Catch up

So I have a lot of catching up to do.

I have been so busy with work and play recently that I haven’t done my civic duty…namely posting pictures and telling funny stories about my girls for relatives that can’t hear them directly. I apologize for that. So, at risk of cheapening any of the aforementioned stories and pictures I will present them at once.

I say cheapening only insofar as describing what happens to a person who looks at a really funny FarSide cartoon and laughs so they get a calendar of FarSide cartoons and they laugh every day. Then frequently they cheapen the experience by looking at all of the FarSide cartoons until July thinking that somehow reading 150 at once will be 150 times funnier than reading just one. Trust me, it is better to spread them out.

But I digress and risk making this post IMMENSE in my digression. Tally ho.

Allow me to recount in reverse order.
Yesterday I went on a bike ride with my Dad, Andy, and Dad’s friend Charles. We planned on 35 miles and we made it 13.1 (very important, that number, in light of the fact that all of our feet and faces were NUMB from the cold). We rode out in Ravensdale and at one point were riding through falling snow and about 1 inch of slushy white snow on the ground. Not good, so we stopped early. But we are all training to do the Seattle To Portland 190 mile ride this summer so I say again Tally Ho!

Last weekend Dad, Tom, Me, Naresh, and Bhanu (who has NEVER been camping even in the summer) decided it was high time to make an igloo…on a mountain…and then sleep in it…for two nights. Long story short, we only did one night but all the rest happened. Bhanu was good enough to actually upload his pictures and he has shared them with us here.

http://www.fastalbum.com/bp/15

Let me just say, it is hard to take pictures when the wind blows hard, the icy rain falls fast, and you are working so hard and fast to simply put together an igloo so you will have shelter from the previously mentioned weather that you hardly have time to think about eating let alone grabbing the camera.

We started at noon and were finally laid down to sleep at 11PM with about 1+ hours of rest in between. We got wet that night and some of us got cold so the second night was out of the question. Nevertheless, the experience was excellent and amazingly enough I would like to do some more igloo building…maybe just not sleeping in it after. We’ll see what time does to my memory.

Those are my recent story/journal-like entries. Now comes the real good stuff. Pictures.

I just liked this picture of Abby reaching for Emma from the bottom of a long thin box laying on the floor. I think it was the fireplace mantle security thing that came in this box. Anyway, Abby and Emma played for quite some time in this box and you know, with the right type of viral marketing I bet someone could make a fortune selling boxes and sticks and string to parents of small children…and cats.

Here we see Abby after two days with braids in. It takes two days to kink her stick-straight hair like this and about two hours for it to straighten out afterwards. She REALLY likes her hair like this lending more evidence to the theory that “The-grass-is-always-greener” syndrome is probably not a learned behavior.

Abby was just posing cute this day with her little skull cap. The shot was blurry but I thought it added to the effect. I also did some blue-photo-filtering on the shot and added a new feature I found in Photoshop called Surface Blur. You can see some real examples of surface blur in my pictures to come from our igloo trip…the humidty in an igloo rivals a suana. But that is for another day.

On to Amelia Mabel.
She really loves looking at pictures (photos, drawings, paintings, labels, logos, anything really) and she also really loves to have things on her head (as you may recall) and look at herself in the mirror.

Here we see a darker side. The one that punishes Polly Pockets for being so…well…pocket sized. She likes the bald ones the best by far and I think I may have just detected a pattern to her cooing and babbling when she is playing with them…something like fee fi fo fum.

And finally we have moved into the rare sightings category.The elusive CockaPeep. First our photographer managed to capture a shot of one sleeping. We never heard from this poor soul again but when we managed to recover his camera and develop his film we knew we could take action.

We set up one of those motion sensing cameras together with a trip-wire hoping to catch the elusive CockaPeep in the wild. We got some tedious shots of Tasmanian Devils, dumb butterflys, some kind of dinosaur, even a boorish Zimparumpazoo. We tossed all those out because we were after something more elusive and finally, our patience paid off.

The Elusive CockaPeep.

Be warned: don’t look directly into her eyes or you will be transfixed.