My buddy Greg Thompson took these shots of the kids sledding on 12.26.06 with his fancy new DSLR, a Pentax K10D. The beast shoots 10 megapixel images and accepts all of his 35mm lenses he’s aquired over the years. To give you an idea of what kind of resolution that is, here’s the same image as one those above before down-rezzing…

Pretty cool, huh?!

——

——

This afternoon, our buddy Mark let us borrow his trailer, as he has for the hundred or so other trips we’ve made moving all of our stuff from Old House to New House for the past six months. This time, though, it was full of geese… big decoys he uses during goose season. So we had to offload about 40 decoys before we could use the trailer.

Rather than immediately put them in the garage, Logan thought it’d be fun to put them out in the yard for awhile, so he placed them all around the white mass of snow that’s now our old front yard. It was a pretty cool scene. We even watched a few flocks of the actual birds pass over the south of us, honking away, flying in those long, graceful v-formations… hoping they’d spot our “flock” and land in our yard. No such luck.

Alas, the decoys are now confined to our old garage… until the next time their asked to stand in the snow and wait for their ‘birds of a feather…’.

Here’s a little snow transition I made in After Effects. If you’d like the project file, you can download it here.

It’s basically just the CC Snow effect and a few solids. I rotated the final comp to have the snow come in sideways. I’m using it for some snow images I’ve taken in the last few weeks and turning them into vids. I’ll post some final videos when I get them completed.

Enjoy!

Since today was trash day, we got a jumpstart on getting the City to plow our neighborhood streets. The plow has to proceed the trash truck. Strangely, the plow wasn’t even chained up, so he swiftly managed to get himself stuck. Luckily, he had a bunch of sand onboard. A neighbor even helped him. While I… uh, took a picture!

The trash truck finally made it to my house, but not before snapping off the wheel of my neighbor’s trash can. The operator actually noticed and got out and fixed the unit. These City folks are certainly earning their pay this winter, and I’m pleased to see their dedication.

This weather really illuminates the human nature of folks. There’s those that pitch in to help a stranger get un-stuck. There’s those that dutifully shovel their walks, drives, and streets, and even those of their neighbors. And then there’s those that shovel only their driveways if they shovel anything at all. And there’s those that write or call into the local paper to complain about what is or isn’t being done about snow removal, instead of getting out and removing some snow themselves.

Darlene got stuck on her way out today. I snapped this pic before I “suited-and-booted” to go dig her our. My neighbor Mike also helped give her a push.

Now that I finally got all of my shovelling done yesterday… guess what I get to do this morning?!

There’s a bunch of my busnut buddies (bus conversion folks) on the Net that head down to Arcadia, FL every year about this time. While they’re enjoying 70 degree weather and chatting it up about all things bussing, I’m shovelling around the 4 foot drifts! Oh well, at least there’s no hurricanes here!

Here’s the door to our garage on the side of the house. Taken 12.21.06

The Front Range of Colorado got slammed with over two feet of the white stuff a few weeks ago… and I’ve been a-diggin’ ever since. On the night of the big dump, a guy in a 4WD made the wrong turn into our dead-end street and tried to back his way out. I watched him from the upstairs window for awile, as he dug-and-spun, dug-and-spun… and finally took pity and suited-and-booted up to go help him.I used a bag of OilSorb (kitty litter, diatomaceous earth) that I use for cleaning up the big oil spills on the bus and he soon had traction and was back on his way. Turned out that he was doing volunteer work for the hospital a few blocks away… driving doctors to and from their homes. Boy was I glad I went out there and helped after hearing that!

From the pic, the snow was almost up to my backside… it had drifted up in the street so bad because of the wind. By morning there were 6 foot fences in our neighborhood totally covered by the drifts!