There was light rain, as forecast, when I awoke. Had my normal breakfast. I ordered three 16GB SanDisk Extreme III 30MB/s CF cards and a Gepe Extreme Card Safe for 4 Memory Cards from Adorama. The three CF cards after the SanDisk rebate will be a lot less than a new portable image download device, and should provide enough additional storage for five nights of camping at Wonder Lake in Denali National Park without a laptop to download onto. Did some computer work.

Had lunch around 12:05. There are 28 mallards out in the yard! Processed images for a stock submission. (You may read more about stock submissions on August 7, 2009.) J had been tracking our mail as it made its way from our mail-forwarding service to us, and she let me know that it had arrived at "the unit" in Wasilla. About 10 minutes later, D brought our mail out to us.

The rain had stopped and there was nice light around 4:30 so I was tempted to go out and photograph the birds at D's feeders. I didn't because I was getting ready to give a slide show of images that J and I took on our trip to Africa in 2007. I use Boinx FotoMagico for my slideshows because it understands colors correctly (it knows what color space an image is in) and it has tremendous flexibility for fades and transitions. I have been using v1.8 for years, and have delayed upgrading because with v2 they split the software into a basic and an advanced version and wanted big bucks for the advanced version. When I launched FotoMagico, it let me know there was a new version, and for kicks I went to the website to check it out. They're up to v3 now, and the table of features indicated that everything I use is available in the v3 basic version and that it's a free upgrade from v1. I downloaded the software, and the v1 license doesn't work with v3, and when FotoMagico runs in a demo mode, it adds a "subtle" (read "very annoying") watermark to each image indicating that the slideshow was produced with FotoMagico. That wasn't going to fly, so I downloaded the v2 software that was also available because the feature table seemed to indicate that the upgrade from v1 to the basic v2 was free. Well, my v1 license didn't work with that either, and I got a similar watermark. So, it was back to the v1 software that I had saved for just such an emergency. Upon further examination, the feature table uses a different symbol for the upgrades to the basic versions to indicate that it's not possible. I might have to shell out the $29 or so for a license to the current basic version if my v1.8 ever stops working.

We went into D&RA's around 5:00. B&P and L (of L&S) arrived around 5:10. B&P brought their dog Willow who is a good friend of Tootie's. We had some really good pizza delivered by a local pizza place and visited a bit.

Then I gave the slideshow of our eight-week trip to Africa in 2007. We went to Kenya at the end of September 2007 for three weeks as part of one of my photo safaris. We went to Samburu National Reserve, Lake Nakuru National Park, and Masai Mara National Reserve, three of the best locations to photograph wildlife in the world. The image of the Lesser flamingo reflections was selected as one of the NANPA (North American Nature Photography Association) top ten images for 2009. You may read a trip report for Kenya on my photography website.
Then we went to South Africa on our own in mid October 2007 for five weeks where we visited, among other locations, Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park, Boulders Beach south of Cape Town, Mountain Zebra National Park, Addo Elephant National Park, Hluhluwe-Imfolozi Game Reserve, Kruger National Park, and Bourke's Luck Potholes. You may read a trip report for South Africa on my photography website.
We returned to the RV around 8:55 after the party wound down. I had some Linie Aquavit because I'm almost out of Asbach Uralt. My Unky Joom introduced me to aquavit, or akvavit, a Scandinavian spirit whose name is derived from the Medieval Latin aqua vitae, "water of life." (You can read more about my Unky Joom on August 7, 2009 and about akvavit in this Wikipedia article.) Linie Aquavit is made by Lysholm Fabrik Maerke in Norway, and it's claim to fame is that it circles the globe from Norway to Australia and back and crosses the equator ("linie") twice aboard a ship while getting conditioned in sherry casks. The inside of the label on the bottle has a certificate of the crossing, and the bottle I have was on the M/V Taiko from 20 Feb 2007 to 9 June 2007. J and I talked about our travel plans for after Denali, then I did some computer work.