Vanessa and I recently took a trip up to Munising in Michigan's beautiful Upper Peninsula. We did some hiking and some canoeing, saw the Pictured Rocks by boat and got bitten by vicious goddamn flies (the "state bird?") at nearly every turn. I love the UP and would like to perhaps be a hermit there someday among the pines. I've uploaded photos of this trip to Flickr, an online photo-sharing service which I'm experimenting with but have reservations about, mostly due to a couple of annoying little problems like the site being slow and not being able to sort my photos by date taken (or even filename). So the Munising photos are all helter-skelter and the order doesn't make any sense at all. I may end up posting them to my own site if I don't get a satisfactory response soon. If I get the bugs sorted out I may start using it as a resource for my own site because I love the keyword feature and would like to pull photos to my site by keyword rather than naming, saving and hard-linking each one for each context.
Speaking of Flickr, I also just attended my 10-year high school reunion in Paw Paw. I was excited about going because I literally haven't seen or run into anyone from my class in the last 10 years, never having spent more than a few days at a time in Paw Paw since graduating. I'm pleased to report that I had a wonderful time, about 60 or so classmates showed up, the majority of which seem to be married and many also have children (wow). People looked well for the most part, no real surprises I guess. Naturally some had gained weight or lost hair, but it was just so surreal and cool to see people again after that long, a crowd of familiar but almost-forgotten faces. I had good chats with a lot of people with whom I'd never exchanged 2 words in high school, good to know that petty clique bullshit from the past can be buried where it belongs...in the gutter. Thanks to all who came out, sorry to have missed all who didn't. Hope to see them all again in a few years. My scooter trip there and back was pretty uneventful, 4 hours and about 140 miles each way, no seized engines thank god.
In older news, the weblog bit of this site is finally back up and running (duh), my third installation of MovableType. I've unearthed the archives of my first MT attempt (early 2003, had a corrupted database and died) and will be adding those entries and comments back in manually over time. Still needs a little finesse, but thanks to Naz for the help and watch for some front page changes around here soon.
From a month or so ago: Vanessa and I went to Michigan in June to attend my cousin Amanda Hackenberg's graduation party. We also stopped at Reits Flea Market (not to be confused with Busy Bea Flea Market, also in Paw Paw). Some real treasures at both places, they come highly-recommended.
I also just added a quick gallery of older photos from a few nature museum / indoor conservatory type places for my mom to see, now you can see them as well. Celebrity appearances by Naz and JR Gault in there too!
Damn, my hair was long and shaggy then.
Posted by: Naz at August 8, 2005 01:31 PM