2008 Year in Review, part 2

Here are the rest of my favorites of 2008. As a special little bonus, I added one of my all-time favorite songs: Harry Connick Jr.'s version of "What Are You Doing New Year's Eve." Turn up the speakers, listen, and then kiss someone.

July

My first good fireworks shots, over the Bay.

August
The Cohen Building on 12th Street

September

Octagonal church on Route 6

October
Autumn at the Niagara Falls Gorge


November
Dan taking pictures at sunrise, Presque Isle



December

One of my favorite ornaments, Santa as a crescent moon.


I hope everyone has the happiest New Year possible. I'm home eating spinach dip with pumpernickel bread. At midnight, I'll watch the ball drop with a toast of sparkling grape juice, wild child that I am. Whatever you're doing, be happy and be safe!

Favorites of 2008, Part 1

I decided that for the last 2 days of 2008, I'd post some of my favorite shots from this past year. I had a really hard time narrowing it down to one shot per month, so I wish I'd thought of doing this 12 days ago so I could have posted 3-4 shots from each month. Oh well...such is life!

January

The swamp at Asbury Woods

February

Snowy tree in the backyard

March
A big wet beaver (at Presque Isle)


April

The Standpipe

May

Magnolia(???) tree at Walnut Creek

June

Emily's 8th grade graduation portrait, Presque Isle

Tomorrow: July-December.

Although it's been said many times, many ways...

Merry Christmas to you. Albeit a belated greeting, I hope you all had a wonderful Christmas. We had a great day here at the Smith household.

Here's the tree after Santa had made his stop...

Liam's favorite stocking stuffers: Slim Jims and a Hershey's Special Dark bar.

When you were a kid, did you go for the biggest present first, or try to save the best for last? Liam's an impatient type, but I fooled him. The big gift was hidden back behind Mommy and Daddy's stuff.

Em got mostly cash and dvd's...she was happy. In order to further my own enjoyment, I wrap the cash in odd denominations in various size packages. I'm not above shoving canned goods or other supplies inside a box just to add some weight and heft to it either.
Dan's favorite present was hilarious....I had to order it from Home Shopping Network. It's that Big City Slider Station, endorsed by the always-apoplectic Billy Mays. It makes 5 little burgers at once. Joy!
After Mom and Dad were done opening our gifts, I prolonged things by getting up and putting the turkey and ham in to cook. Then I pulled a "Christmas Story" bit on them and "found" a couple more boxes back behind the tree while I was cleaning up the wrapping.They were pretty darn excited about the Wii....the thing hasn't gotten much rest since Christmas day! Hope all of you had a wonderful day in whatever way you celebrate.

Sheepish and Guilty

Time sure does have a habit of slipping by, doesn't it? It's been two weeks since I last posted, a fact I'm almost embarassed about. Not that it really matters that much in the grand scheme of things, I suppose, but I feel like I'm being lazy by not getting on here and keeping up with the blogs of the other people I like to read.

I haven't even taken any pictures since those last ones of the tree that I posted. These shots were taken on Nov. 4th at the Peninsula. This may look like a lighthouse, but it's actually part of a pumphouse for the old Waterworks. (The sign on the side says 1908.)

In other news, we continue to have crappy, grey weather and it's still dark when I leave work. We had one nice sunny day over last weekend and I was busy doing other things. I wanted to go get some wintery nature shots.

This weekend if the weather is decent, we're planning a drive to Hamburg NY. They have a big Christmas light display at the fairgrounds and you drive through. I'll definitely take some pictures there.

It's Beginning to Look a lot like....

Christmas!

I practiced some macros this week on my Christmas ornaments.

I love Christmas ornaments.

Unwrapping them all one by one is truly one of my favorite parts of the holiday.

My tree is a mish-mash. I could never be one of those people who has a themed or color-coordinated tree. (Not that there's anything wrong with that.)

Since my birthday is right before Christmas, I usually get at least one or two new ornaments on my birthday, so a lot of these are from my growing-up years.This is the first year we've had a fake tree. Well...I take that back.

The year I was 6 or 7, apparently we were so poor we couldn't afford a tree. A neighbor lady gave us one of those aluminum jobs with the colored light wheel at the base. I wish I still had it because they sell for big bucks on eBay!But anyway, this is the first year I've had a fake tree of my own choosing. Getting a real tree got to be too expensive and too much of a hassle. Last year after Christmas, I happened to find a 7 1/2 foot Martha Stewart tree that was 90% off....I only paid $30!
So an artificial tree it is. And even the doubters in my family have admitted that it looks really nice! Plus, it lets us put the tree up much earlier than we normally would.Besides, any tree that has my Nana's angel tree-topper on it is fine by me.

Tap Tap Tap...is this thing on?

I haven't posted in over a week, and I haven't really taken any new pics either! On Thanksgiving, I didn't take pictures of the family or the spread...I just wasn't into it. The one thing that did strike my fancy was taking a few shots of my nephew David.

David turned 1 in August. He's a sweetie!

He was great about sitting for pictures....And I finally got to use my teacup!

Last night, I took some pictures of my tree and some favorite ornaments. I'll try to post those tomorrow....or a week from now.

At Rest

First, a quick apology for not having posted in the past several days. I don't really have much excuse, except being tired and mildly busy. Also, this snow and cold weather and the early dark have a kind of depressive effect on me, so that when I get home all I want to do is laze around with a book and a cup of coffee!When we drive, we almost always look for the blue highways. (An aside: that's a great book, by the way, Blue Highways by William Least Heat Moon. It's a memoir of his travels around the country by back roads...the so-called "blue highways" on the map.) I always like the blue highways on trips. What the heck do you get to see from the interstate? Nothing but median and billboards. When you're driving on a regular road, you have the chance of seeing something like a sign that says "Pet Cemetery" with an arrow. And you can choose to turn down that road on a lark, just to see what you find.

I'm almost always one to take the turn down the side street and see what we find. On the way home from the toy museum, we came upon a huge pet cemetery. Seriously, this place had more acreage than a lot of the human cemeteries we've stopped to visit. The graves we found were no less touching or sentimental than anything you'd find in a regular cemetery.The cemetery has been open since 1919, but we didn't find any graves older than the 1960s or so. Unfortunately, the place was positively swampy from the rain, which made exploring kind of difficult.

I managed to get some shots from the paths, though.

Most of the graves had pictures of the pets, which was very sweet.

I did happen to see a couple of living animals while we were there...several white tailed deer came out of the woods to munch some grass.

And lastly, speaking of animal pictures, here's Liam's 2nd grade school photo. Isn't he the funniest ham you've ever seen?