It's been raining here like the end of the world. Every day there's a few false rays of sunshine and then clouds amble in, unleash a torrent or three, and rumble on eastward. Whenever I see a break in the rain I slosh out to the pond and dig or move rocks for awhile, until the next downpour drives me back inside to sulk with Zeke and Tink.

This has also meant fewer walks. Yesterday morning I finally decide that Zeke and I both needed a long walk much more than we were worried about being sopped to the skin upon arrival at work. So we hiked the long route, via the Storr's hill trail. The photo is from the nice little waterfall, which you might remember wasn't all that little during Spring thaw (scroll to bottom). This photo was taken standing at the top of the falls.

Now look at the photo a little closer. There, in the vertical center, about one third of the way from the left edge, do you see a couple of white spots? After taking the photo I noticed some of them near my foot and discovered them all over the rock surfaces of the waterfall. They are the final, melted down remnants of candles. All in all I'd guess there were about twenty of them.

Sitting in the dark, damp woods (morning or not) it's not hard to imagine some evil ritual, carried out late at night under the full moon with candles, chanting, and hokey melodrama gleaned from too many movies. On the other hand, with the falls lit up by a couple dozen candles it probably makes for a pretty romantic liason, skinny dipping and all.

Either way, cultists or coitus, it's probably asking too much for them to clean up afterwards...

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Just for giggles I've published some of my recent photos to a .Mac slideshow folder. Anyone with a Mac running OS X 10.2 can subscribe to these slides. I'd been thinking of doing something like this via this website, but screensaver images tend to be much larger and use up more bandwidth (which I pay for). Using .Mac I don't pay for the additional bandwidth, so it's a good first step. I apologize to the non-Mac readers.

Here's the directions:

1. Open System Preferences and click Screen Effects.
2. Select .Mac in the list of available screen savers.
3. Click the Configure button and enter jhalstead in the Member Name box. Then click OK.

You might also want to uncheck the .Mac slideshow, unless you enjoy images of Apple product boxes (among others). Even though I saved the images at a "medium" quality and kept the proportions down around 1280x960, the file sizes range from 100-200k, so you probably don't want to use this over a slow modem connection. If you try this please leave a comment or drop me an email and let me know what you think.

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If you don't have a couple of LED flashlights then you really ought to get some. Besides the LED "lamp" lasting forever it also is impervious to the thing that happens to all of my flashlights: drop it and the bulb filaments break. Of course the other problem is leaving it on and finding the batteries dead the next time you really need it. No problem, get a battery-less LED flashlight.

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