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Here’s a few highlights from this year’s Maine Maple Sunday. Cooper’s Maple Products had a huge pancake breakfast, which we skipped. People were waiting in line for an hour and a half or more just for the pancakes. They also had lots and lots of mud, which I could have seen anywhere. But they had miniature horses, ostrich, peacocks, pheasants and cows. And at the end, we took the really short tour of their boiler house and then got to sample the product of their labor over some vanilla ice cream. I don’t think there’s a better way to experience fresh, real maple syrup.

And now, the photos:

Baby mini-horse:

Ostrich:

and one of the peacocks:

Recently I’ve wanted to scan some photos to be able to archive them. I thought my all-in-one HP printer/copier/scanner was pretty good. I had been using it for documents I wanted to archive, and it did well. I was shocked when I started to scan in photos, though. As you can see from the image below, it tired to enhance the image, which I cannot turn off, and it looks like there was a really heavy Photoshop filter applied to it. I even tried VueScan to see if it would do a better job. I got the same results.

So, I decided that I would research some new scanners just for the fun of it. Turns out there are some pretty good ones for under $100 now. I got a Canon CanoScan LiDE 90 after a little research. I liked that it was powered by USB only, and used LEDs for illumination. That dramatically cuts down on warm up time. The resolution was also about double the HP all-in-one. I went from 600 to 1200 dpi, and it really made a difference. Check out the same photo scanned with the LiDE 90.

I’m pretty impressed, and the scanner only cost $80 including shipping and rush processing. It scans very quickly and is small and light enough to be portable for the weekends. The only draw back is the software for it. The driver looks like something ported from Windows 3.1 to OS X. It’s not pretty, but I’m sure I’ll get used to it.

There is none! Ba-dum-bum.

This is quite the change from 68° temperatures just a week and a half ago. And they say we’re supposed to get more messy weather this weekend. I think we’re going to have snow in May.

Yesterday was my birthday. While I had to work, I did spend the weekend with the people I love, so it was a wonderful birthday. I also got the wicked cute Yoshi’s Island DS. I’m torn between playing that and Animal Crossing: Wild World now. I don’t want my town folk to get mad at me because I’m never there, and I don’t want my town to become overrun with weeds and cockroaches, but Yoshi is just too cute, especially when he flutter jumps.

Manhattan was forced to have his ears cleaned last weekend. He did not enjoy himself at all.

I’m so happy that I caught this photo. Maybe it’s not that great, but I like the angle, the look on his face, and the light distortion from being so close.

Lennon has such unrequited love for Taco. Even though Taco doesn’t show it, I think he loves Lennon, too. He’ll show it in subtle ways like letting Lennon rub against him, or they’ll share the same bed. It’s just so damned cute!

Here’s Bean taking an early morning nap under my comforter. He’s so cute when he snuggles under them like he’s people.

The camera on my new phone is pretty rad. Check out this close up shot of Lennon while he was enjoying the view from the top of the cat tree. Macro mode rocks!

Here’s a cute photo of Bean. It’s really terrible and confusing how he can be so cute, yet so naughty. Such is the paradox of kitten-ness i suppose.

this was just flying around my room tonight… it’s nasty, and i killed it with some toxic cleaner combination of orange clean and i think lysol.

the bug is a little under 2 inches long, and the legs are a good 2 inches long. it’s so nasty that i couldn’t sleep tonight unless i knew it was dead… i just hope this is the one that i saw go under my bed earlier, and not a second one. *shudder*

does anyone know what this is? please let me know.