Too late, even for an April Fool's joke

After promising last month that I'd post more frequently, life in The Hamilton Zone got so ridiculously crazy that once again, I fell flat on my face. I'm sorry about that, but only to a degree. Because the thing is, I'll never apologize for making my family--and especially my kids--my top priority. So from here on out, I suppose the most I'd better promise is that I'll blog when I have, or can make, time. Honest, I'll do my best. But it's the best I can offer.

Anyway, given that it's April, I hope it's not too ridiculously late to finally post February's photo gallery. With all the time that's passed since I posted January's gallery, I've managed to update the format--significantly so--making it much prettier and more functional and stuff. I think you'll agree it's much-improved.

February's gallery highlights include:

• Zienna showing how independent she's becoming, from feeding herself to doing her darnedest to stand up


• Some pretty wild weather around Redding, from a storm with marble-sized hail one week to one bearing several hours of snow the next


• Zach's rather colorful participation in the regional Odyssey of the Mind competition, in which his team placed third and narrowly missed moving on to state level


• Zoë surviving nearly two weeks of missing school with the flu, finding creative ways to amuse herself (and the rest of us)

However, because this is new and untested, the first post is pretty much a beta test. And because it is, I am actively seeking your feedback. The new format is much easier to navigate, offering either a gallery or slide show view. And, you can choose to optimize it for either broadband (larger images) or dial-up (smaller ones), depending on your connection speed. (Note that just about everything on the screen, including text, is clickable and launches something!) So please, play with it, try to break it, and get back to me with your constructive criticism and opinions, whether related to the layout, the images sizes, the navigation, or whatever. This is a work in progress, and I want to make your experience with the gallery as good as it can be.

I will warn you--especially you grandparents--that print-worthy, larger images have been eliminated from the mix. I'd love to continue offering downloads via the gallery, but because it's now running through Flash, that's not possible (Someone correct me if I'm wrong about that, please!). So, until I find a better way to offer the larger images, in order to get to them, you'll need to add "/images" to the end of the URL for the month's gallery. For example, to get this month's images, you'd enter:

www.thehamiltonzone.com/gallery/g0702/images

As you view a gallery, take note of the numbers of the images you want to download--for example "1/44" would be Photo #1 of 44 in the gallery. Then, visit the month's "images" page as described above (where they're listed numerically), scroll to a file you're interested in, right-click/"Save As," and boom, you'll be downloading it (That's assuming you're a PC user. Sorry, Mac users, but you're on your own!). Repeat the process for each of the other files you want to save. If this is confusing or too much trouble, then let me know. I'm not crazy about it as a solution, but it's the best I can come up with for now. I'm all ears if you have a better idea!

Oh, and in case you hadn't figured it out by now, the gallery can be viewed here.

Enjoy the photos and get back to me with your feedback (Please!). And in return, I'll try to get March's gallery up quickly. Notice I said "try." It may still be April, but I'd prefer not to look like a fool twice in one month if I can help it!