Tonight was one of the clearest nights I have ever seen. Interestingly, we also had a full moon tonight, and despite the 30 degree weather outside, I decided to head out and see if I could get a few shots of the moon with my 200mm lens.



After removing my fogged up lens filter and adjusting the camera settings a few dozen times, I was finally able to capture this shot of the moon.

Tonight we had the opportunity to go see Texas State play in the state rugby semi-finals. Despite the freezing weather, we all bundled up and headed down to campus to see the team square off in what turned out to be a fun game to watch.

Randi and Stella were in town as well and decided to tag along. Unfortunately, we weren’t able to stay longer than a half hour or so because we were all freezing. Well that and my camera’s flash batteries died prematurely.

[click thumbnails to enlarge]



Nevertheless, Texas State ended up pulling ahead and winning the game 20-12.

Despite its morbid title, Killer Bunnies is a really fun card game to play with friends. Tonight, we went over to Aaron and Katrina’s house for dinner and some games. Once we managed to keep Asher and Pollox (Aaron and Katrina’s puppy) from attacking each other, we were able to sit down and enjoy ourselves.

[click thumbnails to enlarge]



I thought I was doing fairly well, until I quickly became the target of everyone’s attacks and lost most of my bunnies. In the end and against my best efforts, Aaron emerged victorious.

With Jill spending most of the day up at her office, Asher and I took Brigham up on the offer to come up to his house for the afternoon and play. While there, we all decided to go on a short hike on the trails just behind Brig’s house. For the adventurous 2 and 3 year olds, this trail had everything: sticker bushes, tall grass, sewer tunnels and even a retaining wall to climb.

[click thumbnails to enlarge]



Mason effortlessly made his way up the 10 foot rock wall without any assistance in no time at all. Asher, however, did require a bit of a help up the first part, but quickly took command of the top half and finished out strong.

Asher has always loved books, so I shouldn’t have been surprised tonight when we were visiting Jill at her office that he wanted to go to the library at Texas State afterward. To try and accommodate him while disturbing as few students as possible, we went to the top floor where we found an electrical engineering book about luminescent materials (mostly opto-isolators and such).

[click thumbnails to enlarge]


He really enjoyed flipping through it and looking at the diagrams, but unfortunately, we weren’t able to stay long.

I’ve always known that Jill has been the poster child for mathematic excellence but Texas State is taking that a little too literally!

Asher had a friend over today and they had fun playing with the sidewalk chalk on the back porch. The only problem was that the chalk was a bit moist from this morning’s sprinklers and crumbled quite a bit.

[click thumbnails to enlarge]



Nevertheless, the colors are awesome and the artwork is a sight!

The three stages of a doctoral breakdown: Anger, Frustration and Loss of Mind.

[click thumbnails to enlarge]


Jill has officially fulfilled all of her course requirements for her PhD and is now just down to completing her research and writing her dissertation. Needless to say, things have been more hectic than ever before.

I really liked this photo of Jill. What’s awesome is that she never knows when I’m going to pull out the camera and start snapping. Isn’t it great that she’s always this great looking?

As Jill would quickly point out, I’ve come into quite a bit of camera equipment lately. Through the generosity of others, I’ve added two lenses, an external flash, and a remote to my lineup and I have been having a lot of fun exploring all the new photos that I can take.

Most recently, I got bored and decided to take some portrait photos of Jill and myself. To be fair, we didn’t really dress up for any of these, they were more about practicing composition than actually trying to look nice in them. Although I do think that Jill looks awesome, as always.

[click thumbnails to enlarge]

Okay, so technically my birthday was yesterday but Jill didn’t get back from her San Francisco trip until late last night, so we decided to wait until today. Jill decided to mix it up a little bit this year and had us all go geocaching for my presents. For those not familiar with geocaching, she essentially hid my birthday presents all throughout the city and gave me a list of GPS coordinates that I had to use to find them. At first I was a bit skeptical but it turned out to be a lot of fun!

[click thumbnails to enlarge]




Later, Brigham and Stephanie came over to enjoy an awesome strawberry cheesecake that Jill had made for the occasion. While here, we busted out the Wii and all enjoyed some time snowboarding, skateboarding and golfing.

Jill has been attending a mathematics conference in San Francisco for the last several days, so recently it’s just been me and Asher hanging around the house having fun and trying to keep out of trouble. One thing that has kept us busy is the new set of trains and tracks that Asher got for Christmas. I have to admit, it’s quite an engineering challenge to get all of these pieces to loop back on themselves!

[click thumbnails to enlarge]


Nevertheless, we have had a blast playing with them and it’s been fun just having guy time. Now if we can just figure out how to make the Scion ride the rails properly, we’ll be in business!

For Christmas Jill’s parents gave me an awesome flash for my camera. One of its many nifty features includes being able to angle the flash to bounce it off of the ceiling for a more natural look. Below you’ll see a series of three photos of Jill that show how much better photos turn out with this flash, followed by some photos that Asher and I took.

[click thumbnails to enlarge]




For most of these, I was holding the camera and Asher was triggering the shutter with a remote control.

Tonight the Longhorns played Alabama for the National Championship. Based on Asher’s expression, I’ll let you figure out how well it went.