Thanks fort he advice guys.
I spent most of last night reading the manual - well, half of it anyway. LOL
I suspect it will end up coming to Chicago with me - I'd hate to be there, have an opportunity to get out for some shots and miss it.
I'm going to speak at a conference, so it'll be a pretty busy week for me, but still - better to have th egear and not use it, than to want to use it and regret not having it.
I like the suggestion of the 50-200 and te teleconvertor - never really played with tc's before.
I'm hoping to get some time today to snap some shots of the dogs here - scruffy as they are a week before they go to the groomer - but we'll see.
One thing I noticed in the manual that shocked me was the huge drop in the number of images you can take when snapping RAW files. I knew they contained a LOT of data, but holy cow. The manual suggests a drop from about 100 jpeg images on a 512 card, down to about 29 when shoting RAW.
...as it is the 1gb holds just better than 200 jpegs, so I'll definitely be looking for a 2 gb card or two.
...because I know I'll be playing with RAW shots soon.