I told you about Christmas, but not about my annual Dec. 24 ritual. That's the Xmas Eve Bowl, which is a football game played locally. Due to the warm December weather, snow was hardly anywhere to be found--until the night before the game, when about three inches fell.
The game features former high school players, both those living here and those visiting for the holidays. It's not exactly touch football, is it? They have been playing this game for maybe 25 years, so it's a holiday tradition around here. I played in the game one year, but my main role is to take pictures and serve as the arbiter in case of disputes. It's just a fun time together for everyone.
This year, temperatures were about 20F for the game, which was played on the local high school field. Here's a quick snap or two of the action ...
Like the issue just before Christmas, the edition of the paper after Christmas also had an early deadline, but once those duties were completed, my wife, younger son and I left for a short trip to visit my in-laws--my wife's dad and brothers and sisters.
We left at about 1:30 p.m. on Saturday, the 30th. During one of our pit stops, I saw a rather forbidding sign. I took it that way, anyway ...
We reached out destination, and our first visit was to my wife's youngest sister. She had a new, hyperactive dog, who made friends with David ...
In fact, most of the visit involved talking about the dog and watching a TV program about some animal control people in Phoenix, Ariz. Sadly, that's about all that happened. It got very boring. A waste of a visit. I mean, you can watch TV any time. But we don't visit very often. Make the most of it, no?
We stayed there so late, we arrived at my FIL's place just before he went to bed. It was already past 9 p.m. In another hour or so, we did the same.
There was a little light rain starting as we arrived at my FIL's place. When we got up on Sunday, the 31st, it was raining. Heavily. On Dec. 31. I mean, we've visited there in winter when it was below zero and with about a foot of snow on the ground. There were some remnants of snowpiles here and there, but here's what it looked like out the front door ...
The rain kept falling, but it didn't dampen the spirits of the local bird population. The bird feeders were filled with seed, suet feeders were stocked, and the birds were celebrating, even though the ground was bare. Not that there were worms in the ground or fresh seeds on the bushes, of course. Anyway, here's some of the photos I took (taking into consideration that light conditions weren't good and I was shooting though a window).
First off, a soggy squirrel, who came right up to the window where I was poised with my camera ...
We rarely see cardinals were we live, so I badly wanted to take a picture of the cardinals I saw. This was the best one I got ...
We also saw this woodpecker, who was dining on the suet ...
And while most of the chickadees were going for the seeds, not all of them were ...
... although one of them seems to be having second thoughts.
Alas, I had taken just one set of batteries along, and I forgot to charge them up before leaving. Before long, the dreaded red warning indicator was on in the viewfinder. I took many pictures after that, but before long the sign in the viewfinder said "Batteries exhausted." The camera was done for.
Various sisters and brothers visited during the day, and we talked and visited. We caught up on people, and I showed some of the pictures I had taken during our most recent visit (Memorial Day) on my laptop (before its meltdown after we got home). They enjoyed the show.
That night, New Year's Eve, snow and freezing rain was in the forecast, and we spent the night the way much of Wisconsin spent it--watching the Green Bay Packers' game against the Chicago Bears, while nibbling on chips and enjoying some sodas. Yes, folks, that's as wild as it gets there on New Year's Eve.
The game ended about 10:45 p.m. We switched stations to watch 2007 arrive at Times Square. (New York City is an hour ahead of us.) My wife and I opted to head for bed at about 11:15. But we didn't go to sleep until a little after midnight. ;)
The snow and freezing drizzle overnight wasn't much--less than a half inch. In fact, the sun was up during New Year's Day morning. Take a guess what happened while my wife was watching the Rose Bowl parade that morning.
The world's most beautiful bird, in my opinion, is the blue jay. One of them was visiting the bird feeders that morning. Sitting in the sun just as nice as you please, brilliant blues and white, as I begged my batteries to work for just one more minute. They totally refused. I swear I heard that blue jay laughing at me.
As planned, we headed for home at about 2 p.m. The trip home was uneventful. We got back home about 6 p.m. On Tuesday, we visited my mom, and later I discovered my laptop's problems.
The laptop is back in operation, after re-re-reformatting and re-re-reinstalling programs. All went well except for one thing: The backup CD I made of files and photos I wanted to keep isn't working. At least, I haven't been able to transfer the files from the CD back to the laptop's re-re-reformatted hard drive. The files are there--you can see them in My Computer--but I can't get them to transfer for some reason.
(Any advice? I'm using Roxio's Easy CD Creator 5, which came with the laptop.)
The funny thing was, I was thinking while doing the backup that maybe I ought to transfer the files to one of my thumbdrives. But I opted for the CD backup. And now ...
It's not a major tragedy. The files I wanted most of all were the edited photo JPGs I have been uploading to Photobucket over the last year or so. I still have the original images on my desktop, but I wanted to keep those edited files, too. So far, no good. Grumble, grumble.
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