Sometimes funny, sometimes thoughtful, always a good time
We were outside in the snow, and the flakes falling from the sky were enormous. I guess I’m used to little specks of white; these were a quarter-inch across and beautifully formed. Here are some examples in Kyra’s hair:
Bonus: my two beautiful girls.
Ollie is discovering that pushing a Tonka dump truck along a sidewalk covered in snow doesn’t work very well. It’s funny to watch him get frustrated when the wheels clump with snow and refuse to turn…
Outside Alex and Kaitlyn’s apartment, there’s a hill. Okay, maybe it’s exaggerating to even call it a hill. It’s more like a gentle incline. But it was snowing, and we figured Ollie might want to go sledding. We grabbed a cookie sheet from the kitchen and headed out.
I rode down with him, and despite my enthusiasm, he acted absolutely bored.
We did it a couple of times, but apparently a slow slide down twenty feet of snow isn’t enough to impress this little guy.
We stopped in Idaho Falls for dinner, and the restaurant was in a little section of town with amazing lighted trees. I snapped a picture.
A little over two years ago, I took a creative leap and decided to start working with a digital tablet. It was a ton of fun to draw cartoons and work on some other sketching techniques, but I found that the real value of a tablet like this is in editing photos. It’s so much easier to use a pen (err, “stylus” in the professional lingo) rather than a mouse when working on fine details. The tablet has empowered me to make Christmas cards and do a myriad of other things with photography and practical jokes.
I’ve been working at the high school, earning a bit of extra scratch as a coach. I figured some of that income could go toward a hobby I enjoy, so I did some research and decided to upgrade my tablet.
Here’s the old one in all its 13-inch glory:
And here’s the upgrade, a staggering 24 inches diagonally:
It’s hard to convey the sheer size of this beast in a photo like this; it’s almost as large as my (already crazy large) monitors. And with 2K resolution, the drawing area and details are substantially better.
Hoo boy, this is gonna be fun. As I’m fond of saying, “Now we’re cooking with gas!“
Here’s a sunset from two weeks ago.
And here’s tonight’s sunset:
Our annual Christmas cards are the stuff of legend, and believe me when I say we get a lot of comments about them. People usually ask one of three questions:
My answers are usually along these lines:
This year’s card actually came together pretty quickly, which is either a sign that my creative skills are improving, or that I just didn’t want to spend too much time on it. As a result, our cards went out in late November– far earlier than usual! I’ve had the opportunity to hear from many people asking the questions above, and I decided I’d give my fans a little glimpse behind the scenes.
I should start with the inspiration for the card. Pepper really enjoyed Top Gun: Maverick and was excited to do something with that theme. After some quick research, it was clear we weren’t going to be able to fly in an F-18 like Tom Cruise did for the movie, so I turned to the movie poster. Here’s the official product:
I definitely needed to include Pepper in the card, so I kept looking around the internet. I found a fan-made poster that would work:
I’m pretty sure the shot of Jennifer Connelly is from a still frame late in the movie, but whatever… it’ll do. The next step was getting some photos of myself and Pepper that looked passingly similar. We put on some coats and stepped outside.
A close observer may notice that she’s wearing Harry Potter earrings (the Deathly Hallows) and a Hunger Games necklace (Mockingjay). Call it an Easter egg, if you will. As for me, I don’t have a flight suit, but Maverick did wear a leather jacket in both movies. And I have a ski helmet. Voila!
Wikipedia provided a nice shot of an F/A-18 Hornet on a carrier flight deck:
It took some work to remove the deckhand and make a few other slight modifications to the plane. I also needed a more interesting background, not only to match the movie poster, but also because the blank sky is boring. Cue a simple photo of some clouds:
I found some appropriate fonts to match the movie logo and poster. Bringing it all together, the card came to life:
Often the devil’s in the details, though. The sunset shot required a bit more of an orange tint to everything. The cockpit had to show the clouds through the glass, while still looking like it’s glass and not simply missing. Pepper’s jacket needed to be edited to remove the pink sides. Shadows had to be adjusted. Edges were fuzzed so they don’t look like everything was cut out of a magazine and pasted together. I probably spent four hours working through all of this, but I’ve honed these little skills over the years, and I’m pretty pleased with the result.
In the grand scheme, stuff like this is probably child’s play for a serious graphic designer, but for a hack like me it’s not half-bad.
Of course designing the card is only the first step in the process. There’s the printing, envelopes and address labels, buying a ton of stamps, and eventually showing up at the post office with a box containing 330 cards (our new record). In a way I’m bummed that it’s practically an industrial process at this point; thirty years ago I was hand-writing about 30 cards. Now there’s not really any personalization in them. Still, they seem pretty popular with friends and family, so I continue the tradition…
As Pepper and I shoveled the six inches of snow along the 1,800 feet of our driveway this morning, she commented, “Is this what you thought retirement would be like?”
This is my friend Doug.
And this is my friend Doug on a pillow.
In preparation for our annual White Elephant Christmas party, I wanted to come up with a goofy gift that topped last year’s sexy fireman puzzle of my friend Kim. (That’s a bit of a story.) With help from Doug’s wife Chelsey, and a bit of graphic editing, I came up with this. I’m pretty pleased, and I’m looking forward to the moment when some unwitting soul opens the gift and Doug sees it…
When you have married kids, they have to perform the annual “holiday juggle”, splitting time between families. This year happens to be an in-laws Christmas, meaning Alex and Kaitlyn will be with her family. Since we can lay claim to Thanksgiving, we invited all the kids to come up to Montana for the week. Julian came out as well, and we had a full house.
There were, naturally, a lot of board games. Zack’s wearing a scarf because he had a head cold and felt like his mouth kept getting dry. Apparently wearing a scarf kept his lips and mouth moist?
There were some intense games of Mario Kart. We talked about having a family tournament, but let’s be honest: Zack and Kyra are the undisputed champions, and leave the rest of us in the dust.
Ollie loved having all the space in our house. It’s a nice change from the somewhat cramped quarters he’s used to in the college apartment. He also decided he liked his noodle bowl better as a hat than a bowl.
On Thanksgiving Day, it was all hands on deck as we prepared the meal. Everyone chose a favorite dish and was responsible for making it. But now that I think about it, I don’t remember Alex actually choosing or making anything. Instead, he kind of hung around the kitchen and sampled everything else…
Although they were here for almost a week, the time flew past and before we knew it, everyone was heading back to Utah and Washington. We snapped one last photo before the group split up.
As always, I’m eternally grateful for these good folks in my life. It’s nice to be reminded to be thankful.