Weekend update...

On Thursday Kristi's new camera was delivered... Guess what we've been doing? Yeah lots of pictures. I figured she has been dealing with a "point and shoot" digital camera long enough, so I ordered her the Canon Digital Rebel XTi 10.1 mega pixel Camera. It's allot like the Canon 35mm we bought back in 2001, well except you get to see the picture on the screen right after you click the shutter. So yesterday (Friday) we headed for one of San Diego's best picture taking places, Balboa Park. We started out by the huge fountain at the science museum and headed in toward the center of the park at a snail's pace. Kristi had to have at least 5-10 pictures of everything. Hmm... let's under expose, nah over expose, maybe I can get the water to blur, but the light just isn't right on that flower, etc. Here are a few of the pictures she took (she took a total of 102).

Here is the fountain outside the science museum.


This is the tower and dome on the Museum of Man.


Here is the same spot but I like how she got the sun in the clouds and the reflection in the lily pond.


I just like this picture...

This was a good perspective shot. Kristi used software to make it black and white.

We had a discussion today about tuning pictures with software. Now I'm not talking about "Photoshoping" a third eye on to Gabriella's forehead... I mean adjusting the light, color tone, that sort of thing. Kristi said it's cheating, I disagree. Do you think Ansel Adams got all those pictures with out a little "tuning" in the dark room? Same thing if you ask me.

You can tell Halloween is almost here. Gabriella has been asking to get pumpkins for the last 2 weeks. With the wildfires going on out here the pumpkin patches have been closed, so we ended up at Wal-mart picking out pumpkins. We got them on our way back from Balboa Park around 7 pm, and about 2 minutes after I took them out of the Explorer, the question that I would hear over and over started... When are we going to carve them? After it was all said and done the kids pumpkins came out pretty good with minimal effort from dad... Kristi is working this weekend.

Gabriella waits patiently to start carving her pumpkin.

Both kids look so enthused...

This is the first time Gabriella has been willing to stick her hand inside a pumpkin... usually I have to do it.

Such concentration.

Sean did almost all his carving himself.

Sean's is the ghost in the window, Gabriella's is the bat. Not too bad, huh?

It's been a while since our last post.

Right now the big topic around here has to be the fires burning through out San Diego County. Thankfully the fires are not threatening us in the Tierrasanta area. The Ceder Fire of 2003 was nothing compared to the fires going right now... the Witch Creek Fire, Harris Fire, Rice Canyon Fire, and the Mt Miguel Fire. NBC 7/39 here in San Diego has dubbed this as FIRESTORM 2007. Over 300,000 people have been evacuated from there homes, ending up in evacuation sites like local high schools and Qualcomm Stadium right down the road from my house. Here is probably the most popular picture on the Internet right now... the satellite photo of the fires from yesterday.


Saturday, before all the hubbub started we spent the day up in Anaheim at Disneyland. We still had one day left on our passes from January, so Kristi figured this would be the day to use it. We were there from just after the park opened till around 10:30 pm. You can tell it's Halloween Time at Disneyland...

We got some really good pictures that day. These are the pumpkin characters on top of the entrance gates to the park.

Gabriella had to drag us on the Mad Hatter's Tea Party! Sean HATES any kind of ride that spins so he sat outside the fence and took a picture and this video...



Ya know I can ride just about any ride... roller coasters, log rides, those towers that take you like 200 feet up then drop you. I'll ride anything, but I know why Sean hates spinning rides. They just give me a headache.

Sean wanted to go over to Tom Sawyer's Island so we boarded the raft and found out that the island has been transformed in to a pirate hideout. Sean's sitting on a barrel of Dynamite munching an apple.

The kids got to see Captain Jack Sparrow over there. Kristi said this guy was so good she almost thought it was Johnny Depp.


On the way over to check the lines on the Indiana Jones ride we stopped to watch the show in New Orleans Square. Gabriella always gets picked out of the crowd for things like this, everyone knows how outgoing this girl is!

Kristi used a program called ridemax to plan our trip (January's and this one) and a hint she got for this trip was a good spot to catch the afternoon parade. We were front row and the other side of the street was the fence around the Matterhorn, so the whole parade was focused on us.

The last ride we did for the day was the new Finding Nemo Submarine Adventure. The original Submarine Adventure ride stopped running a few years back and Disneyworld went and filled in their lagoon with cement. Last year while we were here we saw the fence with the signs saying they were bringing back the subs and adding a Finding Nemo theme. We talked about saving a day on our passes and coming back to ride it a few months after it opened... Umm yeah right. Kristi put this one in the ridemax program and it said there was an average wait time of over 2 hours, but we decided to check the line right after the parade ended because we were close. The line looked a lot shorter than earlier so we jumped in. We got through the line in an hour and 15 minutes.

While we waited in line a Disney Cast Member handed out activity cards with puzzles and trivia questions about the ride. It said there are little Nemo's hidden around the area... i found a couple carved into a rock. Sean found one in the lagoon under the water. Some of the plants and rocks had been arranged to look like Nemo.

Here are the submarines... i remember the first time I went to Disneyland the subs were gray to look like navy subs. then the next time I came here back in '92 they had been changed to yellow. Pretty much from what I remember not much changed except for when you enter the grotto under the waterfall. Inside there they found a way to do holograms under water from the movie Finding Nemo... Kind of like the hologram ghosts in the haunted mansion.

Well that's all for now. I'll try to post some Pictures from Baseball here really soon. Sean's playing in the winter league here mostly playing catcher.