich cookie with chocolate creme filling.
Safeway used to carry them. But last time I was in there they only had the chocolate cookies with vanilla filling. Not the same at all. Larry’s Market had them today, but only a few. I bought out their remaining stock. I’m afraid that there is a shortage looming. What will I do?!
I may have to go online and see if I can order a few boxes, just in case… *sigh*
