Annual Kayak Against Cancer

Yesterday was our dive club's annual fundraising event, Kayak Against Cancer (if you click here, you'll still need to click on link to Kayak Against Cancer at the left). The weather wasn't real pretty - but it actually only rained a little. Most kayakers prefer a cloudy day to bright sunshine anyway. And, those really black clouds offshore stayed offshore. It looked like all the kayakers had a good time. And, the fundraising was successful - first rough tally = $13,000 for the American Cancer Society. If you'd like to add to that, there's a Donate button on the webpage mentioned above. Then, of course, there's the party: Lot's more photos on my Web Album.

Mother Ocean - Kayak Diving

After weeks and weeks of windy weather, the conditions were finally right for a kayak dive this morning. And, were they ever right!! This is our kind of Sunday morning service.

Converting old photos to digital

We decided to clear out our storage unit here, toss some stuff and put the rest in Jim's Dad's garage. As we moved the photo albums, I thought I really should scan a lot of them so I can look at old photos once in a while. But, the thought of all the time and effort that scanning takes was overwhelming. Jim said, try taking photos of the photos. hmmm, you mean just stand the album up in a chair, take my digital camera and start shooting? Yeah. So I did. Wow! It was so easy. I didn't have to take the photos out of the album. Just focused on each individual picture and snap away. They didn't all come out great. I experimented with flash or no flash, daylight or indoors. Some came out dark and some had glare. But, if I really wanted a good one, I changed the angle or the lighting until it worked. It took only 10 minutes to go thru an entire album! Here's a couple samples: Our first trip together - California 1993 You know this one is old, Jim's son is now 23. Jim as Santa in 1993: I have even more old photos that I took as slides in the 70s when I lived in California. Sometime in the 80s I had 100 of them professionally converted to Kodak Photo CD. Yes, there were digital photos back then, but you had to have a Kodak Photo CD player to see them! I got out that old CD and put it in the computer, but nothing I had could read the .pcd format. I downloaded a great *free* photo editing program called IrfanView and it was able to convert the .pcd files to .jpg. If IrfanView can't convert it - it's not a photo file!

Florida Home and Garden

I'm always trying to find ways to save on health Insurance since it is our biggest expense. So, when I learned that Jan specializes in that, I set up an appointment. She arranged for us to meet at her house cuz it'd be more fun and I could see her garden. I'm afraid there's nothing she can do to make talking about health insurance fun, but, WOW - what a garden. This is what living in Florida should be like:

From Florida

Beautiful decks and gardens everywhere. It happened to be raining that day. Since we're in the worst drought in decades, I thought the rain looked really nice! Jan especially likes growing orchids: Cocktails anyone? She told me that the insurance I had was about as good and as cheap as possible. Oh well - sure had a nice visit.

RV Body Wraps

We have a new neighbor: There are 5 people currently traveling and working out of this RV. I think a couple of them are actually sleeping in motels. Their job is to visit nice places in Florida and take video that will eventually be available on the website. hmmmm, sounds like a nice job! They call this kind of advertsing on vehicles a 'wrap'. I guess because it wraps around the entire vehicle. I like this one. Some of them are awfully gaudy, like the rental RV in the movie RV. Someday, I think our motorhome should be 'wrapped' with 'GeeksOnTour.com'. What do you think? For more examples, see wrapvehicles.com.