My Life's Ladies

I am blessed to be married to one of the world's greatest women. She is kind, loving, laid back, and driven to succeed, and all the while puts up with me and all of my strange (read: idiotic) eccentricities. And besides all of those great qualities, she is beautiful beyond compare. Luckily for me, we had a daughter who shares many of her traits, most especially, her beauty. We'll see how my daughter deals with me when I start spouting random facts to her friends on road trips - will she quietly ignore me and get on with her life, or will she melt in embarrassment and hope for a car wreck? Only time will tell.
But anyway, here are some pictures I took of my wife and daughter at Enchanted Forest, a mini-Disneylandesqe type of amusement park outside of Salem, Oregon.


It's a Super-Fun-Happy-Slide! Yay! Both of them are out of focus - darn low lighting! - but I like my wife's expression. I think she may be having more fun than my daughter.



Tickling is very fun for all parties involved. If you look carefully, you can see the stamp on my wife's hand, ensuring an easy re-entry later on in the day. No ticket stubs for us, boy! This is high class livin' at its finest.



The natural world is wonderful. And here, I am using the word to mean "full of wonder" as opposed to "great." I feel like Lemony Snickett right now. I am such a dork.

PS: I just finished Harry Potter 7 yesterday at 7:15 pm. I started reading it at 11:45 am the same day. Without counting bathroom breaks and short pauses for snacks, this means I read the 759 page book at a rate of 108 pages per hour. I put this here to show two things - 1) That book was frickin' awesome and exciting - by far the most action packed of the series - two thumbs up! And 2) That's how fast I can read, Rob.

Cousins

Ahh, family reunions - the chance to get together with a bunch of people you are related to, but with whom you don't always relate. Luckily, I get along great with my family, so this runion was a blast. We spent our nights hoplessly overcrowded in three 'cabins' (bigger than my house) with aunts and uncles and cousins and grandpas and grandmas spilling out all over the place. But it was all in good fun, and I'm glad to say I got some good use of my camera while there. I'm also happy that this will be my last post of a picture of Smith Rock, and thankfully, this time there's people in it!


These are my nieces, Kiana & Kaylene (they're twins) who live in Corvallis and love skateboarding. They are quite good too, especially since they just recently started. They have their first sponsor, and I look forward to finding a sweet T to wear with their new brand. Anyway, I forced them to hike with me all over creation on our trip and only let them pause momentarily to snap a few photos. They were wonderfully patient and I appreciate their ability to feign interest in all the weird science facts I constantly spewed in their direction.



This is a picture of my two kids and their cousin Aaron, one of the newest members of our extended family. Both my kids love babies more than anything (including cookies) and so there wasn't much coaxing needed to get this shot. Of course, I think my daughter is watching TV here, but the other two are interested in what's going on!

Peace for now . . . war later?

Smith Rock - The Sequel

Same story as last time, just more pictures.


I like this one for its weird perspective - is the camera looking straight up, or is it looking off of a cliff top at the horizon? You decide.

Here's a shot of where I was. This is on the trail heading down to the main trails. About 2 minutes before this picture was taken, I almost dropped my daughter out of our baby backpack onto some sharp pointy rocks. Luckily for all involved, I caught her by her ankles just moments before her face collided with the ground. But, this is still a nice picture.


Same as above, just different angle and closer. I like the river in this shot.

This picture makes me dizzy - these cliffs were towering over us at incredible heights, and this shot really captures the vertigo staring up at them all afternoon started to give me.

If I were Uncle Rico, I could throw a football right through these goalposts. But I'm not.

I do have more pictures of Smith Rock, but I'm tired of just cliffs and sky. I'll try to add more variety next time!

Father's Footsteps

I recently went on vacation to Redmond, OR for a family reunion. While there, we did many lovely things, such as travel back in time to the wild west on the Crooked River Dinner Train where we witnessed a murder, and then solved it! We also spent a day at Smith Rock. My dad grew up not far from this massive set of monoliths, so it was cool to get to see my dad's old digs. When he was a kid, there were only the trails he and his brothers made to get to the places they liked to play, so I was quite literally following in his footsteps. While there, I got to lug around my camera (with tripod this time!) and took these pictures.

Smith Rock is world renowned as a place of excellent rock climbing. (I do mean world renowned - when I was in England several years ago, I saw a poster advertising Smith Rock in my hotel) I saw this couple way up there and took this shot.

Then I zoomed in for this one - for no real reason beyond showing off my 150mm zoom.

It wasn't until I got home and put the picture on my computer that I realized that the person way up there, on the side of the mountain, nay, the cliff, was wearing flip-flops!

I liked this grouping of rocks - zoomed out, they looked like little bumps, close up, the massive boulders that they are.

This one looks like pieces of . . . well . . . I don't know. I just like them. I don't have any clever metaphors for you right now. Maybe you can decide what they look like and let me know.

I took many more pictures, but I don't have time to put them up today, so stay tuned!

My Big Backyard

We often have a variety of wildlife that frequents our backyard. Most recently, some deer friends of ours (pardon the pun) have been coming to visit. They always lie down in about the same place, and relax through the heat of the day. They are surprisingly tame and I was able to get quite close for this picture.



We also have a Velociraptor that hangs out in our long grass. I had to put a telephoto lens on the camera to avoid its rows of razor sharp teeth, but I think the shot turned out well.



Of course this is actually my son's toy, but he thinks this is the coolest picture ever and wanted it online. How can I resist the pleas of such a cute kid?

Hello again - did you miss me?

It's been a few days since my last posting, and with good reason. One of my other pet passions is videography, and I have spent the last three days working on the latest installment of Hill family films. My wife's family makes reunion videos every year, and as a family we dress up, act something out, and put it on DVD to share at the annual reunion. It is good silly fun, but it means that I end up logging late hours editing the thing and can't do anything else.

But, that's done now, and I can get back to updating my blog. Today we went for a family hike up the Cathedral Tree Trail to the Astoria Column. It was our first time, and we really enjoyed it. My four (nearly five) year old was able to hike all 3 miles without needing to be carried or whining! Hooray. And along the way, I took these pictures.

I don't know what this stuff is called (other than moss), but I think I know what J.R.R. Tolkien was thinking when he came up with the character "Treebeard." I like the lens flare - it makes me feel good about myself.


My daughter is choosing which flower to pick for her mom. It doesn't get much better than that.


Curse you MR. Squirrel! You move around too much and even when I do finally hold the camera steady, you twitch and look blurry! ARRRGGGG! Really, I just should have brought my tripod, again.


This is another shot that turned out blurry, but to good effect. I like the way he's looking off into the distance and seems to be wondering if he's doing the right thing.


Ahhh, the column. The second most photographed place in Astoria (I made that up). I liked the cloud pattern in the background, and if you squint at the bottom, you can see my family patiently waiting for me to get done with this foolishness and climb the column with them.

So I did.