Wedding bells

Well, no actual bells yet. Wedding showers perhaps? Joanne hosted a wedding shower for Amy at our house this weekend. For Ruth it meant a chance to make a bunch of fun party food and hang out with the girls.





And this is about where me and my new friend Christian, decided that we needed to leave the house. Christian is Heather's boyfriend. He and I held our breath so as not to inhale all the estrogen, and we headed for the Taphouse in Bellevue. We sampled beers, ate some good food and then went to watch a movie where people dodge bullets in slow motion and do acrobats with sports cars.

So needles to say that most of these moments were captured by Ruth.








Uh...yeeaah. Too much pink. Too much clucking and squealing. I can hear it just looking at the photos. I made sure all those skirts went home before I returned to scavenge the fridge for leftovers.






There's the one skirt I wanted to stick around! What a doll!

Congratulations to Amy and Abraham! I'll be shooting the wedding so that'll be a blog post of it's own. One more month for those two.




Yum!

The shovel and the level

This isn't really my thing...



I don't take on projects like this. Ruth will attest to it. In fact I believe the day I began digging, Ruth was downright scared. It's a pretty small scale project. It's just not like me and I know that. It's not what I'm good at, and I know that too. But it's a good lesson in trying something new and stepping out of my comfort zone...you know my office.



I'm building a retaining wall in our backyard. Originally there were a few old rotting rail way ties holding back the dirt. I ripped those out and dug a trench. It's a pretty straight forward process. I've been working with Josh ( http://themillerhood.blogspot.com/ ) at his house with several walls over the years, so I felt like I knew how to do it.

I didn't.



But Josh rescued me and put me on the path to success. I didn't dig deep enough or wide enough. I was also apparently being a little too picky on the leveling of the bottom row. The bottom row is everything, if you don't get those right, you're hosed.




Progress is slow as I have more projects then I can keep up with. If I'm not working on my illustration freelancing, I'm trying to get my photo freelancing of the ground. If I'm not doing either of those, I have no excuse to not be in the backyard shoveling gravel and stacking bricks. It's labor! It's real, actual labor. For goodness sakes I'm getting blisters and a sore back!




I've learned something; working in the yard makes me feel like I really deserve ice cream.

Also, I bought a new lens recently so I'm testing it out here on the wall and on these flowers. It's a sigma 17-70mm with macro focusing. Tell me if it measures up.



Also tell me how awesome my wall is.
It makes me feel like a manly man.

Ah, who am I kidding I just posted a picture of pretty flowers.

Memorial Day Weekend

The week before memorial day weekend is a big week of events in our house. May 21st is my birthday, and the 24th is our anniversary. So we booked off a couple days and went home to Salmon Arm to celebrate those two events with our families. The drive to Salmon Arm takes us through Hope, BC, which is one of my favorite places to drive through. The views never disappoint me. Now in the spring the mountainsides are striped with waterfalls.




So this is me as a fresh faced 28 year old on my birthday. I look a little sour actually. I wonder of the years are catching up to me. Heck nah! I'm still in my twenties, life is good! I'm still within the age bracket of people who win Nobel prizes and stuff like that. Not that I'm aiming for a Nobel. I'm older then Spielberg was when he made Jaws. That bothers me sometimes. But I'm younger then Da Vinci was when he painted the last supper, so there's still hope I can influence the art world in some way.



Had to photograph the clematis blossom's just opening in time for us leaving home for the weekend.



So we arrived home to Salmon Arm where my Dad gave me this for my birthday...



If it looks familiar, it's because we've blogged it before. It's Salmon arm from above. Dad took me on a great plane ride as a birthday present. It was fun since my Dad and I are both into photography. I borrowed his lens and we aimed at shooting a few key locations around town, including some of the flooding around the salmon river.

Unfortunately, all the bending backwards to shoot out the window, combined with looking through the viewfinder as I zoomed in and out, combined with the bumpy weather, caused our flight to last only half an hour before I begged Dad to land. blech! sick! What a wimp I am!



After we left town, Dad took a few of the photos we took to the local paper who bought them and printed them on the front page the next week! Pretty funny. My first photograph in print! Can't take much of the credit though. It was Dad's lens, Dad's access to the plane, and Dad's idea.

For our anniversary (five years now!) we stayed at the Prestige Inn on the water in town. Ruth's Dad, Eric won a free night at the prestige and gave it to us as a gift. Thanks Dad! It was great!

This is the Prestige and the wharf from the sky...



And our view from the room...



And my 300mm's view from the room...



I'm pretty sure she' sitting on some eggs there.

Here are some evening pictures from our walk down the wharf.



I've also been playing with Eric's 580ex speedlite for the last week or so. Here's a picture of a bride-to-be as I prepare to shoot her wedding with equipment that I need to learn how to use.



A professional trials, mountain biker rode through town while we were there, and stopped for a show downtown. He did some crazy things on a mountain bike.




I practiced shooting more humming birds...





We visited with family lots, ate some delicious meals, and headed home. Not much else to report.

I feel like I haven't been taking as many photos lately. One of these days I need to blog a random day in our week like I used to, instead of trips and vacation. Costa Rica must have thrown me off.

Until then, here's some closing roller skating photos from an evening with our community group a few weeks ago.

Crazy Squirrel!

I looked out the window the other day and saw this squirrel literally spinning around a branch. I don't know what was going on.