At home (still), but counting down.....

A quick update on travel status. Today, Thursday, we are only 3 days from picking up the RV and locating to Fort Clinch. It will be good to get out of the mess and chaos that has been the condition our home for longer than we care to think about. And no, the contractor won’t be done before we leave town. We can only hope they will be done before we return in October. Of course this is the 5th time we have left on a trip hoping they will be done when we return – and it hasn’t happened yet. Maybe this time will be the charm.

Our current visitors, Kathy and Gary, are set to arrive tomorrow afternoon. Since we don’t have an extra bedroom at the moment, they will stay across the street at Deborah’s house. Thanks, Deborah.

Today’s two photos were taken almost seven years apart. The pelicans shot, was taken in 2001 when we visited Fernandina Beach. It was made with my very first digital camera, an Olympus C2100UZ with a whopping 2 megapixel sensor! My cell phone camera has more resolution than that! But surprisingly, if one doesn’t try to do too much enlarging and one isn’t too critical, some of the photos from that camera still look pretty good today. It did have a pretty fair zoom which helped.

The second photo is with the newest camera in the arsenal – a Canon G9. With a 12.1 megapixel and a 210 mm (equivalent) zoom, plus many current digital camera features, it is pretty good for most photography and photos can be enlarged when needed. The sunset is across the Fernandina Beach marina following one of our many days of rain last week. Now if we could only get some more rain and knock down these high temperatures. Ok, so 95 degrees isn’t high for some folks and certainly not like the desert southwest of the middle east, but with the high humidity, it can be unpleasant particularly if one is out in the sun.

A bit of trivia fluff for those with a weather inclination. One of our local TV weather men – Tim Deegan, to drop names – was responding to a write-in question. The question: Why aren’t temperatures forecast / reported taken in the sunlight? Answer: weather temperatures are taken in the shade. So when you think it’s a lot hotter than reported and you’re standing in the sun; that’s why. He went on to elaborate on Heat Indices (how it feels) and how much hotter it could be in the sunlight. The value he quoted was 12 – 15 degrees hotter in sunlight than in the shade. For example, yesterday’s high temperature reported for Waycross, GA (about 65 miles NW from Fernandina Beach as the crow flies), was 99 degrees (in the shade); the heat index was about 110 degrees, and in the sun, it was close to 125 degrees! Now that’s uncomfortable!

And finally, for those following the saga of my various computer(s) and their ills. The desktop that got infected a few weeks ago, is working fine now and I think I have all the right protection software in place. The laptop, unfortunately, has a new problem. The display, which had been failing regularly since early this year, seems to be ok. But when I added an external hard drive (a place to store all my digital photos for the trek north), it put my laptop to sleep and I can’t get it to reboot. So the laptop is currently in the shop, again. Sigh…

More later.
Wayne