This year’s farm party was a little more subdued on account of the weather, but the kids managed to have a good time nonetheless!

So I went and got myself signed up with flickr. I’d heard of this site, of course, because it is a part of Yahoo and is immensely popular. It was also recommended to me by Jeff – almost exactly one year ago.

So anyhow, those pictures in the sidebar over there will take you to my photostream. For the uninitiated, this is how it breaks down:

• Every picture I post gets thrown into my photostream.
• The photos in the photostream can be organized into large collections.
• Collections will contain sets, which contain a group of photos.

So that is the hierarchy. It takes a couple minutes to sort out, but a little poking around and you’ll be fine. You won’t actually see the collections very much. Those are mainly for me to keep things organized. I’ll be pointing you towards sets most of the time, one of which I’ve embedded below (use the button in the lower right corner to go full screen).

LuVerne Days

LuVerne days is an annual celebration that takes place in LuVerne, IA. LuVerne is a small town near my hometown of Algona. It serves as the origin of the last few generations of Martys. Several of us grandchildren got to drive some of Grandpa’s antique tractors in the parade. Abby even got to drive one back to the farm!

So I believe when we left off Hayden had just banged his head on the fireplace and gotten stitches. This was just before Easter. Ahem.

Someone had asked how the scar healed up:

So he is enjoying the new, post-stitches life.

I’m off to shake some of the dust off of this WordPress installation. I’ll return soon!

ANYWAY… I just popped in to let you know that there are a bunch of pictures posted up for your viewing pleasure. It’s pretty straightforward, but you have to look around for the NEXT and PREVIOUS buttons sometimes because the ads can be overpowering. That’s what you get for free!

That said, you can view them here.

Enjoy!

I do however, blog about the children, the Hawkeyes, and video games quite a bit. Those things are pretty interesting to me – if not anyone else. I got my Hawkeye Highlights section updated, though I hesitate to call most of them “highlights”. It was a great game today; however, as Iowa took double-overtime to defeat Michigan State in Iowa City. I was a little disappointed that it even came to overtime after a disappointing final defensive series.

Of course it could also be said that they were lucky to even be in the lead at the end of the game after riding Albert Young for 5000 yards or whatever it was. Iowa has a decent shot at bowl eligibility, and if they win out ( no small task, I know ) it will be all but a sure thing. It is at times like this that I think about how Iowa State is 1-8 – with a sole victory over Iowa – and it makes me want to keel over the yak on the floor. Oh, well – next year, right?

We have almost all of the memory cards full for the camera now, so one of these days we’ll have a lot of pictures for you. Time has become such a commodity lately. It’s really crazy. I have a lot of video to work on as well. It’s something I like to do, but the only time I have to do it is about 30-60 minutes after I get home at night when I usually feel like…

Playing Halo 3. In the fictional land of galactic war, you may now refer to me as LT. BillyActionface. I’m officially a Spartan officer now, so that is sweet. That is more so a reflection of experience at this point rather than skill, but I have been holding my own.

It is now time to watch the Big Ten finale show, and next time I’ll tell you about my candlelight dinner at the Chick-Fil-A!

Derin did a series on his old site (he has since moved to wordpress.com) regarding the many options out there. Almost all of them – if you wanted to use them for free – had a glaring flaw. Snapfish was cool, but you could only share photos by emailing special links to people. Flickr is very nice, but you are limited to only three separate albums – not good for organizing! Many of the others – photobucket, etc. – are visual train-wrecks. Linking to my pictures almost gave me a headache as by brain tried to sort through the muddled ads and garbage. AND my pictures didn’t actually start until about 3/4 the way down the page!

I was nearly resigned to pay for Flickr Pro when Marcellus the Photographer pointed me to Ringo.com. I think this is going to be the winner – at least for now. The user interface very clean for one of the free sites. At least there is a chance that the albums are the first thing you are going to see! I only have one test album up with a couple pictures now, but I’ll keep you posted as it starts to get more populated:

http://www.ringo.com/photos/albums.html?memberId=166175250

Oh yea, I guess I threw in a video from youtube as well. Caution – it may stir up some bad feelings from the past