Doug's Project 365

For our upcoming Galapagos trip, I have purchased a new wildlife lens that’s more suitable for the conditions I expect to encounter.  The lens on the left is my existing wildlife lens, an 80-400mm zoom; the new one on the right is a 70-200mm f/4, and is better & more modern in every way except long-end magnification, which I don’t expect to need on this trip. Probably most crucially, the new one weighs a full pound less than the old. A pound may not sound like a lot, but it’s definitely noticeable when you’ve been wearing it on your back all day.

I needed some fine-mesh brass screening for a project. I didn’t realize it would be quite this fine.

Ferrous is all worn out from today’s activities. I know how he feels.

The installers were correct, our solar panels do tend to clear themselves of snow. Ferrous was not amused by the occasional WHUMP today as each panel’s worth of snow fell from 2 stories up.

Making turkey & sage pie for dinner this week, and putting the dough in my Pi plate, I thought, “This needs to be geekier. How can I make this geekier?”

In recent years, this Christmas cactus has been a Thanksgiving cactus, a President’s Day cactus, or an Easter cactus. But it rarely blooms on Christmas Day.

These guys were jogging past the front of my office building and singing (yelling) Christmas carols military-fashion (ala Stripes).

I should not be able to harvest parsley from the garden on the last day of autumn.

The camcorder on the left is from 2000; the one on the right is brand new. The old one weighs 2.5 pounds, has a 25x optical zoom, and records an hour of digital old-style video onto a 1.5 ounce tape.  The new one weighs 10 ounces, has a 40x optical zoom, and records 2.5 hours of high-definition video onto a 1.5 gram memory card.  And is waterproof to 16 feet.