Miscellany; feline affection, winter children, eclipse

Not a lot to report these days. Working hard. Going to see MacHomer tonight; hope that it's good. At the least, a trip to Canada should be fun and exciting.

I'm *finally* back on the weight loss train/wagon/boat/generic transportation analogy. SIX POUNDS. That's it. I just need to lose six pounds, and I can start transitioning to maintenance. Oddly, I've been essentially in maintenance since about November ... but not on purpose; it just kinda happened that way.

In other news, I'm staying at the Walper Terrace hotel in Kitchener. I had to call them today to ask them about something, and noticed that, on their website, they advertise that they will have availability for the Elton John concert on March 3. "Huh," I thought to myself, "You know, self... Elton John, he has some pretty good musical chops. Perhaps I will invite my wife up and we will watch him tinkle some ivories (and ebonies, too. And, for that matter, I'm sure that Sir Elton would never touch actual ivory keys; I'm sure that he would agree that elephants needn't lose their teeth for him to play ... but I digress) ...so I looked into tickets. It's sold out. Which means that not only will I not be going (which isn't a terribly big deal), but that parking is probably going to be hell on earth that night. Yee freaking haw.

Happier stuff:
Today's 3 beautiful things:

Feline Affection. Studies come out fairly regularly that promote pet ownership as being correlated to good health. And if you've ever woken up with a cat smugly purring on your chest, you know why.

Winter Children. Couple of days ago, I was leaving the hotel in the morning, and there was a little girl -- she was three or four -- crossing the street, bundled against the cold. She was wearing a sky-blue down jacket that was a little grubby, and mittens dangled from the ends of her sleeves. She was wearing a jaunty, brightly colored winter cap [1]. Her nose was red from the cold. She was walking with her mom, in that "I'm almost tall enough that my feet can touch the ground and my mom can hold my hand without stooping" way. And she just looked really, really happy to be out stomping around in the snow. Unabashed childhood joy makes me happy.

Eclipse. Coming back to the hotel a couple of days ago, heard about the eclipse on the radio. Dutifully trudged outside to see it at 10pm. And ooooh, it was pretty.

Oh, and one more thing: I'm in the process of putting up wedding pictures -- I think I did a good job.

Wedding Bells

My sister's wedding was great. I took a humongous quantity of pictures, which I must now sort through, organize, and prepare. If I had one piece of advice for a budding wedding photographer, it would be: MAKE SURE YOU HAVE A BACKUP. Apply this to everything, and you'll be OK. I brought more cameras, more batteries, more Compact Flash memory, more storage space, more tripods, more film than I needed. The biggest technical failure I had was that my laptop died over the weekend, and while that's a huge frustration for me, I'll have it fixed soon enough, and, most importantly, I lost no pictures.

In other happy news, it was Sonya's birthday today, and we went out to an absolutely delightful meal at the Melting Pot. Also finished my current knitting project (a nice wooly hat), and fixed my rear window wiper on my car (for $45 doing it myself with a used part, instead of $175 for the dealer to do it. Hooray!) Now I need to hop in the shower, throw some clothes in the suitcase, and spend some quality time with my pillow.

Oh, and the Superbowl was today. Didn't watch it, was busy.