Dance Recital

A few images from the recent dance recital. Both kids were in both performances! One picture shows the two performers risking twisted ankles between shows. In another, notice Daughter being camera-shy after performing for several hundred people.

the innocent eye

As we were walking from the car toward (this week's) summer camp, Daughter stops abruptly, looking down, and says "Cool! Water droplets on spider web." I thought this was a very nice observation and I celebrate her moment of wonder.

What's going on here? My first fumbling attempts to introduce Role Playing Games. On the morning this was taken, Daughter finished up a math worksheet and then said "Could we get some new board games? I'm tired of the ones we have." So I sent her for some Littlest Pet Shop toys to be adventurers, grabbed some dice, and sketched out the entrance to a dungeon. The best I could find quickly for monsters was some puffballs. We didn't have much time before school but we got through a couple rooms and a hallway. And we overcame two Rats, two Dustbunnies and one Big Orange Troll! And recovered three jewels from the dungeon.

Guest Photographer

Daughter talked me into letting her take the (older) digital camera to school with her for a recent field trip to a local farm. She didn't have to talk too hard, I'm quite excited about this development.

Bookishness

Being a bookish sort myself I was sort of hoping that my kids would like books too. They do, of course, but not enough to actually cut into time set aside for basketball, dancing and (ew) computer games. Here we see Daughter has picked up The History of the United States, published around 1920, which I keep on a bookshelf more-or-less decoratively. I grabbed the camera, she grabbed my glasses ....

Back in Action!

I've been frustrated in my blogging by a bug somewhere between Picasa (the program) and PicasaWeb (the service) and Blogger.com --- all Google properties, so one might hope they would play well together. When I first took up Picasa it was great: I could select some images, click on one button and it would resize them all, upload to Picasaweb, and open a blog post editor. For a year or more, though, this workflow has been broken. I've been searching for alternatives for a long time. Finally yesterday I realized that by replacing the very limited (and limiting!) Picasaweb, I can almost recreate my workflow, using free and Open Source tools! I'll be using mapivi to select images; and simple shell script (that I wrote) to resize the images using ImageMagick; and scp to copy them to a webserver where they'll be accessible to blogger.com. The script will also print out a snippet of HTML that I can cut-n-paste into the blogger.com post editor - this is the only step that's not as shiny as the old Picasa-based workflow but I can live with it. Long live Open Source!

Seven Years

We recently celebrated Son turning Seven. We do these things up right, with usually a whole week of festivities between family, school and friends. The first few images here are from the family dinner party, then we switch over to the friends party at Pump It Up, a party place with lots of giant inflatable stuff to romp around on. Even Son's parents got into the act a little, tho mercifully I omitted those pics. (I'm trying not to be so photo-obsessed lately, but sometimes I can't help myself: I apologize for the quality of the images :-)
p.s. Do you like the new square image format?