"I have been but little in," said Ninian hastily...

I've an update or two owing: various things happening and the first books read of 2013. But that will have to come later. In the meantime, I have for your entertainment pictures of cats and pictures from the holidays.

"Red sky in the morning, shepherd take warning"

This shepherd thinks he will just go back to sleep for another hour...

I'll post entries with separate links later, but the photos from my trip to Vermont are online.

Something odd happened in the camera, so they came out all jumbled; sorting by ID# is messed up somehow. I'll resort them properly later too.

In the meantime while I'm angsting about Life, here are much more important cat pictures (and snow).


A sample:

I took some time this morning to add photos to several of my Fotki albums, and I rearranged a bit. There's now a wargames folder (for the blurry or overexposed shots of miniatures), more pictures of cats (natch), a couple of birds, some interesting ice and snow, and pictures from a trip to Rock Creek Park with my friend Susanne and her dog Mango. I'll caption them when I have time.

Honestly, have you ever seen such a dodgy-looking crew?

:-)

Also added new albums with photos from recent rambles with da grrlz, my trip to Delware with Neta, and trips to Newport News (including Operation Rapid Transit).

I've been out of the loop lately in more ways than biking. I feel as if I've somehow just missed a couple of months of some of the things I normally do, as if my days somehow got shorter. I've completely fouled up a couple of gaming commitments, I've not yet mailed some things I need to mail, I've allowed my 'sort these papers out' pile to become immense, I've not been keeping up my journal, and I've been missing out on communications with others. I'm going to try to fix that all, though it will take a while.

First of all, gr_c17 mentioned that he had heard from Da Grrlz recently, and it prompted me to check (as I had been meaning to do) and see if they had posted anything from Slovenia or Ireland yet. They're having difficulty getting good Internet access in rural Ireland (somehow not surprising :-), but they had loaded a lot of information about their travels in the former Yugoslavia that are really worth reading about and a lot of beautiful pictures that you shouldn't miss.

Most of all, the account of their hang-gliding exploits had me both scared and envious--I don't think I would ever be brave enough to try it, but it sounds wonderful, and the shots that the intrepid and ever-photographing Melissa took are amazing! If they were 'just' photos taken by a pro from a plane they would be beautiful. That one of my friends took them while hanging under a giant sail makes them (to me) astounding and truly awe-inspiring. Check them out by going here and clicking on 'paragliding'. And don't forget to read Chris's evocative description, The Day We Got To Be Birds. What wonderful, adventurous friends I have! :-)

Some very nice wallpapers here. Almost as as good as Undiscovered Scotland's.

*sigh*

peaceful_fox, you might like this photo post.

Military history friends, take a look at this post.

Many thanks to my friend Nick for this link to The Empire That Was.

A Russian photographer in 1907 perfected a technique of taking three black and white photos through red, green, and purple colored lenses and then projecting the developed images back through colored lenses and combining the three projected images onto a screen. Did you get that? Anyway, they were the world's first color photographs. He was hired by Czar Nicholas II to take photographs of the Russian empire and they are quite interesting--color photographs decades before they were common.