Can we go outside?

Today the only thing separating Jake and Julie from the beautiful spring day outside was a screen door.  Needless to say, after taking a few pictures of them I slipped on their harnesses and out we went.  They seem to know that the harness and leash mean outside time and don't struggle anymore when I put them on.

I really like how this picture shows off their different eye colors (Julie has the green eyes, Jake has the amber ones):

 

More from last Monday

Just a few pictures from the beautiful spring hike earlier this week








A cow parsnip bud


Douglas irises were everywhere

Come With Me Kitty

We think our previous two cats, Charlie & Snowball, were caught by coyotes.  So we decided our new cats should be indoor only.

With the beautiful spring weather we started feeling guilty that they weren't even getting a taste of the outdoors, so when we saw the Come With Me Kitty harness in a pet store, we picked up two.

Jake has a blue harness & leash.  William loves exploring the hill above & below our house so he and bold Jake made a good team.

Julie has a pink leash.  She was a little more tentative, mostly sticking to the back yard grass & flowers.

When we were outside with them, it looked like both cats were having a great time, but looking at the pictures later they did look a little freaked out.

Nevertheless, Jake especially, explored with gusto.  He even climbed a tree.

The one fly in the ointment is that we took Jake out while Julie was sleeping.  After we got him acclimated, we woke Julie up and took her outside too.  In her head Jake was still inside, so when she saw him outside she thought he was a stranger and hissed at him.

She was suspicious of him the rest of the night, but they made up this morning.

Lens Love

As I've mentioned before, Cristie & I are using cameras that can use almost any lens made for any system -- Leica, Carl Zeiss, etc.  Lately, we've been buying & trying many lenses, some of them very old and specialized.

The plan is eventually to sell 90% of these - the ones we don't fall in love with.

Today a lens arrived that is so wonderful we're sure it's a keeper -- it's already pushed a bunch of other lenses right into the "sell" pile! 

For those who care, it's a Pentax "Limited Edition" 77mm f1.8.  Anyway, here are a few sample images from it, and as always click on them to see them a little larger.

Here are a couple of test shots of art pieces in the music/TV room.

Snapshot of me sitting at my desk (wearing green for St. Patrick's Day)

And finally I took a test shot of a flower on our patio.  This picture is nothing special -- the shadows & background are ugly ...

But click on this crop from the picture above, showing what the lens can do!

Anniversary Weekend

Cristie & I celebrate the anniversary of the day we met more than our wedding anniversary.  The only problem is that we can't agree on when it is.

We agree we met over the course of two days; I say March 14th & 15th, she says March 13th & 14th.  Since we overlap on the 14th that's the day we commemorate.

On our first date, 21 years ago, we went to a student pub near Stanford called "The Oasis", and we still go there every year for dinner.  The Oasis has been around since 1958 and has a long tradition of patrons carving into the wooden tables, benches, and even walls.

We usually combine it with a day on "The Peninsula" and with the beautiful weather this year a hike in the hills between Palo Alto and the Ocean was the obvious way to spend the day.

There were trees to climb ...

... and mud puddles to jump.

A splendid time was had by all.

Gorgeous Monday

Exploring new places in the Bay Area has been a recurring refrain in our blog recently, and yesterday we did it again.

Marin has a famously "hidden" town named Bolinas, whose residents like to keep visitors out by hiding the street signs leading there.  With the aid of our GPS we found our way to a trailhead in Bolinas and enjoyed a walk among wildflowers and dramatic coastal bluffs.  No wonder the locals try to keep it to themselves!

The weather was so balmy that in t-shirts we were too warm for part of the walk, which is unusual even in summer right by the ocean.

With all the wildflowers -- lupines, irises, etc. -- Cristie & I took hundreds of pictures.  I hope she'll blog some of hers in the next few days.  William took an "if you can't beat them join them" attitude and took beautiful images with his iPhone and photoshopped them on the spot using Photoshop Mobile.

Being William, he had a few tricks up his sleeve.  Here he's surreptitously video recording Cristie & me while we try to pose him among the flowers for a portrait.  The video makes us look pretty crazy, I must admit, with Cristie & me calling out conflicting suggestions of where and how to pose.

At one point he grabbed one of my cameras ...

... and took a picture of what I often look like to him.

We hiked until Sunset, the light getting more and more beautiful.  Our final reward of the day was a merging of sky & ocean in the twilight, with the horizon almost imperceptible.

Colonial Day

Every year William's school celebrates "Colonial Day" -- the kids dress up in 18th century garb and play period games, cook food, make crafts, dance, and write with quills.

William takes it very seriously, striving for authenticity in every detail.  He was the only kid we saw who brought his lunch to school in a cloth sack.

The girls get into the dress-up aspect of it and love posing for pictures in their outfits.

The boys enjoy the novelty of their school-issued tricorn hats.  I wasn't given one :(

Even the teachers dress up.

 Cristie was one of the volunteers running the period games which include a pirate-themed dice game, a primitive form of baseball, and "hoop and stick" which really took off once the kids realized they could play it with Hula Hoops.

During recess the kids played their regular games in period outfits.

Another activity Cristie helped with was cooking.  Here a girl is making biscuits.

Colonial Day ends ... back to regular school tomorrow.

"Mud" Football

William's friends like "mud football" -- when it rains for a couple of days they go to the park to play touch football and get incredibly dirty.

They invited William last weekend and he liked the idea of getting as muddy as a piglet but the rains didn't materialize.  He had a great time anyway.

Strategy session - studying the playbook

Playing the game

Post play analysis

For anyone who wants more or bigger images, we're sharing them at Mud Football Gallery