094/365...Late

Yup...it was late when I took this.

093/365...Ethan, after sunset

Another Sunday, another excursion. This time, to Pass-a-grille beach in St. Pete. This was taken just after the sunset.

092/365...Play

Today the family Long went on a walk. To a neighborhood park. We played and I snapped this picture.

091/365...Power

Honestly, I wish I had thought about this idea before I took and put up this picture. Oh, well. She's a genius.

090/365...Rain!

Today, we've had rain pretty much non-stop. I got outside today just long enough to snap a few pictures.

089/365...Skies

Today was this girl's sweet 16 party at Ft. DeSoto park. After the party ended, we headed down to the beach to take some photos and I caught some pretty wicked looking skies.

088/365...Passing light

Date night with the lovely wife tonight. Took these from the passenger window hoping for some light painting goodness.

A nearly impossible task

Being a dad of an 11 year old and an almost 8 year old, I'm somewhat removed from one of the most impossible of tasks...capturing a toddler on camera. Without the blur. Or the whining. Or the crying. Or their face (finger, toe, toy, etc) pressed up against the lens. Somewhat removed. That's what nieces (and nephews and grandkids, I guess) are for. I really don't know for sure, because I only have nieces. Two. One infant, one very toddler-like toddler.

To my point, I set out to take a picture of my (very toddler-ish) niece Molly. She was being cute. She's pretty much always cute. But this night, extra cute and talkative and playful, and...Molly-like. Not.easy. At.all

The first picture looked something like this:

Fail. Unfortunately, I was too stupid to realize I wanted to blog about this whole picture taking adventure, so the picture above is only a representation, not the real deal. I have a habit of deleting blurry pictures...idiot.

Things got a bit better, especially when she paused long enough for me to get this one:

Of course, this is not a true capture of the Molly we all know and love beyond reason. So the pic that ended up on my blog (and the picture of the day) is right here:

As you can guess, the picture above was taken mere milliseconds after the completely clear picture. So, not an entirely impossible task...just nearly impossible.

087/365...Snappers

I used to love these things when I was a kid. My wife had to take a trip to a fireworks store (long story) today and our dear friend Alisha picked up a box of these things. She bought them for our boys, but my gut tells me they're really for me.

086/365...Mug

I've always loved the whimsy of the bird on this mug.

085/365...Socks

I'm tired and I really don't have the energy for anything else.

084/365...Young the Giant

In case you missed this post, we went to Young the Giant (or YtG for the uninitiated.) Great concert with a GREAT band.

083/365...Oh...

Oh...

Yeah, I know. Bad joke. It was either a bad joke or nothing at all. I probably should have gone with nothing.

082/365...Sick wife :(

My lovely bride has been out of commission most of the night. Here's to her feeling better in the morning.

081/365...Zombies!

Refrigerator art...when you have an 11 year old boy, that is.

080/365...Molly in motion

My two year old niece is in perpetual motion. I was trying to get a good picture of her drawing quietly. It didn't last long and this is one of the happy accidents I caught.

A wedding, a slideshow and one awesome dude

My wedding day was a pretty cool day. It was the culmination of a nine years of friendship with my wife, five of those years being together as a couple. We also had a pretty big circle of friends and acquaintances. We both had grown up around many of the same people with my in-laws also having a pretty wide circle of friends as well. All told, our wedding was, umm, well attended. By almost 700 people. Big wedding, bigger production. There were dancers, songs and a slideshow, all before we even began reciting our vows. And I loved every minute of it. What does all this have to do with anything?

I'm glad you asked. My wife found a little device thing that can take slides and turn them into images on an SD card. Very cool since this now means our very analog wedding slideshow from almost 16 years ago can now think about joining the digital age. No more cha-shink sounds during slideshows.

So, along with the 60 or 70 slides from our wedding, the in-laws also toted over some slides they had from years past, meaning that we spent some a lot way too much time looking at the vintage goodness through the little slide viewer whatchamacallit.

Then, our boys started to get in on the act. As a matter of fact, we spent the better part of one dinner just looking at slides.

We've had boxes of slides stacked in our family room for the past couple of weeks, taking time to peek into the past and generally just goofing around with the slides a bit. This is a pic my lovely bride snapped.

One day, as we're poking at the slides, one of them caught both of our attention, there was a snap of a way-to-awesome-for-words dude on one of the slides. It turned out to be my father-in-law's best man from their wedding over 41 years ago. So, I struck out trying to find a way to capture the slide on my trusty iPhone without the aid of any sort of analog to digital conversion. Not easy. It took me about 30 or 40 pictures, but I was finally able to get the picture-of-a-picture through the viewer of the little slide viewer thingy. The rest is just the pure coolness of a late-60s dude. Just purely awesome...from the hair to the plain T to the glasses and the way they're just perched on his nose.

079/365...Hair

My lovely wife did this with her hair today. It looked super-cool.

078/365...Stormtroopers

Legos. Stormtroopers. 'Nuff said.

077/365...Unplugged

Tonight Friends of Giants played an unplugged show at Smiley's. Yeah, it was good.