Kit is not pleased that temperatures are dropping. Her coat is fine and thin, so she cuddles up to any heat source she can find.

Sunday morning Michael & I woke up at 5:00 AM to drive to the Pittsburgh airport to fly to Orlando for his conference. 5:15 we got in the car and discovered that the noise that had awakened me at 1:30 AM was a rock breaking our windshield.

Unsurprisingly, it is really difficult to find someone at 5:30 AM on a Sunday morning to drive you to an airport more than an hour away, especially when everyone who you might call at 5:30 AM is out of town. We started to drive to Pittsburgh, but as soon as we were on the interstate realized it was a terrible idea, and so regrouped at the truck stop at Mount Morris.

I’d like to take a moment here to say that USAA may be the best insurance company in the entire world. Sitting in a truck stop I called the insurance company, and was able to arrange everything to get the windshield taken care of. The only thing I had to do on my own was arrange to get the car back to Morgantown after the windshield was fixed. One phone call, 30 minutes, and everything was taken care of. You can’t imagine what a relief that is–or perhaps you can.

Luckily, the airline has a policy that as long as you arrive within 2 hours of your flight, they’ll rebook you on a new flight, so we did in fact make it to Orlando–finding a ride was actually the most difficult part of the morning.

Even better, the rest of the trip was entirely uneventful. Michael’s conference was (of course) in an insanely expensive hotel, and (of course) there was absolutely nothing within walking distance, so I had no choice but to eat at the hotel restaurants. Although expensive, the food was very good, and I got away with only eating a late breakfast and an early dinner. I also did a lot of walking along the lakes–they had a very nice footpath. Though in retrospect, I’m thinking perhaps I should have stuck to sneakers instead of wearing sandals. (Yes, I did see the aftermath of this–rumor is he or his wife was there for the conference Michael was attending, but there were several conferences going on. Don’t know anything for certain.)

I took my camera and took pictures, but am having issues with the exposure on my PowerShot–or I’ve just been spoiled by my Rebel–so it seems like the better pictures were actually taken with my cell phone, which is just….wrong.

I was fascinated by the boccee court, but couldn’t really find a good way to photograph it.
(more…)

This picture is from my last walk this morning.

On of the things I particularly like about going to Michael’s conferences is I generally do a lot of walking. I have no specific plans, so I can spend a great deal of time wandering around.

Resetting the camera settings on my PowerShot seems to have fixed the exposure issues I was having. This picture, however, was taken at night with my phone camera. I didn’t feel like carrying my camera for my evening walk, which is why I found so many interesting things to photograph I suppose.

I just reset my small camera, because I hate the way every picture I’ve taken with it has turned out. Everything is just a hair overexposed, and I’m hoping it’s just a setting that got screwed up.