Smith & Wesson 22A

The main purpose for my purchase of this gun is target practice.  I wanted an inexpensive gun with inexpensive ammo to go plinking.  We have a wooden snowman setup on my Dad’s Back 40 to use as a target.  He’s pretty whole-y at this point.  .22LR, .30-06, .338, and 12-gauge ammunition have all be fired at the snowman.  (I’ll take a picture the next time I’m out there.)  I plan to bring some cans the next time I go.  The should make for a more satisfying target; maybe some water balloons, too.

I’m not a terrible shot, but I definitely need some practice.  I bought 1575 rounds for about $60 when I got the gun, so this is a relatively cheap hobby.  I’m looking forward to the cooler temperatures of autumn to go out an practice more regularly.

There have been no major hurricanes as of yet.  It will be interesting to see if the oil spill will have any effect on the Gulf’s ability to evaporate, there by release heat.

I’ve been trying to eat better food for the past couple months.  I’ve successfully reduced my soda intake, increased vegetable and fruit consumption, and decrease my primarily meat dinners.  As a result, I’ve felt better and leveled out my weight gain at a healthy level.

I haven’t take a lot of pictures lately.  Maybe I’ll have some material to shoot this weekend!

I’ve been a little burnt out lately.  I think I may be take a vacation very soon.

I took this picture from my parent’s house to get a clear shot of it without light pollution.  Smugmug and Flickr.  I want to get better lens to zoom in further and get a clearer shot, but until then this is the best photo I’ve taken of the Moon.

The festival’s theme was steak and wine.  There were local vendors selling crafts, clothing, jewelry, and food.  A grape stomp took place throughout the day.  There were things for kids to do.  Admission was free, wine tasting was a buck or two (select versus premium wines), and we got engraved souvenir wine glasses.  The weather was quite good for a Texas summer day, but I wouldn’t mind if it had been a tad cooler.  If you are in the Bryan/College Station area, make a point to go next year.  It is a neat local event.

There are so many things in life to enjoy, but oft we fail to even appreciate the most obvious.  The beauty of nature, the flavors of fresh food, a good strong wind through your hair, a clear starry night sky, a long hot shower, the love of one’s family, the company of friends, God’s unending blessings.  We’ve been given taste, touch, smell, sight, hearing, and our minds  to observe the world around us, experience it, learn it, use it, and understand it.

There are times when I get caught up in the day to day and loose track of when it is.  April has just disappeared.  I’ve just let it disappear.  I need to make a change and appreciate everything and every moment God has given to me.  Life is a wonderful, one-time only experience; I want to make the most of it.

But, today (2/22/2010) I am making a stand.  I am forcing myself to do things.  I’m going to clean the apartment, make a grocery list, make a non-grocery shopping list, and then go about carrying out my tasks.  I want to make a permanent change and remove this procrastination from my life.

Click for larger picture.

Fortunately, I downloaded the backups beforehand, as you are supposed to do in the upgrade process.  I created a new 5.0 MySQL database, uploaded the backup (after a few tweaks to the SQL to make it work right), and reconfigured my WordPress installation on the hosting server.  After that it worked correctly.  I didn’t lose anything, nothing was corrupted, and I didn’t have to re-upload my files and photos for the links to work.

If you are going to have an upgrade failure, this is the one I would recommend.  It only took about 45 minutes to get everything working after it failed.

I love my new Canon EOS Rebel T1i.  I’ve got a lot to learn, but ever since I got my first digital camera in 2002 photography has been a passion.  These two photos are a few of the things I’ve bought to fill out my apartment.  Most of the dishes are dirty at the moment, so the cabinet seems a bit empty.  It’s normally full to the brim.  I have enough settings for 8 people.

I’m looking forward to the coming months.  I’m planning a holiday party for some of my coworkers.  This will be a good début of the dishware, my cooking skills, and my hosting abilities.  Amanda, my sister is due in January.  I’m very excited about the addition to our family.  Plus, babies can be used as chick-magnets .  I’ve also started planning for the purchase of a house.  It probably won’t happen until after 2010, but I want to get a fixer-upper.  I don’t want it to be falling apart, but it could be in need of a remodel.

Cable and Internet was connected last Tuesday.  I am currently watching the History Channel in HD.  The program is about robot warriors.  I’m a little creeped out by how the military is using robots.  World domination by the machines will be here soon enough.

I definitely like having the whole place to myself.  I can just relax and do what I want in my new place.  Once I get the dishes, I’m going to plan a dinner party to have people over.  That should be fun!

I will get to these issues after I get back from vacation (10 day roadtrip)

First off, as a phone it works much better than my old one.  I can get the volume loud enough to hear well when I’m driving.  It allows me to keep all the phone numbers and email addresses I need for people.

As an Internet-device, it suits my purposes very well.  The browser on this model phone reduces websites to fit on the whole screen, then you zoom in to see what you want.  Also, some sites have mobile pages and the zoom feature automatically turns off for those because they are already the right size.  I have almost completely moved to the BlackBerry for my email needs.  The qwerty keyboard has is it’s greatest feature in my book.

Finally, as an application platform it has a good start, but there is room for improvement.  The BlackBerry App World store has many applications, but not nearly as many as the iTunes App Store.  It also is hard to navigate on the phone.  There is no way to browse the store on the PC, which is a really bad idea.  I want to be able to easily buy apps from my computer, because it is easy to use for this.

Overall, I am very happy with this phone.  It’s not perfect, but it is so much better than what I had before.