This weekend I attended Jon Stewart‘s and Steven Colbert‘s Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear in Washington DC, along with 200,000-350,00 like minded people, another 4 million on-line and countless others watching on Comedy Central or at the satellite rallies. The rally was scheduled to start at 12:00, but we hoped to beat the crowds and arrived at 8:30. It was lucky that we arrived early. We made it into the front section, but only barely. By 9:00 you couldn’t see the back of the crowd. People continued to stream in throughout the rally. Friends arriving just before the start of the rally reached only the very back of the rally 100′s of yards from the last set of jumbo-trons.

While visiting Shenandoah over the past weekend, we made a point (ok, I made a point) to be somewhere with a view for sunset at least one day. Isn’t pollution wonderful?

Spiders are all around us. Most people can’t stand them. The idea of an animal consuming the liquefied contents of its prey seems repulsive (something I find funny given the disgusting nature of the industrialized food we all eat). Feeding habits aside, these tiny arachnids have amazing abilities and have adapted to every area of the world we have changed. Most of the pictures in this post were take in or near my residence. Most of these spiders are less than 1/8″ in size.

Be sure and click Read More below to see all 9 images.

A couple friends of ours came up this weekend and we headed out to Shenandoah National Park for some hiking and hopefully to see some nice fall colors (yes, we were leafies) and hike. When we arrived, the leaves were not so great, but thanks to a frost on Friday night, by Sunday, most of the park had changed over to orange, auburn, brown and red. Among other hikes, we hiked a 7 mile loop that included Dark Hollow Falls, Rose River Falls and the Appalachian Trail. The section of this hike below and along the stream that flows over Dark Hollow Falls was spectacular.

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Our parents came to visit for a long fall weekend and we headed up to Shenandoah National Park. We stayed at the Big Meadow Lodge and enjoyed the many vistas throughout the park along Skyline Drive.

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7:00AM, October the 3rd, 2010.

This panorama was captured at the top of Bear Fence trail at the vista after a decent rock scramble. The photo encompass about 200 degrees and was taken at around 17:00EST. Click on the file for larger version of the file.