This post is long overdue considering these photos were taken on a very cold, very overcast day up in South Bend a month ago. We flew in for Thanksgiving almost a week early thanks in part to my mom hooking us up with incredible seats which provided an up close an unobstructed view of Irish’s crushing one point loss. The high temperature that day was a balmy 21°, we had our asses and feet on ice, they blew it in the last play, and yet an awesome time was had by all!

I received yet another case of 165gr JHP’s from Montana Gold today and just couldn’t be happier with their product. These are some of the nicest plated bullets I have come across and thus far have yet to find a single defect in the several thousand that I’ve loaded. The fact that their prices have yet to go up since the election is, at least to me, just another affirmation of their commitment to the sport.

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Another year. Another June. Another ROT Rally. If only you knew the emptiness I felt inside now that there are another 361 days until it happens again. This year marked the greatest rally going experience – EVER! I don’t even need to go into just how awesome Yellow D-116 was, as I am sure you have read about it. We had the RV spot this year, hands down. So much so that several people came up to us to tell us this… like all the activity, partying, boozing and nudity that was happening right in front of us didn’t tip us off to this revelation. Oh, and there were motorcycles too! Oh, and a little musical extravaganza by an all time favorite of mine… you might know him as The Charlie Daniels Band.

The amount of debauchery that took place this year was immeasurable, which is probably a good thing. I also can’t (well won’t upon this site) share with you the really awesome photos and activities partaken in, but I will tell you this – you owe it to yourself to come down to Austin next year and live through the experience first hand. Let the countdown to ROT 2009 begin!

This past Saturday marked the date of this years Annual Scholarship Golf Tournament for my Lodge. I was designated the official event photographer which required me to step foot on my first ever golf course. It should be known that I don’t play golf, or have any interest in said activity. This aside, I found two things that will make me love golf unconditionally from this day forward: the golf cart and the acceptable early morning drinking of beer.

It is true that the golf carts don’t obtain record speeds, but those little windy cart paths they expect you to ride on are just begging for some daredevil action. I was able to get my cart on two wheels on numerous occasions as well as laid plenty of rubber down. Good times!

Below is a small (and I do mean small) sampling of some photos which I took of the course and event. I arrived just before the sun came up, which provided some nice photo opportunities.

These red and white flowers from my front yard bloom around this time every year. I have no idea what type of flower it is (I’m not a garden person), but they have survived two separate moves and what I imagine to be not as much water as they should be receiving. In any case, it’s always a pleasure to see them return.

04/11/08 UPDATE: According to my mother, the flowers are Amarilis.

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This photo was taken by myself this past summer at the Little Bighorn Battlefield National Park in Crow Agency, MT. This park memorializes one of the last armed efforts of the Northern Plains Indians to preserve their way of life. Here in 1876, 263 soldiers and attached personnel of the U.S. Army, including Lt. Col. George A. Custer, met death at the hands of several thousand Lakota and Cheyenne warriors.

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I took a few photographs of one of my CCW’s for the M&P Pistol Forum and figured I would toss one up here as well. This is a factory standard Smith & Wesson M&P Compact chambered in .40 caliber, without the magazine safety.

For your viewing pleasure, each photo below is linked to a larger version.

Take a look at my two entries below (two because I have two Labradors), then click your way over to Serious Zen to see the other entry. As always, you can click each photo below for a larger version.

Cast your vote by leaving a comment in the appropriate blog.

Casey in ‘The Chimichanga‘:

Molly in ‘The Punishment‘:

We finally have a nice afternoon here in Austin after what was literally like a week of rain. I’ll tell you, after that one week of nasty weather I was getting pretty grumpy so my hats off to those fools idiots people up north who have a whole season of it. In any case, on my way home from putting my new exhaust through its paces I stopped by the park near my house and took some new porn shots of my motorcycle. While 63 photos were taken, I will only present you with four.

A couple nights ago I came across a link on Apple’s “Hot News” page to a tutorial on how to make a Life Poster. At the time I had no idea what that meant, but if Apple was plugging something that wasn’t theirs then I knew it would be cool. After clicking the link I landed right spot on top of Mike Matas’ new blog. Sure enough, he had come up with yet another brilliant idea… and this is what I love about him. Mike is easily one of the smartest, most gifted and respected guys in my field and his award winning Mac application, Delicious Library, is but a small start in his bright future. But moving on…

So in any case, after reading the tutorial which basically involves Apple’s iLife ’05, 98 good photos and a quick import / export in Photoshop, I knew that I would be making my own Life Poster. And on top of that, I knew that it was going to blow (my) Mike away when he saw it.

Since I am linking to the tutorial here, I don’t want to go to much into it other then writing about my own experience with the project. I was afraid that I would have trouble finding 98 photos that I would want to stare at. Once I got into iPhoto though, I realized the hardest part would be weeding my album, which contains a bit over 1,400 photos, down to just 98. I also pretty quickly realized that I didn’t want that many photos of family and friends (no offense) so I tossed a couple dozen nice shots of vacations and geocaching in there for good measure.

So after completing his tutorial I forked $22.99 over to Kodak via iPhoto’s “Purchase Prints” area and they promised to print me a 20″ x 30″ high gloss Life Poster. Even better than that is the fact that I submitted it yesterday late afternoon and it shipped out this morning! How is that for fast turn around? The one thing that mildly bothers me is that the poster, once imported back into iPhoto, weighed in at about 160 MB in size. But when it transmitted the poster to Kodak, iPhoto said it was sending a 11 MB file. I am sure Apple has some sort of on-the-fly compression or something for reasons like this so I will just keep thinking positive.