A new life; same as the old life?

Wow, I can't believe summer is coming to an end. The official end of summer here is Monday 1st September this year. Local attractions either close completely or significantly reduce their operation. We have a local water park in our new town, three golf courses, a beach, and a very nice town center, few of which we have taken advantage! We did do our first garage sale earlier this year, and raised $400 ourselves and with friends over $1000! As you can see we had a lot of crap to sell, but people bought it, with some folks coming back several times over the two days! Click here for a few more pictures. This past weekend it was the Taste Of Highland Park, where local restaurants bring out sample sizes of their product and over charge you for their promotional advertising. It was however an excellent day out, lots of good food and a nice walk to town. On the same day, they had the Port Clinton Square Art Festival, celebrating it's 25th Anniversary. We ended up continuing our walk...

As you all know, I love my camera, despite not being very good with it!  I am hoping to take a class this winter though, with the New York Institue Of Photography. It's a correspondence course , and they give you assignments, tutuor support, etc. It sounds pretty good for the price. If anyone is interested in taking it themselves, let me know, cos they are always sending me discount vouchers. Check out all of the courses here . However, when last in the UK, Lorraine and the Cooper girls went to get proper professional pictures taken. I have all of them on various formats, but I uploaded a bunch of them here. Click to check em out .

Yesterday was an interesting day. We started the morning darker at 6am than it is on some winter mornings, due to a heavy storm rolling in, and finished it the same way with the Cubs game stopped short for tornadoes and lightning, and a superb light show to our south, as you can see on these videos. Check em out! Between the flashes, you can see some excellent fork lightning too. Apparently about 1/2m homes were without power after the storm and there were a record 88,000 lightning strikes.

I recently had my first Jimmy Buffett experience. Jimmy Buffett is a huge deal here in the US and specifically in Illinois. It is a big party time every time he comes to town, people dress up in Hawaiian shirts, and head north to Alpine Valley in Wisconsin and behave like it is Spring Break combined with Mardi Gras, combined with Girls Gone Wild! It's kinda like Vegas, in the sense that what happens at Buffett stays at Buffett, and my camera actually helped that cause by screwing up on the picture download, losing most of the pictures I had of half naked women and girls making out with girls. Here are a few samples.

I have a bunch of pictures and videos of the young 'un that I have been meaning to get around to posting for a while, including some of the "The Pox", some recent, some crawling video, crazy fake laughter, and some older pictures that Lorraine has had on her camera for a while. Lastly, Lorraine had a professional session done whilst in the UK, so there are some of those pictures too. So in no particular order..here goes, click the picture to take you to the linked albums. From UK trip (May), inc swimming, horse riding & Scottish rellies. From June, inc "The Pox" The Godfather & weird sleeping positions. Miscellaneous July Pictures Miscellaneous Videos, inc first feeding, crawling, standing & rugby league! Click here for more videos.