Happy New Year

Leather Gloves

Talked to Dave today - it seems like much more than six days since he left to return to California. Time does fly.

On Wednesday, Linda and I drove over to Stockbridge. She wanted to shop for bedding at Country Curtains, so we did that as well as have lunch at the Red Lion. Great lunch - I had scallops with a Spanish-like risoto. Excellent! I also saw an interesting image at the Red Lion - a chair in the parlor that just begged to be photographed. Light was minimal, and the exposure calculated out to be about 3 minutes. Had two problems during the first attempt - first, someone wandered into the scene about half-way through. Fortunately, I was able to stop the exposure, and then resume once he went away. Then, when I tried to put the darkslide back into the holder, it was obvious that something wasn't right. Apparently the film didn't slide under the tracks, and when I pulled the holder out, the film was on the outside of the darkslide. So much for than sheet. I did a second sheet and am anxious to see what it looks like.

The weather was predicted to be lousy on Thursday, so I planned to spend the day working on the presentations that I will be giving in February. That went reasonably well, and I think I can consider that done.

Had an unpleasant surprise Thursday night - and now I'm facing the need to do an investigation of the provenance of one of the articles that appeared in a recent issue of the magazine. I think the authors were a little careless in the way they chose to use a reference - not malicious but just naive. But the rules have to be followed, and that could be unpleasant.

Linda and I had a nice time on New Year's eve. We had dinner at Sushi Thai Garden in Saratoga - very good food, in an immaculately clean setting with a very congenial service staff, and reasonable prices.

After dinner we went to First Night. We saw the Saratoga Springs Youth Orchestra, the Saratoga City Ballet Company, LB Walker, the McKrells, and we danced to the music of the Swing Docs. The Youth Orchestra is pretty good for a group consisting of Junior High and High School students. But the highlight of the evening had to be the McKrells - what a fun group!

Overnight we had about 4" of fresh snow, so this morning Linda wanted to go skiing - even before we cleared the driveway. So we strapped on the skis and took off across the golf course. It was fabulous - not too cold and lots of fresh snow. When we got back I cranked up the snow blower and took care of the driveway and front walk, and Linda trimmed around the edges with the shovel.

This picture was my entry in the Winter Soltice show at Saratoga County Arts Council. I like it a lot, and everyone who has seen it has had nice comments. Unfortunately, SCAC tends to treat photography as an embarassment - they hung all of the monochrome photographs at the end of a long, narrow hallway, and on the day we dropped by the light at the end of the hall had burned out, leaving it in almost total darkness.