We plan to ring in the New Year with friends tonight. This is a pre-party shot.
Looking back on 2010… it has been a good year. This photo-a-day project has given me a reason to take time out each day to document a moment to share. Maybe most importantly, just to take time out to see things. And to focus on the good, rather than the bad.
I look forward to the new year and wish you a healthy, happy 2011!!!
I raked and bagged many, many leaves this week. There are many more yet to fall.
I used a sepia tint and some fuzzy/glowy treatment with Picassa. I like how it turned out.
Santa brought me a new Mario Karts wii game. I’ve been tearin’ it up! 🙂
Got this lovely wii-snapshot in my wii-inbox for reaching a new level. That’s my wii-head on Luigi’s body — my favorite karts avatar.
Wanna race?
Christmas decorations — they won’t be out for much longer, so I may as well enjoy them.
Note to self: taking a photo in dim light without a flash turn out very grainy. 🙂
We went for a bikeride this afternoon. It was a sunny, crisp day.
We took a ride through nearby Yett Creek park and decided to go geocaching, since we had the GPS with us. We found three caches (here’s a pic if you want to check them out) for which we had preloaded coordinates ahead of time. I use the website geocaching.com to look up coordinates, and log the ones we find.
What a fun afternoon!
…my true love gave to me… a bowl of delicious risotto!
🙂
Merry Christmas!!!
This song has been going through my head so I thought I’d share it with you…The Eagles cover of Charles Brown’s Please Come Home for Christmas…no video on this youtube link, just audio.
It’s Christmas Eve!! A bunch of us went downtown to take a Segway tour of Austin with SegCity. I’ve been wanting to do this for a while. Friends had relatives visiting so it was a fun opportunity to take one for a ride.
This is a shot of the 10 of us buzzing along south of Town Lake with some of the new skyline as a backdrop: Laura, Denyse, Chris, Irene, Lori, Dave, Tricia, Dolia, Jake and our fearless tour guide in the lead.
It was fun. Did you know SegCity is not just a Segway tour outfit, but a Segway dealer?! I think I must have one of my own. 🙂
We made pizzas with Dan and Lynn at their house tonight. We brought the doughs, which Monte made ahead of time. Here is his most excellent recipe:
This thin and crispy pizza dough is best baked in a hot oven directly on a pizza stone. Use a pizza peel to move the pizza on and off the stone. This recipe makes four pizzas about 12 inches in diameter. Use a Kitchen-Aid mixer.
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1 1/2 c. warm water 3 t. dry active yeast 3 T. sugar 2 T. olive oil 4 cup bread flour 1 T. kosher salt |
Bring water to 110 degrees F. Pour half into warm mixing bowl. Add sugar and yeast, stir with a spoon. Wait for the yeast to proof, about 10 minutes.
Add the rest of the water, oil, salt, and mix. Install the dough hook and add flour in increments. Use a high speed while the mixture is soupy. As the dough comes together, set speed on 2 and run for 20 minutes. Adjust flour for dough that is moist but not sticky.
Divide the dough into four. Oil doughs and bowl lightly and let rest for an hour.
Roll then stretch pizza dough to size. Dust peel with corn meal and flour. Place dough on peel and add toppings. Slide pizza off peel directly onto stone. Bake 5-7 minutes in hot 450+ oven.
This is the 5th winter we’ve lived in this house. The first year the pistache out back turned a phenomenal shade of yellow before all the leaves fell. We haven’t been treated to that again until this year. I guess the drought/rain, heat/cold balance has to be just so.
Many of the leaves fell before turning yellow this year. But this shot gives an idea of how pretty it is.
It’s nice to be home again.
We woke up in the wee hours this AM to watch the lunar eclipse. It was very cloudy and breezy last night so the cloud cover was whizzing by with some brief openings in which you could get a glimpse of the moon.
This is a shot of it as the moon was passing out of the shadow of the Earth.
Today at 5:38 PM local time is the Winter Solstice — first day of Winter.
Oddly enough the forecast is for temps in the 80’s today. Pretty bizarre.
On my way to the airport this morning I stopped by to visit my dad’s grave. He’s been gone a little over a year.
Not a bad view 😉
It started out foggy and overcast, but has turned out to be a beautiful sunny day. I took one more drive down to the waterfront today. No sandy beach here — lots of rocks worn smooth from the endless wave action.
Saw lots of shore birds. Someone was diving about 20 feet offshore. A ferry went by. No orcas in sight, though. The seals can rest easy for another day.
I took a drive today to visit Brian, Gail, Josh and their friend Edgar.
To get from the peninsula side of Puget Sound to the Seattle/Tacoma side you can take a ferry, or you have to drive around the south end of the Sound. The Tacoma Narrows bridge was built in 1940 to make that drive shorter.
This is a shot of the crossing today from the Gig Harbor side. The old bridge is on the left. On the right is a newer, twin span that was completed only several years ago. Now each bridge carries traffic in only one direction.
The original span was completed in July 0f 1940. It was the longest man-made suspension bridge in the US at the time, and the 3rd longest in the world. Only four months later it had collapsed. Let that be a harmonics lesson to all of us…
Here’s a youtube video with footage from November 7, 1940, the day the bridge collapsed in 40 mile an hour winds after pitching and swaying for over an hour.
Sheila365 
