So Long and Thanks For All The Fish

I was a little more than halfway through my morning run when I realized that I had missed a day. Not that the day was a complete blank. I did lots of things. Not big important things. Just Saturday sort of things.

But Day 178 didn't follow Day 177. Four and a half days shy of the halfway point in my yearlong quest to post at least one photo every day, nothing.

Now I'm calling it a day.

Here are a few sample excuses:

Last week we upgraded our antique 36-inch CRT television for a new Sharp Aquos 46-in LED LCD television. I ran a network cable into the family room and bought a five-port switch at Fry's. The TV and a Sony Blu-Ray player both have 10-100 ethernet network adapters. And both have Netflix streaming built in. In addition, I've added cabling necessary to plug my Macbook Pro laptop into the TV and stream Hulu.
The timing is not coincidental. When we dropped cable TV as a cost-cutting move after my full-time job was cut to half-time in January 2009, we agreed that we'd restore cable service long enough for me to watch the 2010 World Cup in South Africa. Next week, Surewest will connect the new TV to their Digital Choice service and next weekend I'll watch USA take on England in the first game.

To complicate the daily photo shoot further, I will have cataract surgery on my right eye on June 30. Five years ago I had cataract surgery on my left eye, so I know from experience that there will be at least a day or two when I won't be able to take photos. Sure, I could bank a few photos to cover the period, but I'm not going to do that.

My decision early in the game to post photos that were taken days, sometimes weeks, earlier sent me down a slippery slope. I slipped from taking a photo a day to uploading a photo a day. Not a minor change. Now I've splashed in the water.

So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish is the fourth book of Douglas Adams' trilogy, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Its title is the message left by the dolphins when they departed Planet Earth just before Earth was demolished to make way for a hyperspatial express route.