"Flash! Aaa-aaah!"

I made a FinnBounce for the onboard flash on my camera. It seems to work pretty well! Here's a sample picture.



I like the lighting. The focus seems a tad soft. Still working on that.

Kate at 41 weeks

A few from this week's photo shoot. I still haven't gotten my dark backdrop--that's the underside of our table in the background there. (The table is set up now, so I guess it won't be filling in for pictures anymore.) That first picture makes me laugh. We have an old family picture where I'm making a very similar face (minus the drool), when I was about six. I'll have to see if I can get ahold of it.

Kate is getting around quite well and practicing standing. She waves to people (opening and closing one hand) and blows raspberries, which is hilarious but hard to get a good picture of--mostly it just looks like she's drooling a lot.

She still doesn't have any teeth, but she's been expanding her food repertoire. We got her an "O" cereal (Barbara's Breakfast O's) which she seems to enjoy a lot. I've been singing "Would you like to eat an O, succulent and sweet, a nearly perfect circle, toasty and complete" (from the Sesame Street sketch--"and it'll cost you just a nickel." "A nickel?" "Riiiiight....") She shows a definite preference for "big people food" and wants to eat whatever we're eating. She's enjoying peas now, which is a pleasant surprise, since the first attempt at peas met with less than favorable results. They're not just any old mushed up peas, though, they're peas that have been cooked in an Indian-inspired dish of chicken and red lentils. She just gobbles them up. Yum!

Painting again...sort of

I haven't been painting for a few weeks, since we were in Ohio and then busy moving. Sylvia has started radiation treatments and has to go to Bremerton every day. We didn't have anyone to watch Kate today, but I went ahead and took her out with me. She's gotten better at amusing herself now, so I thought I might be able to get some work done while she played nearby. That didn't go so well. I'm going to be working on some other projects for a while, and then we'll have to see what we can do for finishing up Hogwarts. Maybe I can get volunteers to go out with me for a day, or something.

A couple of months ago I agreed to do some set painting for a multi-stake musical production at church ("Savior of the World"), thinking that I would be heading the painting committee. Well, turns out I am the painting committee. I'm going to be painting some big plywood arches to look like stone. Fortunately they only have to look like stone from a distance.

I also got a call from some friends of Ross and Cathryn's (owners of the Jerusalem mural), asking if I could paint some clouds and airplanes on their son's bedroom walls. I haven't been out to see the room yet, but should be starting that soon. I'm going to try to keep it really quick and be done in a week or so, and not have it drag on (and on and on and on....) I love clouds. The great thing about clouds is that they're so free-form and non-exacting. The airplanes might require a little more precision.

And on top of that I'm also going to be doing a pencil portrait for my brother's wife's uncle, that has to be done before Christmas. I haven't done any drawing since Kate was born, so I'm not sure how tricky that's going to be.

So, today I went out to Port Orchard, hoping that I would be able to get at least a little painting done, but also to pick up some of my supplies for these other projects. Sylvia had put everything in the closet while I was away. (Having the mural in a closet makes it very handy for storage.) I did what I could today, picked out some paints and brushes to take home with me, and put everything back in the closet. I'm not sure when I'll be back out there.

Here's Kate playing with my hanging spoon. It's a spoon on a string, taped to the wall. Whenever people come to see the mural they always ask, "Why is there a spoon hanging on the wall?" I use it as a plumbline for getting my vertical lines straight. I had a piece of string, and I just needed some kind of weight on the end. The spoon was handy.

(I did a spell-check on this post, and it wanted to change Bremerton to "premarital." Hmmmm....)

Kate at 40 weeks

I think I know how I'm going to do the Monday photos here at the new apartment. This entails getting a dark backdrop, which has not happened yet. Maybe next week. This week I just shoved the background clutter out of the way and made the best of it.

Kate was a little distressed, with the upheaval of the move and everything, but she seems
to be adjusting okay. She's quite mobile now and is enjoying crawling around on the nice new carpet. This is the view of Kate that I see most of the time now. (The picture's a little blurry, but just too cute not to post.)

Here Kate enjoys a can of Apple Beer. Not the Apple Beer itself, just the can. It was empty. But boy, she sure enjoyed it. Cans are fun! Doug says Apple Beer is "crisp and clean, not very sweet, and hard to get ahold of outside of Utah." They should hire these two to do commercials.

The new place

Packing is a pain, on both ends. We're still working on the unpacking part, as you can see from this picture. We haven't gotten our kitchen table set back up yet, so we've been using one of our little Korean tables.

We spent about a week getting everything moved over, mostly in the afternoons after Doug got home from teaching. It dawned on me that this was my first actual in-town move. We were very grateful for the help we got from our friends--A group of men from church who came over one night and got all the big stuff moved; Tom, who had to carry yet another computer monitor (he said he's been carrying entirely too many monitors lately); Scott, who came over several times and watched Kate for us while we moved things in and out; and Rebecca, who saved our bacon on that last day by coming over with her dog and entertaining Kate while we did our cleaning.

So we're settling in. There are a lot of things that we like better about the new place, and a few things that aren't quite as nice. Our old dishwasher, for example, failed rather spectacularly one night, and we had to wait nine days for a replacement, but when it came it was truly a thing of beauty. The dishwasher here doesn't quite compare. The refrigerator door shows a certain reluctance to swing shut, so we always have to make sure it's closed all the way. I'm loving the washer and dryer (wheee!). The shower is also very nice. And the shower heads are nice and high, which will be great for when our tall relatives come and visit.

We've still got a lot to do to get things organized, but I think this will be a good place for us to be.