You'll find moving Memorial Day remembrances all over the blogosphere. Unfortunately, I'm not in a maudlin mood. Instead, I'll simply say that I appreciate the sacrifices that have been made and continue to be made by men and women in the military and point you to this article by the Union-Tribune's Robert Caldwell.

This was the first three day weekend that I've had off in ages and I almost felt like a government employee, banker or someone else who has what I would term regular hours. I thought I'd take the extra day and head out to take some photographs since my Olympus E-500 was feeling neglected. After shooting, I sat down to enjoy Panera Bread's free wi-fi and discovered that I'd forgotten my card-reader. The biggest downside of the E-500 is that its direct camera connection is only USB 1.1. so it took nearly a half hour to transfer 1.2 GB of images to my laptop. Next time I'll remember the card reader.

Anyway, being Memorial Day, I thought I'd head out to Fort Rosecrans National Cemetery. It's been years since I've been there and it is a beautiful and moving site. The cemetery was understandably more crowded Monday than it normally is and I heard one person complain that the cemetery had run out of the regulation flower-holders.

Like I said, it had been years since I'd been to the cemetery and things had changed. There were many more markers surrounding the one I was looking for:

That's my grandparents' marker.

While I didn't walk around the entire cemetery, the sheer numbers of markers and headstones was a lot to take in, and Fort Rosecrans is just about out of room.

I also headed over to Balboa Park to take some pictures, I'll try to post some of those in the next couple of days. On a purely photographic note, I was quite impressed with how well the polarizing filter for my lenses worked. As you can see, the sky is a rich blue. Without the filter it'd be much lighter and less dramatic. I know the effect can be duplicated using Photoshop, but the filter is much easier and less time-consuming to use.