Mad Times

Independence Day

Spent most of July 4th out at Howdy Acres, the home of our friends Kate and Mark.

	Here's Mark and me (left to right) geeking out. I had to do some work so we were trying to get my windows laptop configured to talk to Mark's wireless network. Between windows, the lame cisco software, and my company's paranoid configuration of my machine, it took us (both pretty computer savvy guys, Mark especially) 15 or 20 minutes to get the stupid thing set up so I could VPN into work. As you can see from the picture, Mark has at least partly switched to macintosh and OSX. He says all he had to do to get the mac to talk to his wifi was click "ok" when it asked if he wanted to talk to this nice network it had found lying around. Sweet.
	Here's Chewie (yes, it's short for Chewbacca) in what Kate calls his "hood ornament" which he had to wear to keep him from tearing out the stitches that resulted from a nasty gash on his chest from unknown causes. Chewie is pretty entertainingly dippy even without the cone head effect, but with it, he's a barrel of laughs--and a little sad.
	Vine Maple (Acer circinatum)
	The pinky gold color in this is purely an artifact of the late afternoon sunlight and the limitations of the chameleon ccd, this tower is the same silvery grey that all such towers seem to be.
	SPECIAL AREA REFER TO SPECIFICATIONS AND/OR OPTIONS
	Some foxglove which really was pretty much that shade of pink.
	Chewie betraying his ostrich heritage