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I spent a few days in Zion National Park rappelling into slot canyons.

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Late in coming, but here are some photos from our trip to Oregon. Larger images are here.

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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.

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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.

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I've already fed him.

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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.

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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.

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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."

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

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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.

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In Mansfield Park, Austen contrasts the attractive, witty Mary Crawford against the shy, dull Fanny Price. Throughout the book, we learn that Fanny is to be prized for her moral character and this is realized in the end by the hero of the story. Her moral principles are most notably displayed when she declines to act in a play of questionable worth. In the PBS version, she is persuaded to take a part and so we lose the contrast between Fanny and the other characters. We don't really learn any reason for the hero's selection of Fanny other than it was just meant to be.

One of the turning points in Persuasion is the fall of Louisa Musgrove. Captain Wentworth had been praising Louisa's strength of conviction as an indirect criticism of Anne's character. Louisa insists on taking another walk by the sea before leaving Lyme even though the party should have returned home. She seriously injures herself. This causes Captain Wentworth to begin reexamining Anne's character and his overreaction to the past. The fact that it was Louisa that pushed for the late walk is left out of the movie. We are not left with any reason for Captain Wentworth's change of mind concerning Anne other than her clearness of mind during the accident. (Also, near the same time, Anne receives an obvious admiring look from someone which causes Captain Wentworth to do some more rethinking. This is also left out.)

Northanger Abbey is a satire of the Gothic romances of the late 18th century. Due to her novel-fed, overactive imagination, Catherine begins to suspect that her host has murdered his wife. No self-respecting person would have believed such a thing if put in the same position. That is part of the satire. Instead, the movie includes a scene of someone telling the heroine about rumors concerning the man's wife. So not only does the idea not originate with her, but other people treat it as a possibility thus losing some of the strength of the satire. To finish it off, Catherine is told at the end of the movie that her judgment was correct even if she had the details wrong.

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It is a very easy read. The sixteen chapters contain eight almost separate stories. The format is due to the novel being developed for inclusion in a magazine published by Dickens. It is considered one of Gaskell's best novels and evidences her ability as a story teller. Charlotte Bronte said about it: “I find it pleasurable reading: graphic, pithy, penetrating, shrewd, yet kind and indulgent.”

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