Caleb's First Place Art

At the Valley Art Show in Duvall this year Caleb took first place for his oil painting. Emma had a first place entry a couple of years ago. Here is Caleb's on the wall at a local restaurant.

"Whidbey Hill" by Caleb (14)

Emma's Keyboard Creation

Here is a video of a song that Emma composed on our Yamaha keyboard. Caleb did the camera work and Dad did the video editing. Enjoy!

Colin's Art

Colin created some artwork in Paint. Looks strangely like Mario, doesn't it?

My 14th Birthday!

When I turned 14 I joked that I didn't feel any different from when I was thirteen and 364 days old, but I suppose I have a new-found authority. This is mostly because at the age of 14 I'm allowed to legally drive our dinghy ( with a 65 M.P.H. motor ), even if I still have to ask Mom and Dad to drive.

On my actual birthday I didn't actually have a party ( don't worry I had one later ), instead I got some pre-party gifts.Some of these: A wii game "Endless Ocean", a dolphin PartyLite candle holder, The art of drawing people kit, and The Up soundtrack piano book (Rilla and Cian accidentally gave it to me to early.)

For the first party we celebrated with Dad's side of the family, hosted at our house. We all had a great time ,and I got more gifts and some gift cards too.
For the second party with moms side I got another wide variety of gifts including, (Colin and Cian's favorite), two Super Soaker water guns; imagine.

Well, I've had a great year, and here's hoping for another.
-Caleb

InDesign CS5 & Flash

Adobe CS5 was officially announced/launched today! I've been working on InDesign CS5 for the past 18 months or so and wanted to show some cool animations that can be created in InDesign and then exported to Flash.

I took individual images of the family with their iPods (or borrowed iPods...from me). Dropped them into Photoshop and created the iPod ad-like image. Placed both images into InDesign then did a fade-out animation on the top image on mouse-over. This was exported to Flash and embedded here.

And this proves that Flash can work with iPods! (...okay maybe that is stretching things a little). Just mouse over the image below or open in a new window with this link.

Easter 2010

We hosted an Easter Celebration at our house Sunday afternoon, with the usual feast with family/friends. The highlight is typically watching the kids hunt for Easter eggs in the front yard. Here is a picture of Rilla with her Easter egg bag.

Rilla (6) Easter 2010

Honey, what happend to the license plates?

You know that sinking feeling...after a tough day at work, the commuter van drops you off at your car and you realize something's wrong. Sure enough someone had stolen my license plates! Fortunately they couldn't get the front one off - which made it easier to explain to the officer who took the report, that it really had been stolen. Within a couple of days we had new plates and all is well. Bummer of a pre-April Fools joke though!