The Pomranka.Net

As is our tradition with most major holidays, we go over to Curt and Maryann’s for celebration and wonderful food.  With Curt being a rehabilitated chef, you can always count on having more food than you need and great friends.

I got a few more photos from the evening that I have uploaded to my flickr page in the Christmas 2009 set.

Of course we always stay too late whenever we visit Curt & Maryann, but with it being Christmas the girls were up and ready to go at 5:43am.  (I was so hoping to make it until 6.)

This year the girls went straight for their stockings and seemed pretty pleased, but the big fun came from the gifts under the tree.

This year I took a chance and gave Jennifer something she has said she wanted, but never asked for as a gift.  Although many of the women I worked with advised me against it, I got Jennifer a very fancy, stainless steel, long lasting, nose hair trimmer.

Naturally I dressed it up in a fancy jewelry box and gave it to her at the very end.  Only fitting for such an important gift.  But I think it was a good choice, because she did excuse herself to go try it right away.

The frenzy ended within an hour and about 15 minutes after saying it was the best Christmas ever, both girls amazed me by saying they were bored.  Bored at 7am on Christmas morning?!?!  I just don’t get it.

Fortunately, they realized that was just silly and they started playing with some of their new toys.

(Sorry for the poor quality of the camera phone, it was what I had.)

Not too much later, Jennifer’s parents arrived and round two of gift giving commenced.

Needless to say, our house was covered with gifts and wrapping paper.

After all the gifts we opened, Jen and I made a nice dinner (although 90 minutes later than we planned) and we enjoyed the day.

I have more photos from the day posted on my Flickr page under the Christmas 2009 set.  I did not get any amazing photos, but thanks to David Hobby (a.k.a. Strobist) I duplicated the lighting set up I had last year and was able to move all around the living room without worrying if the light would look good.

Now to dive into some of my gifts and see how I can make even better photos in 2010.

Popularity: 61% [?]

Olivia brought home this wonderful piece of art that is a house decorated for Christmas.  It is made up of 11 individual pieces of notebook paper and each page is a different room.  She notes that most of the windows have Christmas lights on them.  Starting at the top

Attic
Playroom  -  Office
Guest Room  -  Parents’ Room  -  Kids’ Room
Dining Room  -  Family Room  -  Living Room  -  Kitchen
Basement

Click the image for the original size on Flickr and see all the detail.

Popularity: 31% [?]

It is not often that Lily is calm, but the other night she was kicking back on the arm of the chair relaxing.

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Saturday morning is a great time to go to Bread Company (a.k.a. Panera Bread) with friends.  today I brought my camera and Lensbaby selective focus lens.  It was pretty grey and gloomy outside and the light was not great, so I cranked up the ISO to 1600 and dropped in a f2.8 aperture ring.  There is a decent amount of digital noise in many of the photos, especially the first two where I still had in a f8.0 aperture ring.

But playing around with it in Lightroom allowed me to salvage something.  I kinda like the look of Maria “RealFitMama” Sparks in the photo above.  There are more photos from the day, all taken with my Lensbaby at my photo site, all in the Saturday at Bread Co gallery.

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