A Very Long Week

It has been a very long week. Roughly 14 days, with a single break in the middle. It started with a week's worth of preparation for the servicing of one of our cameras at work, followed by an instrument change during the weekend. Unfortunately this fell on Saturday, which is the one day during the week when I get my me-time. It's amazing how much missing that can mess me up for the rest of the week.

The week continued last Sunday with a break at Kiholo Bay, where we took the French engineers who were helping us service the camera. To be fair I did fly my camera at Kiholo Bay, but I got up at 5:30am to bake cookies for the luau, so it was still a pretty exhausting day.

Things continued on Monday, with more work at the summit that continued until Friday night.

During this whole fourteen day week we took apart what at one point was the world's largest digital camera, put enough current through a reed switch to turn it into a hybrid rocket motor, dropped a 19" electronics/optics rack roughly 12 feet, rebuilt and tested the crate in a single day, and finally set up the instrument it drives, and tested it at various points on the sky. I spent a total of 11 days above 4000 meters. By the end of the day on Friday, the dark circles under my eyes looked like bruises.

So today I took off with my son and tried to fly a camera.

Aaaand... it didn't happen. He'd forgotten to tell me he twisted his ankle on Friday, and couldn't hike across the lava. So we both did ground photography for the rest of the morning. I got to do large format photography again (four sheets of film), infrared digital, and lots of panoramas. So the day wound up being pretty good after all.





I've got four new images to add to my Zazzle and Etsy galleries, and the weekend is yet young!

I also sold my third print on Etsy at some point during the 14-day week, though I couldn't get the print in the mail until this morning. But it was a nice reminder of better times, and was great incentive to pack up my gear and get out this morning.

Because of the rapid rebuild on the crate, and the fact that we didn't miss our exchange date, my boss gave me Monday off. I planned a pretty hellish hike from Anaeho`omalu Bay down to Kiholo Bay, touching on several gorgeous beaches, and at least one inland pond. I hope to come away with three days of photography this weekend, both from the ground and from the air. So today really is just the start on what I hope is a really good weekend.

Tom