and now, back from the beach!

My health has been as poor as my schedule busy! The head-cold before & during the star party faded, but chills and profound lethargy struck me at the Oregon coast on Thursday and Friday. I tried to act healthy Saturday only to collapse later in the day, and a headache joined the parade Sunday morning. Thankfully, a few good meds took care of it after a while, and the best weather of the weekend hit when I was doing my best. Nothing like a sunny day on the OR coast - rarity has a lot to do with that! Now to wash out all the smell of campfire smoke...

just back from the Oregon star party..

Here's the summary version, graphic from a weather station nearby (with my annotations)
http://www.granitic.net/update/astro/osp08wx.jpg

A fine time, many new sights and a new obeserving pin -- more later, must crash..
Images at http://picasaweb.google.com/alphaPDX/OregonStarPartyXXI

ugh - bad timing

I'm home with a head-cold, when I should be preparing for the Oregon Star Party.  Nothing like being exhausted before a long drive + several days of sleep deprivation!  We'll see how this turns out.. but it's an inauspicious start.  Weather forecast is looking good, and other than some shopping we have everything we'll need. I need only get healthy!

2-2-busy..

plus my pocket-PC is missing, which had the first draft for a Waldo report.  I had it on Monday, but that doesn't count on Wednesday!  We're resting up for our pilgrimage to OSP - see the website at http://www.oregonstarparty.org - then join us!  Sooner or later, relevant posts will resume..

In the meantime, I had scratched my glasses at Waldo; I now have glare-free, scratch-resistant lenses instead.  Not cheap, but it could have been worse.

camp stories, part 1

Well, we're back from 2 consecutive weekends of camping. Both were quite fun, and quite different.

Timothy Lake is near Portland, therefore more crowded & 'used'. We arrived Thu. evening to blue skies & fairly warm wx; if we really wanted to swim this was the time.. but we didn't. It turned out that we were the only family here that day (my sister was in an adjacent campground).

Friday we hiked to the other camp & found my sister's site pretty fast; we visited for awhile then decided to take a longer walk. Without food or map, we proceeded toward Clackamas Lake; it was a pretty walk but we turned around when the lake failed to appear in a timely manner. Bugs were fairly few this weekend, but cooler air & clouds began to take over. The rest of our extended family began arriving as the day waned, but we were pretty spread out between the two camps. We visited several of them before turning in.

Drizzle and fog greeted us Saturday; good thing firewood was reasonably priced! It was too cool for swimming, and the campground wasn't convenient for other pursuits.. so we did some driving. First stop was Clackamas Lake, probably 15 minutes past our hike's turnaround point; it's an interesting jade-green lake and worth a visit. I had seen it a few times in the 1970s, possibily even paddling on a rubber raft there. From there it was on to Little Crater Lake, an amazing sight even after a couple of decades. It may not be a tiny volcano.. but whatever it really is, the color is reminiscent of the big one.

We returned to the camp, gathered our taco-salad ingredients & proceeded to the other campground, where others in the family assembled their contributions and covered the table. A fine meal followed, then the huge family photo. After a while by the fire (and three pretty poor birthday-songs to people who deserved better), we headed back to camp. Hard to believe the camp trip was already over! The next day we broke camp, headed home for 2 days of cleaning gear and clothes.. and set out again!

Images at http://picasaweb.google.com/alphaPDX/August08 -- the first half of the photos are from Timothy Lake.

no news but still talking..

Well, I have glasses again - a bit more reflective (not me the glasses :) but they'll do nicely. I also found another gore-tex hiking hat for $10, not as stylish as the mustard-colored wonder ($30) but again it'll do. I'm waiting for a classic lens to arrive for my digital slr, a Minolta 35-105mm ("new" style); that will act like a 52-156 mini-telephoto in 35mm equivalence. They stopped making these in 1990 or so (the "old" style was from 1985, I believe), but it's reputed to be in original condition. I need to stop buying lenses for a while; I nearly didn't get this but for backpacking it is small and light, supposedly like new, and a great complement to my 17-35 zoom. Speaking of hikes: my bride and I continue to recover from ailing knees (tendonitis & bursitis respectively), and our hiking season has been drastically altered.

The photo at right shows the beer* I had tonight - it fit extremely well in my hand, and bottles should Not do that! The bottle has a fine dent that feels quite spooky, like I had partly crushed it.. but like I say, it felt really nice.

* Oh, I hadn't mentioned that I have celiac disease, no wheat/rye/barley products for me. The 'beer' above is made from fermented sorghum, and I thank Anheuser-Busch for making Redbridge Ale for people like me. Five years ago when I made my own beer you'd have never heard that from me; but times change..

Aggravations & exhilirations
While on the way to replace the lost glasses, I lost a week-old GoreTex hat -- arrgh. Then on Thursday my wife and I went hiking with co-workers, and I lost a large lens-cap for my camera. Seems that things are just trying to get away from me!
On Friday, we went north to see Stevie Wonder at the White River Amphitheater - great stuff! We got back to PDX around 3AM, it's now 9 and I should be sleeping.. ah well. Legs are feeling the ache from the hike (climb!) of Dog Mt in the Gorge, where my lens-cap awaits. I'm 0-2 on lost and found (glasses & hat), so will need to shop for a new lens cover soon. Took a few fine shots of Mt. Rainier, only to find today that I had dust on the sensor. Seems that I'm complaining a lot, must get my mind right...

Fourth of July retro

We had a fine time at the Vancouver fireworks show.. mostly. We set up shop in a large field, then sat for over three hours and literally chilled as we awaited darkness. The setting moon was a fine sight. When the fireworks began our entire area was in motion -- two huge trees were blocking the view! I had expected the shots to go much higher, and the trees would be nice foreground objects, but this was not what we came for! We shifted over and saw the rest of the fine show, but many of my images were now off-tripod. Still, I liked the effect of shorter shutter speeds, so no big deal. The big deal came later, when I realized that I no longer had my glasses - somewhere in our shuffling in the dark, they unclipped from my shirt and disappeared. So the rest of the 3-day weekend I've been using reading glasses, so that was/will be an expensive loss. Check out a few of the images at http://picasaweb.google.com/alphaPDX/Fireworks