I gotta tell you…the adults are telling me that this retirement stuff is hard work. They got their new truck on order (pale Adobe Ford F450) to match the Champagne color scheme on the New Horizons and production of the rig is ongoing.

This week they interviewed some estate sales companies to see how to get rid of stuff. Since their human kid and Neil’s sister are taking all the good stuff; the remainder is only figured to be 3000-5000 at the estate sale auction; which means that by the time they pay the estate sale fees they will essentially break even. So…it looks like they’re going to do a lot of donating and trashing instead to get ready for the house sale and then a big donation to the AmVets organization to support their charitable causes to get rid of everything else. This means it will actually (probably) be easier than they thought to get rid of everything.

They also looked into getting the stovetop fixed since it has a broken burner. The repairman tried to get it apart for awhile and then said “I give up, I can’t fix this for you.” and charged Neil $116.10 anyway. He doesn’t think that’s fair since it wasn’t his fault the repairman gave up and has complained to Sears to see about getting a refund. Once the house sells they’ll either give the buyers a small credit towards a new stove or else put in the cheapest one they can get if the buyers insist that it be fixed; no sense buying a new expensive model at this point.

Neil drywall compounded and painted the kitchen ceiling where there was a noticeable repair line and also fixed a couple of minor drywall issues in the master bedroom. The wallpaper strippers/painters for the foyer and downstairs bathroom will be here Monday and he’ll use the leftover paint they leave to fix up the nail holes in the hall where he took all the family pictures down from the Rogue’s Gallery for storage. Now that the decision not to do the estate sale has pretty much been made; he’ll negotiate with Connie to see what they can craigslist or donate now to get rid of stuff.

He’s also been working on learning how to do this thing called High Dynamic Range (HDR) photography. Even wonder why when you get back from your vacation your pictures don’t look nearly as great as it did standing there? The reason for this is that your eyes can see a lot greater dynamic range (from light to dark) than the camera can capture. So…the solution is to take several shots that range from underexposed to overexposed and then process them into a single HDR frame that looks pretty much like your eye saw it. The picture in the previous post captioned Badlands Sediment Layers is an example of the output…the final shot looks pretty realistic to what they saw despite the single properly exposed shot looking a lot more washed out. He’s still experimenting and learning the technique but so far it’s a pretty easy thing to do and certainly makes my web pages look better when I post the photos.

That’s about it for now…sorry, no pictures of the estate sales people (Neil wonders why all estate sales people are little old ladies in tennis shoes)…cyas.