Pictures, pictures, pictures.

I have been taking a lot of pictures lately. I bought a new digital camera. It's a Canon PowerShot A620 and it's a very nice camera for a very good price. You can get them for around $200 and they are awesome. I bought mine at NewEgg.com (who is also awesome) and got a free 1GB memory card for it.

The A620 is 7.1 megapixels, has a swivel screen and lots of controls. Best of all, it takes AA batteries. My old Canon PowerShot S-30 digital camera took special Canon batteries that cost a lot of money and always went bad after a short period of time. I highly recommend buying a digital camera that takes AA batteries if you can, becuase you will never be stuck without power in a pinch. In the worst case you can drive up to the convenience store and buy some extras.

Maggie was very interested in the new camera as you can see here.


So far so good, although I haven't taken any amazing pictures with it yet. It takes very nice pictures and I have some ideas for locations where I'd like to shoot. We also get some good lightning storms here (unfortunately no rain but that's another story), which would make a really cool picture if I get a tripod. I really am a point-and-shoot kind of guy, although I took photography class in high school, I would like to learn to compose some more professional shots.

Work insanity.

I haven't kept my goal of updating this blog three times a week in the last week. I was working extended hours and not getting home until after 10:00 p.m. every night, so I just didn't feel up to it. Now that I'm back on more sane hours, I'm back to updating.

I disputed our property taxes this week. It didn't go over well and they are not going to lower them. The main reason is they did not give me all the information I required to dispute them. Primarily, they did not give the specific parameters they use to calculate the taxes. For example, they only factor in home sales in the same neighborhood as your home. Nowhere on the paperwork did it say that. So, when I went in with several comparable sales figures for the nearby area, none were in my exact neighborhood and would not be considered. It's great that I know now, and will be better prepared next year, but I'm pretty certain they leave out that information in order to screw the taxpayer out of excessive taxes for an extra year.

My family is also down to visit right now. Everyone is here and we're just hanging out. They have visited Texas before so all the tourist stuff has been done. For the most part we're telling stories, playing cards and watching my wife and mom play the puzzle games on the XBox. ZZzzzz...

There's some other interesting stuff going on but I'll put that in another update.