A short followup to my travel woes that I wrote about the other day....

It took almost three days, but I was finally able to get through to United Airlines today, to reschedule my trip back home to Japan. I'd originally been scheduled to visit a dear friend with a two-day stopover in Milwaukee, but that had to be canceled when United decided it would rather use the plane that was supposed to service Cleveland to instead service its hub in Chicago. (Probably a smart business move that benefits the most people, but the short end of the stick is [...]
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I was supposed to be visiting a dear friend in Milwaukee today, but the cold snap hitting most of The States created havoc with the air system and so I'm still at my folks' place in Ohio (where at the moment it's -12°F / -24°C with strong gusty wind). So today between trying to (and failing to) contact the airline to figure out my schedule, I tried shooting the birds out on the back deck again, as I did the other day. It was cold.

I was in all-manual mode today, with both focus and exposure. The Voigtländer 125mm has [...]

Well, that's a bummer. The forecast was for some bad weather overnight, so I thought I'd be smart and get a hotel near the airport to avoid having to drive up tomorrow for a 2PM flight out of Cleveland, but as soon as I got into my room at the hotel and checked tomorrow's flight, I found out that my flight for tomorrow (Monday) was canceled and reschedule for Thursday(!), but that's only the domestic part... my flight back to Japan seems to have disappeared.

My mom had just dropped me off, but I didn't have a way to contact [...]
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The other day I posted some Goldfinch photos that I took on my folks' back deck. I included that post's lead photo on my Google Plus "Select Blog Photos 2014" photo album, where I put a photo or two from most of my blog posts.

Google Plus has an "Auto Awesome" feature that can automatically do things to copies of your photos if you opt in, and in this case it decided to add the snowfall to a copy of the goldfinch photo. It's a simple snowfall animation that repeats every 4/5th of a second. Simple but nice.

They've since [...]

The pictures of snow play I posted earlier today of my brother and his family reminded me that there's much from last year's trip here to Ohio that I still have not posted. At the time I'd done one Snow Play post, so I guess today is a followup.

These pictures of Anthony (age 10 at the time) sledding in the back yard are from exactly one year ago today.

He gained confidence as time went... here's a shot from 10 minutes later; he seems much more composed....