Wow, I didn’t realize it until this morning, but this is the 6,000th post on Idiot Central here. That’s certainly some kind of milestone.

I’m sitting back at my work desk after a long weekend at Mom’s house for Easter, and the view out the window is completely different today. The trees here are just about to bloom, and the grass is growing fast and thick. I’ve been working pretty much nonstop since right after the Christmas break and our office had what they call “rest and relaxation” week, which basically means “we’re not giving you the week off, but don’t send people email or expect to get any response.” I was planning on working through most of the week but didn’t realize how much I needed time away to recharge; I’ve gotten pretty burned out since the beginning of the year. I took a couple of days to work on the truck and then drove up to Mom’s house for our first visit since last year, where Finn and Mom and I basically sat and relaxed and didn’t do much other than eat and sleep. That was lovely, and it was great to sit and visit with her and Renie and Tony.

While I was up there I brought the Yashica large-format camera and set it up on the back porch for some family photos, which we haven’t done in several years; I used my Fuji as a crude light meter to sort out the settings and then ran through a 12-frame roll with the family. I’ve got everything wrapped up in a package to thedarkroom.com for developing; hopefully it all works as advertised and I didn’t fuck anything up.

Mom sent me home with a bike her neighbor dropped off in the garage, something they couldn’t fit in their moving van, and asked me if I wanted it. It’s a Miyata 712 that dates back to 1988, which is actually the same vintage as my Trek road bike, and carries a more complete component set than the Trek (my bike has a mixture of Shimano 105 and Suntour components, while this bike has a complete set of Shimano 105 gear as well as two very nice wheels). The frame is about 3″ too tall for me, so I’ll pull the components off and trash the frame—it’s cracked at the cable routing tubes, which makes the frame worthless anyway.