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Nice photo.

Seen at Wal*Mart: A big yellow box labelled “Idiot’s Guide to Preventing Identity Theft“. Contents of box? A paper shredder.

In case you didn’t already know, I’m in California at the moment. I’m here for two training courses; this means I’m fortunate enough to have a free weekend here.

Yesterday I drove 140 miles to visit Mission San Antonio de Padua. It’s one of the original missions that the Spanish Catholics built when they were trying to bring civilisation to Native Americans. It was the third such mission built, and was founded on 14th July 1771. Since then it’s moved from its original location, grown and shrunk, fallen into disrepair and been restored, but all the while it’s remained an active mission community.

There are some missions that are closer than this, but I chose to visit this site in particular because it’s the most authentic of those that are still standing. Many of the remaining missions have had towns grow around them, but Mission San Antonio de Padua is unique because it’s a little isolated and unlikely to have anything built around it. It helps that it’s situated in the middle of an active US Army base.

To visit the mission you have to leave highway 101, take 15 miles of country backroads, then present yourself at the gatehouse of Fort Hunter Liggett. The guard will ask for drivers licence and car registration/insurance details (or hire car agreement), look over you and the car, then let you through. A further 6 miles into the base and you arrive at the mission. It’s just near the main buildings of the Army base, as can be seen from above.

The buildings are traditional Native American adobe buildings (mud and straw). It was the first building in California to be covered with fired clay roof tiles.

It was also the site of the first Catholic marriage in California.

The church at the centre of the missions is fairly large with a raised bell at the front (at the right in the top picture of this post).

Next to the church is a large quadrangle that’s referred to as the Padre’s Garden (second photo in this post). That’s surrounded by the main missions buildings. Many of the walls and doors facing into the garden are painted with themes relating to mission life and the local wildlife (some of which were circling overhead while I was there).

There’s a public gallery of mission photos on SmugMug. No photos of the army base.

This name has been thrown around for a while. It appears everyone was right.

I don’t think I’ve ever blogged about something as mundane as dinner (no, I blog about other mundane stuff) but tonight I have to make an exception. Neither Lisa nor I are big into seafood, but tonight she picked up some beautiful fresh Blue Grenadier fillets (sold in the US as New Zealand Whiting) and we cooked them on the BBQ in foil with lemon juice, fresh cracked pepper and chilli flakes. Lisa served them with some fresh salad, and it was fantastic. Nicest fish I’ve had for years.

To finish off such a healthy dinner we’re following it up with huge pieces of chocolate cake.

You need:

• Two-and-a-half cups of self raising flour
• Half a cup of cocoa (or maybe a bit more…)
• Cup of caster sugar
• One-and-a-half cups of milk
• 125gm melted butter
• One or two free range eggs (proper free range, not the pretend ones from the supermarket)
• Dash of vanilla extract

Sift dry ingredients together. Make a well, add eggs and vanilla, mix lightly, add milk and butter, then beat. Bake for ~50 minutes about an hour at 180C.

Posted mainly so I can remember this in future, but feel free to use. Copyright (C) 1908 Lisa’s Grandma.

It’s not even three weeks into the year and I’ve already missed a whole bunch of days from the 2009 photo challenge. I think there are two main reasons for this:

1. Living primarily in a smallish country town it’s hard to see things as unique or interesting. Other folks take fantastic reflection photos of San Francisco skylines, and the windows of the local IGA plastered with ‘VB Challenge’ posters hardly compete.
2. I just don’t have the dedication or enthusiasm or imagination to find ways of interpreting the world around me with in a constrained timeframe and with a constrained subject.

I know that Trevor and Jeremy have deliberately chosen subjects that everyone should be able to find around them in everyday life, but when I see that the day’s subject is Clouds and I’ve got a cloudless blue sky outside, what can you do? How can you possibly interpret the entire absence of clouds as a photo about clouds? It’s not that I can’t take an interesting photo of clouds (I can!) but I’m just not good at doing it on demand.

Another example is Zipper. All I’ve got is the poor set of plastic teeth that faces a daily struggle to hold my jeans in place, and I cannot conceive of an interesting way to capture that image with any modicum of taste at all.

I could possibly have visited the local haberdashery shop and taken photos of newborn zips yet to be dragged into the world of clothing, but then again, in a smallish country town, sneaking around taking photos of rows of zips is the sort of behaviour that will have people starting to cross the street when you approach while whispering ‘weirdo’ to themselves.

Some of the earlier subjects actually worked out pretty well, but others have thrown me completely. My resolve to finish the challenge is looking like failing for another year.

I didn’t even think about the January 2009 monthly challenge, because I knew ahead of time that wouldn’t work. I’ll see what March turns out to be.

As you might have noticed from an earlier post (thanks, Lisa, for uploading that horrid photo) we’ve got a couple of webcams. We bought them so that when I’m away from home we can use Skype to keep in touch and I can say hello to The Kids before they go to bed at night.

I was initially going to buy the Microsoft VX-3000, but every review I read said that the microphone quality was pretty poor.

Every such review also said that the Logitech QuickCam Pro 9000 was the camera to buy. I couldn’t find a bad word about these; everyone — professional reviews and consumers alike — said they were the bees knees.

The only problem I had was the price. The RRP is $199.95, and given that I wanted two, that meant smacking down $400 on webcams, which I was not about to do.

I did some digging on staticice, however, and found that MSY sell them for $102. This was a much better price. The only problem I had there, though, was that I couldn’t get to MSY in time and even if I had they didn’t have stock.

On the way home, on a teensy bit of a hunch, I dropped into OfficeWorks. They had them in stock, but wanted $149.95 — a saving over RRP, but still a bit much.

While I was there though I overhead someone else asking about getting a discount, and the OfficeWorks person said basically: We don’t discount. What we will do, however, is beat a valid competitor’s price by 5%.

Bingo.

I spoke to one of their very friendly staff, pointed them to the $102 price on the MSY website, and left the store with two Logitech QuickCam Pro 9000 cameras for $96 each — less than the RRP price of one camera. Happy with that.

Hyper-inflation, anyone?

Ron Dennis is to step down as team principal of McLaren and hand over to current number two Martin Whitmarsh ahead of the new Formula One season. [Source]