Sorry for the silence (again). (How many posts have I started with that?) (Don’t look, I don’t want to know.)

Things have been hectic. Buried at work, feeling sort of lost outside of work. Not been fun. But this morning I looked up as we were leaving one of our school’s fall festivals and thought this looked a little like I felt – cloudy, but I know the blue sky is up there. Just need to get back to it.

Canon EOS-1D Mark II N, EF 70-200 mm f/2.8 L IS USM, ISO 200, 1/3200. f/5.6

You may have read that football fans kind of trashed the University of Georgia campus a week and a half ago. It’s a seasonal right of passage of some sort – trash everything. Apparently someone didn’t get in on the action and decided to catch up …

Canon G10, 18 mm, ISO 200, 1/50, f/4.0

But by afternoon, it had mostly been cleaned up …

We were headed out to dinner and I paused in the garage, lifted a camera to my eye and started to frame up a shot. The wife called out from behind, “WHAT ARE YOU DOING?”

A bit startled, I turned and said there was some nice light falling on Buster … she rolled her eyes and sighed. Small boy then says, “Women, they just don’t understand our love of cars, do they?”

I might keep him.

Canon G10, 30.5 mm, ISO 200, 1/320, f/4.5

One day a week I walk the small boy to school. It’s only a short distance and the Mrs. does it the other four days of the week. Friday is my one morning where I don’t have a class or meeting, so off we go.

We joke that he has a “something shiny” problem – when dispatched to do something around the house, he’ll often forget what it is he’s supposed to be doing and do whatever strikes him as interesting. (Usually reading while perched precariously on the edge of something.)

He gave me a hard time this past week as I stopped to shoot some quick photos. I probably deserved it, but he was still on time for school.

Canon G10, 18 mm, ISO 200, 1/25, f/4.0

This has not been a creative weekend. It has been busy, but not overly creative. Mostly yard work, home work, driving around looking at things and computer work. Which, to be honest, I had hoped would be done today, but there’s still this long list of geeky-coding-grading type things I need to get to …

I did get the two home Macs up and running on Snow Leopard and it seems to have gone off without a hitch. I got so comfortable with my computer skills this morning, in fact, I extricated a Windows Vista laptop we acquired a month or so ago from the closet … and I turned it on.

If you know me, you know I’m a Mac guy. I like things that work. Okay, I like a lot of things that don’t always work, but those are fun things that I can play with. When it comes to, you know, working, I want things that work. Hence the Apple products all over the house – the wife has one, I have two, the kids have one, we have iPhones and iPods and Time Machines … we’re like a freaking Apple showroom. (Okay, from the late 2007-early 2008 Apple era. But if someone wants to send me a shiny new MacBook Air or octo Mac Pro, I’m more than happy to be updated …)

But I haven’t really used Windows Vista. And I feel … well … weird about that. I’m supposed to be objective, I’m supposed to be open. I’m supposed to look for solutions to problems and, while I do not have a computer problem right now, I get asked lots of questions about computers and I always say the same thing – just spend the money and buy the Mac. But that answer comes as much from momentum and what I think is a well-founded educational and anecdotal background than it does from actual usage.

(Okay, writing this is making me queasy. Really, really queasy. Just so you know.)

So, I think I will try to use this Vista machine for a bit. Not for everything, maybe just as a little road machine, back and forth to work, keep track of email and some web surfing. I want to be able to get past the “it’s different” phase, which will be a big stumbling block. Because the buttons are in the wrong place and the tactile quality kind of sucks …

And I won’t do anything of any high value on it because I do not have a backup schema in place for it – no archiving, no DVD drive on it, no extra external hard drives.

This is my Week of Living Dangerously.

(Okay, drama over …)

Canon EOS 5D Mark II, EF 35 mm f/1.4 L USM, ISO 100, 1/40, f/1.4