This past weekend I had the chance to go to Dallas (specifically Irving) to attend the TOA EyeCon and work on signing up new clients for my little business 460. It was a lot of fun, very succesful, and well worth it!
Our hotel was right alongside this canal setup that was really quite cool. Sadly I only had a chance to wander down around it in the dark on our first night there, while it was raining a little bit. But that’s alright, the pictures turned out pretty great!
Yeah, that’s a mouthful. One evening during our trip to Japan in April 2017 we went over to the Roppongi area of Tokyo to see the Tokyo Temple for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, just a few minutes walking from Hiro-o Subway station. Across the street is a fantastic park that we just happened to be taking a break in during the sunset. The colors that evening were incredible.
There are several areas in Tokyo where it’s hard to believe you’re actually in the middle of one of the most populous cities in the world. This park was one of them.
Three Years Old. Elle is such a sweetheart, and so smart! She can speak so well, knows lots of words and nuances of English. She loves her characters and her colors. Ever since Emmett’s birthday in August she’s been looking forward to her birthday, asking us about it all the time, telling us what presents she was going to get. For a long while it was going to be a pink drum, but later she changed it to a pink guitar.
We celebrated with a big family party tonight and served a proper BBQ meal with 3 kinds of meats, funeral potatoes, salad, carrots, and a lot of BBQ sauce. It was so good! This was my first attempt at brisket and I am quite happy with how it turned out. I will definitely be doing one again soon! Now that it’s been done, I’m not so scared. But, enough about smoking…
Birthday PortraitAlicia managed to snag the last Unicorn Blanket Cape at Costco. Quite the snag! Elle loves it.Along with her Unicorn Blanket came a little stuffed Unicorn. It’s her new best friend.Eleven hours on the smoker, 2 hours wrapped and resting, and this big black beauty became the main course for dinner. Daggum it was good.The brisket did not disappoint. Not one bit.Along with the brisket we had some pulled pork and smoked chickenShe got the cutest My Little Pony hat and gloves and socks. Elle wanted a new guitar so bad for her birthday. Glad we could deliverElle got her guitar, and she wore it all night. Here she is opening Candyland given to her by her cousin IsaacGrandma and Grandpa Allan were not in town for Emmett’s birthday, so tonight they brought his present as well. More LEGO’s. To say Emmett was excited is an understatement.Yeah, it’s tall. Six cakes tall! Elle loved the Peppa Pig topping on her cake
A tropical storm rolled in earlier this week that has been dumping buckets of rain over the past few days. It’s been so needed! Last night the temparature dropped a little bit, and that rain turned into a little hint of snow on the mountain tops.
When I was younger my family had this little teepee made from fabric and sprinkler pipe. We played in it all the time, it held up well and was a lot of fun. I’ve been wanting one for my kids to play in for awhile, but for Alicia it was just one more project on her already too-long list of artsy projects to do.
Several years ago my sister Katie was feeling entrepreneurial and went door to door selling these teepees, so I asked her if she’d be up to me paying her to sew one. She wasn’t sure if she wanted to. She then said maybe Calli would be up to the task so I reached out to her next. Calli was unsure if she wanted to but tried convincing me that sewing wasn’t hard and that I could do it. Ha! As if! Anyway, she said “maybe” so I left it at that.
Fast forward a few days. My brother Scott still lives in the neighborhood we grew up in, the one Katie sold teepees in. One of those neighbors had bought a teepee years ago from Katie that was going unused and wanted to know if Scott’s kids wanted it and dropped it off at his house. Scott told Katie about it, she then called me and here we are today, proud owners of a little teepee!
The cherry on top of the story though is while Katie was doing the door to door sales all those years ago, my Mom was the one that was actually sewing them. So, while I was being passed around amongst siblings it was my sweet mom that used her angel magic to send her grand babies a teepee that she had made 20 years earlier. ❤️ #lovenote
For the photo-geeks out there, this is ISO 12,800(!) at f1.4. The original was a pinch dark, so I re-processed in-camera (Fuji can do that to RAW files), bumped the exposure 2/3 stop, and then saved a new JPG which I then sent over wifi to my phone to use on the blog. Technology is amazing.
September is coming to an end, and it went out quite beautifully. This is a 5 image panorama of photos taken in portrait mode and stitched in Affinity Photo, a pretty solid photoshop alternative that only costs $50 once. The stitched photos are straight-from-camera JPG’s shot with Velvia on my X-T20, no processing at all besides putting them together.
Fujinon 50mm F2 @ F4, ISO 320, 1/125s, Fuji Velvia. Click to enlarge full size.
We bought a new(er) van. I grew tired of the 2002 Odyssey and the problems associated with age and miles. We now have a 2008 Town & Country Limited, fully loaded, with 94,000 miles on it. We bought it at auction with my friend Shad at Integrity Motors, and unfortunately it came with some issues associated with middle age, but those are pretty much taken care of now and hopefully it gives us some good years of service ahead.
Today Alicia had a Relief Society Super-activity and was going to be gone from 9am – 4pm, so I decided it was time to take the kids on an adventure in the new car. I grabbed a bunch of DVDs, some water, my camera, and some snacks and we headed off for the Provo River Falls, which is along the Mirror Lake Highway.
Our first stop was at The Junction in Heber for some lunch. I got the Cowboy Burger. It was dang good. I’m a sucker for any hamburger with BBQ sauce and baconKids love straws. We had to take a few potty breaks on the drive because of how lunch started out. The Junction serves burgers and pizza, so I got a cheese pizza for the kids. Elle loved it, Emmett loved the fries.Halfway up, in between Francis and Kamas we found a great playground to stop and get some wiggles out. There was another mom there with her 3 year old so the kids had a friend to play with.Mirror Lake Highway is an open grazing road, so sometimes we had to slow down and enjoy the cattle.Um. No comment needed here.The mighty Provo River Falls! Unfortunately, our destination wasn’t terribly picturesque – the water was super low! Last time we were here a few years back they were going strong.Having the water level low meant a lot of river-bottom hiking for us. Emmett had a blast climbing all over. It was actually nice that the water was barely running as it made a safer play environment and took a lot of stress away from me!Unfortunately I never got a good picture of the kids at the falls. This is the best of the lot.
It’s been about a year since I went through and edited my photos from our trip to Japan in April 2017. Tonight I was feeling nostalgic and wanted to see all the photos I took that I had forgotten about beyond the ones that I’ve shared online or have as my desktop wallpaper. Definitely a trip down recent memory lane! I love Japan, I can’t wait to go back again.
This is the moat? around the Imperial Palace in Tokyo, the first place we walked around after arriving. On my first night there, after dinner with my friend Taka, Alicia went to sleep at the hotel but I couldn’t do that quite yet, I needed to live it up! So I went for a walk around Sakae in Nagoya. It was so good to be back.This is the view from the 3rd floor balcony of the first AirBNB we stayed out. Nothing exciting, but this is suburban Japan. This is the setting I lived in for 2 years. I miss it so much!We had about a 30 minute wait at the Mikawa-Toyota Train Station. I wandered around the platform and took photos. It’s slightly elevated. This is the view. More suburban Japan.Before we headed out for Kyoto on Day 3, we took a walk around the Nagoya Station with our friend Taka. Not too far away was a little shrine, we hopped in for a short visit.
