I convinced some other people to let me inflict my hobby on them.
Hallelujah, we got a warm day. Abby and I headed to Pinnacle Mountain to fly a kite. Unfortunately, the wind wasn’t blowing much at all. Note the kite laying on the ground. So we spent three hours on the playground see-sawing, sliding and swinging. I was playing around with balancing flash and ambient light. Abby was between the camera and the sun. I exposed for the sky and then fired the flash off camera at Abby’s shadow side.
Bitter-cold days are the bane of the stay-at-home-dad. It didn’t get above freezing today. It was one of those days where you don’t even want to get into a car to go somewhere else even if your destination is in a warm building. You have to get all those extra clothes on and there’s the hunching of the shoulders against the cold wind. Then the car is cold until you’re almost to where you’re going. And you’ll have a cold walk from the parking lot. And then on the way home the car will be cold again. All of that is at least doubled with a 2-year-old. Especially if she insists on sitting in the driver’s seat and jacking with the steering wheel and pushing the radio buttons for five minutes while you stand in cold.
The best bet is to stay inside. It turns out that little kids don’t really care about the cold, but they care about being bored. Even if they don’t understand that boredom is what they are feeling. Not even Abby can watch Dora the Explorer all day without getting tired of it. So I busted out the finger paints in the hopes that I could keep her entertained for about 15 minutes or so. I also thought I could get some good pictures of her covered in paint.
Gina started breaking down the Christmas tree this evening and I protested, saying we hadn’t shot our annual family Christmas portrait. I use “annual” loosely here. So I got all my pitchure takin’ junk out. In hindsight, it would have been better to think of this earlier in the season. I would have shaved and worn a decent shirt and we would have combed Abby’s hair.
We had us a whole mess of Christmas this year. First, we moved to another city a couple of weeks before the big day. Then for the big day loaded up and went to Branson to see Mimi and PawPaw. That’s where I gave Abby the jack-in-the-box that has apparently been giving her nightmares ever since.
We got a late start, what with the moving and all, but we finally put up our Christmas tree. I don’t know what the deal is, but Little Rock has a dearth of your tradition Christmas tree lots. And by dearth, I mean none. We finally ended up at Cantrell Gardens where word was the trees were grossly overpriced. But one of the advantages of waiting until three days before Christmas is that you can get a $60 tree for half price. And a $20 tree stand for half price, too. Sweet.
Our tree is only five feet tall, much shorter than what we usually get, but this year it seems like we have enough ornaments to properly cover the tree.
I set used the Strobist’s recommendation on how to light a living room for these types of family events but I think I put the flashes in the wrong places. (It worked a lot better for Thanksgiving dinner.) Plus I had the camera on the focus mode where it chooses what to focus on. I thought that would make it easier for Gina to get some shots of me and Abby. The camera invariably focused on the tree and not on the people. I need to get this right before Christmas Day.
Fayetteville gussies up its downtown square every year for Christmas. The city makes a big deal out of it. We’ve never been so we thought we ought to go before blowing this popsicle stand. I have to say I was underwhelmed. It was fairly pretty, but it was tough to find a good photo. Maybe if I had my tripod and I weren’t doing a family outing and the wind weren’t blowing about 50 mph, I’d have got some better photos.
We hosted a Thanksgiving feast for Gina’s parents, my Dad and my Grandma, the star of an earlier post. I used a brining recipe from Alton Brown of Good Eats fame and it turned out marvelous. It was the third or fourth time I’ve brined a turkey and it’s the only way to go. In my experience, roasted turkey is generally dry and unappealing. With the brining method the juices flow out of the bird like the Nile River when you hit it with the electric knife.
What with it being Halloween and all, we embarked on some punkin’ carvin’. Abby helped scoop out the innards.