Boolie

50,000

I’m two for two.

After reaching the 50,000 word goal for National Novel Writing Month in 2005, I did it again this year, hitting 50,737 words according to the NaNoWriMo validator.

And with two days left to spare!

Not quite the tour de force of 2005, where I crossed the 50,000 word mark a week early and ended up with 56,251 words by the end of the month.

The “novel”, such as it is, was a lot of fun to write but is still a complete mess. Sometimes a character will morph into another mid-chapter when I realize it’s really better suited for a different part of the book. There are huge gaps in the timeline, missing sections of the story, and all of that, so after the end of the month I’ll need to fire up my outliner and start making some structure out of the madness.

Not a bad show, though, especially given that I got behind in the early going until I mounted a steady comeback that took me over the top.

Three cheers for Boolie! Hip hip hooray! Hip hip hooray! Hip hip … shhhhh, quiet now, let’s keep it down. Sammy’s sleeping on my lap and Ellie is snoring behind me.

Spyhopping

After testing out the flash I wanted a picture of Scout looking down from the window seat similar to scrunchy Sammy but she wouldn’t cooperate. As both the oldest of the pets and the one who has been with us the longest, she’s the most inured to my hijinks. I was laying on the hardwood looking up, that’s the ceiling to the right, the molding right above her, and the picture window to the left.

While I was at first disappointed I couldn’t get the picture I wanted, I was delighted when she tilted her head just so and I was able to slide a few inches and position her like an orca spyhopping above the waterline, a cat’s ear in place of an orca’s head. So what started in disappointment ended with one of my favorite pictures of Scout.

No flash for this picture, there wasn’t anything to bounce it off of anyway.

Window Seat

Another flash test with Scout, also bounced off the ceiling as fill-flash.

One of the things I like about my new camera is the battery system, which is both more accurate and more detailed about how much life is left in the battery. All of my previous cameras used the same battery system, which had three indicators:

Your battery is full
Your battery is about to die
Your camera is shutting down

A slight exaggeration, but not by much. The new battery is one of the nice little touches to the 7D that doesn’t make the headlines.

The downside of course is that I can’t use the same batteries from my old cameras, and I found out this morning just how painful that could be. After visiting Ridgefield last weekend, I left the battery in the camera during the week so I could take pictures of the pets. Last night I put it in the charger but went to bed before it finished.

As you may have guessed by now, I got up before sunrise this morning to go back out to Ridgefield, arrived at the refuge and realized the 7D’s battery was still sitting in its charger. At home, 30 minutes away.

Sigh.

There’s a reason I get my camera gear together the night before I go hiking, a morning person I am not. On the plus side, I did bring my old Canon 10D along, so I wasn’t completely dead in the water. And water there was, it rained hard the entire time I was there.

It reminded me of a time years ago when I was in grad school and not long after I had gotten my first tripod. On a day hike in nearby West Virginia, I forgot my tripod and ended up missing a nice shot of a bat hanging in a tree. On my next trip, eager to avoid the same mistake, I checked, double-checked, and triple-checked that I packed the tripod before leaving.

Yet when I got to West Virginia, I realized I had brought the tripod, yet left the camera at home.

Happy Thanksgiving!

I haven’t had much time for blogging or learning the new camera with NaNoWriMo going on this month (after a slow start I’m currently at 44,195 words and barring unforeseen mishaps should cross the 50,000 word finish line before Monday). I did make sure the hot shoe worked by hooking up my flash and using it as fill-flash on one of my favorite subjects, sleeping in front of our biggest picture window with a bit of fall color behind her.

I’m reminded of two things:

How much I love my black-and-white cat
How much I need to clean the window

I Just Had a Terrible Thought

Halloween is this Saturday. What if a child comes to the door dressed as a baby hedgehog?

No Ellie no!

Black Coat, White Coat

Another view of the marmots from the colony near the Skyline Trail, two juveniles being watched by an adult. With the two youngsters side-by-side, you can better see the variability in their coloring, black coat on the left and white coat on the right.

Touchdown Celebrations Are Getting Out of Hand

Saturdays and Sundays in the fall are usually full of football and this weekend was no exception. Saturday morning I hit Ellie on a crossing route and she sprinted untouched into the endzone, dropped the ball (baby hedgehog), and peed on it. There weren’t enough yellow flags in the world to be thrown for this truly unsportsmanlike behavior and, after consultation with league officials, play was halted.

A moot point since the heavens soon poured forth and we headed inside, my wife decided it was a good opportunity to give the whole hedgehog family a good washing. Play resumed on Sunday with no showboating by my star receiver, she brought the ball back to me after each score, like she had been there before.

Good girl, Ellie, good girl.

First of the West

I was first exposed to the noisy chatter of red squirrels while hiking in West Virginia when I lived back east. I would see them a few times more before moving to Oregon, where I wouldn’t see or hear them again until my first real trip to Yellowstone in 2004. On my first hike in my first few hours in the park, I came across this red squirrel near the beach of Shoshone Lake on the Shoshone Lake Trail. I’ve since seen them quite a bit in the park, but good pictures usually elude me, so this first picture remains my favorite of my pictures of red squirrels in Yellowstone.

Aren’t I the Cutest?

I originally grabbed the camera to take a picture of Scout, but Sam started playing with his favorite string and I couldn’t resist a picture when he struck this pose. Though taken late in the morning next to a big picture window, there was so little light from outside that I turned on the lamp for a little more light. It has a much warmer color than the outside light but that goes well with Sam’s orange fur.

Unfortunately the pictures of Scout didn’t come out so well, my older cameras don’t work as well in these situations, but I’ll keep at it. She only gets in the tree if I put her there, especially with the weather getting colder she’s been re-colonizing the warm beds in my office.

We got the cat tree came from a fantastic pet store, Green Dog Pet Supply, a locally owned shop not far from our neighborhood in NE Portland. We also get our pet treats from Green Dog, and in fact they are the folks that turned us on to Wildside Salmon that the cats go crazy for. It is also the place where we get our Dog Toys to End All Dog Toys, the family of hedgehogs that Ellie loves so much. So Green Dog comes highly recommended not just from us, but all of our little ones as well.

Gang of Four

All hoary marmots have dark fur in their face and feet, in some it extends into the shoulders and legs. But this gang of four, part of a colony near the Skyline Trail in Mount Rainier National Park, had the most dark fur I’ve yet seen, mixing in over much of their bodies. Some of the others in the colony had more typical coloring and they all intermingled between two large rocks, so I was pleased when these four finally got together to pose for their family portrait.