Took a stroll down South Congress yesterday with Trish and her co-worker, Daniel, for my first photowalk. Trish picked a good route and I had a lot of fun; I must admit that it's amazing how many times I've driven down SoCo and never really looked at what's there. We spent close to two hours on SoCo before we headed over to the Long Center to snag some pictures of the Austin skyline at sunset. I was a little sad that I only had my monopod and not my tripod, but I was still able to get a few good shots after the sun set.



I normally tend to shoot with all settings on auto, but I decided to switch over to full manual for this outing -- it was probably the best decision I've ever made. Not only was I able to shoot in RAW format (I can't shoot in RAW with auto settings), I feel like I know my camera so much better now. I still have a ways to go, but the experience gave me a lot of things to look forward to.

Anyway, I decided to open up a Flickr account so that I could more easily share my favorite pictures. Feel free to browse my photostream.

As I was turning onto our street on Friday evening, I noticed something sitting in the middle of the road. I originally thought was a rock, but as I drove around it I noticed that it was a turtle. Selina was outside talking to some of the neighbors when I pulled into the garage and said I was going to walk down the block to save a turtle from being smashed. She gave me a strange look...I mean, not that I blame her; our neighborhood isn't exactly known for its turtle population.

I walked to the corner, picked him up and returned to the house. The neighbors (and the dogs of said neighbors) were all interested in the little fellow, but being the shy creature that he is, he wanted nothing to do with anyone. I sat him in the grass and we started taking pictures while the dogs licked and barked at him.



One of the kids from across the street said that he brought the turtle home a few days ago after finding him trying to cross Hwy 290 and that it had been living in his back yard since then. He wasn't all too concerned that the turtle was roaming the streets, so I told him that I was going to take him to the creek that runs through our neighborhood park. Selina said I should take him to Lake Pflugerville, but I was too lazy to drive that far. So off into the creek he went.

Fare thee well, little turtle.

Finally sat down for a few hours and hammered out the code I needed to get a basic version of my blog back up and running. Old posts are temporarily unavailable (I need to write more code for that) and people can't leave comments (more code needed for that as well), but at least you can read the new posts.

Since I up and decided to join Twitter, I also wrote a custom Twitter feed that should appear below the navigation bar. Sometimes the Twitter API has a cow and ignores my requests like a 2-year-old in the middle of a temper tantrum, but most times you should see my last three tweets.

Well, it's getting late here in the Tovar household. I need to jump in the shower and hit the hay.