Mountain Meadows Farm Company Picnic

This was my first time to Mountain Meadows Farm for a company picnic. I hope they do it there every year. I loved it. I was impressed with the food, games, and entertainment. Mt. Si in the background was fabulous too.
The thing I wanted to do the most was to get some fly fishing instructions since I heard there would be some. They had a few rods laying around and a pair of instructors to help whoever wanted to try. The instructors were great but I was really bad. Even C tried helping me after she figured it out. I told her I needed to try it in Alaska. Ha! I got the string tangled on the pole twice. That's pretty bad.
On our way out we stopped by the giant basketball court. That was totally cool. I don't think I ever made a basket but it was too fun to worry about things like that.

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Christmas Dinner 2007

C and I went to Marc & Heidi's on Christmas Day. They have two really cute kids and two fabulously friendly cats. Purvis is grey, and Cooper is orange. C says her arm is sore from carrying Isadora around. It snowed an inch or two while we were there so we were all excited. I spent a lot of time shooting the cats.



See the rest of the pictures here.

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The Paramount

C and I went to see Collective Soul, David Gray, and KT Tunstall at the Paramount last night. They were all really great. The keyboard guy for KT banged on a trash can lid for the last song, and Collective's lead singer looks like Sammy Hagar now. Between sets I had to pull out the digicam and shoot the amazing ceiling.

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Jingle Bell Run 2007

C and I ran in the jingle bell run again this year. It was cold enough that it snowed a little bit when the race started. Yeah I wore shorts. I ran a lot faster than I thought I would. All because it was an intense sport of weaving through a crowd of slow pokes. The costumes are always great. Thanks to my ability to run with a digicam, everyone can see what running snowflakes look like (trust me, you don't want to see the videos, they'll just make you dizzy). But everyone seemed to love the gingerbread man the most. He turned out to be one of C's bosses!

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Digicam in Kirkland

I was around the Kirkland waterfront one evening when the light got pretty sweet. All I had on me was the new digicam and I wondered if I could pull of some half decent pictures with it. I did process these in Lightroom, but not too much.
Using the macro function does a nice job of blurring the background. It'd be hard to use that on people portraits though.
These were my favorites from that half hour with the digicam...

Corolla

We took the Corolla in to get detailed. It was looking pretty old and the seats really needed to be cleaned. We dropped it off before they opened, paid over the phone, and picked it up after they closed.
After work the next day I parked it in Bellevue for a couple hours. When I came out it started up with a bit of trouble. As I drove off it didn't have much power and seemed to be dying. Then when I got to the first stop sign it totally quit. I started it back up and when I put it in gear it stalled again. I managed to drive it, with embarrassing flashers going and stalling repeatedly, a few blocks to a parking lot near the highway.
I got to sweat it out in the hot sun waiting for the tow truck to take me two miles down the road to get it fixed.

The detailers had power washed the engine and gotten water in some spark plug wire tubes. It apparently took a day for the water to soak through some seals before it started shorting the spark plugs. I'm glad I still had enough dry hamsters under the hood to get me a few blocks down the road.

The detailers did a fabulous job, it just cost us twice as much as we thought it would.

Fortunately I had the digicam to keep me occupied while I waited.

Digicam

I got C a digicam. a Canon SD800IS. It rocks. It's fast, the face detection focus system really works! And it's small and light, unlike all my gear.

She made me list (in an email) all the reasons I wanted this one instead of something worthless and trashy, I mean cheaper, before I was authorized to buy it. Good thing I like to make informed decisions once in awhile. I rattled off a series of things that I wasn't sure she'd even read. Next time I'll write something about how it'll do the dishes to see if she's paying attention.

C diligently opened the manual to learn more about it, but thanks to tech-support-hero-Kelly (who has one too) she didn't get very far. Whew!

It arrived just in time for her trip to Virginia. I hope she uses it to shoot pictures of all the relatives I'm missing and videos of her sister being herself. :)