cold weather

It got cold here, with the low supposed to be -11 F and the high the next day of 10 F. [SARCASM] This is proof we don't have to worry about global warming anymore [/SARCASM]. I went out with my camera in the morning and took this image of some water dripping out of the aqueduct drain over a little creek.

 Aqueduct drain

Then I headed overland to Longfellow Pond. The snow was cold enough to squeek. Someone had cleared the snow off of an area to skate, but the ice was pretty atrocious (bumpy and the surface was hardened partially melted and frozen snow). I took a panoramic image to try to turn into a little planet. I need to work on how I fill out the middle a bit more, but as a proof of concept shot I think it worked out ok. This is from approximately the center of the cleared ice in the middle of the pond. Processing it did bring my computer to its knees though, maybe 4 GB of memory isn't enough after all.

Planet Longfellow

New Header

I made a new header image for this blog and uploaded it. I am not 100% happy with how it worked out, but maybe 85%, and I think it is a big improvement over the boring blue rectangle that was there before.

The image is a composite from Wyoming. On the right I am climbing the SW arete of Lost Temple Spire in the Deep Lake area of the Wind River Range. Dawn took the photo. The background is the Teton Range from the summit of Teewinot. The Grand is on the left and Mt Owen is on the right I think. I was going to put a climbing silhouette on the left too, but decided that didn't work out so well. Maybe some day I'll get ambitious and make some different header images and make them switch or something.

In case I do change it, here is the header image I'm talking about.

Sledding fun

A winter storm blew through a few nights ago with enough snow to cancel school for 2 days. The snow started out wet and heavy and weighed down and broke many branches. The second day the sky was blue, the sun was shining, and we went sledding over on the aqueduct. First we had to get all bundled up and walk there trading off carrying the sled.

Then P and T headed down the hill. 

But what goes down must walk back up.

Just heading down the hill became a bit boring. Someone had built a kicker at the bottom so of course the goal was to jump off of that. Unfortunately steering was not so easy with these sleds.

EEEEEEEEEK!!!!!!!!

Liftoff

Houston, we have a negative on that orbit, brace for impact.

OOF!

In addition to sledding people slid and tumbled down a shorter steeper hill. A good time was had by all (at least some of the time). As far as we know no children were permanently harmed in the making of this blog post.

lamest guarantee ever

Check out this guarantee on some batteries I recently got from China...

That's right, they will repair or replace any device damaged by these batteries provided the batteries have not been charged by the user or device. Of course it does caution you to charge before use.

I am going to get my sister to charge them for me, so I'll be fine.