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I love this idea of having defined vacations, where if you're off, you're expected to not show up for work. This after several years of grad school, where in principle you could go on vacation any time, but in practice it just never seemed to happen.
Actually, speaking of grad school, although I'm off from the hospital I actually do have to go back in to take care of some business. But in the meantime, Joanne and I drove up to the White Mountains to wander around the Basin-Cascades Trail. I didn't realize several things about this trip. First, despite the relative warmth in Boston (mostly 30s-40s) the White Mountains are considerably colder this time of year, which meant that there was ice on the trail which kept us from going very far along the trail, and that it was damn cold. Second, Zipcar instituted a mileage restriction on their cars, and the cost per mile after the limit (180 miles) is $0.45. So the trip cost a lot more than we thought.
From a photography standpoint, the day portion was pretty straightforward with long exposures on a tripod. The legs on my inherited Slik U212 tripod recently broke (again), and I retired the mofo. There were several problems with this fellow: (1) leg angle was regulated by a friction cuff, which meant that with enough force one could spread the legs, which is not a reassuring thing, and (2) the plastic clips break radially, which causes some obvious issues. This latter issue had previously happened and I had patched it by putting brackets across the break, which works, except that the bracket was pretty sharp and I've cut myself more than once on it. When another leg clip broke I decided I'd had enough.
I went with a Manfrotto 190XPROB, which is the aluminum version. Figured that I wasn't going to pay twice the price for the carbon fiber version in order to shave off a pound. This model has a couple advantages: (1) a neat horizontal mode for the center column, which was instantly useful because it allowed me to set up the tripod on one side of some fencing and have the camera over the fence; and (2) a mechanism for controlling leg angle that has the leg come up against a hard stop (rather than held in place by friction).
