Today's Activities

I guess we have a little bit of cabin fever going on, or something like that. We decided to go do a few fun things today. This morning, we went to the Lehnis Railroad museum because they had a special exhibit on date nails. These are nails that are driven into railroad ties when they are laid in order to track their age. That was a lot of fun. The girls really enjoyed it too. Here's some pictures.

While we were there we picked up a booklet on fun things to do in Central Texas. We saw a little blurb about the Regency Suspension Bridge and decided to go check that out too. Here's a map of where it is, about 30 minutes SE of Brownwood and only 889 miles from Wall Drug. Oh yeah, we took some pictures of that too. Make sure you check out the pictures to see an Axis deer. Well, sort of. It was on the other side of a game fence and I tried for a while to get a good picture of him. However, there were some other tourists driving around and this one old lady kept driving past every time I'd almost catch him. At one point I was only about ten feet away but there was some brush blocking my view. I was waiting for him to take a couple of steps when said old lady zoomed by in her Lincoln Towncar and spooked the deer. ah well...

We've been shooting a lot of pictures lately. I bought a Nikon D40 around Valentines day and I really like it. I bought a Magic Lantern DVD guide to it and it's really helped me to better understand photography. Reading Ken Rockwell has helped me too. So, I'm starting to take some better pictures because the SLR gives more control than a point and shoot and I'm starting to understand white balance, aperature, and some other basics. I have an old Nikon film SLR but I never really learned to use it well because by the time you got the film developed I could never remember what settings I'd used. But with the digital SLR, I can see the effect immediately and it's much easier to understand how the setting changes I just made have affected the output. I've shot almost 2000 pictures in the past 3 weeks. That sounds like a lot, but it can shoot 2.5 pictures per second. It would have cost about $450 to get that much film developed. The camera is a steal. I got it on a special deal at Amazon and paid about $460 for the camera, lens, extra battery. I'd highly recommend it if you're on the market for a new digital camera.

Other than that, not much is going on. We had so much fun stuff going on today that I forgot all about fertilizing the lawn. Managed to get to Home Depot and get the Scott's Turfbuilder but never got around to putting it on the lawn. Guess that will have to wait for another day. And for those of you up north who are still enjoying sub-zero temperatures, yes, I'm putting down weed n feed and watering the lawn already. :-) It's actually really starting to perk up down here. Anna took this picture the other day in front of the doctor's office: