Camping and Baseball

Hi All,

As you can see, blogging is not top priority in my world. As you can well imagine there are a myriad of things that have occurred since. I have a variety of media to share, and the stories that go along with them. Please enjoy these snippets of the last month and a half!






CAMPING


Now with Sharper Video.....


On the weekend of Aug 28-30 Christina, her parents, and I took Brian on his very first camping trip! It had been a rainy week at Warren Dunes leading up to our trip. So the ground was quite muddy (note giant blue tarps). Brian had a lot of fun!! He was especially thrilled to climb the sand dune seen in the videos. He wanted to climb it himself and he did so until about 30 feet from the top (I carried him the rest of the way). When we got to the top Brian got applause from strangers! They had never seen such a little one climb such a long way! Brian did slide all the way down by himself! After climbing the sand dune and playing all day he slept very, very well!

He also liked eating outside, roasting marshmallows, sleeping in the tent, finding acorns, playing at the playground (his self named 'blue park'), and taking walks with anyone who would go with him. He was not a fan of getting his first bee sting! Especially because he was asleep when it happened! Not a good wake up call.....






At the end of our trip Brian did not want to leave. He insisted to all of us that he wanted "More camping please!" on a repeated basis! All this and we never even went to the beach! The poor weather has caused the beach to be closed due to unsafe swimming conditions.






Panoramic View From the top of Mt. Randall (sand dune) looking west.

Panoramic View to the left of the first panorama looking north.


BASEBALL

Over Labor Day weekend, Patrick and Shawn came to visit Chicagoland, Indiana, Michigan and in Patrick's case (Wisconsin). This was a lot of fun. The main purpose of this aside from seeing friends was to attend a White Sox/Red Sox baseball game at US Cellular Field. The video below was my experiment for the day. I used the sports setting on my camera to take lots of images. I then put them all in a slide show with a very fast transition speed. The result is stop motion animation! Every image you see is saved as an individual still on my computer, so if you see one you want, email me! Also, these images were taken from our fantastic seats (Thanks Shawn!) about halfway up the upper deck behind home plate.





Also, I played around with making panoramas. Ever since I discovered that I had a panorama utility, I have been looking for fun pictures to take. The below images are from our seats at the cell...


Full ColorSame Image

Black and White

Squished to make wallpaper






DOWNTOWN/THE LEDGE


The below pictures are of the Sears Tower's newest additions, the ledges. They are glassed in rooms at the Skydeck observation floor of the tower. They supposedly can hold 5 tons each. It's also the hot new place to get married here in Chicago (its been done multiple times already).


Street View, Full Frame

Zoomed in a little....

Zoomed in as much as the camera can! Note People in the ledges!!




That's all for now!


-Paul




New Reading Project: The Great Inflation and its Aftermath, by R. J. Samuelson.


On the box: Background noise of Thomas the train engine on TV. No music.