Tracking Santa

Christmas Eve after Children's Service at church, getting ready to eat some dinner and logged on to NORAD's Santa Tracker. The kids loved it and wanted to watch until he got to our house !



Merry Christmas!

Wisdom

My son and I were on a day trip to a local camp and on a nature hike I saw this huge old tree. Took one shot and had to keep moving.

Weekend; 11/14/08

Devistating storms hit just about 8 miles away this Friday night. Saturday the forecast had more storms coming through but nothing too bad. It did make for some nice photos of the unsettled sky.

A little Battleship, Star Wars style and my son asked for some help. We called in satellite technology to spy on the emperial fleet. He didn't miss a shot after his satelite imagery showed up!

I threw an old odometer from my wife's mountain bike on his bike and he thought that was really neat. He maxed out at 13 mph.
A quick trip to the park made for some fun pictures and this wasn't the best picture but I loved the shot of the lightsaber flying to me.

October Tuna

The elusive tuna was finally caught. After wahoo, dolphin and sailfish, we finally got to hook up with the elusive tuna.
I thought this was a neat shot of the line glistening in the sun.



My wife fought the first catch of the day.


My son learned to prepare the baits:

And the end result was a great day of seeing lots of ocean life and 2 nice size tuna.

Drip, drip, drip...

There's a tropical storm/hurricane coming up the coast. Today at about 2 pm the first light showers began. This afternoon I decided to take some pictures just for fun and while I was out on the front porch a fairly steady rain began to fall.
I thought I'd try to capture some pictures of drops falling from the front crepe myrtle.

This wasn't the clearest shot of this drop but it was fun because there a rain drop that hit something and dispersed in the background.

After a while my trusty pal showed up on the porch and pretty much did the same as me and just hung out watching the rain...
drip, drip, drip.

Tattoine???

One evening last weekend I looked at the sunset to see what reminded me of a scene from Star Wars. It looked like there were two suns setting! I ran inside and grabbed the camera to snap a couple of photos of what I guess was an ice cloud or the like reflecting/refracting sunlight.

The real "Dark Knight"?

We took an opportunity to have the grandparents watch the kids and go see The Dark Knight... wow what a movie, really it could have been two movies and I would have been satisfied with each independantly. Put them together and it was amazing. The title for this blog is due to the first image of this humming bird that I took after returning from the movie.
This little guy just looked sort of dark with his wings fully extended so I ran with it, but Batman with a giant needle sticking out his face would be dangerous! :) Then these guys get lazy and wouldn't hover for me while eating so I went ahead and took a few pictures of them sitting down.

Uh oh I think he sees me... I don't like looking down the barrel of that thing. Makes me want to shut my eyes!

Hanging out at the ocean.

We took some vacation and visited the aquarium in Virginia Beach. We had a great time but it was HOT; made us glad we decided against going to Busch Gardens in Williamsburg and visited here. I enjoy the aquarium and find so many pictures I want to take but it becomes difficult with the people walking in front of you, plus the kids see so much stuff that they want to see they are running from one exhibit to another :) .

They have two separate buildings with a nature walk between the two where I saw this egret poking about in the mud. Ironic to see a bird so clean and white walking around in such muddy conditions!

The other really cool thing (to me) was that it was close to Oceana Naval Air Base. Many years ago I went to an air show there and all day long these F-18's were running. I couldn't not take pictures of them they are just so impressive.

The day after the aquarium visit we headed to the beach in Nags Head/Kitty Hawk area. In all the trips during my life I don't recall the ocean being this clear in our part of the world. It was amazingly clear and calm which made for a great time for all of us. When the kids got tired of being in the water I used their goggles and got to see minows, fish, crabs, and hermit crabs. It was a blast and I actually woke up the next morning in a weird semi-concious dream of scuba diving in the ocean.

Esssssspresssssoooo!!!!!!!

Last weekend our new laptop arrived. I was going to get plain black but it would have delayed the availability (scary considering this took 3 & 1/2 weeks from ordering to delivery) so we decided to get Esspresso Brown since it will be mostly used downstairs in our kitchen area.

So far I am very pleased with it, as well as Vista. It's a 1.86 Ghz Duo Core w/ 3Gb of RAM and a 250GB HD. Suprisingly it was not loaded with lots of useless junk software and I did not have to remove anything.

I'm off for some Sushi!

Fusion Fun!!!

So my wife came down with the flu in the middle of summer... YUCK!

I stayed home to take care of the kids and figured I'd take them for pizza buffet lunch and a trip to Walmart. I thought it would get us out of the house and let my wife rest while giving us something to do. My son had a gift card from his birthday for 10 dollars and he wanted "floam" that he keeps seeing on television commercials. This is crayola's equivalent called Fusion Model Magic.

It's neat. It doesnt smell like play-doh does and it doesnt crumble as bad for much better clean up. One thing though, it doesn't go well with hair as my daughter found out when she used neon green to make ear-rings matching her shoes... yes I had to get the scissors! :)

Triple Meat-Cake Slam

My son has been deep sea fishing twice in his life. Both times a citation fish was caught (a wahoo and a dolphin). He loves fishing and wanted the "triple meat slam" for his cake with a bottle nosed dolphin. At 11 pm my wife asked me to mold a dolphin, wahoo, tuna, and bottle nosed dolphin out of fondant icing. Here are the results!


My son always colors his wahoo with red stripes so we did the same.

He decided to put gummy sharks, sea weed, and sand at the base (thanks to a creative Mom).

Ice-shroom

One Sunday I noticed a mushroom with a large chunk of ice sitting in front of it. It gave the apperance that the mushroom grew out of the ice. Reminded me of somthing mythical from a video game.

Later in the day when I got a chance to snap some pictures the original block of ice had melted. There was still ice laying in a pile so I recreated the scene from earlier in the day and the ice-shroom was born.

Brrrrrrrrrrr.....