akirlu | Back From Far Flung Ports of Call (Reply)

So we have returned from Boston and Amherst and points miscellaneous in the vicinity. I've added two new states of the Union to my life list: Rhode Island and Connecticut. We giggled a lot about how small Rhode Island is. Particularly when we pulled off the highway to buy a wireless mouse for my laptop (forgot to pack one) and found ourselves face to face with Rhode Island Community College. Really? A whole one just for Rhode Island? These dollhouse scale East Coast states are adorable.

I've started posting some of the pictures on Flickr, just the ones from our visit to Mystic Seaport and dessert in Providence so far, but more to come. I'm still getting used to the new camera. My previous Panasonic Lumix compact camera had stopped being able to focus while we were at the Met back on our January NYC trip, and I've been limping along with the one before that, which works fine but has a chunk missing from the lens, so if you know what to look for, you can see a fuzzy spot in every image. I'd gotten pretty good at composing around that, but when I stopped at Costco to upstock dog food before our Boston trip, it turned out that they had a really good deal on the display model of a discontinued Lumix, so I snagged that for the trip. This new camera is much more like a 'real' one, in that it has such fancifications as an aperture priority and shutter priority modes, and I normally don't even want to deal with all that, plus they've shuffled around where the white balance and metering options are so it's all one big new learning experience. I did a lot of shooting in Intelligent Auto mode as a result, but seem to have gotten a few good pictures anyway. And I didn't have to try to compose pictures around the divot in the lens.

I think, however, that I will never figure out the hows and whys of Flickr viewership stats. My Flickr page normally trickles along in the single- or double- digit viewers per day unless I post new pictures and echo them here or on Facebook, but on Wednesday, the 21st, when I didn't post anything, my viewership shot up to almost 700 views for no reason I can track, especially since no individual picture had more than 5 views. WTF?

Anyway, we had a really nice stay with our good buds in Natick, got to spend some highly enjoyable time getting better acquainted with Hal's siblings and nephew, Hal received the finest, most painstaking haircut of his life, inconveniently for return appointments this was in Worcester (but if you're ever in Woostah and need a haircut, we recommend Michaelangelo's), and we ultimately got out to Amherst in good order and had a visit with an old college pal of Hal's, and the wedding came off beautifully and at long last our dear friend

pecunium is well and happily married. More perhaps on all that later, but for now I have a Chunga cover to exnihilate, and fresh from the triumph of finishing another chapter of my long overdue TAFF report for the next issue of BEAM, I am keenly aware that I have less than three months remaining if I'm really going to finish the whole report by Loncon3. Must get cracking...