Spanawaste.com

Why hello there! It’s nice of you to join me in another year on a blog that is really about two years behind and rarely updated. You are loyal and kind and good looking and I think that all of those things should be rewarded… over and over again.

This holiday season wasn’t too bad, not too stressful or otherwise taxing on a brother. Our family Xmas photo turned out alright. People have been telling Mrs. S how much they love it and I spent at least a week brooding about how soft (unsharp) I thought the photo was and how maybe the expensive lens I bought myself for Christmas was a bad copy. Anyhow, we sent out this photo with our holiday cards:

Christmas day was spent visiting the in-laws in Pierce County. We visited the Motherland (Spanaway) and Puyallup and the Bonney Lake area. I had a lovely quiche at brunch at my mother-in-law’s house.

Mrs. S was given a really old, vintage mink coat at my father-in-law’s house. This was not a Xmas gift; rather, it was in the family in a sense and the previous owner no longer saw a reason to have a mink coat laying around the retirement home. She also received another coat that they thought was a beaver pelt. The jury is still out.

When Lois sees this, she’ll see that there might be some merit to Mrs. S’ threats of turning her into a pug coat.

For New Year’s Eve, we did some Patron shots at home and then drove down to lower Queen Anne to find parking and walk over to the Seattle Center. As usual, my parking karma was good and it didn’t take us too long to nab a spot a number of blocks away. We took a water bottle and filled it with a mixture of fruit juice and vodka and drank it through a straw. Somehow, between a big dinner and drinking lots of water throughout the day, we weren’t able to catch the slightest hint of a buzz and were generally sober and cold as we worked through the crowded Center.

You might have heard by now that there was a malfunction with the fireworks display. It was kind of lame, but I can’t help but feel that it wouldn’t have been all that great even if there wasn’t a glitch. Oh well.

We’re seriously considering altering our plans for next year, as this year fell the slightest bit flat. Our tradition was meeting up with Ms. Q and her guy friend at the Center, but OBVIOUSLY that wouldn’t have worked this year. I mean, we had a good time, but the fact that we were impervious to alcohol certainly didn’t make our time MORE fun. Next year: Intravenous Grey Goose.

New Year’s Day I was kind of cracking up inside, because despite the fact that we didn’t get drunk, Mrs. S still had some hangover symptoms. All the consequences without the benefit. Hilarious. After she recovered we took a drive over to Kerry Park over in Queen Anne so that I could take a few photos. I was inspired to go there after seeing some of the shots that a commenter on my Flickr site took.

Obviously, mine aren’t anywhere near as good, but I do blame the time of day and the light for SOME of that. Not all. I did get a few portraits I enjoyed:

And I played around with Photoshop and tried no less than five different methods of doing color to black and white conversion and decided that I liked this one best for it’s relative ease and control and final result:

Well, I won’t make any promises about how frequent I’ll be blogging this year, but I feel slightly optimistic given how easy this post was to write. Hey, maybe I’ll even do a site redesign! Happy New Year.