A few photos from recent trips

Well, quite a bit has happened since my last post here. I spent two weeks solo in Chicago for work. Lindsay and I went to a wedding in LA. We spent a day in Santa Cruz. I shaved my beard (and am now growing it back again). Actually that’s all I can think of.

Chicago was a great time. I stayed in a fancy hotel and went to a pretty interesting training. Anthea came to visit, as did my mom and Tristan. I ate some great donuts, and a (not pictured) great pizza.

Anyway, long story short, I took a few photos and figured I might as well post a few of them.

Anthea in Union Station

This Panorama turned out pretty well, except that I somehow (even though I SWEAR I did, I always do!) didn’t lock the exposure. So I ended up with two differently exposed photos, which I didn’t spend the time required to try to match more evenly and instead just used photoshops (generally pretty good) “match color” feature. So you can see the seem. I’ll probably go back at some point and do a better job.

This donut place was a chain (or at least there were a number of different locations, I don’t know if “chain” has a technical definition, but in the case I use it to mean “more then one location”), but was very great. The donuts were expensive-ish (2-4 bucks I think?) but were creative/quality enough to justify the price I believe. Case in point: the creme brulé donut had a very hard caramelized sugar shell on it. Which is easy enough to do if you are making creme brulé, but I don’t know they kept trays of the things hard/crackling all day.

This was a really cool old (50s? 60s?) arcade machine in one of the arcades on the Santa Cruz boardwalk area.

We really like Santa Cruz. The rocks are cool and all, but honestly the coolest part of this was the group of kids bodysurfing in the water.

I took this photo because when we move from this apartment someday, I’d always like to remember the few (see:currently in a pretty serious drought) but awesome rainy days we’ve spent in our apartment. I may not want to remember the crocs, but there they were! Edit:Actually, I also should point out that there is a ridiculous amount of grain (if this were digital I’d call it “grain”) on the crocs. To be fair, I did try to bring out more detail from the shoes, so ultimately this is my own fault, but I didn’t actually notice how bad it was until posting this. It’s my fault.

A portrait of Nicola that I like a lot. Good looking guy!

Edit: I realized I mentioned a wedding, but didn’t actually post any photos from it. That’s mainly because, to be honest, I didn’t take any photos that were that worth posting. But, for the sake of keeping track of memories:

This should be an interesting next few months, lots of fun stuff planned. For now, time to go to bed and read “Code Complete” <3 p.s. I finished reading the Gentleman Bastard's third book ("Republic of Thieves"). I really enjoyed it.