Back From Far Flung Ports of Call

[akirlu]

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...

Comments

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Rhode Island Community College. Really? A whole one just for Rhode Island?

It has half a dozen campuses, but, yeah.

[athenais.livejournal.com]

Flickr stats, argh, don't get me started. They're so damn useless.

I've never been to western Mass. Would like to see it. Glad Terry is happy at last.

That is such a pretty photo.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

City of LA has nine, and that doesn't count neighboring incorporated cities. So, um.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Aw, thanks. I consider myself very much of a learner in the photography department. It's funny because I started taking more pictures first as a way to build up a morgue of reference photos for painting and drawing, which I still don't do hardly any of, and as a way to add visual interest to the blogging, which seems to have worked a bit better. Nowadays, I take pictures for taking pictures, for being able to do something when the light or the vista or the play of shadow or pattern is marvelous and I want to save it. Maybe some day I will actually start using this stuff for painting. I'd still like to do that, too...

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Thanks! The light was mostly flat and awful that day, so I had to think sideways to find ways to get an image I liked. Now after the fact, I'm sorry I didn't take more picture of the trip, but that seems like it's always the way...