Buying a new camera before going to a place of scenc wonder leads to the road of excess.  Excess picture taking.

Going to a place of beauty that also features casinos leads to the road of excess hiking in the thinnest of atmosphere, which leads to the road of excess.  Excess in the form of affordable buffets, funded by the unfulfilled dreams of casino despair.  I should have taken pictures of food rather than say gorging myself into bellyaching literally and bellyaching in the whining figurative, because I had eaten too much.

Seriously, though, if it weren't for the lack of oxygen, Lake Tahoe would be one of the finest places on earth.  Amazing in a wilderness way, but without that remoteness of not having slot machines handy.  At the end of the day, I like sucking in the thick air of sea level.  Hiking at 9,000 plus feet hurts my little underdeveloped lungs and my fat little fireplug legs.

I'm moving to LA so that I can not only know the air is at maximum, non-altitude thickness, but I can see it.

Perhaps the coolest part is rather than scratching each other's eyes out after a three-hour car ride there and three hours back in the rather tiny and confined, but lovely and well-designed space, of the new Mazda, we were all snuggly close.   M. sees it as a milestone of unity.  Perhaps he's right, since car trips of my childhood made me hate the other passengers more.  Of course, unlike my sibs, M. never hits me or kicks me in the back of the seat.

And, I never slept with my brothers.

If you want to check out the literally hundreds of pictures I took with the fab new cam, go here and/or here.  Here's a tip, though, scroll fast, because there are a lot of boring as shit shots unless you are writing a manual.  Far too fucking many of me testing out the settings and reacquainting myself with concepts like shutter speed, f-stops and depths of field.

Oh, and I beg of you, skip any of the ones M. took of me.  That man has a knack for making me look shittier than my ego will allow me to believe.  Seriously, I've always had a couple of pounds to spare, but in those pics I should be rolling myself into Jenny Craig or risk getting buried in a piano-sized box.

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