Wandered the yard with the camera this afternoon for a few minutes.

Maple (unknown variety):

English Ivy, on Maple trunk:

Maple (unknown variety):

Fallen Maple leaf:

Rebecca and I have a habit of standing around, talking about all the things we could do to our house.

Some of our talk has centered around the ugly "patio" of poorly-laid bricks and easy-to-trip-over landscaping timbers.

This morning it was a brisk 65 degrees, perfect for some manual labor, so up came the patio.

Thankfully the people who laid these bricks previously had indulged in quite a bit of sand, so I only need to screen it before laying everything back down, hopefully better than it was before.

One of the best tools ever is a 6-foot-long tempered steel spike with a cutting edge. Great for removing stumps or prying up landscaping timbers.

I've also found that I enjoy yardwork as a nice form of exercise, instead of doing something pointless, like lifting a weight 50 times, or walking around in a large circle.

Well, after the illness suffered by Pete, I thought the mouthful of mouse meme might've been dealt a death blow. Or at least a feel-like-death blow.

Then came Karen Marcelo. She's a sneezer with a camera and a mission. She's also a cow-orker, a cool SRL person, and the dorkbot-sf poobah.

Click the image above to jump over to the live Flickr tag. Which, by the way, isn't picking up every tagged photo. Probably has to something to do with Yahoo! being pure evil, taking away the old skool login. Yeah, that must be it.

It's interesting to watch the meme morph. Some folks had to adjust for corded mice. Some tried a side-saddle mouthification. Pretty evenly split as to if the participant used a hand to support the mouse, or if it was completely supported using just the jaws.

Well, the "5 things" meme has made the rounds.

Last night, what started as a lark has now made it to the far other side of the world. I present the Mouthful of Mouse meme. About as useful and intelligent as the "5 things" meme.

Just photograph yourself with a mouse in your mouth. That's it. Do it! You know you want to!

We had quite the blast of cold in the mountains of North Carolina today. Was enjoyed by all.

Over thanksgiving, my brother loaned me a Nikon D100. This is my first foray into digital photography beyond using my shoephone's camera to take blurry snapshots of strange supermarket items.

Sending photos to Flickr, I'm finding I'm going to exceed the limits of their free-ride accounts. My first thought was "oh, I should go FlickrPro". Then I decided to check out some other services before I go about spending money.

Currently I'm checking out SmugMug.

So far, I like the slideshow feature. I think I like the themeability, but then again, I reckon I just want a Flickr theme. I like the fact I can have multiple galleries. The downside to multiple galleries, though, is I no longer have just "my flickr," but rather "my foo gallery on my smugmug." Flickr's concepts of sets as pulling from a global gallery as an organizational tool may make more sense in the long run. It's not about what gallery a photo lives in, but which collection(s) the photographer has chosen to display it in.

Of course, as my wife said, "but everyone else is on Flickr".