I had a good, busy weekend:

I went up to Keene, NH on Friday to visit a friend and do some hiking. While Keene isn’t exactly a hotbed of activity (especially during the summer, when all the college students are away), it was a nice enough visit.

We hiked Mt. Monadnock (which, according to this site, has surpassed Mt. Fuji as the most climbed mountain in the world) on Saturday morning. The weather wasn’t great, but that kept most other folks off the mountain; we pretty much had the trail to ourselves. By the time we reached the summit, it had cleared enough that we could see some surrounding towns and countryside, and it was sunny & hot when we got back to the car.

The hike was a good opportunity to try out my new camera lens. Ever since my trip to the Olympic Peninsula last summer, I’ve been wanting another lens for the camera – lack of zoom on the old lens meant bald eagles were just specks in the photos I took. The new lens zooms in much more than my other one (70-300mm vs. the old 35-80mm), but that makes it much bigger (physically), much more succeptible to camera shake, and it requires a good deal more light to get a good photo. It also has a pretty impressive macro mode that lets you get amazingly close shots. We’ll see how the pictures came out.

I saw Dodgeball on Saturday night. Stupid as parts of it were, there were some real high points, including a fantastic sequence on the (fictional) ESPN 8 and a spectacular cameo appearance by Lance Armstrong. Caleb and crew will be interested to learn David Hasselhoff also has a cameo role.

Yesterday, we made a polenta pound cake from Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone to accompany some fresh strawberries – it turned out very well!