The Facility in the Middle of Nowhere was quiet. Rob's [1] at DragonCon, [2] Spring [3] took the boys out for a day of swimming (borrowing the car, Lake Lumina) and thus left me and Spodie (the cat) to ourselves.
Leaving Spodie to fend for himself, I decided to walk to US-441 (just shy of two miles west of The Facility in the Middle of Nowhere) and take pictures along the way, to get used to the new digital camera I picked up a week or so ago.
The one thing I've noticed about the camera (an Olympus D-550 ZOOM [4]) is its propensity to suck the living daylights out of batteries. So the night before I recharged eight AA batteries to see just how long they could last in this camera.
Not long as I found out.
Just outside the front door a large spider had made its home and I thought I'd get a picture of it. Turn the camera on, activate the digital zoom (10x) and click the camera is dead.
Fiddle around some more, turn it back on, attempt to zoom and click it was dead.
Take out the four freshly recharged batteries, replace them with the other four refreshly recharged batteries, turn it on, zoom and click its dead.
No combination of batteries lasted at all.
[5]
So there goes the taking of pictures. But I still did the walk out to US-441.
I was amazed to find not only sidewalks along the way, but concrete sidewalks. Nearly every sidewalk I've seen down here in Lower Sheol have been asphalt so it was refreshing to see a real sidewalk. Chain link fences too. Except for the occasional palm tree it felt like I could have been walking through a neighborhood from Detroit (where I spent many a summer). Although unlike Detroit, I was the only one out and about walking. Granted, it's South Florida, end of August in late afternoon where the heat and humidity have backed the landscape for the day. Come October the walk might actually be very nice.
[4] http://www.steves-digicams.com/2002_reviews/d550.html
![[5] /boston/2002/08/31/US-441-walk.png](/gemini.conman.org/boston/2002/08/31/US-441-walk.png){kind=link}