Weekend in review

Wow. Had a very, very busy weekend. Let me explain. No, there is too much. Let me sum up.

This was the weekend of the Comal County Fair. We took the kids to the parade Friday, and also the petting zoo and other assorted fair things. I entered a bottle of my blueberry mead, which was an utter failure as such--having absolutely no flavor of blueberry in it--yet was surprisingly pleasant to drink as a plain mead with a slightly purplish cast to the liquid. I was rewarded with a red ribbon, which is my best showing ever, with my prickly pear and holiday spice entries both earning third place ribbons in years past. Sunday I took the Bug and Fairy Girl to the midway, paid a small fortune to get them wristbands, and let them ride pretty much everything there all afternoon. I was exhausted by the end, and that was just from watching.

Saturday The Wife had a wedding in Lago Vista. A very nice wedding. We dropped the kids off at the Nama's in Bastrop, and I drove over to the wedding venue (note: If wanting to get from Point A to Point B in Lago Vista, just give it up. It's not possible in that Byzantine maze of roads). My job for this wedding, as it is for all of The Wife's larger weddings, was to back her up as second shooter. She was armed with her newest toy, the 5D mark II camera, and I would be using her 50D with my Rebel as the emergency backup. By the end of the night she would've done just as well leaving me home. I struggled with the 50D, as the settings which are so intuitive to me on my Rebel XTi don't produce the same results on the 50D. I was getting horrible over-exposures and inconsistent strobe illumination. Exposure compensation kept getting accidentally altered. I couldn't adjust the settings in the dark, as the control layout is different from what I'm used to. None of the shots I normally pride myself on--the groomsmen, reception candid shots, infrared images of the venue--came out. In six hours of shooting, I'd wager I got maybe a dozen keepers. That's pathetic by any measure. It all comes from my not being familiar with the 50D's quirks and tendencies when shooting (I hope) rather than any inherent incompetence on my part. At least, that's what I'm telling myself. Fortunately for all concerned, The Wife knocked it out of the park, as usual. She got a wealth of stunning images, despite having to reshoot some of my assigned shots during my long night of crash-and-burn. This is why you hire a professional photographer for important events, rather than a semi-competent amateur.

Last but not least, upon returning home, we discovered that Windows 7 is a very clever program. So clever, in fact, that it will figure out a way to download the latest so-called "Critical update" even when you've told it not to. That same critical update that's crashed the computer on startup five times over the past two weeks, in fact, forcing us to recover the use of said computer via System Restore. But this must have offended Windows 7 in some manner, because it went through the trouble of deleting all of our previously-established system restore points this time, forcing us to to a complete and total reinstallation of every piece of software. Ouch. And certain programs and drivers, which worked fine before, is not being rejected by Windows 7 as not worthy of being recognized. Seriously, it's contempt is tangible. We're now 24 hours and counting on the grand reinstall adventure, and The Wife still can't get the monitor color calibration to work. We haven't even tried to get our Photoshop plugins going. Wouldn't it be nice if Microsoft spent more time designing an operating system that, you know, operated with the software we need instead of automatically assuming the user is a dolt and would much rather prefer to watch dancing paperclips or whatever.

Now Playing: Tom Petty Wildflowers