By the time I get to Phoenix....
Jan. 6th, 2006 12:05 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
thewayneWell, not by the time, as I've already arrived. Lots of stuff happening.
Left Cloudcroft Wednesday, got into Las Cruces early enough to pick up a wireless router for my dad's network so that Russ and I won't have to haul our router back and forth when we come and visit, went to a camera repair shop and got a couple of lenses looked at, then pillaged a book store. Spent the night with my aunt, got into Phoenix around 10pm. Easy drive, and for the first time my new car got over 30 MPG! So that was cool. Got 32.something from Alamogordo to Lordsburg.
I had wanted to take my aunt out to dinner, but she hadn't been feeling to well. So I stopped at this place that I remembered her saying had pretty good Mexican food. It was anything but pretty good. Perhaps it was slightly better than Taco Bell, but that would be a pretty close judgment call. Speaking with Russ today, she said she remembered Aunt Odella saying there were two locations of this restaurant, one was good and one was bad. Let me put it this way: if this was the good location, I DEFINITELY don't want to eat at the bad one! At least I've (figuratively) added another to my list of "places not to eat in Las Cruces."
You'll notice the remarkably first person singular usage in the preceding. Russet stayed home, she has to work second half (midnight to after sunrise) doing remote observing Saturday and Sunday, then be on-site to work Monday. The timing just didn't work. So I'm solo for this trip.
On to other stuff!
...And Then A Miracle Happens. Camera repair store. I needed two things done. I have a 4x5 press camera, a Speed Graphic that I want to use for my portraiture class coming up, and I wanted to make sure the shutter in the lens was being reasonably accurate (it seems to be). I brought a second lens to be looked at: the Vivitar 28-300 zoom that got dropped back in October. After it was dropped, the auto-focus stopped working. I ran a b&w roll with it while focusing manually and the negatives looked not as sharp as they should be, so I feared the internal alignment of the lens elements had been compromised. So I stopped using the lens. I contacted Vivitar to try and find out how much a repair would cost and did not get back a reasonable answer, the replier just didn't understand what I was talking about and their system for contacting tech support/repair was so screwy that I just didn't feel like messing with it.
So I give the repair guy the zoom. He slaps it on a 35mm body and it focuses just fine. Sigh.
It looks, thorough the viewfinder, like it is focusing properly. So I decided to spend some time in Tucson today and stopped at Pima Air Museum. I got there about 65 minutes before they close. :) Fortunately the woman running the desk didn't charge me admission, just asked us to put some money in the donation jar, so I cleaned out my pocket of singles. I shot 86 images in that remaining hour! I had three lenses with me: the Digital Rebel's 18-55, my Vivitar 28-300, and my Canon 35-105. I shot several sets of images with the Vivitar and the Canon at the same focal length and exposure, probably over the weekend I'll get to compare them and see how sharp the Vivitar is looking.
Good Doobie Points! My aunt found a cell phone at a casino that she semi-frequents. She doesn't have a phone and didn't know that a cell phone is more or less tied to the owner, and if the owner calls the provider, that the lost phone is electronically deactivated. She went to security and they said no one had reported losing a phone, so she kept it because she thought security would pocket the phone. Fortunately there was enough juice left on the phone (she didn't know how to turn it off, or use it, for that matter) and I found a phone entry for "Dad". So I called and asked if he had a son or daughter that had recently lost a phone. Turns out he did. He put me on the phone with the woman, turns out she's a manager at FedEx in El Paso, so I left the phone with the FedEx office in Las Cruces and she was going to have her driver pick up the phone when the regular run was made. She had already replaced the phone but was very thankful that it had been found: she had something like 120 phone numbers programmed into it!
Bookstore Hit. Hit two bookstores, one in Las Cruces, one in Tucson. Got a few banned books. Also got a book by Christopher Buckley. Man, that guy is funny! Really enjoying it, I'll talk a little more about it later.
Moozik. Added a few more albums to my laptop for this trip, mainly a complete run of Fairport Convention and Steeleye Span, at least as complete as Russet's music library contains.
That's about it. Got an early and busy day Friday, so off to sleep am I! I'll try and finish my book and movie lists over the weekend, so if you're waiting with bated breath, get the fish out of your mouth and wait patiently.
Left Cloudcroft Wednesday, got into Las Cruces early enough to pick up a wireless router for my dad's network so that Russ and I won't have to haul our router back and forth when we come and visit, went to a camera repair shop and got a couple of lenses looked at, then pillaged a book store. Spent the night with my aunt, got into Phoenix around 10pm. Easy drive, and for the first time my new car got over 30 MPG! So that was cool. Got 32.something from Alamogordo to Lordsburg.
I had wanted to take my aunt out to dinner, but she hadn't been feeling to well. So I stopped at this place that I remembered her saying had pretty good Mexican food. It was anything but pretty good. Perhaps it was slightly better than Taco Bell, but that would be a pretty close judgment call. Speaking with Russ today, she said she remembered Aunt Odella saying there were two locations of this restaurant, one was good and one was bad. Let me put it this way: if this was the good location, I DEFINITELY don't want to eat at the bad one! At least I've (figuratively) added another to my list of "places not to eat in Las Cruces."
You'll notice the remarkably first person singular usage in the preceding. Russet stayed home, she has to work second half (midnight to after sunrise) doing remote observing Saturday and Sunday, then be on-site to work Monday. The timing just didn't work. So I'm solo for this trip.
On to other stuff!
...And Then A Miracle Happens. Camera repair store. I needed two things done. I have a 4x5 press camera, a Speed Graphic that I want to use for my portraiture class coming up, and I wanted to make sure the shutter in the lens was being reasonably accurate (it seems to be). I brought a second lens to be looked at: the Vivitar 28-300 zoom that got dropped back in October. After it was dropped, the auto-focus stopped working. I ran a b&w roll with it while focusing manually and the negatives looked not as sharp as they should be, so I feared the internal alignment of the lens elements had been compromised. So I stopped using the lens. I contacted Vivitar to try and find out how much a repair would cost and did not get back a reasonable answer, the replier just didn't understand what I was talking about and their system for contacting tech support/repair was so screwy that I just didn't feel like messing with it.
So I give the repair guy the zoom. He slaps it on a 35mm body and it focuses just fine. Sigh.
It looks, thorough the viewfinder, like it is focusing properly. So I decided to spend some time in Tucson today and stopped at Pima Air Museum. I got there about 65 minutes before they close. :) Fortunately the woman running the desk didn't charge me admission, just asked us to put some money in the donation jar, so I cleaned out my pocket of singles. I shot 86 images in that remaining hour! I had three lenses with me: the Digital Rebel's 18-55, my Vivitar 28-300, and my Canon 35-105. I shot several sets of images with the Vivitar and the Canon at the same focal length and exposure, probably over the weekend I'll get to compare them and see how sharp the Vivitar is looking.
Good Doobie Points! My aunt found a cell phone at a casino that she semi-frequents. She doesn't have a phone and didn't know that a cell phone is more or less tied to the owner, and if the owner calls the provider, that the lost phone is electronically deactivated. She went to security and they said no one had reported losing a phone, so she kept it because she thought security would pocket the phone. Fortunately there was enough juice left on the phone (she didn't know how to turn it off, or use it, for that matter) and I found a phone entry for "Dad". So I called and asked if he had a son or daughter that had recently lost a phone. Turns out he did. He put me on the phone with the woman, turns out she's a manager at FedEx in El Paso, so I left the phone with the FedEx office in Las Cruces and she was going to have her driver pick up the phone when the regular run was made. She had already replaced the phone but was very thankful that it had been found: she had something like 120 phone numbers programmed into it!
Bookstore Hit. Hit two bookstores, one in Las Cruces, one in Tucson. Got a few banned books. Also got a book by Christopher Buckley. Man, that guy is funny! Really enjoying it, I'll talk a little more about it later.
Moozik. Added a few more albums to my laptop for this trip, mainly a complete run of Fairport Convention and Steeleye Span, at least as complete as Russet's music library contains.
That's about it. Got an early and busy day Friday, so off to sleep am I! I'll try and finish my book and movie lists over the weekend, so if you're waiting with bated breath, get the fish out of your mouth and wait patiently.
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Date: 2006-01-06 08:56 pm (UTC)