This time, they actually let me spring him as promised. I don’t know who’s happier, me or him.

He’s doing fairly okay - I have to keep a close eye on him to make sure he’s not trying to lick his stitches or chew off his fentanyl patch (being held on by the blue bandage on his foot), but for the most part he just wants to sit, be stoned, and snuggle.

He does find time to hate his new haircut, which took odd looking patches off of all four of his legs, plus all his belly fur. He looks like some demented person tried to shave him like a poodle and was stopped just before they got to his tail.

But really, he’s being super sweet and cuddly, and really happy to be out of the hospital. Unless, of course, I try to medicate him. This was him after my first round of chasing him down to dope him up:

Anyway, very, very happy to finally have him home and have him apparently be on the mend. Couple more pictures over at my Flickr.

Edited to add: Oh, and his collar’s off because I’m here keeping a close eye on him. He still has to wear the satellite dish when I’m asleep or at work for the next couple weeks, but at least as long as I can keep watch on him he’s free of that misery.

A few of my better photos from my ridiculously good seats watching the poor old Cubbies lose to the Dodgers a week ago:

Thanks to my friend Matty Lew, who generously subsidized my ticket, and blatantly lied to me about the extent to which he was doing so because he knew I would have been way too proud to accept said subsidy otherwise.

So Flickr has a feature wherein you can compare the statistics of all your pictures, and see which ones are the most popular, see where your hits are coming from, and things of that nature. It’s pretty interesting and a fantastic way to kill time if you’re really bored.

I have one photo that is far and away the most popular one (almost 2500 views vs. the 2nd place photo’s 1900, and 10th place’s 390). Is it well-composed? Is it of something particularly unusual? Or is it this:

That’s right, a picture I took of a grow room in the Amsterdam Hemp and Marijuana Museum is the most popular picture I’ve ever taken. It’s managed to make its way onto the first page of search results for both “hemp” and “marijuana” on Flickr, so I suppose that helps.

I’m inordinately amused by how very, very many people seem to enjoy this picture, despite how utterly craptacular it is. Piss-poorly framed, shot with a terrible resolution camera, and really kind of indistinct. But it’s weed, man, so it’s popular.

Clearly, I should start aiming more of my efforts in everything artistic at the stoner crowd, because they’re easy to please.

I went horseback riding today with my camera, the pictures that were not completely blurry are now up on Flickr. Western-style riding is ideal for this, since you only need to keep one hand on the reins at all times, instead of both (as you do when you ride English-style).

However, it is not ideal when your horse randomly decides to break into a trot coming down a hill and you have to try and pull hard enough to stop him with just one hand because the other holds your very expensive camera. That was fun.

By the way, remember how I said I was going out with the Old Fart Bike Brigade 2: Electric Jewgaloo? They’re in way better shape than the Atlanta crowd. I got totally dusted by four guys over the age of seventy biking up a looooong but gentle incline.

They even managed to go up one hell of a steep hill at the end. I took one look at the hill and said, “This is No Country For Young Whippersnappers.” My dad and one other guy agreed with me, and all three of us felt really old.

Chaplin likes to come sit on my lap while I’m trying to read things on the computer. Fortunately, my computer has a built-in camera so I can capture him making goofy faces like this one:

If only I could figure out how to make the flash less bright so it wouldn’t completely blow out his fur.

Now soliciting comments to improve upon the the title posted at Flickr (linked from the picture).

Please enjoy these photos of my father and stepmother’s tour of the “Five ‘Stans”: Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and Tajikistan.

Dad’s still figuring out how Flickr works, so his captions (which contain a fair bit of historical context for what you’re looking at) are actually posted as comments. Although some of the comments, like this one, are courtesy of Ray Ann.

My next door neighbor just took this picture after hearing Chap whining and then seeing him stick his paws out under the door:

Poor bored kitten. He looks so hilariously pathetic in that picture.

I’ve finally uploaded the last of the best of my Europe photos, from my 2005 trip with Mark.

Here’s a link to the full set, the captions have descriptions of what the hell it is that you’re looking at, along with some entertaining stories of stuff we did while over in Euroland.

If, unlike me, you don’t have an abundance of free time on your hands, they’re also broken down country by country if you don’t want to look at all 400 or so of them.

As long as it took me to upload all my photos, I’d hate to see how long it takes Mark to upload his. He took about three times as many pictures as I did, though in all fairness, he’s a much better photographer.

And since I’m talking about Mark as a photographer, I think this is obligatory:

Saturday I went to the Golden Dragon parade celebrating Chinese New Year with some friends, and my pictures are up.

I’m really happy with how these came out, since this is the first time I went shooting with my giant (70-300mm) lens and did manual focus the entire time.

I will say, this is the first parade I’ve been to in a while, and I’d forgotten how incredibly repetitive parades are: Dragon, dragon, float, marching band, dragon, marching band, Kung Fu school, dragon, dragon, marching band, dragon….

A few of the highlights (click to go to each photo’s Flickr page: