Well, as it turns out, my MP3 player problems are solved. I remember that I needed to format the card from the Classic software - but I looked at the player itself, and its "formatting" seemed to consist of having an empty folder called "VOICE" on it. So I made a similar folder on the Smart Media card, and voila! it's formatted!

And then I went into Musicmatch, the player manipulation software (and a whole lot more - it'll convert .WAVs to MP3s, for one very cool, nifty thing), and it, too, recognized the card. I had to do a bit of fiddling under menus here and there to find the toggle between the card and the MP3 player's internal storage, but it's there. And it's a bit misleading of them to say I've now got 192 MB of storage; what I've actually got is one 64 MB drive and one 128 MB drive. So, if the 64 MB drive has 60 MB of stuff on it, and the 128 MB drive has 120 MB of stuff on it, and I want to add one more itty-bitty file that's 10 MB large, I'm screwed.

Oh, well, such is life. I mean, I wouldn't turn down a Shuffle if one landed in my lap, but I don't exactly feel the need for one, either.

In other news, we've had a busy few days. Emil's been on vacation this week, so yesterday we went to Point Mouillee State Game Area, down by Flat Rock, where the Mighty Huron empties into Lake Erie. (I looked for a map, but all I could find were .pdfs, and I didn't want to put y'all through that . . . ) I'd been there a few years ago on the Huron River Watershed Council's fall bug-collecting outing, but you couldn't walk around anywhere at that time because it's open to hunting. Since then I've wanted to go back in the summer, and explore it a bit further. It's basically a flat marshy area, full of waterfowl. (And here let me apologize for the quality of the pix; my camera was set to overexpose the shots by 2 f-stops because I was last taking pictures in the evening, inside, and I forgot to change the settings back . . . I doctored these in Photoshop but they look a little surreal nonetheless.)








We took bikes and rode around on some of the access roads. I took my mountain bike and Emil rode the Dahon:






The place looks pretty scenic, if you look toward the north. If you look south, however, you get several uninterrupted views of Fermi II . . . I am very bummed that the settings were off on my camera, because I wanted this shot especially for Kevin, and here I have to annotate it:








Oh, well. Emil took a picture, too, so maybe his will come out:








(He had to go through a lot more steps to take the picture with his camera . . . I managed to snap off several shots of him getting ready before he actually was ready to take my picture, but I will refrain from posting them all . . . )

Anyhow, when he develops the film, if the picture is decent, I'll post it here. (He thinks it might have been double exposed - raise your hand if you remember cameras that would let you do that.)

We had lunch along the shoreline. It was a bit reminiscent of Mackinac Island or Maine because there were big rocks over which you had to scramble, and you had to pick a seat carefully. But finally, there was no getting around the fact that it was Lake Erie.








But still pretty nonetheless:








On the way back, we drove through Trenton and Wyandotte before heading west. Trenton was an armpit, but we both thought that Wyandotte looked really nice - much nicer than I'd expected. Trenton seemed like a town full of defunct factories - and I'm guessing that Wyandotte is where the factory owners and salaried employees may have lived . . . It still looks quite prosperous, at any rate, and like there has been recent prosperity because there was a lot of new building.

So that was yesterday.

# # #


Today we went to the Manchester River Folk Festival. The music was pretty good, the arts and crafts were nice, the homemade root beer float was wonderful and lunch was better than expected . . . but mostly it was an Occasion to Take the Midget Out:








After getting a little air in her tires, she - and we - were ready to roll:








I only took one picture at the festival itself, and it's blurry, so I won't post it here.

All in all, a good weekend so far!

Next week we head off to Erie for a few days . . .