Whew!

I am very tired this evening.

Today was the 2006 Delaware GIS Conference: Patterns of Change. I am, if only unofficially, the State GIS Coordinator for Delaware; I serve as host and emcee for this conference each year. I also serve on the Conference Planning Committee.

We started with a series of GIS workshops on Wednesday, followed by a Vendor's Reception/Conference Social Wednesday evening. It was nice to be able to have all the set-up done and have the vendors in place the night before the conference.

We had a bit more than 200 people registered and a nice crowd actually showed up. We had many interesting presentations and speakers and lots of great vendors.

It was great fun, but the few days before are always a time of great nervousness and spurts of work. The day of the conference itself is a marathon. My job is to be the public face of things, start the plenary session with a sense of energy, meet, greet, glad-hand and take photos.

By the end of the closing plenary I was dragging, but I think our event was once again a success.

So now I am worn out, but happy.

And So We Begin Again

Summer arrived this week-end. It drove down from Pennsylvania late on Friday afternoon, having skipped out of work an hour or so early.

At least, that's how it seems. I feel like it was only last week, or the week before, that we were starting to have warmer days. And now? Overnight, we've started another summer beach season.

Memorial Day Weekend, 2006, has been a hot three days. There are plenty of tourists here for the sand and sun. Lewes and Rehoboth both have newly gussied-up main drags. Rehoboth has a wider beach.

We spent some time Saturday on the beach at North Bethany with parts of my family. Today, we spent the afternoon on the beach at Cape Henlopen State Park.

So here we are again. Traffic. Rude drivers. Families in our restaurants after a day on the beach during which their smallest members have become over-tired, over baked, over-stimulated and on the edge of a breakdown. It can get ugly.

On the other hand, we live at the beach. We can spend an entire day in the surf and still be home in our own living room, cleaned in our own showers, with our cats on our laps, after a very brief drive. That may just make it all worthwhile.

It's Alive!

This is a Jacaranda Tree given to me by my friend Sandy. He'd grown it from a seed collected on a business trip we took out to California some years ago.

It has lived on our porch for a few years now. By the end of last summer, it had grown too tall for comfort. Sandy suggested cutting it back to within a foot or so of the ground and letting it "bush out."

This spring, I did so and have been worrying about it ever since. In the last week, though, I was pleased to see a few new shoots coming out the sides.

Another Walk in the Park

Park Path

I took a sunny lunchtime walk in Dover's Silver Lake Park earlier this week. Of course it was another opportunity to take pictures.

I would have posted this earlier, bit Flickr was having a bad week and I have been working out a kink in my back that may in fact be a Buick.

The Flickr folk seemed to have straightened their site back out and my spine is starting to come back into something like alignment. So here it is!

Fire in Dover

We had minor excitement in Dover this morning when a fire broke out in the attic of the Old State House, on the Green. The building is in the middle of extensive renovation, so there was nothing much inside to be damaged, and the fire fighters caught it quickly and put it out fast. I understand one of the renovation construction workers was injured, but I don't know how badly.

I took a break to get a few shots of the aftermath. Greg Hughes, of the Government Information Center, was more on the spot and got lots of shots of the actual fire fighting. He's posted those on his Flickr site.

Getting Back on Course

I took time this morning to try some golf. I walked a truncated round on the Heritage Golf Course.

The Heritage is close to home and inexpensive. But it is also being redeveloped as a shorter course with townhomes. You can see some of the evidence above.

The back portion of the course has been scraped clean and the fourth and seventh holes are closed. Other holes are drastically shorter. And there's a huge mound -- Mount Golfmore? -- looming over several holes.

I needed to get out and see how bad my swing has gotten. I'd hit a bucket of balls at a Dover-area driving range recently, but it's just not the same.

I'm still a rotten golfer, but I was somewhat heartened by my play. I scored a respectable six on the tough, island-green par-5 and I scored what I think is my first Birdie on a par-3.

The eighth hole has been cut down to a very short 90 yards. The first time through I hit too much club and bounced over the green entirely. The second time around I dropped down to a wedge and bounced to within about a yard of the hole. I'm not a great hand with a putter, but I sank that one.

I guess I'm still a duffer!

Filed in:

• golf
• 2006

This View of Hybrids Bugs Me

There's a story on hybrid cars in the Business section of today's News Journal. The article -- Can hybrid cars really save you money? -- takes the line that most of these articles have seemed to take lately. That is, now that gas prices are rising, are hybrids really a good way to save money?

It's a valid question, but it ignores the main reason that I and many other early-adopters had for buying our hybrids: air quality. I love the higher mileage that my Prius gives me. I've long wanted a way to cut my personal use of a non-renewable energy source. But my chief concern was, and is, to reduce the amount of air pollution that I create. And my Prius does that quite well.

To be fair, this particular article does allow that the environmentalist angle remains valid, but it quickly goes back to busily debunking the notion of hybrids as a way to save money on gasoline.

That's fine, and may be a valid point (though I note that they focus mostly on the Honda hybrid), but I have to insist that gas mileage is not the main reason to own a hybrid.

On Indian River

This is the view from our table this evening at the restaurant known as Serendipity, in Oak Orchard, Delaware. The dining room over-looks the Indian River about where it broadens out into Indian River Bay.

We had dinner there with Andy and Lyn and their daughter Rebecca. Our Colleen and their Emily and Rachel were at Sussex Central High School getting ready for the Dance Gala we attended after dinner. Christina spent the afternoon with a buddy and met us at the show.

There were groups from the high school, from various dance studios, and from the Southern Delaware School of the Arts. They were all very good, but I was quite proud of the girls from SDSA. They were the only middle-school group dancing. They held their own; they more than held their own.

I Used to Be Unique

A report from R. L. Polk & Co. confirms what I've been seeing out on the road:

Nationwide registrations for new hybrid vehicles rose to 199,148 in 2005 -- a 139 percent increase from 2004 according to R. L. Polk & Co. For the second year in a row, Toyota Prius led the segment commanding 52.6 percent of new registrations. However, with more models entering the market, hybrid share for any given vehicle is being challenged.

I used to be one of the only folks out there in a Prius. Lately, there are more and more of us. I don't mind; I think it's good to have more low emissions vehicles out there.

I do miss that sense of being special, though.

Returning to an Old Favorite

Sunday evening, I finished reading the novel I'd borrowed from the Lewes Public Library. This week is full enough that I won't have a chance to get back to the library again until the week-end, at the earliest.

So I found myself in front of the book shelves late that night, scanning the titles of books that I've read and thought enough of to own a copy. I was looking for a book I could comfortably revisit.

As is often the case, I eventually grabbed one of the Aubrey/Maturin novels of Patrick O'Brian. I keep coming back to these books. This time, it was the first in the series, Master and Commander. This book, by the way, does not tell the tale that was told in the movie of the same name; it gives an introduction to Captain Jack Aubrey and his pal Stephen Maturin.

At the start of the book, Jack is given a promotion and his first command, a "little small squat merchantman with two masts" as Stephen calls it when he first sees the Sophie.

Small, old, slow and not very powerful she may be, but a command is a command and Jack celebrates with too much food and too much drink. He wakes on his ship at dawn the next day, hug-over, sour and sick. But slowly, the sun comes up.

As his thoughts ranged on so the low cabin brightened steadily. A fishing boat passed under the Sophie's stern, laden with tunny and uttering the harsh roar of a conch; at almost the same time the sun popped up from behind St. Philip's fort -- it did, in fact, pop up, flattened like a sideways lemon in the morning haze and drawing its bottom free of the land with a distinct jerk. In little more than a minute the greyness of the cabin had utterly vanished: the deck-head was alive with light glancing from the rippling sea; and a single ray, reflected from some unmoving surface on the distant quay, darted through the cabin windows to light up Jacks coat and its blazing epaulette. The sun rose within his mind, obliging his dogged look to broaden into a smile, and he swung out of his cot.

I love the language in these stories, and I've always been a fan of seafaring stories. So what if this will be my eighth or ninth time through this book? I love these books.

Filed in:

• book
• aubrey