adventure and excitement?

Well, it could be considered that.  

I declared war on back-yard-invading plants, for the first time in quite a while.  My primary goal was the blackberries, which had reclaimed a lot of territory along the back fence since I ripped them from the ground & installed the fence in 2003.  I did some fine damage to their plans today & piled plenty of debris into the recycle bin, then took a break.  I noted another task that was probably more important, and more difficult: the neighbor's bamboo had begun to sprout about 5 feet into my property, and just below a fine viburnum.  After my break I grabbed shovel, loppers and a hatchet and got to work on the new foe.  As the day waned I was exhausted but satisfied, having ripped out many tendrils beneath the surface and pushed all that I found back to the property line.  Several of the roots were over three feet long, and one massive one was closer to eight feet!  I am sure that somewhere beneath my plant, enough root remains to trouble me again - but for now I claim victory in this first skirmish!  

But oh boy do I ache...

updates?

Quiet times, with my wife back in school, daylight disappearing & plenty of cleaning up to do.  We've rearranged some furniture in the house, isn't that exciting?  Really, the most interesting stuff has come from the trees in their colorful autumn cloaks -- I'm trying to capture a falling leaf with a little (but not too much) blur in the shot.  So far so poor, at this point.  The shot at right is from my office building, testing a few camera tricks.  I used white-balance bracketing, so it took a picture & processed it with 'normal' color, a slightly cool and a slightly warm color balance.  In the case of autumn leaves, the warm balance made the colors richer but still natural.  Fun with cameras!