Cool Photo of the Day

heatherkh did a superb job of catching the sunlight on the colorful rocks in the Coeur D’Alene River in northern Idaho.

I also really liked her picture of the water skipper and his shadow.

Cool Photo of the Day

I really like the contour lines in this landscape photo by austinspace in northwest Spokane County.

Cool Photo of the Day

nicora found this cool old truck outside Kalotus. I think it would make a great backdrop to some portrait photos.

Some rights reserved.

Just got back from a 10 day vacation. It was good to get away from everything and relax. Only had internet access for about an hour when Von and I found a closed coffee shop at 10pm that had wifi available in the parking lot. Caught up on some email and sent some photos to Flickr, otherwise it was an internet free week. Withdrawl cravings were extreme at first, but then subsided when you realize there was nothing waiting for you except a lot of spam!

Hope to get caught up here on the blog soon.

We have found that getting out of town is sometimes the hardest thing to do. There is always one more thing that needs to be done and so you always leave 2 hours or more later than you planned.

To counter this we have started leaving the night before! We might get out late – and two hours later than we had planned – but it is still a day early. We might not even get very far. But the next morning there is nothing left to do but have breakfast and get back on the road.

Our annual trip to Washington’s Long Beach peninsula for our family reunion would be no different. At 330 miles, it is a long drive, especially when pulling a travel trailer and trying to keep the speedometer at 60mph so as to keep the miles-per-gallon above 8. We pulled out Thursday evening at about 8pm with an audio-book in the CD player for the kids.

I was getting tired by 10pm and so we decided to pull in to The Dalles and ‘boondock’ at the local K-Mart parking lot. Once again we were not alone. There were a number of 18-wheelers in the parking lot and a couple of RVs. We don’t pull out the slide when we are just over-nighting but I do jack up the tongue of the trailer to level us out a bit so that our beds are not ‘pointed down hill’.

I stayed up to for a bit to wind down while everyone else went to bed, excited to see cousins the next day.

We had Brad, the pastoral intern from our church, over for dinner last night. Afterwards we treated him to a geocaching expedition to Bateman Island to find the Ghostly Pirates of Cache Island. Brendan, Kevin, Kyle, and Kirsten would hunt the elusive treasure along with Brad and me.

We got a late start, heading out about 7pm but I hoped we would be able to complete all 3 stages of this cache before dark. Brad and I stopped to take a photo of the sunset when we noticed that we were being followed by the blood-thirsty natives who guard this cache! By the time the evening was over we must have left a pint of blood behind to the little flying buggers.

On our way to the first stage, My expert navigating ability took us down the wrong fork of the path. When we realized our error we tried cutting across the brush but were thwarted by thick brambles and had to keep an eye out for a nice little black and white skunk who was not too happy with our excursion into his territory. An owl kept his eyes on us for quite a bit of this first trek until we got too close for his comfort.

We finally found a way through the bramble and found the first stage without a problem. Inside a little treasure chest was a pirate map. “X” marked the spot and luckily had the GPS coordinates for our next stop. I plugged them into the GPS and back down the trail we went, looking for the next clue to this pirate mystery.

The sky over the island was getting darker; our energy was being drained due to blood loss; but we finally reached the second stage, an ammo can. I opened the container only to find a skull, and it was speaking to us! (The folks who hid the cache rigged a digital recording to a light sensitive switch that ‘spoke’ when the light changed). He was verbally giving us the coordinates! Too cool.

We entered these final coordinates into the GPS and made double-time to the final stage. Once we got to the area the kids found the container quickly. It was an actual treasure chest! And full of booty! The kids had fun looking through the chest and Kirsten made a trade. We all signed the log book and headed back to the car as fast as we could to avoid as many of the blood-thirsty natives as possible.

When we got back home I checked my ‘tracks’ on the GPS and we had covered 2.2 miles. It had taken us about and hour and a half to wander the island, dodge a persnickety skunk, and admire an owl. All in all, a great evening out!

Last Friday night, after getting work, dinner, and other stuff out of the way, Von and I headed over to Preston Winery to enjoy the evening listening to Steve Haberman play and sing some jazz standards accompanied by a nice bottle of wine.

We were not disappointed. I enjoyed Haberman’s laid back style. He joked with the audience, told some jokes, but mostly just had fun.

The wine we had was delicious. Last time I picked a non-vintage wine (I am a cheap Norwegian) but this time we asked the waitress for her suggestion and were very happy with the 2003 Gamay Noir she suggested.

So we sat, listened to music, and dipped bread into some Artichoke Spinach Dip — a thoroughly enjoyable evening.

Just noticed that the Tri-City Astronomy Club and LIGO are having a star gazing event this weekend.

I have not been active this past year with my telescope but if it does not conflict with anything else on our schedule I hope to take the kids. They love staying up late and the folks who man the telescopes are usually very informative.

Look through telescopes at distant treasures of the night sky: star clusters, nebulae, galaxies. Join the Tri-City Astronomy Club and LIGO for this dark-sky star gazing event!

• 7:00 PM: Film, “Einstein’s Messengers”
• 7:30 PM: Tony George, “The 2006 Total Solar Eclipse”
• 8:15 PM: Roy Gephart, “Observing Deep Sky Objects”
• 9:00 PM – 11:30 PM: Telescope viewing of the Deep Sky!

I just ordered myself a 4 Gigabyte SD card to use in my Palm T|3 – I have had a 1 gig card in it for a long time and was ready to move to a 2 gig card but this price was just too good to pass up! The best thing is that it has free shipping and only a $10 rebate, so I am only out of pocket $64 until the rebate comes back.

I can now carry more photos, more maps, more of everything! Almost want to buy another one just to use as a thumb drive I can carry in my wallet.

I just received the USB to IDE Adapter cable I ordered from Computer Geeks the other day. At $9.50 each they were a steal! (Plus I found a 10% off coupon online). I cannot trace where I found this, but it must have been on the FatWallet Hot Deals Forum.

Why would you want one? If you have to ask then you probably don’t need it. But for anyone who has ever had to copy data from a dead computer to a new one this is the perfect tool. It allows you to hook up a 3.5″ hard drive from a regular computer or a 2.5″ drive from a laptop to your computer as if it was a USB drive. All you have to do is remove the hard drive from the dead machine and then all the data that was on that poor old computer can be copied over to the new one without any problems. (Before you toss that old hard drive make sure you destroy it – unless you want someone else to recover all your personal data.)

The other thing you can do is use those old drives as backups – or spend a little bit for a 300 GB drive and use it as a backup drive using this fancy little cable.

It comes with not only the adapter but also the power cable that is needed to power up a desktop hard drive (laptop hard drives get the power from the USB cable). All in all a great deal for $9.50.

The Opinion Journal.com has an interesting article on the fact that liberals are having fewer babies than conservatives and will, if the trend continues, give the conservatives the edge. Whether this is just a natural bi-product of natural selection, a consequence of wanting to save the planet, or just plain selfishness is hard to determine.

The fertility gap doesn’t budge when we correct for factors like age, income, education, sex, race–or even religion. Indeed, if a conservative and a liberal are identical in all these ways, the liberal will still be 19 percentage points more likely to be childless than the conservative. Some believe the gap reflects an authentic cultural difference between left and right in America today. As one liberal columnist in a major paper graphically put it, “Maybe the scales are tipping to the neoconservative, homogeneous right in our culture simply because they tend not to give much of a damn for the ramifications of wanton breeding and environmental destruction and pious sanctimony, whereas those on the left actually seem to give a whit for the health of the planet and the dire effects of overpopulation.” It would appear liberals have been quite successful controlling overpopulation–in the Democratic Party.

I like their conclusion: Democratic politicians may have no more babies left to kiss.

I just picked up a sample ballot for the September 19th primary and the first group of candiates are those running for Democratic position in the US Senate race. Everyone knows maria Cantwell. Of course the Republicans are against her but they don’t really get to vote the Democratic side.

Cantwell’s position on the war in Iraq has cost her some support on the Democratic side of the fence. For many Democrats, Anti-War = Anti-Cantwell and they are planning to vote for Hong Tran, a Seattle attorney.

But he is not her only opponent! No, she must also go up against veteran candidate “Mike the Mover” who I understand has lost 15 consecutive elections. If that is not enough she must also run against Michael GoodSpaceGuy Nelson. Yes, he legally changed his name which must have something to do with his belief that we should be colonizing outerspace. Here is what he wrote on a Tri-City Herald Forum:

President Kennedy and President Johnson are to be praised for getting us to the Moon in 1969, about only 69 years from the horse and buggy age of 1900. After getting to the Moon,we should have then started launching space habitats so that we would now have orbiting space colonies around the Earth, around the Moon, and around our Planet Mars. The Space Shuttle was a big, big mistake that has prevented us from building the coming orbital space colonies that many of your descendants will be living in. The principle is that whatever is put in orbit, should stay in orbit.

Progress through knowledge.

M. Goodspaceguy Nelson, a US Senate candidate

Oh, how I bet the Republicans wish that one of these two guys could win.

Stephen Ambrose is best known for his histories. I just finished reading Comrades : Brothers, Fathers, Heroes, Sons, Pals which is about male friendship. The topic may seem out of character for an author who writes histories of World War II, stories of Lewis and Clark, biographies of Dwight D. Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, Crazy Horse, and General Custer. Yet Ambrose shows how important the friendships were to these men. Close friends are a rare commodity that should be cherished.

To these stories Ambrose adds his own story, his relationship with his two brothers and his father, a touching story about how the man who was a strict disciplinarian who was quick to criticize his sons, “delighted” in his three sons’ adult life. The relationship of father to son is a continuum; seeing my father as a disciplinarian who was rarely home but now is proud of his sons. Was his father the same? Now my kids see me as the disciplinarian — someday they will see the pride. It has always been there.