Squirrels nibbling on a wire out in the street left my folks without Internet for the last 24 hours... now I know what it must have felt like to live in the stone age. At first I figured that it must be a general outage, so we didn't call the service provider, Time-Warner Roadrunner, for a long time, but when we finally did, they came out fairly quickly and replaced the whole set of wires, and now everything is running nicely.

Now that I can connect again, I see that I have 149 new email messages, so I'm Well and [...]
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Since the tractor ride the other day, Anthony has gotten to steer the small riding lawn mower while he sits on the seat in front of me and I work the foot pedals. As you might imagine of a six year old, he can't get enough of it.

As we were riding the mower around the lake this afternoon, I was struck, as I often am, by the beauty of the view, so I stopped the tractor. Anthony protested "I want to drive more", but I asked him to appreciate the view. Kids take every good thing that comes their [...]

My laptop, which I'm using for photo processing during my month in Ohio, found its disk full after a few days of photos of Anthony's cousins. The 80-gig disk needed a quick upgrade.

On Monday I ordered an "On-The-Go Pro 500GB 7200RPM Triple Interface FW800/FW400/USB 2.0 Storage Solution" from Other World Computing, and it arrived Tuesday. It's a small external housing with Firewire and USB interfaces, and holds the same kind of disk as the laptop; I got the 500 gig version, with the faster 7200 RPM disk, which will help with Lightroom (which benefits greatly from faster disk)..

I [...]
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Yesterday's rock-throwing party ended abruptly when Grandpa showed up with a tractor and wagon. We loaded the kids (and an adult for safety) and headed off...

Anthony again had Grandma's old camera, and so again after loading both our sets of pictures into Lightroom in the evening, I could interleave the photos and view the event from two perspectives, something I'm finding that I really enjoy.

In the photo above you can see Anthony taking a picture....

After a trip around, Mike swapped with Marty for the next circuit....

Anthony and I were playing at the sandpile when a gaggle of relatives passed us on the way down to the lake, apparently so the kids could throw rocks into the water (which is real entertainment when you're a kid, or, if there are good skipping rocks, of any age).

I wasn't sure how many rocks were down by the lake, so I had Anthony fill a bucket with pebbles from the driveway...

As I've written before, Anthony has recently shown an interest in photography, and it's gone up a notch here in the countryside with all his cousins. Grandma's [...]