Yesterday, we had a little Winter party with a few friends. One of the things I did was teach Kayla how to make hats with a loom. Super easy!
We also made some cookies. We didn’t make as many as cookies we made for Halloween because there was a little cookie disaster earlier that morning, but I saved the day! I also made red, green, and white icing. In the next day or so we are going to make a lot more.
Last Saturday we had a few friends and family members over for a Halloween party to decorate cookies and carve pumpkins. To get ready for it I made yellow, orange, white and black icing. Jennifer also made over 50 cookies of all shapes and sizes. There were pumpkins, cats, Frankenstein faces, owls, leaves, and other Autumn or Halloween shapes. We had all sorts of sprinkles, stencils, and other things to decorate the cookies with. Whatever anyone made, they got to take home.
Kurt made only one cookie, but he spent a lot of time on it. He got pretty creative with it. Beginner’s luck I think. If he could have repeated it, then I might call it skill.
Tim made a bunch of cookies. Each seemed to get better than the last one. Probably because he ate all of the ones he messed up.
After decorating cookies for awhile, everyone went outside to carve pumpkins. For my first Jack-O-Lantern, I just drew on the pumpkin with a dry erase marker. I used this so I could easily wipe off any excess marker after I finished. I think my first one came out okay.
This past weekend, my friend Angee asked me to take photos at her daughter’s sixteenth birthday party. It was an 80’s themed celebration. Lots of eighties inspired outfits. Armed only with my Nikon D200 and SB-800 Speedlight, I was able to walk away with some good candid shots of the evening. I’m not posting them all, but you can see a few more photos of Kayla’s party on my Flickr site.
When I was a bit more mobile, long story, Jennifer and I went to the Grays Harbor Shorebird Festival. This year the festival was held on May 2nd through the 4th in Hoquiam, Washington. Each year thousands upon thousands of shorebirds stop here at the Grays Harbor National Wildlife Refuge for a bite to eat and a chance to rest on their long journey north. Many of these birds travel over 15,000 miles to their northern breeding grounds. The muddy tideflats of the Grays Harbor Estuary is “one of 4 major staging areas for shorebirds in North America and one of the largest concetrations of shorebirds on the west coast south of Alaska“.
The best veiwing times are at high tide, so plan your trip accordingly. The high tide will cover most of the mud flats so the shorebirds will be concetrated closer to the viewing areas. We timed our trip just right. We arrived just before high tide. That day they recorded nearly 40,000 birds. Some of the most abundant birds out there were the Western Sandpiper, Dunlin, Semipalmated Plover, and the Green-winged Teal duck.
At the main viewing area, there were employees from the Wildlife Refuge with professional scopes spotting birds and helping other spectators find some of the rare birds hidden among the thousands. The rare birds we saw that day were the Red Knot, Ruddy Turnstone, and the Caspian Tern.
The highlight of the day for me was when a few thousand birds flew in that unique cloud-like formation maybe 10 feet above my head then landing in the mud flats just beyond the viewing area.
Yesterday, I went to see Bert Monroy give a seminar as part of the Photoshop CS3 Creativity Tour organized by Kelby Training. He’s an expert when it comes to Photoshop. He’s even in the Photoshop Hall of Fame. If you ever get the chance to attend one of these seminars, definitely do it. I consider myself an intermediate user of Photoshop, so this seminar was perfect for me. It reviewed some of the basics yet introduced me to some of the more advanced features of the program.
I took a few pictures while I was there with my iPhone. I uploaded them all to my tumblr site. Check them out. The above photo was taken when I ran into Bert Monroy in the lobby before the seminar started. I took another of Bert Monroy answering questions at the first break and one of where I sat at the Photoshop seminar. Pretty funny!
There was a bunch of the booths set up in the lobby by different vendors. I stopped by the B&H table and picked up a few of their free catalogs. The onOne Software company had a table setup up with info on all their Photoshop add ons. I went to the National Association of Photoshop Porfessionals table and joined. I ended up getting a $50 book and DVD for free as part of the membership. Wacom also had a table set up showing off their Cintiq displays. That display is definitely going on my wish list at B&H. The Cintiq display is what Burt Monroy uses on his podcast.
Bert also does a weekly podcast. I’ve been watching it since the first episode. It’s called Pixel Perfect and is produced and distributed by Revision3, a company Kevin Rose helped start with a few others from the TechTV era. They also do a bunch of other podcasts I listen too like DiggNation and The Totally Rad Show. You can download it from the Revision3 website or via iTunes.
