San Fransisco

I was in San Fransisco last week for a few days. They sure have wonderful weather there.

High Speed Photography

I built a home made air gun and got some neat high speed photography shots. Here's the gallery.

Kayak and Stop Motion Photography

Emily and I went to Bigelow Hollows Park for a picnic with some friends.



I got my camera flash repaired and took a new set of high speed photography. Here is the full set.

Summer Time

Yesterday, Emily and I went on a picnic and then today we went and picked berries in the morning at Meadowbrook Orchards.

Hiking

Emily and I want hiking at Wachusett Mountain (an old favorite of mine). Here are a couple pictures I took.

Emily is Back!

Emily got back Sunday night. It was great to see her and she's been sharing all sorts of neat stories. Here is a blog with some of her adventures.

Emily's first day back was not a good day for our cars. We knew Emily's car had a problem since when I tried to run it while she was gone it smoked a lot. The smoking was caused by a slipping belt. After reading about this on the internet I had decided it was most likely a problem with the AC pump and had hoped we could bypass the air conditioning with a shorter belt since she didn't use the air conditioning. My estimated cost for this was $200 including labor. It turned out that it was the alternator that had died which was an expensive part. Also since I hadn't been able to drive the car for two months the brakes seized and all four disk brakes needed replacing. Total cost was almost $1500 :(

Then at night I drove my car to a parking lot to pick up a cable for my computer. Came back to my car and it wouldn't start. It just clicked when I turned the key. At this point I started laughing because I just didn't know what else to do. After thinking about it for awhile I decided it might be the battery and had Emily drive me to a store (with her newly fixed car) to get one. Thankfully this fixed the problem. I guess my battery must have had a catastrophic failure during the five minutes I was in the store since had been working fine. Even though the battery cost $75 it felt like a bargain compared to what had happened with Emily's car earlier in the day.

Today should be a better car day.

Giving Blood

I gave blood last week. It was my 24th pint so that means 3 gallons! Wikipedia says the human body has an average of 5 liters (1.3 gallons). That means I've donated 2.3 times my volume of blood!