1882 and all that…

I took this shot of a church bell with my 50MM f1.8 lens while walking around a cemetery last week.

I am currently having a pretty nice Christmas – New Year’s holiday. While it would have been nice to spend some time with Cy and “T” at their place in Vermont, I really couldn’t work up any shred of enthusiasm for the 48 hours of driving that that would entail. Instead, I’ve opted to do basically nothing out of the ordinary to end off 2010.

Metropolitan Atlanta apparently doesn’t share my penchant for the unremarkable – the area was blanketed with about 1.5 inches of snow on Saturday afternoon, marking the first time since 1882 that Atlanta had a white Christmas. I have to admit that I was skeptical that we’d actually get any snow, but it started falling at around 3:00 o’clock, and by 4:00, when I left to have dinner in Macon, it was obvious that there would be some accumulation. I got back to the house at around 10:00 to find everything covered with the white stuff. It’s remained fairly cold since Saturday and, while the snow is gradually giving way to the dead stuff underneath it, there’s still enough in the yard to make a snowman, were I so inclined.

I’m not.

As a completely unrelated aside, I’d like to point out that most of the pictures included with this entry will have nothing to do with anything that I’m typing. I just pulled a CD out of an old CD folder from 2002. Figured I’d post a few shots from then and see if I’ve improved at all in the last 8 years.

Grandma Sprague at Thanksgiving, 2002. I wrote about her death in one of the earliest entries in this blog.

Yesterday afternoon, I once again drove down to middle Georgia and spent about 5 hours doing basically nothing with Chris. We walked around a bookstore, spent some time driving around taking “light paintings” (my phrase for shooting long, unrecognizable photos of lights at night while moving – you get some really cool effects and Christmas lights are always fun to play with), had some pretty good Indian food for dinner, and probably broke some sort of law by driving into Rose Hill Cemetery after dark. I must admit that that last bit was sort of creepy. Not because I worried about ghosts harassing us, but because I worried about roving bands of vandals harassing us. Fortunately, that didn’t happen and I arrived home safely at about 11:30 last night.

Mom looks on as I attempt to make my nephew Samuel throw up his Thanksgiving vittles.

I’d intended to do quite a bit of housework today – up to and including painting my bedroom. Didn’t happen. While I did get some cleaning done, and while I did manage to do three loads of laundry, I also spent a great deal of time watching 30 Rock, which is a hilarious sitcom that I’d never heard of before a few weeks ago. It’s on Netflix, so I started with season one, immediately got hooked, and am currently 9 episodes into it. Maybe I’ll find some paint tomorrow.

I forgot to mention in my last entry that I finally have a new cell phone. I was so sick of my iPhone 3G that I was literally counting the days until December 12th, when I could upgrade the stupid thing. As soon as that day arrived, I ordered a phone running Windows Mobile 7 – just to stick it to Apple.

Samuel and Riley check out photographs from a much earlier time.

Unfortunately, I discovered within a day that the Windows phone just isn’t ready for prime time and brought it back to the store, where I traded it for an iPhone 4. So far, I don’t really have any complaints.
I mentioned this because I downloaded an app last night that should let me update this blog with the phone. Hopefully, that will inspire me to do it more often during coffee breaks or whatever. We shall see.

Billy Napier looks for a receiver in a losing effort at Villanova in the 2002 playoffs.

Lastly, I’ve decided to take a stab at at “No Dairy January,” a concept thought up by Betsy Jones. She says that she generally feels better when she avoids dairy products, so she’s going to give them up for a month. Her main concern, she says, is giving up cheese and ice cream.

Pshaw, say I. I’ve been living on cheese sandwiches and milk for most of my adult life. If I can do without them for a month, she should be able to.

I’m not saying that I can, you understand. I’m just going to give it a shot and see if I feel any different.

If I don’t, I’m chowing down on 5 pounds of macaroni and cheese come February 1st.

TWD