Speaking of weekends...the camping trip.  Very fun, but I have to learn that if I'm going to go do that again I need to get a sleeping pad and a real sleeping bag...a comforter and a pillow won't work.  As I described previously, we were unable to have a campfire because of a burn ban in effect for the park - even in the fire rings/grills.  That left us free to concentrate on the other main planned activity, hiking.  Two days, ten miles in total, and ten pretty difficult miles.  Lost Maples is a "State Natural Area", not a "State Park", so the hiking trails were not your typical nice crushed gravel or wood chip paths.  The trails often involved hopping from rock to rock across the Sabinal river (admittedly no more than a creek at the moment), generally navigating around large stones scattered around the path (Y's guess was that the paths were laid out along natural drainage channels, which would explain the rocks) and in some places climbing up some pretty steep grades, with a 400-foot elevation change to get you out of the canyon and up to the top of the hills for the view.  It was all very gorgeous, and very quiet, especially yesterday morning when we were on the more challenging West trail.  We were sore as heck after the first day and pretty much dead tired on the drive back yesterday afternoon, but I haven't had any problems moving around today.  All the walking and other exercise I've been getting has really paid off.  In fact, I just got done washing and waxing Sir Roderick's car as a thank-you for letting me borrow it.

I did also do some fishing in the Sabinal on the first day's hiking and caught fifteen small sunfish of various species, which was fun since I had friends along to witness it and take pictures.  It was especially awesome that I managed to catch three fish on my first three casts of the day.  Boom, boom, boom.  I've got this down pretty good.  Or I was just lucky and got to them when it was feeding time.  Here are some photos:

So, today marked the end of Q1 2008 and guess what means?  The company I've been working for since August 2004, the company which has been in existence in one form or another for almost a decade without showing a profit, finally gave up the ghost.  Too bad, since it seemed like we were finally getting our product and messaging aligned with some kind of a market, and since the project I was working on was just about to enter system test in preparation for release.  One of the main investors was heavily invested in the real estate market, and that's that.  However, no sooner had I packed up my office, gotten home, called my folks and started unemployment paperwork than I got a call from a recruiter.  So, hopefully this will not be another eight month jobless stint.  I certainly have more experience and more contacts than I did in 2004.