The Girl and I just returned from our nine day vacation with her family, and we had a wonderful time. Some of the views, and the activities, will be remembered for a long time to come. I just got the entire set of pictures onto Flickr, but you can see one of the better ones below, a view of our ship, from the beach on Labadee, Haiti.

The urge to smoke while on vacation was almost non-existent. As a matter of fact, I completely forgot to put on a nicotine patch a couple of days. Add that to the fact that cigarettes were, for the most part, completely unavailable, and the week was pretty smooth sailing, on that front. It also didn’t hurt that food was always available.

Hopefully I’ll have time to expound on our wonderful vacation in the next few days.

What a perfect weekend to get away. The weather agreed with us, for the most part. With the exception of some strong winds, and short, but heavy rainfall on Friday night, this weekend was picturesque as The Girl and I traveled down to her old stomping grounds, to go camping on Loft Mountain in Shenandoah National Park.

We arrived a bit after 10:00 PM on Friday night, to find our tent already set up, a fire going strong, and drinks being poured by the remainder of our camping crew. We woke up early on Saturday a little worse for wear, and, after a great breakfast over the camp fire, we set out to do some hiking and generally interact with nature. Saturday night was spent recuperating from our day’s hike, and enjoying more good food and drink, and a ‘dramatic re-enactment’ from The Girl as entertainment.

This weekend was exactly what I needed. I really appreciated being able to relax and take my mind off of everything but the world around me for a couple of days. No worrying about work, or fretting over Ole Miss football, or planning for the wedding, was just what the doctor ordered, and I’m very appreciative of the rest of the crew for really doing the bulk of the planning to make the weekend happen.

The scenery that we encountered was breathtaking, and I only wished that the pictures that I and The Girl took could honestly do it justice. I leave you now with a photo of our fateful camping crew, as taken by L, she of the engagement photos, and a photographer so knowledgeable of the ways of her craft that she is actually able to be in pictures that she takes:

(click on either photo for a link to the full set)

Much thanks need to go out to our very good friend L, she of the photo-journalistic tendencies, for going with The Girl and I this past Sunday to take some engagement pictures. I really wasn’t feeling very good about myself on Sunday, hungover after a typical Rebel football Saturday, and really feeling like I just wanted to curl up on the couch and sleep my way through until Monday. We were going to take ‘a few’ pictures, and ended up with upwards of 700, but after seeing the finished product I’m so glad we did it, and I’m glad that L was taking the pictures. She helped pull us out of our initial awkwardness a bit faster than a stranger would have, and she had no problems giving us direction, and coming up with great ideas, and you can really see the care, and the love that she put into the finished product, and for that, The Girl and I will have to spend the rest of our lives trying to find a way to thank her, because these pictures are something that we’ll keep with us for the rest of our lives, and that’s priceless.

The picture above is one of my favorites of those that L has shown us so far. All in all, as per usual, The Girl looks much better in most of them than I do, but I’m alright with the idea that I’m the one marrying up. View the full set here, and thanks again to L for such a fun afternoon, and such a wonderful gift.

When I launched the site’s redesign a few weeks ago, it was only partially complete. It was materially enough complete to publish, and I was excited about getting it up and running as quickly as I could. There are, though, small little tweaks, fixes, enhancements, additions and subtractions, outside of the basic additions of posts, or updating outbound links. As an example, you can see the Frequently Asked Questions page. I wanted to update the look of the past editions of this site, to give more information, and to give it a cleaner look than was employed previously. As another example, though, read the answers to many of the questions related to my content management through Wordpress. They’re don’t make a lick of sense within my current site architecture, and need to be updated. So it’s little things like that that I spend my time on, when I do have a fleeting moment or two to devote to the site, often at the detriment of actual posts. It’s just as important, though, at least to me, as the posts, and so I do those things so that the site can be considered complete in my own eyes. It’s a labor of love, I know.

With that in mind, 0ne of the pages sorely in need of attention is the about page. It has served it’s purpose in the past, for sure, but I really wanted to add to it, to sort of revitalize it along with the rest of the site. To help accomplish this, I e-mailed The Mom about three weeks ago. I wanted to know if she had any older childhood pictures of me in digital format, because I wanted to add a few to the site. Of course, she didn’t. I asked as politely as possible for a favor, the 1,743,597th favor that I’ve asked my mother for since I was born, to be exact, and within a few weeks, after I’d forgotten, actually, I received the gift of twenty-something pictures from all steps of my childhood journey through this world. The pictures brought back memory after memory, but, as anyone from my generation knows when looking at pictures of themselves as a child, it was hard to distinguish, when viewing, if the coloring in the photos were due to aging, or the god awful outfits we were forced to wear as children of the seventies.

After downloading all of the photos, I spent my lunch break at work doing some color correction on the photos in Photoshop, and was amazed at the results. I use Photoshop CS2, and am generally a huge fan of all things Adobe, anyways, but the ease of which I was able to bring life back to the past surprised even me, and the results are obvious, as you can surely see:

The pictures seemed to jump off the screen, to the point that I actually began to think about the implications of such a process. Imagine a world in which history doesn’t fade; where the photo of your great, great grandparents, passed down through the years, can be saved, possibly forever, for future generations. Or where your parents wedding photographs can be displayed at their 50th wedding anniversary, as if they were taken yesterday. Of course, the beauty of originality can’t be overstated, but the safety of a digital alternative, brought to a world in which wear and tear is inevitable, can bring an assurance to those important event that we want to be remembered. Or even those moments where our mothers put us in frilly jumpsuits and gave us girlish hair cuts.

Such moments may not go down as legendary in the annals of history; maybe not even my own personal history, but they serve my purpose now. The update of the about page should be done shortly, and I’ve got a brand new set of pictures, which I’ve decided to share on Flickr for all to see. Some, I like, but they’re all there, even the ones that I’m less than proud of. Maybe, just maybe, they’ll be around for a while.

The cherry trees along the Tidal Basin will be blooming later in the spring, but you know what? I’ll probably be back at work before then. So I figured, as I walked last Tuesday, that it might be prudent on my part to take a picture of them now. I particularly like this picture because I was able to focus on the branches in the foreground, which gave the rest of the picture a hazy, out-of-focus quality that makes the path and the bridge in the background seem more like a drawing than a photograph.