Friday, February 24, 2012Random Stuff at a Random Time
A middle-of-the-day random post? Sure! Why not?
1. In case you hadn't heard, the Pittsburgh Zoo has a brand new baby gorilla. I pretty much had no choice but to drop everything and go pay it a visit.
CAN YOU STAND THE CUTE? Yeah. Me neither.
The folks at the Zoo say the mom has been hanging out by the glass, so it's not hard to catch a glimpse of the tiny beast. I have a few more photos over on Flickr.
By the way, if ever there was a time when it was helpful that my camera is my bitch, THAT was it. It's crazy dark in there and Mr. Canon was all "Nuh-uh. Can't be done. Too dark," but I slapped it across the face and found a way to get it to work.
2. Want to make your DSLR your bitch? I can help with that. There is a spot left in tomorrow's afternoon Getting Started with Your DSLR course. Email me to register.
I also have a session coming up on February 29th from 9:00 am to 1:00 pm. If you can talk two of your friends into attending, one of you will get to learn all sorts of camera fun for free. One email is sufficient to register all three of you.
Questions? Let me know.
3. There is a new toy available that helps you find apps that might be of interest to you. It's called appSmitten and basically it lets you search for apps by categories (e.g. educational apps for kids aged 2-6). It will email you recommendations. I already used it to find three kick-butt apps for Alexis' Amazon Kindle and two for my iPhone, leading me to wonder why someone didn't think of this before? It was much easier to dig through the millions of available apps using appSmitten than it is in the Android or Apple store. You can check it out here, if you so desire. (FYI--that's an affiliate link. Unemployed people need to pay the bills, yo.)
4. I have started working on a refresh of this here bloggy blog, so if you see anything wonky over the weekend, SORRY! Refresh your page and you'll probably be treated to something new and wonky. It'll be a fun wonky game!
If you've got any suggestions or requests, now would probably be a good time to mention them. I can't promise that I can incorporate them all right now, but I'll try my bestest.
5. It has been something like 20 hours since I last treated the Internet to a Penny photo. I'll be back later to fix that.
Northerners Aren't Supposed To Have To Pay For These Things
Considering I have been known to take a route that adds an hour to a trip just so I wouldn't have to pay a 50 cent toll, it's kind of surprising that it was my idea to pay to play in the snow last weekend. We've only been sledding twice this year, though, and WTH? TWICE? It's February! I'm supposed to be on the verge of being sick of snow at this point.
Instead, I was all, "I want to see snow SO bad I'm willing to give up Starbucks for a month for it."
OK, not really, but I was ready to cough up a tiny bit of our tax refund.
So we took advantage of a rare convergence of schedules and headed to Nemacolin to play in the snow. I picked Nemacolin because it was the cheapest place we could go for snow tubing. I was willing to pay, but not any more than I had to. It's possible that I spent HOURS researching the whole thing in the interest of saving a buck or two.
After a long drive, we pulled into the parking lot and bundled up. Then we trudged through the mud and headed for the snow tubing hill. Yes, mud. That's what happens when snow melts, you know. Mud shows up. Considering it has been entirely too warm all winter long, I was impressed the mud wasn't deep enough for a wrestling tournament.
By the time we reached the snow tubing hill and started walking on the man-made snow, that whole "bundled up" thing started to seem like a mistake. If we had walked even ten feet further, I'm certain we would have started to strip layers. We could have found out for sure if there was enough mud for some wrestling.
I somehow managed to convince Alexis that she needed to leave her coat on just in time for it to be our turn to hurl ourselves down the hill. She Who Is Generally Game For Playing In Snow froze in place. "I don't want to!" she cried.
"Too bad," I replied as I told her to sit her butt down in the inner tube. I linked our tubes together and launched us down the hill through a flurry of protests and complaints. Less than two seconds after we started gliding, the whines broke free and turned into giggles.
Of course.
Two hours later, Alexis declared snow tubing to be The Best Thing Ever.
I just might agree.
But could we PLEASE get some snow so I don't have to pay to do it again?
(Cell phone pic because I was too chicken to take my camera snow tubing.) (You're really lucky I didn't imbed one of the many videos I took of us going down the hill. I'm only sparing you becuase I don't want to be responsible for making people puke with my horribly shaky video "skills.")
