Flashlight testing day 1

Rode in today with the brightest battery, the 3.7v LiIon single cell. Light set on "high" - Brightness was great, but it went out at about 28 minutes. I could turn it back on but it went back out in about another minute. I put it on Medium and it lasted the 8 minutes in to work.

Since medium power is probably no brighter than high with 2x AA NiMH, I'll probably try the AA cells next.

In the end I may just use this as a backup, at least as long as my HID continues to work. The HID has hours of runtime, so I only have to bother charging it once a week or so, and that convenience counts for a lot.

[EDIT] - if nothing else, this flashlight is useful for reusing old batteries - I just dropped a mostly-dead single AA cell from the battery recycle bin in it, and it's been burning fairly brightly for 20 minutes already.

CROP walk summary

We came, we walked. T and C(the dog) and I did the full 5 mile walk around Chelsea, and we raised $265. Not too bad for a first year and a late start. Most of that was gathered online either here or at work. All of us had nice encounters with others of our various ages and species, and I had a good 20 minute talk at the end with someone who is a closet science fiction fan, and had a fairly cool tiny dog.

She knew a lot of Ray Bradbury, which I'm somewhat lacking in, but I held my own on Heinlein and Clarke, and in the end after the conversation led to The Forever War, I pointed her to Old Man's War, and I mentioned that I'm currently reading the Heris Serrano and Honor Harrington series, if she likes space opera. I did warn her about Weber's tendency to sound like a military historian for a page or two at a time. She did dive into her car and get a pencil and paper to write the titles and authors down, so I hope she likes them.

Book finished

Against the Odds by Elizabeth Moon
Suiza/Serrano book 2, Familias Regnant book 7

Enjoyable, just enough separate storylines I think, nice wrapup. Wonderful bit of poetry at the end in the song for absent friends (see wikipedia entry).

Several things hang on vastly improbable events, but that's kind of par for the course in this series.