During the evening my attention was drawn to the activity of the fire fighters. I was first told that they would be done with what they had to do in about an hour. Well, as it turned out they weren't done until many hours later due to the additional fires. Later, and perhaps while the fire fighters were still doing their work, a caravan of trucks drove up which really caught my eye. I first thought that someone further down the street was throwing one huge party to draw in so many vehicles all at once. It did become apparent some hours later that there was no party and that these folks were searching for the boy. This was also the first I'd heard about a boy being missing, and the time was now around 3 am. Danny and I both briefly spoke with the searchers as they'd wondered if the kid could be hiding in our garage or in my car underneath a down throw that I keep in it. I explained to them that our garage was always locked with a deadbolt and that I never left my car unlocked. It was highly unlikely that the boy was hiding in either place.

Not long after that a huge helicopter came in from the east and began the aerial search for the boy over the many open fields of sagebrush that we have here. The coyotes were howling too so there was really a lot of noise.

About 4 am our neighbor two houses to the north was on the phone with us as he'd been woken up by the chopper. That was when I found out that it was the shed that had burned (I'd previously thought it was the master bedroom of the house and I didn't find out until this morning that more had been burned when I took a look at the online version of the Nevada Appeal). Anyway, this was all happening in the middle of my day so I wasn't kept awake by the noise, and I can tell you it was really, really noisy with the chopper flying around and around and low to the ground until daybreak.

At the time of this writing, all appears to have finally settled down around here. The dozens of trucks and cars have left for the most part, although there may be one or two out of my line of sight. Rich likely has a load of paperwork to do if he had proper insurance on his stuff that was damaged and/or destroyed. Personally, I won't miss the noisy Mustang but that's just me not liking anything noisy. I've got a backyard now filled with footprints from the hiking boots that the searchers wear and wonder how long before the winds we get here will simply erase them into oblivion.

Why the boy did what he did is really anyone's guess. I have a few opinions without even having known the kid, but they're best left unsaid.

Danny is good. He's off to work right now so he can't get in my hair while I work on one of my projects.

I'm good too. Still keeping weird hours but that's all part of working the graveyard shift. Yes, work is going good too. Loads of printing nightly still. I think we went through 2-1/2 cases of copy paper last night plus all the other forms that we print. On the average we manage to keep three laser printers constantly busy for a solid 3-4 hours each night, a continuous form laser printer busy for 5-6 hours and a band printer busy for one hour. You could say that we do a lot of printer baby-sitting since we're constantly feeding them paper and forms. We do a whole lot more than that, but the printers are squeaky wheels and they get their attention.

More later, got to go check on a neighbors kitty cat now while it's still light outside.

I am sick and tired of receiving calls about some kid's truancy on my cell phone. If I answer the call, it is only a recording. If I don't answer then they leave a voice mail. The trouble is that one cannot return the call to the phone number they call from. They're wasting my precious time and I can't be bothered to find their number in the phone book to let them know that they need to change their ways. This isn't something that anyone should ever simply leave a voice mail about - missing one's education is far too serious in today's world.

I sure am glad that I never bothered nor had the time to have kids...

Okay. Rant over.

Work is good. I've been at my current job 1 year now, and more than half of that time on the graveyard shift. I think I'll stick with this job for a long time to come.

My Danny is fine too. He is always the one around here who can never find anything and can lose something within five minutes of having it in his hands. I am constantly called on to find things that I've never laid my eyes on until he loses them. Fun huh?

We took a vacation a few weeks ago. It's been quite a few years since I've actually gone anywhere during my vacation time but this was a special occasion - his Mom had her 80th birthday! What a time we had celebrating! I can't remember when I've eaten out so many times in one week. It was all good, and despite the weight that I gained I survived all the fun.

Be good to yourselves. Not sure when the next time will be that I'll get to update this.

Pardon the mess. Please. This is absolutely the very first photograph taken with the D50. I took this picture as soon as the battery had a full charge. At the time, I really hadn't read much of the manual so it was really just a point and click affair.

When I took this photograph I had made my way through the manual once. I'm still not quite sure of what I'm doing, but I am having fun. Notice how the camera essentially removed the background all on its own in "close up" mode. Yeah, those are mine.

Now, just to prove that my Danny wouldn't break the camera, I tried taking a picture of him in "portrait" mode. Yes, he is rather a pink man - it's not the lighting, the camera or anything else having an effect.

I miss the folks at Walmart, but I'll be back over there to shop and at least to just go chit-chat with them on my weekends, which I plan to do - maybe late tonight. They have not been forgotten and I did gain a new skill while working there that I can fall back on if ever needed should we eventually decide to leave this area.

Life otherwise? My hours have definitely changed. This is now the start of my day instead of being the middle or end of the day. This schedule will last about 2 months while I'm being trained, then I will be on swing shift permanently which is my favorite shift. I like being awake several hours before heading into work and when those hours are entirely daylight hours it's even better. I just can't get much housework done in the night hours.

I now have the time to clean up after a lot of his little messes without them being recreated within a couple of hours. I can get the kitchen back to looking like a kitchen instead of a junk drawer that has exploded. He has this bad habit of leaving everything on the kitchen island no matter where it actually belongs. He actually opens his junk mail and leaves it lying around instead of immediately tossing it into the trash. He has enough address stickers to last him for the next century spread out on the diningroom table and those are going to get filed away neatly. I can now vacuum the carpet and mop the floors and have them stay clean until he returns. That's the best part - a few days without mud being tracked in or his drinks being spilled on the floor. Oh joy! Oh work!