The country sure is beautiful in this area. I took this picture just north of where I work back a couple of months ago when the wheat fields were golden. Summer is gone. I don't feel like I took as much advantage of the area as I could of. I had hoped to get out a bunch.

Ah well... no use having regrets. I am looking forward to winter (but not the cold). Nice thing about the area is that it doesn't go totally grey. I noticed last winter when I took that train ride to visit my brother Chris and his family, how much of a contrast there was between the evergreen country and the grey Minnesota and Illinois areas. I am hoping to get a bunch of snowy landscape pics and the like.

Haven't been taking that many pictures over the past month. The weather has been very bland. I missed the week or so of leaves turning. It was colorful and beautiful, but I just didn't feel the urge to pull out the camera.

Starting to feel like taking pictures again. I am waiting for a good opportunity and some good light. I am back to carrying my camera with me everywhere. Feels good to do that... though I think it hovers that border of being a dedicated artist and a male tourist type fellow (ie gadget man). I try to keep it simple. Sometimes I wonder why I didn't study photography exclusively when I was in college. I took a lot of photography classes and spent a ton of time in the dark rooms. I love it so much. Its about being out there and in it. It my two favorite things rolled into one, hiking and art.

I want to get used to shooting people more and not just landscapes. I need to get more comfortable with it. Living in a inner city for years, I got in the habit of not being overly friendly to people on the street and avoiding too much contact. I think to get into doing street photography, I would have to gain back some of that small town mentality I grew up with.

My cat Cali has been sick lately. She has an upper respiratory infection. I have to give her Biomox twice a day. Plus they found she has a thyroid condition. She has got pretty skinny lately. I just thought it was her age.. she is 18 after all. I have had her since I was 10. Evidently the thyroid condition has been making her so thin. Been giving her a half tablet of Methimazole everyday. She has actually been gaining a little weight.

It was a really cool image. Funny image to see an x-ray of. I always find that kind of stuff entertaining. I was amused that I had to go to a pharmacy to pick up some of Cal's medicine. The bottle had her name on it. : )

Here are more photos of my vacation trip to Michigan. This is a series of the Bocce Ball Tournament we played on the beach. Looking back now, I wish I had taken notes so I could have given more of a play by play. As it is I remember quite a bit. I hope you enjoy them.

Of the Michigan vacation there is still more to come. I will be finished with the shots of the fireworks fairly soon and will post them. After that there is still shots of the dune jumping and then a shots from all during the trip. Stay tuned. :)

This is also a test of my new way of posting images and tiles. I wrote php scripts that should make it a lot easier to get tile indexes like this one up. Now all I have to do is make the images, tile swatches, and write some text... rather than coding every html page and link. Makes things a lot easier.

"Chronologically this is one of the last images I took that day. It was long after the bocce ball tournament was over. I wanted to get a good introduction image so I threw all the balls out on the sand and shot until I got something I was happy with."