I had a dinner date with my friend Tonicha last night. I wore a skirt that I got at Value Village (Maia and I went together on Sunday), and was feeling so cute I made Darren take some pictures of me. :-)
It was a really fun evening and the only slightly creepy part was this old man, who smelled like cigarettes, kept coming over to us and alternately hitting on us and telling us how much we ate. WEIRD.
Of course, Frannie had to get in at least one picture too.
We enjoyed the pleasure of the company of some friends from Piedmont, California this weekend. We had dinner with Paul and Maia at their home in the spring, and now they are visiting Canada and were able to spend time with us. We knew they would be coming over for dinner at some point, but were so happy when it ended up being Saturday night, which turned into a sleep over in the living room. They are such a really delightful bunch of fun people!! I'm looking forward to staying with them next time we go down to California.
Here are some pics of their daughters, Mimi and Lucia, with Jackson and Frances.
Ok, just came back in from playing with the camera on my phone a bit more and I think I figured out how to correct the settings. There are a couple manual controls for brightness and color value. The first one of the dalias is just the regular setting, and the second one decreased both the white value and the brightness.
The first one is way too blue/green, but the second is much closer. The petals are not quite as yellow as they should be, but the leaves are pretty true.
Using the same corrections I took this on the deck. Obviously there aren't any focus controls but the colors are really good here.
If only it would remember the settings!
It's summer again! Isn't that lucky? Nobody wants to take pictures of the cold, windy rain in the summer time, but believe me, that's how it's been for over a week. So cold I didn't think it would warm up again, but it has.
Unfortunately, I really don't care as much for the Samsung phone camera as I did the Sony. Look how washed out these are compared to the other beach picture.
Doesn't take anything away from what a great day it was though!
Remember the summer of 2007?
No?
That's because it only lasted for two weeks!
Luckily I was able to make the very most of it, and even captured rare proof of its existence.
I'm really impressed with the quality of mobile phone cameras these days! This one of the kids was taken with my Sony Ericsson Z550a, but I've just switched to a Samsung SPH-a900 and I like it too. I used it to take a new Facebook profile picture, though I'll have to play more with the light settings. This was by a window with a lot of diffuse light coming through:
It's about the same res as our first digital camera. 1.3 megapixels. Our current camera is 7, I think. The Samsung came with a data cable though which will make me much more likely to start taking mobile pics.
Well ... I should save the fan fair for when the little plants are in and the grass grows back (and the fence is finished), but it's otherwise done!
The boring old walkway, back when there was also a pine planted strangely in the middle of the front yard (on the left).
This chair is a good example of why I never want to have friends over for dinner. Would you want to sit in this crusty chair? Even my father-in-law gave it a second look and he was wearing his overalls.
Wouldn't you rather sit in a nice chair like this?
It's not a hard choice.
We're having dinner guests over on Saturday and I refuse to make them sit in the ancient hand-me-down chairs from my mother-in-law that were ugly to begin with, before the kids dumped a year and a half of dinners on them.
It's not hard to recover a seat chair. I went down to a leather shop and bought a couple 1/2 hides, graded for motorcycle chaps. COOL. Made a pattern out of an old sheet, and loaded up the staple gun.
Six chairs in total but I'm already 1/2 way done. I'm loving them!
So today I put down more of the dried up hunks of sod and watered it all down, and then covered it all with a layer of dirt and watered all that really well. This is an experiment, and I'm hoping that the wet dirt will bring the grass back to life, which will then grow up through the dirt layer and look all green and pretty.
Jackson is back in swim lessons now and THANK GOD his instructor Daniel is back. That guy is such a fantastic teacher! Jackson will have him three days a week all summer long and I can tell it won't take long to undo the lazy habits his previous teacher instilled in him.
Finally finished my flash animation project. Darren has the file now and will be composing some dope beats for it.
The weather is so fantastic. It's truly summer. I've got funny tan lines on my wrists from wearing my work gloves.
I didn't do the family thing. It's too satisfying to stay home and work and I didn't want today to go by without a little more dirt-work. I didn't get away from the computer until 3 pm but I still got some done here. I leveled and filled the second row for the tires, and even made sure there was still a bit of a slope so there won't be big messy puddles when it starts to rain again.
I'm not sure if the turf that's been sitting around all week is dead and gone, but grass dies off in the winter and comes back so I'm going to try to revive it. I'm back-filling with dirt in the big empty patches now and will pack the sod back on it. I did a little patch up near the sidewalk between the tire rows, and then dumped some more dirt on top to even it off.
Hopefully the grass will grow up through, or maybe we'll have to throw some seed down - that wouldn't be a big deal.
I was inside working on a flash intro for OpenSourceLife.net today until 2 pm so I didn't get a lot done outside, but I managed to finish placing the blocks for the tire rows, and got the far one leveled and mostly packed in with dirt. I had just enough pieces left at the end to make some stepping stones for getting in and out of the car.
We're visiting with some of Darren's family from Arizona tomorrow, and I'll have to finish that flash animation, so tomorrow will probably be a bust.
Josh drove his Prado over today so I could mark how far apart the tires are, and how wide the door opens to make sure it won't hit the fence. I didn't get all the stones laid out yet but I am so close, I can taste it!
Oh wait, that's actually dirt in my mouth.
I'm done with the walkway part and will have just enough pieces left to wrap some stepping stones around from the driver's side door to the path. I keep forgetting that it's going to be a right-hand drive!
Tomorrow it's more laying out of stones and then back-filling with dirt until it's all done. Then the planting begins. As I get farther along, more and more people stop to chat about it. So far all the comments have been positive and nobody has asked if I've got a permit, which I actually believe I am supposed to have since, technically, I am going to be parking there. Hmmm...
Oh, and I decided not to do the grass pavers. I've got just enough concrete to do it this way, and so far this entire project, including the beginnings of the fence, hasn't cost me a dime! I like it like that. My biggest expense will be the plants, and for that I don't mind splurging.
I didn't have a lot of time to work today, but here's how it's looking after a couple more hours:
Soon that Toyota Prado in the neighbor's yard will match the one sitting in our new parking space! Josh is still loving his, and hasn't had any problems with it. He said today that he knows somebody who can hook me up with a supplier of the plastic, click-together honeycomb grass paving system I want (like this kind of thing).
Sweeeeet.
