Opal at Celebrate Life has given me “The Versatile Blogger” award, which I greatly appreciate.  We’ve been reading each other’s blogs since at least 2008.

Many of these blog awards have a list of requirements that go with them – which really makes them into a sort of ‘award meme’ – and this award has its own set of requirements, which I’ll be treating a tad differently.

One of the requirements is to nominate 15 bloggers that you follow regularly or have recently discovered – a little bit of linky love and sharing with others some blogs that you like.

What I started with, instead, was to trace the lineage of the Versatile Blogger award as it came to me.  I went back 97 ‘generations’ of the award before I came to a blog that had died.  Some of the blogs had been awarded multiple times, but I just followed one path back, making it all the way back to May 30, 2010. I’ve included links to all of the ‘generations’ of the award before me on the right.

The Versatile Blog award has been around a long while in internet time.  The earliest mention I could find of it was from October 2007.  There is a Versatile Blogger Award site, but  its earliest post is from only a few months ago.

Another of the requirements is to tell the person who nominated you 7 things about yourself:

1. I don’t do memes or awards.  I’m making a bit of an exception on this one, because it’s fun.  Sometime meme and award requirements are just too much of something I’m not interested.  I also don’t like to make others feel like they are obligated to do something, which is why I won’t be passing this on to anyone else.
2. Though I was born in the North, I’ve been a legal resident of the South for three quarters of my life. However, I was a legal resident of Texas for tax purposes when I was in the Navy and we lived in California, Connecticut, and Idaho.
3. I’ve spent about 15 1/2 months under water – 6 deterrent patrols on a nuclear submarine.
4. I didn’t need to wear green on St. Patrick’s Day – my eyes are green, as are my dad’s, bother brothers, and two of my sisters.  The other sister has blue eyes.
5. Even though I have a bachelors degree, I’ve never been on the campus of the college I got it from.  The same is true for our son-in-law.  We got our degrees from the same University and they weren’t mail order or online course.  We did our coursework in actual classes, but they were held on military bases.
6. I am a member of The Order of the Blue Nose (line crossing ceremony for the arctic circle).
7. I rode a bus unaccompanied to Houston from Nebraska when I was 13 to spend the summer with my mom and step-dad – I lived with my grandparents.  That summer of ‘65, we lived in a very depressed area (slum?) very close to downtown. I rode a Greyhound bus unaccompanied back to Nebraska at the end of the summer.

Sipapu Natural Bridge Trail, Natural Bridges National Monument, Utah, September 30, 2011

Natural Bridges National Monument overflow camping on nearby BLM land

Farmers’ Market, Great Falls Montana, September 1, 2007

Mt. Rushmore, South Dakota, August 22, 2007

“Reach” for our facebook fan page has gone over 10,000.

Reach?

What the heck is that?

According to facebook, it’s the number of people who have seen any content associated with our page during a seven day period.

Another way of saying it is that something related to our American Civil War on facebook has been seen by 10,588 during the seven day period from April 2nd through April 8th.  That’s up 282% from the previous week.

There must be something to it.  The number of likes has been rising and the rate seems to have increased.  Today we went over 4500 and it currently stands at 4505.

Four blogs contribute material to The American Civil War on facebook:

• The American Civil War; http://civilwar-online.com/;  Jerel C. Wilmore
• Seven Score and Ten; http://gathkinsons.net/sesqui/; Allen Gathman
• Daily Observations from the Civil War; http://dotcw.com/; Mike Goad
• The Civil War Daily Gazette; http://civilwardailygazette.com/; Eric Swanger

I’ve created a Pinterest pin board called Great Depression and have pinned all of the large images from my “Eyes of the Great Depression” series, as well as a few other Great Depression images I’ve posted.  At some point, I plan to return to the Eyes series and do some other posts related to the Great Depression.  There are many thousands of images from the period that are in the public domain.

I now have 23 boards, 480 pins, and 26 likes on Pinterest – and there are no copyright issues on any of the items that I’ve pinned.

By far, most of the images are mine to begin with.  The rest are public domain, from websites that encourage – or, at least, allow – pinning, or are used under the “fair use” provision of copyright law.

Most of my Pinterest pins are images from my Haw Creek website and blog, which provides most of our internet income, even though I spend little time on it for posts, updates or maintenance.

I doubt that we will get much of a traffic boost pinning from my own pages almost exclusively.

Where I hope to see the boost is from the repins. I figured it would be worth a try.

I still have concerns about copyright issues associated with Pinterest.  For now, at least, I’m going to shy away from pinning too far away from the nest.

Update 3/24/2012 — I’m reconsidering my concern over Pinterest. Pinterest has come out with revised terms and is working on making private pinboards available.

I’ve developed a Pinterest Policy page.  Most pages here will be open for pinning, though the front page, archives, and selected pages will have it blocked.

A Pinterest pinboard, to me, is an online, published compilation of images that someone has collected.   It’s sort of like a published scrapbook.  If ya publish it, ya need to have the rights to publish the individual items in the scrapbook (compilation).

_______

I don’t like it.

It’s a great concept – organize and share all the beautiful things you find on the web.

There’s just two big sticky problems.

Copyright

The first is called copyright infringement.

Pinterest is primarily based around collecting pictures.  In collecting images and “pinning” them on their pinboards, the Pinterest user is publishing copies of other peoples’ work.

Copyright of a photograph or drawing starts as soon as an image is fixed in some sort of permanent form.  For electronic images, that occurs as soon as an image is saved as a file.

Making copies of this file, including publishing it somewhere other than where it is intended, violates the exclusive right of the creator of the image to make and/or approve copies.  The right to copy is why it’s called copyright.  If you didn’t create it and didn’t get permission, then you don’t have a right to copy, you don’t have a right to pin.

Terms of Use

The other big problem is the Pinterest terms of use.

Under the terms of  use, if you use Pinterest, then you  “represent and warrant that: (i) you either are the sole and exclusive owner of all Member Content that you make available through the Site, Application and Services or you have all rights, licenses, consents and releases that are necessary to grant to Cold Brew Labs the rights in such Member Content.”

The terms of use also says none of your Pinterest activities “will infringe, misappropriate or violate a third party’s patent, copyright, trademark, trade secret, moral rights or other proprietary or intellectual property rights, or rights of publicity or privacy, or result in the violation of any applicable law or regulation.”

In other words, by the terms of use that everyone agrees to before they can use Pinterest, every user is saying they have the right or permission to use every single thing that they are putting on their pinboard.

Somehow I rather doubt that many users really understand or that they even actually read the terms of use, let alone this part.

Wikipedia has an interesting statement concerning Pinterest and the issue of copyright.

Pinterest has a notification system which allows copyright holders to request that content be removed from the site. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) safe harbor status of Pinterest has been questioned given that it actively promotes its users to copy to Pinterest, for their perpetual use, any image on the internet. Pinterest users cannot claim safe harbor status and as such are exposed to possible legal action for pinning copyrighted material. (emphasis mine – MpG)

While it’s an interesting concept, given the present state of the internet and current copyright laws and treaties, the design of Pinterest by its very nature fosters unintended abuse of the intellectual property rights of others.

I’ve spent too much time researching and learning about copyright.  I ‘m going to have to take a pass on Pinterest.

Copy Right, Copy Sense

The internet has a lot of fascinating, interesting, and useful sites.  Here are a few that I’ve found:

• Free online file converter – Convert media files online from one format into another.
• The Fantastic in Art & Fiction – Sponsored by Cornell University’s Institute for Digital Collections (CIDC) this image-bank provides a visual resource for the study of the Fantastic or of the supernatural in fiction and in art.
• A History of the World – The British Museum and BBC uses objects to tell a history of the world.
• Shooting in a Dust Storm – Cameraman Bob Poole was filming elephants with ease — until a giant dust storm rose up and swallowed all the light.

• Wikiquote –  the free quote compendium that anyone can edit.
• HHMI’s Virtual Museum – Stroll through exhibits on biological clocks, infectious diseases, cardiology, and neuroscience at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s online museum.
• List of Colors – a comprehensive list of colors at Wikipedia.
• Home Gardening – A supplement to the Cornell Gardening resources website.
• Image Searches – for use with blogs, web pages, etc.  (make sure to check for creative commons license or other conditions – images posted on line are NOT free for the taking just because they’ve been posted.
• Compfight is an image search engine tailored to efficiently locate images for blogs, comps, inspiration, and research. We make good use of the flickr™ API, but aren’t affiliated with flickr.
• everystockphoto.com – search engine for free photos. These come from many sources and are license-specific.
• Freerange Stock was formed with the goal to provide quality stock photos for commercial and non-commercial use. For free.
• search.creativecommons.org is not a search engine, but rather offers convenient access to search services provided by other independent organizations.

The internet has a lot of fascinating, interesting, and useful sites.  Here are a few that I’ve found:

1. Discovering Lewis & Clark® – “in pursuit of our mission to make this the most comprehensive and useful Lewis and Clark website on the Internet.”
2. Hershey’s Kitchens Recipes– the chocolate desert experts.
3. PublicLibraries.com “strives to promote the use and support of local public libraries in every city across the United States.”
4. Archaeological Institute of America– “The AIA promotes a vivid and informed public interest in the cultures and civilizations of the past, supports archaeological research, fosters the sound professional practice of archaeology, advocates the preservation of the world’s archaeological heritage, and represents the discipline in the wider world.”
5. Lindsey Stirling – an American violinist, performance artist, and composer. In 2010 she competed on the fifth season of America’s Got Talent, reaching the quarterfinals. She has a large number of music videos available on her YouTube channel, which has nearly 200,000 subscribers.  Since music videos can be heavily edited, I looked for a video of a live performance and found a performance at Scenra Theatre, in Washington, D.C.
6. SeedsNow.com – “All our seeds are 100% Non-Genetically Modified (Non-GMO), 100% Heirloom/Non-Hybrid, and 100% Open-Pollinated. This means you can actually save your seed year-after- year!”
7. Space Adventures – “the only company to have sent private citizens to space..,”
8. Cultivate – “a new online resource for kitchen inspiration and design.”
9. Patrick Smith Photography – Landscape views not often seen.
10. How to Draw – “a collection of tutorials that will teach you everything from perspective basics to shading chrome.”

A new comment on one of my blogs says, “I have read a few good stuff here. Definitely worth bookmarking for revisiting. I wonder how much effort you put to create such a great informative website.”

At first glance, this very complementary comment might appear to be legitimate, but it’s just too vague, with no correlation whatever to the content of the post.  It’s comment spam.

The funny thing  about this particular comment spam is that it was left on a post titled “Hello World.”  The blog isn’t even active.

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When I went to update our virus protection software last month, I upgraded to a product that had more protection, and didn’t think anything more about it.

Friday, I was viewing my e-mail spam folder prior to permanent deletion and found a message from Norton telling me that my virus protection software had been automatically updated – the old software that was no longer on our computers.

Time to contact customer service.

I managed to get online and find the customer service link.  There was a note that said that the customer service online chat was the quickest way to resolve problems, which was fine with me.  I don’t care for dealing with customer service by phone and, with chat, there’s no struggling to understand the representative’s accent – and there was no way I was going to try to resolve this with e-mail.

The wait was just a few minutes and I “worked” on other things while I was waiting.  The customer service “expert,” to use Norton’s term for their representatives, was able to help in a relatively short period of time.  He did offer to apply the subscription time to our current product and refund 10% of the renewal price.  I told him,  “I would prefer the full refund instead.”

After he had processed the refund, he wrote, “I’ve noticed that you have been waiting for longer than expected. I’m sorry for this inconvenience and as a gesture of good will and to thank you for your patience, I would like to add an extra 30 days to your subscription. Is that ok with you?”  How did he know it was my birthday?

He didn’t, of course.  Funny thing, though, it was his birthday, too.

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It’s unfortunate that unethical individuals and organizations try to take advantage of people through the internet.

Imagine an online world where you didn’t have to deal with spam, viruses, phishing and scams.

Unfortunately, that innocent online world only lasted a few short years.

I was subscribed to a few genealogy online mailing lists that went silent in the 90s when a guy in Atlanta selling laser printer cartridges sent one of his ads in a mass email to the lists.  At the time, the mailing lists were hosted on a server at Indiana University.  The load from that mass emailing crashed the server and, eventually, that incident forced the mailing lists to find a new home.  That was my first exposure to the impact of internet spam.

Today,  staying protected from online attack requires spam filters, a good virus protection program and a firewall to prevent unauthorized access to your computer.

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How about you?  Any recent spam or virus issues?

I’m running another test of the settings of the plugin to send posts to facebook.

The figure provided with this test is a trend of satellite determined temperature variation for the lower atmosphere of the entire planet.  The figure is published monthly.  The temperature variation (or anomaly) is plotted as a temperature departure from the average value from January 1981 to December 2010.

The high peaks of the running 13 month average at 1998 and 2009 occurred from periods with strong El Ninos.  The drop at the end of the figure corresponds to La Nina periods

This is a second test of the feed from by blog to facebook.  It’s not intended to be a tutorial on how to set up a feed, though there may be some useful information for doing that.

There are a number of different ways to provide a feed from a blog to your facebook page (wall).

This is what worked for me.

However, that isn’t exactly what I wanted to do.  I wanted to the info to go to a page associated with my blog, not my personal facebook page.  I didn’t realize that I had to find something that would do that until after I had installed a WordPress plugin that would only send the post to a personal facebook wall.

Facebook Page Publish.

The second try was a plugin called Facebook Page Publish.  After installing the plugin, it took me a bit to find the link to its settings page.  Instead of being on the plug-ins menu, its under the Settings menu.

To connect the blog to facebook with this plugin, you have to create an app.  To get to the menu for building an app, use this link, or, if that didn’t work,

• go to the menu at the bottom of your facebook page and select Developers – or use this link.
• then at the top of the developers page, select the link for apps .

This post is intended to be a second test of the feed from my blog to facebook.  It’s not intended to be a detailed tutorial on how use the App feature or the WordPress plugin, so this is as far as I’ll go with it.

Many bloggers are now sometimes bloggers or former bloggers who I see more on facebook than on their blog or commenting in their blog.

So, now, I’m going to try to integrate facebook with my blog.

If this post stays here, it worked.  If it didn’t work, this post won’t be here, except in short term internet memory.

Lorem ipsum is dummy text long used for formatting layout in the printing and typesetting industry.  Today, it finds use in designing web page or blog layout.  Dummy text is used to eliminate the distraction of reading the content of the page and allows the viewer or developer easier focus on how the graphical elements, including the text, work with or against each other.

I’ve never seen it in video – but, why not:

The time lapse is from 899 photos taken over a period of about 75 minutes and compressed in the video to about 53 seconds.

Davina Haisell as more information on Lorem Ipsum in her post, Lorem Ipsum for the Smarty Pants.

We missed the big dust storm in Lubbock, Texas, on Monday by just a couple of hours. Even though we fought the wind all day, we managed to make it past Lubbock before the storm hit.

We were on the homeward leg of a 6 week trip and had planned to go further south, crossing Texas below Dallas and Fort Worth.  Saturday and Sunday nights, we had been camped near Carlsbad, New Mexico.  We were able to get online Sunday night, barely, and checked the weather forecast for where we were thinking of going – wind and blowing dust, with temperatures in the mid to high 90s.  The forecast for the Lubbock area was cooler and windy, but blowing dust was not mentioned. After talking it over for a bit, we decided to head north instead of east.

I did get a some video from our windy day’s trip and produced a short YouTube video.

On this trip, I decided that I was not going to try to keep up with a travel blog.  My intent was to keep a written journal and take lots of photos and video and to incorporate the journal and images into blog posts after we got home.  I was only partially successful.

While I did take lots of photographs and videos, the written journal fell by the wayside after only a few days.

I did read quite a few books over the last six weeks, though.

Yesterday we had a bit of wind and rain.  After the rain had passed, Karen spotted a rainbow through the skylight of the camper and I walked out to the highway to get to an open area where I could see it without trees, structures, or vehicles in the way.  I ended up on the edge of the median of the southbound lane of US 50.  The image is a composite of three photographs.

Nature is so amazing!

We’re traveling again.  My contact job ended about 2 1/2 weeks ago and we left home 2 weeks ago.  This time, I decided I was not going to try to keep up with the trip on a day to day basis.  Each time I’ve done that, I got behind and ended up skipping some days.

I’ve taken a lot of pictures and video, including several fairly decent time-lapse sequences.  Post processing is complete for about the first day and a half of our trip.  I’ll be posting about the trip in more detail when we get back home and I’ll be doing it day-by-day to get the whole trip published in sequence.

We planned to be away from the internet quite a bit this trip.  I pre-scheduled the videos that have been posted every three days or so through to the end of the trip.  Karen is posting pretty much as we go on her blog, but she is also pre-posting for some of the times that we will be away from the internet.

Most of the time when we have internet access, we are camped in an RV park that has wireless and is near or in a town, like Grand Junction, Colorado, where we are now.

Josiah Marshall
Favill

Image of unknown
man used for John
Beauchamp Jones.

Image of unknown
woman used for
“refugee” Judith
White McQuire.

Joseph Howland

Horatio Nelson Taft

William Howard Russell

Seven of the writers that I am including at Daily Observations from The Civil War wrote diary entries or letters on July 21, 1861 that related to the battle near Manassas Junction and/or the aftermath.  The following are excerpts from their writings of the day:

Josiah Marshall Favill – “In the order prescribed by the regulations, for a force feeling the enemy preparatory to an attack, we marched forward, passing over the open field and into a piece of full grown timber, apparently the slope of a considerable hill. As we slowly ascended the rising ground, suddenly a loud screeching noise overhead sent more than half the regiment pell mell the other side of a fence that ran along the road side. Here we crouched down flat on our bellies, our hearts in our mouths..,” – Diary of a Young Officer.

John Beauchamp Jones – “The President left the city this morning for Manassas, and we look for a battle immediately. I have always thought he would avail himself of his prerogative as commander-in-chief, and direct in person the most important operations in the field; and, indeed, I have always supposed he was selected to be the Chief of the Confederacy, mainly with a view to this object, as it was generally believed…” – A Rebel War Clerk’s Diary at the Confederate States Capital.

Judith White McQuire – “We were at church this morning and heard Bishop Meade, on the subject of “Praise.” He and his whole congregation greatly excited. Perhaps there was no one present who had not some near relative at Manassas…” Diary of a Southern Refugee During the War.

Joseph Howland – “On The Battle-Field Near Bull Run… Our brigade is making a demonstration in the face of the enemy and a fight is going on on the right of the line five or six miles off.” – Letters of a Family During the War for the Union.

Horatio Nelson Taft – “This has been the most exciting day yet. We have heard the guns all day from the battle which has been raging at or near Mannasses Junction. There is no news that can be relied on public tonight, only that a terrible fight has been going on all day.” – Diary of a Clerk in the U.S. Patent Office.

William Howard Russell – “The calmness and silence of the streets of Washington this lovely morning suggested thoughts of the very different scenes which, in all probability, were taking place at a few miles’ distance. One could fancy the hum and stir round the Federal bivouacs, as the troops woke up and were formed into column of march towards the enemy.” – My Diary North and South.

1. Crimes against butter – people imprison for selling margarine. (U.S. National Archives)
2. Stuxnet: Anatomy of a Computer Virus – this is the virus that shutdown the Iranian nuclear fuel enrichment centrifuges.
3. Göbekli Tepe – the oldest known stone human-made community and place of worship yet discovered.
4. Chihuly – fantastic glass art.
5. Tittle – a small distinguishing mark, such as the dot over a lowercase i or j.
6. Photopic Sky Survey – Fully interactive map of the night sky composed of 37000 pictures stitched together by one man.
7. Do nothing for 2 minutes.
8. Crossword Clue Solver
9. Portrait of America – Mobile free photo booth in an old VW van traveling cross country, capturing pictures of people.
10. Palouse Falls – an upper falls of ~20 feet (6.1m)  and a lower falls od ~180 feet (55 m ). (Wikipedia)
11. Code Talkers – American Indian heroes of World War II (National Museum of American Indians).
12. Butterflies and Moths of North America – collecting and sharing data about Lepidoptera.
13. Captured: The Ruins of Detroit – French photographers Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre set out to document the decline of an American city.
14. J.K. Rowling Official Site
15. Reflections

This may become a regular feature – or maybe not.

1. T.G.I. Friday’s
2. Grizzly kills man at Yellowstone National Park, first fatal mauling since 1986
3. honey badger – The honey badger (Mellivora capensis), also known as the ratel, is a monotypic species of mustelid native to Africa, the Middle East and the Indian Subcontinent. (wikipedia)
4. In some cultures, Friday is considered unlucky. (Wikipedia)
5. Engineered from the finest genes, and trained to be a secret courier in a future world, Friday operates over a near-future Earth, where chaos reigns.
6. Hogweed – Heracleum Mantegazzianum — a plant more commonly known as the giant hogweed and native to Central Asia — is spreading fast in several states, and experts are urging some residents to beware. The tall plant with large, attractive flowers the size of umbrellas contains sap that causes blisters, burns, even blindness.
7. Kidnap survivor Elizabeth Smart joins ABC News as commentator.
8. Solar System Scope – Interactive 3D model of the solar system – interesting, but too busy with ads.
9. Katrina killed Six Flags New Orleans – Wikipedia
10. Your Paintings – a BBC website which aims to show the entire UK national collection of oil paintings, the stories behind the paintings, and where to see them for real. It is made up of paintings from thousands of museums and other public institutions around the country.

11. The Mountain from TSO Photography on Vimeo.

At Daily Observations from The Civil War, I publish daily writings from letters and diaries of 150 years ago, scheduling posts well in advance to keep from getting overwhelmed or behind.

While working with War Letters of William Thompson Lusk, I came across some familiar names.  On August 11, 1861, Lt. Lusk writes to his mother, “I have been fortunate in meeting several friends most unexpectedly during the last few days. Miss Woolsey was at our encampment on some errand of mercy yesterday evening. I saw her for a few moments, and promised to call upon her and Mrs. Howland soon, which I shall do if allowed to leave the camp. The laws are very strict though now, and I doubt whether I shall be able to leave the camp for some time to come.”

Miss Woolsey was Georgeanna Muirson Woolsey and Mrs. Howland was her sister, Eliza Woolsey Howland.  Many of their civil war letters – and those of other family members – are preserved in Letters of a Family During the War for the Union, another book I have been working with. There, Eliza Howland writes to her husband on October 1, 1861, “Very little to tell you about except a few calls, including one from Mrs. General Franklin to ask us to take tea with her to-night. Lieutenant Lusk of the 79th, whom we used to know as “Willy” Lusk, also came. He seems to have grown up into a very fine young fellow, handsome and gentlemanly, and with the same sweet expression he had as a child. He was studying medicine in Europe when the war broke out, but came home at once and enlisted as Lieutenant in the 79th, where he is now Acting Captain—so many of the regiment were either killed or taken prisoners at Bull Run.”

Georgeanna and Eliza lived together in Washington, D.C., while Eliza’s husband, Joseph served in the Union Army of the Potomac.  When the Army of the Potomac left the Washington area, they tried to get permission to travel with it.  However, they were unsuccessful until the Sanitary Commission gave them positions  on the hospital ship Daniel Webster.

All three survived the war. 

Eliza and her husband returned to their home in New York after he was wounded in 1862 at the Battle of Gaines’ Mill, effectively ending his military career. 

Georgeanna became very prominent in nursing during the war and after, including being one of the principle founders of the Connecticut Training School for Nurses. 

William took part in engagements at Blackburn’s Ford, First Bull Run, Port Royal, James Island, Second Bull Run, Antietam, Fredericksburg, and many other minor battles. He was also a staff officer of Isaac I. Stevens until Stevens’ death, and he commanded two companies during the Draft Riots of 1863.  When his command was sent to Delaware and designated as inactive, he resigned and returned to medical school. 

The tagline for this blog says that the blog is about sharing photos and images along with occasional commentary.

Lately, there’s not been much of any of any of that.

I’ve selected and randomly sorted a large number of my photos and collected images – and I’m going to start posting them on a fairly regular basis, starting tomorrow.  Some of the pictures will have appeared here before; most, though, will be posted for the first time.

I’ve always had the best intentions in the past for blogging about our trips, complete with descriptions and photos of some of what we have seen and done.  Unfortunately, with the seeing and doing, the blogging can’t keep up, I get further and further behind and end up not sharing all that I had hoped to share.

I  think on our next trip that I’ll take a different approach.  During the trip I’ll record what we do and see using the camera, a handwritten journal, and brochures from places we visit.

Blog posts will be developed sequentially from the journal entries and photos at some point when I have the time to sit down and write.  Sometimes a single day of our exploring, doing and seeing may play out over several daily blog posts.

Hopefully this will give me a plan for better sharing of our future trips.  I do intend to continue posting and sharing material from past trips that I have not yet shared or which has become “lost” over the years.

With my current employment situation, we won’t be doing as much traveling this year as we have in previous years, so my opportunities for trying this plan are going to be slim.

The photos on this post are from a 2007 weekend trip to Dallas, Texas.