We are ready to go home, but are not ready to stop being on vaca­tion. Today we walked around in a very dry rain­for­est, saw a very wet water­fall and drove in a lot of traffic.

The Hoh Rain­for­est sec­tion of the Olympia National Park was very inter­est­ing, but it was a lit­tle dis­ap­point­ing because we expected wet. June and July are the dri­est months there and so far May has been very dry too. The trees are huge and cov­ered in moss and would have been befit­ting of a rain­for­est if only they had been drip­ping moisture.

The Mar­rymere Falls were at the end of a half mile easy hike and a 1/4 mile straight up hike, but worth every effort expanded to get there. As a bonus we got a home baked choco­late cookie at the upper look out. There were a group of 4th graders tour­ing the falls and Donna and I arrived just as they were tak­ing a break. One of the chap­er­ons was hand­ing out cook­ies and they had a cou­ple left over and offered them to us. When we asked where they were from they told us from down south near Tacoma. When we told them we were from down south in South Car­olina they seemed more impressed with that, then the stu­pid ol’ waterfall.

At this point we still had a long drive to get back so we bypassed a cou­ple of other inter­est­ing things to do on the Olympic penin­sula and headed back to Seat­tle. It was Fri­day after­noon, so with the traf­fic and the con­struc­tion delays it took us a lot longer to get to the hotel than we thought. Oh well, it is a late night, but tomor­row it will all work out because with the time change we will lose even more time, huh. I’ve stopped mak­ing sense so it must be time to quit.…

I took 293 pic­tures on the trip north­west. I started sep­a­rat­ing the wheat from the chaff tonight by get­ting rid of the crummy expo­sures, the out of focus images and the what was I think­ing pic­tures. Eighty three of the pho­tos included Gnorm the gnome which came out too. The best of Gnorm’s Gnorth­west Pho­tos cam be seen on my Flickr page. After the first run through I got it down to 62.

The above photo is one of the out­takes. We went for a walk at dusk on the beach at Kalaloch and I set up the cam­era on my goril­la­pod for the long expo­sure while Donna con­tin­ued on down the stairs. The red blur in the lower right is her in her red jacket walk­ing through the scene.

Another vaca­tion out­take. This is from the Olympic Sculp­ture Gar­den in Seat­tle. The title of this piece is Wake and it is by Richard Serra. 10 big ol’ rusty metal plates welded into 5 wave shaped forms. To get a sense of scale look to the left and you will see Donna in her red jacket.

I ran out of books to read after I fin­ished the one on the plane home and haven’t had time to get to the used book­store yet, so I had to re-read some­thing I had around the house. Picked “School Days” by Robert B. Parker. Tonight I stum­bled on the sec­tion of the book I was think­ing of back in March. Here for pos­ter­ity are the Spenser Crime Buster Rules so far:

#8: Always look.
#8a: Don’t blun­der into some­thing while you’re looking.

If I find more I’ll make a sep­a­rate page for them.

A cou­ple more cam­era con­tenders sur­faced today, both of them Canons; 1) Pow­er­Shot A710IS & B) Pow­er­Shot SD800IS. The SD800 is about the same size as my cur­rent Kodak and it’s zoom’s widest angle is 28mm, not the 23 I have already, but it meets ever other cri­te­ria. The 710 is the least expen­sive option, but it’s zoom starts at 35mm. Plus it, like the Pana­sonic DMC-TZ3 I men­tioned yes­ter­day, are about and 1–1/2″ thick com­pared to my lit­tle more than 3/4″ Kodak. I will need to go to a store and put one in my back pocket try it out first (hope­fully not get­ting picked up for shoplift­ing in the attempt.)

I thought when I cre­ated a link cat­e­gory for South Car­olina Blog­gers it would be easy to get 6–8 that I would enjoy read­ing daily over there. Hah! Fat chance. I did some search­ing and ended up find­ing sev­eral polit­i­cal blogs that linked other polit­i­cal blogs, but that ain’t cut­ting it, I don’t do politics.

The blog that showed up #1 in every search was South Car­olina Trial Law Blog. With­out even look­ing at it I dis­missed it because I fig­ured it was going to be like the polit­i­cal blogs and I don’t do law. In des­per­a­tion I finally checked it out and it wasn’t half bad, so I might link in the roll.

A while back I was listed on some geo-blog site that listed you by long & lat so you could see other blog­ger in your neigh­bor­hood. I couldn’t find it now.

I did stum­ble on a cou­ple that you find to the left now, but there had to be some­place where I could find a lot of state blog­gers. About to give up when I hit pay dirt for Charleston area blog­gers: Post­cripts — A Low­coun­try Blo­gos­phere Hotspot. I think I can get some qual­ity blogs there for sure. Now if only there is a link on that site for a statewide group.

Now for some­thing com­pletely dif­fer­ent on South Car­olina. Next year we are get­ting a dif­fer­ent license plate design. The DMV opened up the design­ing of the plate to artists and three final­ists were cho­sen. You can now vote on which design you want to have on the back of your car here: SCDMV You don’t have to live in South Car­olina to vote.

I picked the one on the right, but it prob­a­bly won’t win, it’ll be one of the other two because they are more colorful…

Got more of the deck done today. I quit at around three quar­ters mark. I still have that one cor­ner, the seat area, the rail­ing, the three steps to the yard and the whole out­side of the rail­ings. I had to stop because it started to rain. Now you are ask­ing your­self why would a lit­tle rain make me stop. I mean, I’m already pretty much soaked from the over spray, plus I’m get­ting wet from above because I’m wash­ing off the sof­fits and gut­ters while I’m at it. Just feels fool­ish stand­ing out in the rain I guess.

Last night, the used once two years ago pres­sure washer seemed to be act­ing funny, it wouldn’t come up to full pres­sure at first. It would start and when I squeezed the trig­ger it would come up to about half power. After hold­ing the trig­ger in about 30 sec­onds to a minute then it would kick in. A cou­ple times it wouldn’t ever jump up to full pres­sure. Turn­ing it off and on wouldn’t help. Then one time I squeezed the trig­ger and then hit the power, it came right up to full speed. Tried that same pro­ce­dure the next time and it worked again. So now I have been doing that each time I start/restart after a break. I won­der if that is the proper pro­ce­dure. Maybe if I had read the direc­tions I’d know.

EDIT:

I for­got we went out to breakfast. Blue­berry muf­fin for her and a coconut pineap­ple cream muf­fin for me and we split a bot­tled water.

After this weekend’s big push we are now more than a third of the way to the goal of tak­ing a pic­ture of every Post Office in the state of South Car­olina. Today we did a dozen on the way home from Greenville. This is a dif­fer­ent angle than I used in the gallery of my favorite Post Office for today, Cross Hill.

For break­fast I had a bowl of raisin ban, a cin­na­mon bun, half a banana and a small OJ. Donna had half an order of bis­cuits and gravy, half a banana and a bagel with cream cheese, water to wash it all down.

Today’s photo total was pretty good, we have had 2 days with 13, so it would have ranked as the sec­ond most pro­duc­tive day if it hadn’t been for Sat­ur­day. On Sat­ur­day we did 7 POs on the way to Greenville. Took a break at the hotel for a while and then did 4 on the way to the ball­game we didn’t stay for, doing four more before call­ing it a night. For a total of fif­teen pic­tures on Sat­ur­day. Speak­ing of night, two of those pho­tos were shot in the dusk and the last two were taken in the dark. They didn’t come out half bad, so we may be doing more low light images.

Lunch today was at a Taco Bell in Green­wood. Two chicken taco supremes for Donna and I had 3 soft beef tacos. A medium Sierra Mist foun­tain drink was shared between the two of us.

156 Post Offices down with 304 to go. This weekend’s pho­tos are up in the Gallery or on the Flickr page. No cap­tion­ing yet and the titles need fix­ing. No geo­t­ags on the Flicker images yet either, so they don’t show up on the map. Go peek if you just need to see how many ways I can put a Miata in a Post Ofice park­ing lot, but if you want a story to go with the image, come back later this week.

Fin­ished pres­sure wash­ing the deck yes­ter­day. Then last night we headed over to Home Depot for some waterproofer/sealer. Two years ago we used clear Thompson’s and were pleased, but this time we thought we might get some­thing with a lit­tle color. We only had a cou­ple choices besides clear, Sheer Honey Gold or Sheer Rus­tic Red.

Look­ing at the color on the con­tainer, the Honey didn’t look like much of a change from clear. Didn’t really want to go with the Red because the house is brick and we wanted to keep a lit­tle con­trast between wall and deck, but the color on the jug didn’t look too red, so we bought a cou­ple gal­lons. I think this col­ored stuff is slightly thicker than the clear that we used 2 years before. I filled up the cheap pump sprayer I used had before and started to apply the stuff. Ick. It either comes out too fast or if I dial the noz­zle back it comes out too sparsely. And boy is it red. When I did the first cou­ple of pieces of the out­side rail­ing I called in Donna for a sec­ond opin­ion. We both agreed it was darker than we antic­i­pated, but thought it looked pretty good. I ditched the sprayer and we each grabbed one of the two foam brushes we had left over from another paint­ing job and started at it.

After about 30 min­utes Donna bailed on me, the mos­qui­toes were awful thick and were eat­ing her alive. I was fine by that any­way because I had told her I was happy to do the whole job myself. I stuck it out for another half hour or so until the last of the two foam brushes crum­bled to uselessness.

We bought some more foam brushes on tonight’s shop­ping trip, so I’m all set to tackle more staining/painting/water proof­ing of the rail­ings and balus­ters on Sat­ur­day. I’ve got a nice big old roller for the floor just stand­ing by until I’m fin­ished with detail work.

We had a mas­sive deck and screened porch built on the back of our house in July of 2000. It runs nearly the whole length of the house with half being screened porch and half deck. Of the two, the porch gets the most use because it is cov­ered and has ceil­ing fans mak­ing it a 3 sea­sons room. The only time we don’t use it is dur­ing our two month win­ter. The deck is more of a 2 half sea­sons place, early spring and late fall. We went the first 5 years with­out doing any­thing to the deck, but then it really needed some help. Pres­sure wash­ing and Thomp­son Water Seal­ing held up for a cou­ple more bring us to this year.

Hope­fully this will hold us for the next cou­ple of years. The sticker on the out­side of the watersealer proudly announces that it is good for three years. We’ll see. After fin­ish­ing the deck around noon we promptly went inside and spent the rest of the day inside enjoy­ing the air con­di­tion­ing. We did go back out at 9:00 PM (it was still 90º) to get an ice cream and go gro­cery shopping.

My cubi­cle neigh­bor brought in a chal­lenge for me today. Fresh from my suc­cess of fix­ing his home PC with my used (and slightly noisy) power sup­ply, both he and I felt I could tackle his dig­i­tal cam­era problem.

He has a sev­eral year old Kodak LS420 that won’t turn on. When you flip the power switch the ready light flashes 3 times and stops with the cam­era never turn­ing on. I searched the web for other men­tions of this issue and couldn’t find any. I down­loaded the user man­ual which told me that symp­tom meant that the bat­tery was not fully charged. He has the Kodak charger and 2 bat­ter­ies. The charger reports that both bat­ter­ies are fully charged, but either one acts the same way, three flashes and noth­ing. Let the cam­era sit for a while and try again, same results. The cam­era has no DC-In jack, so we can’t try that option, plus the cam­era dock is no longer avail­able to see if the cam­era might turn on with that.

I think the thing is broke, but there is still an out­side chance that the both bat­ter­ies are either bad or not really get­ting charged mean­ing the charger is bad. So should Jim spent $25 bucks for a new charger and bat­tery to try and save a 5 year-old 2.1 Mega-pixel cam­era or use that twenty-five bucks for seed money on a new camera?

Even though I didn’t fix the cam­era Jim rewarded me by giv­ing me the camera’s cool semi-rigid poly­ester zip­pered case. Fits my Kodak V570 real nice and offers a lot more pro­tec­tion than the lit­tle cloth bag that came with it.