We've had lots of exciting events recently; Denise's sister Amanda was married last week, and our friends Rob & Kathryn had their baby boy this week. So, I've been taking a lot of pictures. I took about 4GB of photos (RAW format, about 400 photos) at the reception last night. It's difficult to do good candids though; poor uncontrolled lighting, people moving, etc. I would eventually like a 50mm f1.7 lens; there's no zoom, but they're amazing in lower light, do a great job with the blurred background that makes portraits great, and pretty cheap as far as lenses go. But until then, I turn up the ISO to 800 and put up with a lot of noise. Here's a few from this week:

Lichfield Family

---

Adam & Amanda Walsh Wedding

Coolest picture of the night

I love macro!

James got me some macro filters for Christmas. This is a shot of one of the ornaments on our tree. It's a crystally snowflake kinda thing that's about two or three inches across. Next project: Adam and Amanda's rings.

Early Christmas present for Denise

I gave Denise one of her Christmas presents early, so she can use it at Amanda's wedding on Friday. It's a series of magnifying filters for our camera, so she can start doing the "macro" type shots she's been wanting to do on Amanda's ring, dress, flowers, etc. We'll have some good pics in the days to come, but she did snap a picture of my fingertip.

Random

I was just looking at Cara's blog, and through various linkages (thanks Ashley!) found the Which American Accent do You Have? quiz.

Ah! A quiz after my own heart:). It's actually fairly accurate from a linguistics point of view, although I'm anxious to put in a full blown Utah accent, and see what it comes up with. A Utah accent is a completely different beast, as Utah was settled heavily by western European immigrants. Hence things like 'feel' sounding like 'fill', and 'fill' sounding... well, not like your normal English, but 'fell' is as close as I can get. We actually discussed this in one of my linguistics classes-- turns out that the stereotypical Utah accent is composed of vowel lowering, where some/most vowels become the next lowest, physiological speaking. We didn't even get into calling spaghetti 'eye-talian' food. That, my friends, is a whole 'nother post (as is the evolution of the pronunciation "'nother").

I started reading Wheelock's Latin today. Serious nerdiness, but Willex calls. Besides, who but me really wants to know that I'm reading Wheelock's?

word of the day: loquacious. As in: this post is overly loquacious:)

Will Pictures

Long week! First, there was the 8 hours overtime (which will be nothing compared to how much work + school will take up a month from now, but it still feels tiring). Then, Will AND Denise were both sick with a nasty stomach flu for half the week. Denise is fine, though Will is still a bit sick.

We're about to send off more Will pictures to grandma, so I figured I'd post some here. Yep, there's a lot, so I'll post the small versions (click to expand). I'm also out of time, so I won't put it in a table either. Friends & Family: the uploaded pictures really are highly compressed and aren't as crisp as the originals... email me if you want any "full size" images.

There are days...

when I make no sense. I've been DYING for a bit of time to myself for about a week... and here's Will gone to bed early and I don't know what to do with myself! He's been in bed for an hour and half (about an hour earlier than he usually goes down), and I'm bored stiff:). I've had to learn to work so hard since he was born that I'm not sure what to do with a whole two hours of free time. I'm not sure if that's really weird, or really good. Working hard is not my strong suit...
I do believe I'm going to go work on my scarf.
Oh, word of the day: malediction. 2 bonus points to anyone who can tell me where the quote "deep, subterranean... malediction" comes from!