I just felt like being artsy...

This one's from quite awhile ago, but I just felt like being artsy...

I got a phone call last week saying that my paperwork to goto Papua New
Guinea has finally moved out of the Black Hole that is their government
system, so I've started going through to clean up my computer a little
bit. You'd think that out of 250Gb on my hard drive, that I'd have more
than 3Gb free, but you'd be mistaken... Time to dump a bunch of stuff
on my external hard drive...

House Sitting - Dog

I've been house sitting for a few days now at a friend from Church's
place. It's a great big house on a nice lot that has a large open
driveway in front of it where the dog and I play catch. The dog is one
of the largest labs that I've ever seen. And, as far as labs go, they
never really grow out of their puppy stages. This one is pretty good,
as long as you tire him out. So, we play catch with the tennis ball in
the driveway with a 'chuck-it' slinger. Those slingers are awesome,
with just a flick of the wrist the ball flies a hundred feet. I guess
they're basically an atlatl, but 'chuck-it' is a fitting name.

The driveway where we play catch has been plowed, and has a little berm
of snow that comes up to the dog's midsection. He likes to grab the
ball without slowing down for the berm and plow over the top of it.
Usually I think he does this because of all the hard packed snow on the
driveway that makes it fairly difficult for him to stop in time to avoid
crashing into the pile of snow. Which is exactly what happened on one
of the throws.

The ball left the atlatl and the dog took out after it, but just as he
was catching up to it, it took a funny hop and the dog hand to go
sideways in order to snatch it. This sudden movement caused him to
slide sideways a little bit on the hard pack, which normally would have
been fine. However, this time he was much too close to he berm and his
momentum carried him directly into it. The berm, being exactly the
right height for this, took out the dogs legs and he went flipping over
it onto his back on the far side, where I saw, for a moment, four
floundering paws waving in the air. I started laughing so hard that I
about had to take a knee to keep from falling down.

On top of all this, the dog hadn't kept hold of the tennis ball, and it
took him nearly a minute in order to find it. Good times.

Winter Solstice

Well, it's finally the shortest day of the year. Since I hadn't done it
before I knew that I needed to take a picture when the sun was at it's
highest point just to show everyone how low the sun is during this time
of year. By the hand method, the sun was at 5 degrees above the
horizon. (if you stick out your fist at arms length, from the bottom
knuckle to the top is supposed to be ten degrees. Using the "stack"
method, you should have your hand directly above your head after nine of
them, indicating ninety degrees... My hands get pretty close to that.)

From looking at this picture it does a pretty decent representation of
what "high noon" looks like. The whole panorama was taken at 12:45pm on
December 20th. The high temp yesterday was about -10 degrees
Fahrenheit, so you can also see all the steam from fireplaces and
furnaces. Also, the sun was almost directly south at this time.

Today the sun rose at 10:58am, and set at 2:40pm, which gave us about 3h
41m of sun... So the highest point the sun reaches should be right in
the middle of those times... I'd say that picture was taken very close
to the highest point.

What's the good news? Tomorrow is 13 seconds longer than today...