Tag Archives: photos

News

A few favorites

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I just added a few more favorites to the small “Arizona Vacation – 2012” photo album.  This set is intended to include those photos I love the most from the entire trip, so I’ll be placing some photos here that you might also find in the other photo albums from the trip, just to highlight them.  Here’s today’s uploads:

Here’s a few shots of the “nippliest” mountain peak I think we saw… I think these turned out great, considering they were taken in a moving car though the front windshield.  You can see a bit of dashboard reflection and a few slaughtered bugs on the widshield if you look real close, but I think even that adds a little something interesting to the shots.  Shot 1, Shot 2, Shot 3.

I meant to ask Jay this when we got to Arizona, but completely forgot about it until I found these tonight: What the heck do you call these “retarded punk-ass cacti” we saw on the way down, in New Mexico?!  I expected to see more of them during the trip, but I only saw them on the way there, just after we passed White Sands.  They look like cactus that don’t know how to cut their hair or even look decent and respectful…they’re just “punks”.  It was very amusing to me (and apparently ONLY me, as I was the only one laughing–hysterically–in the car) when we kept driving past more and more of them.  After I calmed down a little I was able to snap this and this.

And here and here is proof positive that not everything is brown in Arizona… regardless of what everyone thinks… It is, however, much more expensive to maintain this color of lawn…

And lastly, to close out today’s posting, Achmed and Walter watch the sun rise over Lake Pleasant.  G’night.

Family News

Back Home

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We’re back home now.  We got in around 4:30pm on Sunday, after another marathon 2-day drive up from Arizona.  Pat and I decided to go through the Colorado Rockies on the way back for a change of scenery and to see a whole different part of the country.  It was pretty amazing–and pretty scary at times.  We ran into a couple blizzards in the mountains that made things pretty slow-going for awhile, but we came through it unscathed.  I took a ton more photos (over 400) on the way back, so feel free to take a look.  There’s some awesome mountain shots in there, along with a few shots of the blizzard conditions.  And here’s the EveryTrail path we took… Check out the “Statistics” on that one!  At our highest elevation we hit 9,993 feet!

When I hit the first snow storm in the mountains, I think Pat was asleep.  It went from crystal clear sky and road, to ice-covered road and blizzard conditions in a matter of seconds.  Then, about a quarter of a mile into it we came upon an overturned car in the ditch.  There were four other cars stopped along the side of the road helping, so I kept going, though I did slow down much more after that.

It sure was a quick, activity-packed, whirlwind ten-day vacation, that’s for sure!  Everyone had a great time, and we brought back a lot of great memories–and a lot of extra gifts and keepsakes.  We’ll definitely be doing it again, but next time we’ll stay longer.  Not necessarily to do more–we did plenty, believe me–but just to take in everything that much more, get a better feel for things, and perhaps do some serious decision-making.  Sandy will be coming next time for sure.  Even if I have to drag her.

Family News, Photography

Arizona Road Trip

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We are currently on a one-week vacation in Arizona!  We drove down here, leaving Wisconsin on Thursday, April 5th, 2012.  Here’s some highlights:

This was our drive from Wisconsin to Arizona.  Then I tracked our Grand Canyon visit on Everytrail. Most of the photos from the Grand Canyon are attached to the Everytrail trip, but for the COMPLETE Grand Canyon collection, click here.  I also took two panoramas, which are here and here.

I also tracked our drive up to the top of South Mountain on Everytrail.

Here are a couple of Panoramas from the top of South Mountain.  You can rotate them 360 degrees, and view them fullscreen:

http://www.photaf.com/index.php?PanoramaId=79400
http://www.photaf.com/index.php?PanoramaId=79399

Here’s a few of my favorite shots from the trip.  And here’s our collection of photos from the Gateway Arch.

Here’s our photos from Jerome, Arizona – a tiny town located at the top, and on the side of, a mountain.  What a scary drive this was, but the food at The Haunted Hamburger was great!  It was featured on the Food Network.  And this is the complete photo set from our trek to the top of South Mountain.

And last, but not least, this is a collection of Achmed and Walter’s antics on the trip.

News

Snow Sculpting and Birthday Party

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We had a great day today with two events.  This morning Kevin, Tyler and I went to the Snow Sculpting Championship in Lake Geneva, and this afternoon we had a birthday party for Kevin, who turns the big one-four tomorrow.  The snow sculptures were very nice this year, and we took a lot of photos.  Instead of sorting through them and posting the best ones, I just named and uploaded (still uploading as of 6:24pm) them all.  That way you can get all the angles and details we saw ourselves.  116 photos in all.  I just found out the winners too, and that news was a little disappointing, in my opinion.  Usually we can pick which one is going to win each year, but I guess this year several of them were excellent and it was probably a close race.

I took pictures at Kevin’s birthday party as well, so I’ll be uploading those next.  Matt made an awesome giant ice-cream-filled Oreo cookie cake for his birthday!  Sandy also made a Cherry Chip cake for the party to give everyone some options.  We had Pizza, then the cakes, watched a Jeff Dunham video, then Kevin opened his gifts.

Oh, and US National Snow Sculpting now has a Facebook page, which is where I found out who the winners are.  I have re-named and re-ordered the photos, so the first three sculptures are the 1st, 2nd and 3rd place winners, and the People’s Choice winner is further down the set, in alphabetical order.

Here’s the Snow Sculpting photos, here’s the Birthday photos, and here’s the Snow Sculpting Facebook page.

News

Boofest & Peterson’s Pumpkin Patch

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Halloween 2011We just got back from Peterson’s Pumpkin Patch (9210 63rd Street, Kenosha, WI) and wow, it’s pretty neat!  Hundreds of carved & lit pumpkins crammed into one frontyard… It’s a pretty cool display, with some great, spooky added decorations as well.  The yard right next-door is also “haunted” and well-decorated, including sound effects, lighting, and fog.  Check it out if you get the chance–it’s only lit October 29th-31st.  The pumpkin patch is done for charity – for the American Diabetes Association.

We also went to Boofest at the Kenosha Museum earlier this afternoon.  All of the photos from both events, as well as a final “lit” photo of our own pumpkin are right here.  The pumpkin patch photos are uploading right now, and there are 140 of them, so they should be done uploading in about an hour (around 10:00pm, 10/29/2011).

News

Kenosha wind storm 2011

Kevin looks at downed treeFor those not aware of it yet, we had a huge wind storm blow through Kenosha Thursday evening.  It did a lot of heavy damage to the area.  We have taken some photos, so I create a collection of them on my Flickr page.  As for us, I think we fared pretty well compared to the damage many others (including our neighbors) suffered.  We lost power at the start of the storm, around 8pm Thursday, but it was back on Friday afternoon.  Kevin certainly learned a good lesson about many of the luxuries of having electricity, since he didn’t have any video games or movies (after his iPod battery died), and we had no lights or computers to use.

After all of our home repairs that Jay and I did a couple weeks ago, the porch was spared.  The security lights Jay installed for us, however, are now shattered, so I’ll have to replace them, and the brand new door closer I installed on the back door was ripped right off the back screen door.  The closer survived intact, but a chunk of the back door was ripped out and still attached to the closer and the wall!  That was it though, no other damage to our house, luckily.

This morning Kevin, Socks and I walked down by Eichelman and Wolfenbuttel parks and the new marina and took a few more photos.  When we got to the tot park I realized that the new marina slips had shifted way north, and into the duck pond!  Most of the boats are still docked in them, so I bet there was quite a mess at first, with overturned and sunken boats during and after the storm.

Today more of the roads are open again and more traffic lights are working, so we’re getting back to normal.  I still see a lot of tree services hard at work and We Energies trucks driving around though, so they still have a ways to go.

News

Southport Park

Kevin, Socks and I walked around Southport Park tonight and I took a few photos. You’ll find those in this set.   That set also includes some photos from our recent walk through Petrifying Springs park.   I also found some tile art on the side of the water treatment plant tonight that I hadn’t seen before, so I took some photos of those too and added them to my Kenosha Art set.  We followed a new path that went behind the treatment plant and into an area of woods along the lake. It was pretty neat. Even ran across what looked like a beaver! It ran away and hid quickly, so we only got a glimpse of it, but it was bigger than Socks! This is my favorite shot from tonight. Love the view.

Family News, News

The makings of a future ‘geek memoir’, perhaps?

While searching through my oldest documents I recently stumbled upon an old text database containing hundreds of postings from my website.  For me, this is exciting.  It’s a chunk of my past that I thought was lost forever.  Tiny glimpses of day-to-day things, just ramblings mostly, akin to short Facebook or Twitter posts (which weren’t even possible back then).  I have been carefully going through them (there are a lot of spam postings in there as well) and grabbing everything significant, and re-posting it on my site here.  They start in January, 2001, over 10 years ago!  This is when I first put up my website as jimtrottier.com–right near the end of 2000 and into 2001.  I’m pretty sure I was still in dialup back then!  This was very shortly after BBS’s went away and I was no longer a “sysop” of my own BBS–if anyone out here remembers those days.

There are some elements still missing–including nearly all links & photos, but I’m still adding a lot more over this weekend.  All of the photos were in various places on the web back then, and not on Flickr as they are now, so the links are missing, but the references are still there.  Some images were actually embedded in the site themselves though, and amazingly, I was able to recover some of those, but others, I’m afraid, may really be gone forever.

If you’re interested in reading these flashbacks, the easiest way to jump back there is to drop down the “Archive” list in the right sidebar on this site, then pick a month and year.

News, Photography

Zombies invade Lincoln Middle School!

UndeadKev - BeforeKevin’s really having a good time with his Theater Arts class this year.  First he scared the crap out of us when he came out of school with horrible head, arm and hand injuries.  This week he came home Undead!  I really got a kick out of it.  So much so, that we both decided to take it even further and digitally enhance him even more.  I used Kai’s Power Tools on his teeth (yikes! Sounds painful!) and google image searched for “scars and cuts” and found some decent skin disorders to copy.  Believe me, the ones I actually used were extremely mild compared to the horror that I found in those search results!  Take a look at the before and after photos.  He took a copy of each photo to school today to show them off.  On the back of the BEFORE photo I wrote “Dawn of the Dead”.  On the back of the AFTER photo I wrote “28 Days Later”.

Family News, Photography

Old Album 11 coming soon

Old Photo Album #11 is coming this weekend.  This one has been a real challenge.  I have spent almost every free moment I’ve had this week just scanning, cropping, editing and filtering these photographs.   This album is (or I should say WAS…read on) filled with mostly black & white, very very old photos, some of which have faded almost completely to white.  They kind of turn a ghostly grey shade, with an almost invisible image on the paper.  Luckily, applying a few filters pulls much of the photo back, restoring it enough to be recognizable.  That is, if you know the people or places in the photo already.  And, for many of these, this has been another part of this album’s challenge–trying to identify everyone.  You’ll find plenty of photos titled “unknown” in this album.  There were so many, in fact, that halfway through scanning the album I decided to go the extra mile on this one and fully disassemble the album to get to the backs of each of the photos, hoping there are written names and details on them identifying everyone.  That turned out to be the case in about 1/2 of the photos, so it helped quite a bit, but left me with a ruined album. The originals are mostly destroyed.  Peeling them off the sheets ripped many of them apart.  I figured this might happen, which is why I made sure I had good scans of every photo before I attempted this.

So, at this point the album is at just over 200 photos in size, with still probably a couple dozen or so that are still “unknown”.  Most others had some writing on them, so I added that to the captions, as well as filling in my own details from memory whenever it worked for me.  Some of the photos are only about 1/2 the size of wallet-sized, so they can be pretty tiny.  I have about 10 more double-sided pages to edit and save, and the amount of photos on a page varies a lot from 2 or 3 bigger photos to 10 or more small ones, so there may be 300+ photos in the album by the time I’m done.

I should be able to complete it this weekend though, and get everything posted.  So, as I’ve asked in the past, if you know anyone in them that I haven’t already identified in the titles, please add a comment to the photo.

Family News, News, Photography

Old Photo Album #9

Old Photo Album #9
Old Photo Album #9

I just uploaded Old Photo Album #9.  84 photos in this set.  Includes Harold, Donna, Beth, Penny Clifford, Clayton, Paul, Paula, Karen and one of her exes (Bert) and many others.  Also includes a few photos of Rex and Prince, two of the dogs we had.

It’s a little easier for me to scan a whole album now, so you should be seeing many more of these old photos from me real soon.  I can insert a flash drive in my MFP and scan whole album pages directly to the flash drive, so I don’t have to leave the scanner for each photo or each page any more.  Then I move the flash drive to the PC and process all of the pages at once.

Photography

Happy Labor Day…without the Labor!

I just realized, looking back on our summer this morning, that I haven’t posted any swimming photos this summer, except the tiny one of Ty diving in on opening day. So I went back and dug up the only few I took this summer–from July 4th.  There’s seven of them, so I uploaded them to the “Swimming at Rosemary’s” set.  They’re the first seven photos there.  Now it’s off to George’s for our Labor Day cookout! L8r!

Family News

Duck Feeding

During our walk we stopped to feed some bread to the ducks at the tot park today.  Take a look at the exciting footage…in 2 videos and a few photos.  It’s so exciting, I bet you could watch and stream both videos simultaneously and not miss a thing!  Give it a go.

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