We made our first backpacking trip back in April. We only hiked a total of six miles but carrying your bed on your back is different from what we usually do. The weather was great - only a little bit of rain during the night.

The Three Musketeers is a novel about the adventures of four musketeers in 17th century France. Muskets are only used once by the musketeers. Swords and occasionally pistols are the weapon of choice. The story line consists of conspiracies, daring escapes, duels, and lots of hard living. The horses have the hardest lives as they are frequently left for dead on the journeys.

The novel is the first of a trilogy though I doubt that was intended during its writing. The second definitely feels like a Hollywood sequel capitalizing on the success of the original. It is still a very good story with high tension moments.

All the novels were published as serials. They read very differently from the serialized work of Dickens. The latter two novels have climaxes in odd spots and have self-contained stories within them. Dumas seems to have had difficulty ending the third. English editions of it are usually broken up into three volumes. The entire trilogy in my collection is 3,464 pages. That's a lot of sword fights.

Dumas does a great job creating evil characters. I have rarely seen the lust for vengeance portrayed as well. He seems to have forgotten his revenge-driven character in the third book, but I didn't mind as it kept it from being too formulaic. My primary complaints are two-fold. First, the shaming of the primary hero, d'Artagnan, by the king near the end of the last novel did not fit with the larger than life character that Dumas had created. Second, in the second and third books the musketeers begin to become caricatures of themselves.

A great side benefit of working through this trilogy is a greater understanding of French history during this time period (and to a lesser extent, English history). My editions had ample backnotes on all the historical characters and events. I have already come across a few references in my reading that I would have not appreciated before.

The descriptions of the French court and its frivolity, excess, and endless intrigues were enough to make me think that perhaps the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror weren't such bad ideas after all. Maybe I should read A Tale of Two Cities again or perhaps something like Scaramouche.

I've already fed him.

We hiked our first trail in Patapsco Valley State Park on Saturday. It was a peaceful two miles — thousands of flowers along the trail, the echoes of woodpecker activity, the gurgling of running water, and mountain bikers crashing down the hills.

What do you do when you're driving down a country road in New Mexico and you're bored? Pull out a gun and shoot a sign I guess.

I have spent one night in the last twenty years in Florida and it just so happens that the Space Shuttle Endeavour was launched that night. I had no idea there was a launch scheduled until I arrived at Cape Canaveral that afternoon. It was the RVs lining the road to the Air Force station that tipped me off. The security guard confirmed it. It was a once in a lifetime opportunity even if it did mean missing a lot of sleep to see the 2:20 am launch.

I awaited the launch on the edge of the base. There were hundreds of families, high school students and college spring breakers there. A favorite activity among the high school crowd was to mock the photographers with tripods and lenses as long as my leg by standing in front of their cameras without seeming to notice. I hadn't brought a tripod or my newer camera so I was limited to a point and shoot.

The general attitude among the teenagers was of being too cool to be there. They were talking to friends on cell phones, standing around in circles looking oblivious to the scene around them, and making jokes about last minute repairs that the shuttle might need. That ended quickly when the shuttle lifted off. At ignition, there was an audible gasp from everyone at the brilliant light. This video does a reasonable job of capturing what we saw (though with more detail). After several seconds of only seeing the shuttle take-off, we finally heard the rumble.

At some point while everyone was waiting around, some teenage boys were joking about swimming across the water to get a better look at the launch. A 7 or 8-year old boy quickly corrected their distance estimate. His fathered added some technical details to this and really impressed the high schoolers. At this, the father proudly told his son, "See, it pays to be a geek."

The crocuses are out. The temperature was up to 70 degrees today. Ants are invading our house. Spring is here.

Every time I hear there is going to a meteor shower or a lunar eclipse, I promise that this is the time I will be out there watching it. Any every time I forget or decide I'd rather be in bed. I finally got out there this past Wednesday. It was tempting to give up hope due to the overcast skies but everything cleared up by 8 pm.

Since I was braving the cold, the camera came out with me to produce a record of this event. I set it up on our deck with its mode set to night-time shots. The first shot was a blurry, bright mess. I started running through the menus trying to recall how to get this thing into some sort of manual mode. But of course, this is a consumer camera that only grudgingly allows anything resembling manual control. These sorts of settings each require the navigation of 3 or 4 menus using tiny buttons—buttons that don't seem to be designed for adult fingers, especially not gloved, adult fingers.

I eventually found a mode that gave me a little more control and managed to get some decent photos. The one on the left shows the Earth's shadow beginning to obscure the full moon. When taking these shots, I had the choice of setting the exposure to catch the part of the moon in the shadow or the other part. It was impossible to get both. If you click on this link, you can see the moon just before full eclipse. It is a rust color with a very bright sliver still illuminated by the Sun. Saturn is the yellow dot off to the lower left and Regulus is the blue dot above the moon. I tried to convince Shannon it you looked really closely at Saturn you could see its rings. I don't think she believed me.