Our Persisting Memories

Our family had a very traumatic experience this last Saturday. We had some family friends in town, the Brown Family, and their 2 children visiting us for the weekend. With Saturday being too cold to do any outdoor activity we chose to go to the mall. The kids had a wonderful time in the play area, loved the carousel, and we all had lunch in the food court. The 2 older girls walked while we had Phoebe and Max (about 4 weeks younger than Phoebe) in small umbrella strollers. The lines for the elevator are horrible on Saturdays because apparently everyone is there that has a child in a huge stroller. We opted to use the escalators instead since we only had the small strollers. We had already been up once before, and we were heading back down to go to our cars. Phoebe and I were halfway back up on the escalator from BJ and the rest of them, with a bunch of people in between us. They were getting near the bottom when all of a sudden I see BJ turn around with pure panic on his face ye...

It has a taken a while but I think I'm finally happy with the way I'm processing my photos. Prior to this I was still experiementing with color balance and color saturation to say something about my subjects. Functionally though I want to capture exactly what I'm seeing when I take the picture. I'm the sort of person that gets mired in the technical details of something. I like to know how each small detail affects everything around it. With the huge amount of options available for processing raw files it took me almost a year to start producing something I can say I really really like. That's just the colors though. I think I'm finally where I want to be with regards to processing. I can still find a special photo and make further adjustments so it stands out as a background for my PC, but as photos that we print and hang on our walls I can finally say these are where I like them. 56705|640 56645|640 56411|640

I think I'm finally ready to start posting my favorite songs from last year. I'm going to have to group them since I can't really compare something from Meshuggah to Andrew Bird. They'll be in playable flash format for your perusal. I'll also link to the bands last.fm pages. This will probably be an ongoing thing throughout the year.

This post is over due, like many others, but better late than never! This last weekend we went to the Dallas Zoo. The weather was perfect for it! The last time we went Phoebe was still a bit too young to really appreciate the animals and the zoo environment, and spent most of the time in the stroller. This time she really got to wander around and enjoyed the animals. Here are some highlights of the zoo: 56531|380 The meerkats came right up to us and stared back at us. They were so close, what a treat! 56597|380 Playing with all the big statues they had. 56525|310 56573|310 We went to the petting area and Phoebe wandered away from us over to the pigs. She got more than she bargained for when she walked up to a very large pink pig who was being kept behind not much of a cage. She was very intimidated and freaked out, to say the least, and came running back over to me moaning. She was also scared by the monkeys. One area of their habitat was behind a large glass wall so you could...

Sophia has discovered Daddy's glasses. She loves them. 56257|500 Sophia has also posed very well for pictures. 56185|640 She's so used to her picture being taken that she EXPECTS it. 56179|500 Phoebe plays with daddy's mouth while Sophia brushes his hair. 56215|500 She likes to get dizzy and swish her hair about. 56227|500