New photos

I took the camera out this morning to practice composing some photos. I never have hiked into Stillhouse Hollow Nature Preserve in Northwest Austin, even though it is only a few miles from the house and I run or ride by this place several times a month.

The hiking was non existent. The trail is a blacktop path and less than a half mile long. It was a nice quiet walk though, and I got a couple of  nice shots.

 This morning's destination

 Found graffiti

Heart shaped cactus

After shooting a few dozen photos and playing with my camera settings, I drove over to the scenic overlook on Loop 360. I'll come back here on a less cloudy day.

 Downtown Austin from the Loop 360 overlook.

Since you have made it this far, you deserve a treat, so here is a photo of Squirrel from a few days ago. 

Picture this

I am thinking about trying a 52 week photo challenge, or even a 365 day, photo-a-day challenge to document the upcoming year. It will be interesting to look back in 2017 on how the children and I have grown and changed after a full year of this new life.

My parents have already let me have my Christmas gift, a new camera, an Olympus OMD E-M10. I was able to buy it locally with a 14-42 Olympus M.Zukio Digital 14-42mm (f 3.5-5.6II R) lens. I don't know what most of that means.

Here are a couple of my first shots.

The camera has an on board picture story mode. Our first Christmas tree in the new life.

The view from our backyard this morning, The moon is barely visible. 

My tri-color lanatas are starting to fade for the winter.

I have a ton to learn about this new camera and I'm excited to have some really good pictures of the kids.

Another one last time

Divorce is exactly opposite of the joy and great fun of a wedding celebration. It's a cold and unfeeling process. My lawyer warned me about this idea early on.

Part of the process I wish would end quickly, the endings.

It seems that I often need to do some thing one last time to move this divorce to a new, further state of completion. Today it was one last time to deal with the collected seasonal decorations and ornaments for a Christmas tree I evidently lost somewhere between the house being cleaned out and a judge's gavel. I was really interested to see and keep the ornaments and decorations the kids made when they were preschoolers. When it came time to start dividing up the collection, those are the things I chose.

Last week I bought a new artificial tree for our little house. One huge benefit of the past 6 months, our house is relatively uncluttered now. Imagine your living room. Now imagine someone removing half of your junk. Voila!

The tree I bought is about two or three feet shorter than it's predecessor and it fits in a spot that the larger never would. This new tree also fits with the uncluttered feel of this new life, but that may be due to the small number of ornaments the kids used to decorate the new tree. As quickly as I got home, I added the recollected treasures to our little tree. This is now the perfect Christmas Tree!

Still, it is sad to see a bunch of things that we collected together over half a life time strewn across a garage floor, waiting to be picked, one ornament at a time. It was like choosing up teams for the worst after school basketball game ever.

Really though, it was just one more last time to remind me of the way things once were and how they won't be again. Not even after the last, last time.This should be the last of the shared "stuff" to deal with. We still have to deal with 25 years of photographs and videos, but that is another issue, for another last time. Maybe that will be the end of it, too.