Spring Break

Ah, glorious spring break! A break from the norm. The first couple of days I spent relaxing, mostly computer gaming. Tuesday I set off for New Mexico to see the family. On the way down I listened to Ashley's Eragon book-on-CD, and quickly got hooked into that. I had just seen the movie on rental, and Ashley was right, the book was much better. Incidentally, I do agree with the sentiment that it's really a Harry Potter/Lord of the Rings ripoff, but it's entertaining and compelling all the same.

I spent the next few days relaxing and hanging out with my family. They weren't on spring break, so I was alone for the midday most of the time. Wednesday I got down to Santa Fe with my mom, and we shopped around and visited Blue Corn, one of my favorites. We also started experimenting with her new scanner and scanning photos and negatives. She was interested in a program for organizing photos by tagging, so I did a little bit of research there. I found a wonderful little free app, from Adobe of all people. Adobe Photoshop Album Starter Edition is a free program that implements the tagging features my mom wanted, and extremely well. It's all drag and drop, everything is intuitive, and it even does simple photo doctoring like red eye removal and cropping. Granted, it's really a fishing hook to get people to buy Photoshop Elements, but my mom doesn't need that kind of power. This is the first program I've found that includes tagging, and it's done very well. Scanning negatives turned out to be very easy for the 35mm film that the scanner was designed to use. However, when my mom started taking out the 110 and 126 films, we had to get creative. She even has large squares of film with very old pictures, and no feed holes or registration tabs or anything. I have no idea how we'll deal with those.

I also went to Jeannie's youth group on Thursday night. I met a lot of her friends there, and we all played a game called something like "The Winking Game." It involves a circle of chairs, each chair with a person standing behind it (a guard) and another sitting in it (a sitter). One chair is empty, and only has a person standing behind (the winker). The winker must wink at the sitters. When a sitter receives a wink, they must attempt to jump out of their chair and run to empty one. The guard behind the runner must attempt to tag them before they're out of arm's reach. If the runner is tagged, they must sit back down, but if they are not tagged, then their guard becomes the new winker. There are a couple of other rules, like the sitters must sit in the back of the chair, not the edge. Also, the guards must keep their hands clasped in the small of their back unless their sitter starts to get up. After a time, both sides switch. It just so happened that we had equal numbers of males and females, so we divided the groups that way. It was very fun, and fast paced. The group had a short sermon from the pastor, and ended with a short worship. I had a lot of fun there, and I got a chance to hang out with Jeannie.

On Friday afternoon, my dad and I went out Geocaching around the edge of the mesa they live on. First we attempted to find Volcanologist Field Day. We had a wonderful and scenic hike down from the top, but when we got to the boulder field we got stumped. We're sure it was there, but there are so many small crevices and caves among the fallen rocks that it could have been anywhere. Had I been alone I might have searched longer, but I preferred to spend the time hiking with my dad. I don't get to see him nearly often enough, so I cherish the time we do get to spend. After that, we hiked back to the top and backtracked along the top of the mesa to find On The Edge. We were able to find that one, and hiked back to the car. I definitely had fun, and I pretty sure my dad did as well.

Saturday I decided to leave for home early. I could have gone to my brother's track meet, but instead I will go back down for his State Finals meet after my school is out. He's graduating at the end of May, so that will be exciting. I listened to almost the end of Eragon, but it was cut short by the time I was home. I was looking forward to a nice relaxing, quiet evening. Just myself, possibly Jackie, Cameron, Ashley, or some combination. Instead, when I got to the house, there was barely a parking spot for me, half of the corner couch was on the front lawn, and all of my friends were in the house. Ashley decided to rearrange the living room just as I was getting home. She had spent most of the day cleaning up after Cameron's 21st birthday party and his prompt move-out, and I was grateful that the house was mostly clean. However, I was pretty upset by the sudden upheaval of the entire living room. My room was full of assorted junk from around the house. I consented to let the girls use it to store stuff for Cameron's party, but I expected it to be clean when I got home. It was not. Worse yet, I had let Jackie use my spare LCD monitor to troubleshoot her laptop problems and back up files. I found it laying on the bed under a pile of junk, and the screen was scratched in several places. I spent the rest of the evening being a grump, and Ashley apologized. I don't mind if she rearranges the furniture, but I would prefer it if she at least warns me, and maybe waits for an evening when I haven't been driving long distance or doing something else that frazzles my nerves.

Anyway, not too bad of a spring break. I wish I had gotten more done to catch up in calculus, but I've got a month left to push to the end.