New Toy

My birthday always falls over Thanksgiving weekend, and this week the Longhorns gave me an extra birthday gift by whipping Texas A&M on that day. The missus trumped the Horns, though, and forked over to get me a new toy, a Sony 'Cyber-shot' digital camera, with all the trimmings.

Obviously, working in a communications field, I'll get a lot of professional use out of it, too, but hopefully the addition to my toy box will result in livening up this blog a little.

Here's my first crack fooling around with it:



That's Margaret on the left and Bud on the right. It's not that I'm anxious to launch into dog blogging, even if cat blogging appears to be a competitive sport. But they're typically laying beside me or on the deck right out my office window when I'm writing this blog, so perhaps readers will be interested to meet these heretofore anonymous Grits contributors. (Besides, I saw Scott Chafin chastise a blogger for failing to mention his dogs until two years into his writing, so I wouldn't want to set myself up for that complaint!)

Obviously, just back from the holidays, I haven't had a chance to use it yet on blog stories, but I've been fooling around just to get the knack of it. Kathy is quite the gardener, and she's turned a once-barren, hyper-eroded backyard into a really cool spot. Check it out:



That's the view off our back deck. Here's another:

I'm always astonished the dogs don't destroy everything, but they seem to limit their destructiveness to the obviously well-worn paths, plus they like to stay on the deck. Wouldn't you?

Anyway, enough fiddling around. I've got one more personal-ish blog item to do before getting back to the criminal justice business. But I hope Grits readers enjoyed a happy holiday.