I Refuse to Say Goodbye to Summer Yet

Yes I know, fall is nearly upon us, but I refuse to admint it yet. There are still a lot of good riding days left.

I know I haven't been very religous about blogging but, today was a very special day. As you can see from the pictures I had a very special guest join me on an adventure, and oh what a great adventure it was. Yep, that's my Dad on the four-wheeler.  You may know him as  Russ. 

If you follow my blog you'll know that the location is not that different from earlier posts. Yes I've been to the Stone House many times on my dirt bike. But having someone to share it with makes it fun all over again. Just like you have never been there before.

This first picture is shortly after we got underway.  A great view of the road that leads to the stone house. 

We stopped at the bottom of the hill to check out the granite bridge.  Dad is a huge rock wall fan, so I stopped by this bridge to look it over with him.  Turns out he has never seen it, so I'm really glad I stopped.  I've spent many warm summer days sitting under this bridge, admiring the work, thinking, I bet Dad loves this bridge. Well he's a fan now. 

The base of the bridge is actually granite, just like the walls.  In fact the whole bridge is built entirely of granite.  Pretty amazing really.

I told Dad that I thought it had been there since before I was born.  He thinks probably it was there before he was born too!   Could be.  It is pretty amazing.  I bet most people that drive that road don't even know it's there.  You really can't tell from above, you have to get out and walk down the hill to see it.  I'm not sure how I first found it.  Probably I just walked down to the brook.  Not only do I like rocks, but I like brooks too.

So the next photo was the height of our journey, literally.  We were in the highest blueberry field above the stone house.  What a view from there.  You can see in all directions (duh).  What I mean is you can see really far in all directions.

We spent quite a bit of time up here trying to pick out landmarks and make sense out of what everything was around us.  We are pretty sure we could pick out dodge hill, where we used to live.  We also think we spotted the mountain that Dad lives on now, Great Pond Mountain, Camden Hills, The famous ledges where the lovers leap story my Grandfather always used to tell us about, Mount Katahdin, and I know there was more.  We think we could see the ocean, and Brewer lake.  If we've got any of those wrong don't bother to tell me.  The point was the chance to stand there and share it, trying to figure stuff out. 

All in all, a great summer day.  A trip to remember for a long time.  I purposely left out the part where I crashed going up the hill.  For a minute there you thought I'd changed didn't you...well I haven't.  A few more battle scars in the ole dirt bike. I really just wanted to give dad something to remember! 

Stay tuned.  Where heading for the Trails to Rails project next.  I went there once this year and had a greand time.  Dad and I have decided we'll do it together next year. 

Making Your Desktop Picture Span Two Monitors

So I decided the other day that I wanted to set my desktop background image to one that spanned across both monitors, instead of being duplicated on each monitor. I've done this many times before with Windows XP. No big deal. Well, several hours and a few swear words later I finally got it working on my Vista computer. Thought I'd share my frustration in the hopes of helping someone else.

So I did the normal stuff you would do. I looked at my monitor resolution and took the height as is, and multiplied the width by 2 (cause I have two monitors and I want the picture to span them both). I used Photoshop Elements to create a picture I wanted using these dimensions. Then I used Explorer to locate my new picture file, right clicked on the picture and said, set as desktop picture. The new picture was placed on my desktop, but no matter how I tried it would not span across the two monitors correctly.

I struggled with this for hours it seems, but I was finally able to get it to work. The problem seems to be when you right-click a file and select set as desktop picture, some kind of conversion or optimization takes place, and the picture is no longer the right size. Instead, if I right click on the desktop, select Personalize, the Desktop Background, I end up at the Desktop Background dialog box. From there I have to use the Browse button to locate the properly sized image. Once the image has been selected I set the position to be tiled and bingo, the picture is properly displayed. Phew. What a struggle.

Bottom line, browse to the picture instead of right clicking on the picture to get this to work. Good luck.