Baby Steps

So alots gone on in the last 118 days since we've talked last. I don't know where to start. Thats where the baby steps come in.

I got a new car. A new car. 2010 Mazda 3 hatchback. Its so new, its from the future. I already love it.

Pictures. I've been taking alot of them, and I am finally learning how they work and how to have them come out. I just started messing around with HDR images. They're pretty neat too. I don't know that much about them, but they're composite images of between 3-5 images of different levels of under/over exposure that are combined so that the whole image has proper exposure. Its just barely starting to make sense to me, but the images look pretty cool. I will have examples.

Sitting on top of a mountain, taking pics of the sunset.

My first HDR of our living room

Training is 100% in swing for next year too. I jumped right back into it again starting off with 18 and 20 hour weeks. The legs feel great, like they haven't lost much fitness since October. I like riding long miles in the winter and getting to spin around different areas. I've already found a ton of roads I've never been on that aren't even that far from my house.

I've already had my first epic ride of the year last Saturday in Stroudsburg. The day we got like a foot of the white stuff, I thought I'd try and get in a good 4 hours along the Water Gap up into New York. We weren't supposed to get much snow up that way so I hoped that I would make it without trouble. Within an hour of me leaving town, unbeknownst to me, it starting snowing in Stroudsburg. I was riding north, directly away from the storm. I felt awesome and thought I had pulled on over on mother nature. On the way back, about 15 miles from home, the roads were covered about an inch deep. It got to be too sketchy to ride up or down most of the hills so I was off the bike hoofing it on foot. I ran about 3 of the last 15 miles of the ride in the dark.

I will be back soon.