Emoji

🚘+📷=😎

Birthday = Thursday:♋️

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Categorized as Site Stuff

Main Music

We went to Music On Main in Victor last night. It’s been a while and I was surprised at the turnout! I don’t go for the bands, the music is just an excuse for me to wiggle my little hips and no ass while I walk around taking pictures.

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Categorized as The Valley

Pipers Friends

Hmmm, this is pretty weird. Piper was hanging out on the edge of the deck when a family of magpies showed up. They were dancing around in front of her and she didn’t budge, and they didn’t care she was there. Really?

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Categorized as The Valley

Prime Photo

Amazon’s got a photo contest going on so I thought I’d submit a shot of me in Amazon rapture mode with my Fire HD and Echo in my backyard.

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Categorized as Alexa

Flyby

I grabbed a couple of shots of the New Horizons flyby of Pluto this morning. It was pretty exciting watching it happen live on the cool app I downloaded from NASA.

Update: One of the first images is coming through:

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Categorized as Various

Rain Grill

A little rain didn’t stop our dinner tonight.

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Categorized as House

Backup

Last night I was testing my desktop for current drivers and noticed an Intel update for my hard drives. I started the update process, waded through warning after warning that I better know what I was doing (I didn’t :-) and halfway through, everything stopped cold… Uh oh! Rebooting didn’t work, my computer was dead.

On 1/31/14 I bought some backup software from Macrium, setup a daily incremental backup with a full backup every Wednesday, and it’s been cloning a disk image over to my Western Digital 4TB USB 3.0 drive flawlessly for a year and a half, and now I need it.

I scared the crap out of Piper as CD’s were flying off my bookcase as I calmly looked for the Macrium Rescue CD I had initially created. I finally found it, inserted and rebooted. As it was loading I’m thinking all I have to do is select the most recent incremental image file from my WD drive on F: and let it do it’s thing.

The knot in my stomach did a backflip when I didn’t see my F: drive in the drive list. There was a message that USB 3.0 was not supported and I had to recreate my rescue CD with 3.0 drivers. Sure, if I had a working computer to do that little chore!

Then, the solution struck me! I pulled the WD cable out of the USB 3.0 port and plugged it into one of my powered USB 2.0 ports on the front of my box, and rebooted the CD. Sure enough, there she was, and I restored my system successfully. It was slower than it should have been, trudging along on 2.0, but hey.

Bottom line: great backup software and a dedicated backup device sitting on my desk, saved my ass! btw: I just upgraded to Macrium 6.0 and the new rescue disk supports USB 3.0 :-)

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Categorized as House

Sundry

(Sundry: various items not important enough to be mentioned individually). I just got back from a quick little clear my head jaunt to Missoula and emptied out the dregs from my camera. There was a great shot of Cat and Dave, Brian playing drums and some walk around Missoula shots. Oh wait, I just mentioned them individually!

What the hell, click below to see them…

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Bubbles

A conglomerate of recent spurting Yellowstone rockerage for your visual consumption.

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Categorized as Travels

First Flight

Riley’s hot air balloon flight the other day earned him the First Flight Ceremony from Ross’s crew. I’ve done a bit of research on this and the ceremony ranges from a simple champagne toast with a story about the tradition to a more sadistic one where champagne is poured on the head and dirt rubbed in to celebrate the return to earth.

I think this shot that his wife Jess got pretty much shows which category his ceremony fell into, along with the fact that he took a shower when he got home :-)

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Categorized as Family

Yellowstone

The kids needed to get back home to the Seattle area, and they wanted to visit Yellowstone, so I came up with a scheme where we both drive up to West Yellowstone, I park my truck in town and Steph and I slide into their ride and we use my senior pass to get into the park for free. It worked perfectly.

We had a great time in the park, took a ton of pictures, watched Old Faithful go off, then the kids drove to Missoula to layover for the night, while Steph and I drove home.

It took a lot of walking to get these shots and all you have to do is click the photo below.

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Categorized as Travels

Victor Parade 2015

I guess the word’s getting out that the 4th of July parade in Victor, ID is one of the best small town parades in the country. We’ve been coming to this event for eleven years now and this one seemed bigger and busier than ever.

I got right up to the front line today, east of the new stop light, and took a lot of shots, which I’ve managed to whittle down to 287. You can scroll through the set by clicking the photo below, or jump right into the SlideShow.

Here’s a couple of fun little video clips from todays parade:

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Categorized as The Valley

Family Time

My Fourth of July weekend couldn’t start any better than to have family over for a barbeque and a firepit in the back forty. In attendance were Riley and Jess, Dave and Cat, My sister Lorelle, Brian, and Steph of course.

I hooked up all of my electronic toys to an external hotspot, including my Echo who belted out any tune anybody wanted to hear, just by asking her. My new barbeque grill stayed on the deck while the boys bonded over cooking meat.

The firepit ignited with four matches and was well maintained by my boy, and sis was quite impressed by the fact that I obtained a fire permit for the night and called the sheriff’s office when I lit it up :-) Click the photo below for more…

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Balloons 2015

I normally cruise around the launch area on balloon day looking for interesting angles but today Riley was going up so I stayed planted in one place, shooting him. I can use the expression shooting because he’s sitting right behind me on my office couch and gave his approval. (how nice!)

So here’s my shots of balloon day this year, from one location. Click the photo below…

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Categorized as The Valley

Rileys Ride

My boys in town for our Fourth of July, finally. I’ve been telling him for years that he should be here and he and his wife Jess finally are. As a reward, he got to ride solo with one of the great balloonist that do this every year. His was the second leg so we followed the team to the first touchdown, the original party got out, and Riley took off.

They found out this was his virgin flight so at the end he got the traditional champagne bath. I missed that part because I drove the first party back to the fairgrounds. But, I now know what his hair feels like soaked in dried champagne! Click photo for more…

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Categorized as Family