March 20th, 2009
I ride the Amtrak Acela train from Boston to New York for business. It is usually good service, but today was awesome.
First off, I had to change my reservation to take the 5:10am train. The meeting was at 10am, and the 6am train gets to Penn Station at 9:45am, meaning I would be late for sure. So I called Amtrak to change my reservation. Amtrak’s telephone customer service is really nice to use. Unless I’m calling the day before Christmas or during some other peak period, the hold time is never more than a minute or two.
Plus, you don’t pay a fee for changing your reservation. In fact, if your new reservation is less expensive, they will credit you the difference. And you can change your reservation at any time, as long as there is room on the train.
I only travel to NYC maybe a couple times a month. But as soon as you take a few trips, you start building miles that lead to First Class upgrades. There are really nice things about First Class. In Boston, you can go upstairs to the ClubAcela waiting area if you want. Yes, there is an upstairs at South Station!
The First Class car is not usually as packed as the rest of the train. And you get a hot meal. A really, really good hot meal. I opted for the bagel and cereal this morning, but I noticed blackberry bread pudding with chicken sausages. Next time…
The clincher is the convenience. I can drive ten minutes, park my car, and walk downstairs to the train. Or take the T to South Station if I’m taking a later train. The Acela drops me downtown at Penn Station, about two blocks from the office.
Oh, and they’re testing wifi on some trains. I’m writing this from the train. 
My laptop is plugged into one of the outlets (one for each seat). The seats are big enough to spread out.
A day trip to NYC is a long day. The Acela does it in comfort. I’m a fan.
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August 11th, 2008
Hi everybody! Leah Katherine Thrall was born at 6pm on Tuesday July 29th. She weighed 7lb 10.5oz. We are taking a lot of pics.
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March 11th, 2008
We went to the British Virgin Islands for a week. It was awesome! I’ve uploaded some pics.
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February 26th, 2008
The weather is here
Glad it’s not beautiful
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February 22nd, 2008
Yesterday we left a car at the Coal Creek parking lot off Teton Pass, then drove up and parked at the summit of the pass. We hiked to the summit of Mount Glory, then traversed out past Little Tuckerman’s Ravine and dropped into the Coal Creek drainage. Here’s a sample, I will post more later.
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February 20th, 2008
View from the porch:
Moonlight hike:
Taken around 11pm. Shooting at night is a lot of fun. I borrowed Dan’s portable tripod. There were two problems. Auto focus is hard at night, and manual focus isn’t really a feasible alternative with these cameras, especially lying in the snow in the dark. Also, I need to figure how to set the exposure settings to take a clear picture that is lit without making it look like daylight.
If the camera doesn’t detect enough light to auto focus, it will use the flash to light the scene for focusing purposes. So I was popping the flash, focusing, then closing the flash again. That seemed to work. I took a pic that had potential but put a low f stop on it, so I ended up with an unfocused background.
This is a lot of fun!
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February 15th, 2008
I recently realized that I would never get around to repairing my old cheap Chinon film SLR and decided to replace it with a Digital Rebel XTI.
I had been wanting a digital SLR for a while. It is really fun to shoot in RAW mode and then tweak the image before converting it to a JPEG.
Pebbles sits still and is very photogenic.
Sammy is not as easy to catch. Her chair is not in a well lit part of the room, and she has almost no contrast compared to Pebbles.
I really wish I had this camera when Sammy was a pup.
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February 15th, 2008
(With apologies to E. B. White).
I traded in my car the other day. To the unknowing observer, it looked like a 1998 Subaru Outback with about 160k miles. Maybe needing some rear suspension pieces, definitely needing a new clutch, power steering pump and valve cover.
But a closer look would have found dust from trips to Moab, a receipt from the car wash in Boulder where I used to go multiple times a month during the ski season and scars on the underbody from pushing maybe a little too hard on trips over Ophir Pass and the back of Bartlett Wash.
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September 10th, 2007
We lost one of our ferrets the other day. Lucy had been sickly almost from the day we got her, but she was also the more lively of the two.
Back when we lived in Boulder, Alyssa’s ferret Tasha passed away. Tasha was a superb ferret, the kind of animal that is kind of an ambassador for the breed. Alyssa was missing having ferrets about and suggested we get a couple. At this point, we were living in Boulder so we went to the local mall pet store and picked out a couple that could have been (and quite possibly were) twins.
They came home with us in a cardboard box. Containing ferrets in an open-topped box is not easy. Especially not young ferrets. We had purchased a cage on wheels for the apartment. The designer of the cage had apparently not known ferrets very well, as the openings between the bars were easily navigated by our two girls. So they had the run of the place for the first two or three weeks.
Ferrets spend a lot of time sleeping, but when they are awake they are very playful creatures, especially when they are young. They love jumping around, and have been known to bite a toe or two when feeling especially frisky.
Lucy, you will be missed.
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