Getting ready for New Year's Eve

December 31, 2008
Peoria, AZ

Our best wishes to everyone for a happy, healthy, and prosperous 2009!

We've spent the last few days enjoying the new-found nice weather. It almost feels like we've been able to break out of winter hibernation. Temperatures have rebounded to the low-70s, and we're loving it. After the Holiday break, we've started back on the project list. I was able to finish up the outstanding plumbing jobs, and spent an afternoon reorganizing the garage to make it easier to get at some of the power tools. I've got a couple of projects lined up for the next week or so that'll require the table saw, so it was good to dig in out. We'd been using the garage as a "staging area" for things we were donating to charity and, now that those things are gone, we can get back to normal.

Since the weather was nice, we were able to open up the house and air things out. We also gave the inside a "spring cleaning" yesterday. Today, it's all about preparing for tonight's dinner. Our friends Ana and Larry are coming over, we'll do the horseradish-garlic crusted prime rib with "creamy and crispy potato pie" (a new recipe we'll be trying for the first time). Then, we'll watch the ball drop and have some Champagne, and maybe even stay up until midnight (for us, the ball drops at 10:00!). Of course, here in Arizona, there's a New Year's Eve tradition of people shooting guns off into the air at midnight and every year there are one or more incidents of things (people, houses, cars) getting hit by the stray bullets. We'll just stay inside.

We have some new "neighbors" that we'll keep an eye on: a group of hawks (white-tailed, I think) has moved in nearby. We've seen them perched in a tree in the distance a couple of times and one of the (human) neighbors says that they've seen a hatchling being cared for. When we walked the dogs last night, a couple of them were having dinner on one of the street light poles, and they were definitely eyeing the pups as a possible meal. I grabbed the camera and shot a few pictures, but the sun was just setting and the light wasn't too good. It did give me a chance to test out the new 2x lens extender that I'd just gotten, and it makes quite a difference on my 70-200mm lens. Click here for a couple of shots of the hawks and a couple of test pictures with the lens extender.

My primary reason for adding to the camera equipment is our planned summer trip to Alaska next year. Since there should be more than a couple of opportunities to see wildlife, and the wildlife is actually "wild", getting good shots while staying safe is important. I've priced out a few telephoto lens options but they're several thousand dollars that I can't justify (once again, I've forgotten to buy those lottery tickets), and the extender is a cheap and practical alternative. It's the new me: cheap and practical!

That's it for now; gotta walk the pups and do the sous chef work...