Gang Aft Agley

We bought a cord of firewood today, should let us finish out the winter without using the electric heat. While we were waiting for the last of it to be delivered, Kiaya, Keigan and I walked Mariposa. As we started on our walk we made sure we were well bundled against the rain and cold, but partway through the walk we were surprised by big juicy flakes falling around us. Enough to get Keigan thinking about the possibilities of a snow day when he starts back to school on tuesday. Thankfully nothing stuck and the cold rain soon returned, but we have had our snow for the year.

Stacking the wood after it arrived was less than pleasant as it was all cold and wet, wet enough that our gloves were soon soaked through. Keigan and I soon gave up the neat stacking and started to toss it into a pile in the garage, where we will sort it out later after it has had a chance to dry, or at least wait for a day where the temperature is slightly more pleasant.

Yesterday afternoon I was able to pick up my new camera, though I had to run to a second store to pick up the 55-200VR lens as they were out of stock at the branch I chose to go to. It is such a pleasant experience to be able to store more than a handful of pictures on the camera at a time, no more lugging the laptop out for something as simple as a soccer game. Our previous camera had a limit of 64mb of memory, though we had never purchased such a large card, 32mb was big enough at the time. To make matters worse we had lost the 32mb card several years ago, and were stuck with just the 8mb card that initially shipped with the camera. Off the top of my head thats 43 jpeg images at a time or 7 tiffs.

With nothing more than a glance at the quickstart manual I headed off to Caden’s game. An hour later I had a collection of blurred and out of focus images, with a few that might be kept. Not necessarily a reflection of the camera or the operator. I knew going in that the lighting was horrible, yet I was mainly interested in using it as a learning experience, and I quickly learned not to shoot handheld telephoto shots in low lighting. What I was interested in was the area of the pitch that I could cover, as with my previous camera I was limited to plays happening directly in front of me if any detail was to be included, otherwise it showed up as a group of players too small to see who had the ball.

After I got home and read the manual a little more in depth, I found that I wasn’t using the focus correctly (duh), in sports mode it will continually update the focus on the center sensor, only using the other sensors when nothing is in the center. I was treating the focus more like my old 35mm nikon autofocus where I would continually have to lift my finger off the button and then press it halfway down again to tell it to start to focus again.

In an attempt to deal with Gang activity within the military the Defense Authorization Bill for FY 2008 bans gang membership within the ranks. As I was reading about it the line that caught my eye was the following prohibitions against membership in organizations that … advocate the use of force or violence; or otherwise engage in efforts to deprive individuals of their civil rights.. Now we know why the Members of Operation Yellow Elephant aren’t enlisting. They are specifically prohibited from it.

On a side note Operation Yellow Elephant has a story about sending the troops Beef Jerky. Reminds me of the local news story the other night where we saw pictures of a group packing care packages for soldiers stationed in Iraq. Among the items being packed were cans of spinach. Who the hell wants to be stuck in a war zone and open a package from home and get Canned Spinach.

In the right hand sidebar, I’ve started to include items I’ve recently read that if I had time I would link to and write a comment about. Unfortunately time seems to be a precious commodity, and as such I’m reduced to clicking a link and automagically sharing these items.

So despite our best efforts Rethuglicans manage to keep both OH-05 and VA-01. In the case of OH-05 the NRCC spent over $400,000 in order to keep a R+10 district, with nearly the same vote percentage (55-45) as in 2006.