21st - 24th

Inspired by the good Brian Koning's framed photography, I decided to make work of getting a some of my favorite photos enlarged and framed in my apartment. This has been on my to-do list for a few months now, but I finally ordered mats and backings from a website and they came last week. I had most of Friday off so was able to pick up some 8x12's of my pics, adhere the photos to the backings, and use two-sided tape to attach the framing mats to those. It's a nifty little process. I've done 5 so far, but I have ten more mats to use... Most of these photos have made a previous appearance on my blog:

I'm pretty happy with how they turned out. I'll eventually make a few more for the apartment and a couple for my office.

Saturday I spent the day recording some music. I usually lay down a vocal and guitar idea and then add bass, electric guitar, keyboard, maybe shaker; then I tap out a drum beat using the drum voice on my keyboard - just to get a general idea of how it would sound with a band. I've been recording on and off since April or so... and I only recently realized that I have quite a few song ideas coming together. Getting a really quality-sounding recording seems to be pretty complicated, but I'm gradually getting a little better/quicker at it. I was pleased with a song that I got down on Saturday.

Saturday night my church Bible study group did some Christmas caroling at a nursing home. I wasn't particularly looking forward to it... and maybe had a bad attitude about it, but it was actually really fun. I thought it'd be awkward. But I'd challenge anyone not to have a good time belting out familiar and less-than-familiar Christmas songs and verses... (there are a bunch of weird Christmas songs out there) with a group of friends. Musically, we had our strong and weak points, but that didn't seem to matter to all the folks at the nursing home. They thought we were a professional touring group.

...Had a x-mas party with some friends last night. It was a great time. It was an everybody-brings-something meal... and we followed it up with a game of spoons... of which I was the winner.

Tonight I had a Christmas Eve service at church and I'll fly out of Portland Christmas morning to head to Florida. It's been 8 months since I've been back. I'll arrive home @ 10:30 PM where there'll be a full house of family waiting to give and receive gifts. Then, vacation.

Saturday was spent snowshoeing again... This time, Brandon, Matt, and I headed to the Alpental area at Snoqualmie Pass (about an hour-and-a-half to the NE from Olympia). I've been here for snowshoeing once before and it's the same trailhead area for Snow Lake (where I backpacked back in August). We picked up some tire-chains on the way because we heard a news report that traction tires were required through the pass, but it turns out that they're only officially required for trucks and over-sized vehicles. As always, I was a bit nervous that the conditions wouldn't be quite right, but as always I was pleasantly surprised. Three was over 3 feet of snow to walk on with a light snow falling.

About two weeks ago a couple people were killed in an avalanche on the trail to Snow Lake. We decided to steer a bit clear of that area and stayed mostly in the middle of the valley... but sometimes the vertical is just a bit too tempting so we did some climbing around on the opposite side from where the avalanches happened.

Brandon blazing our trail:
It's always extremely quiet when you're surrounded by snow-covered-trees.
At the far end of our trek we found a small waterfall:
Matt enjoing a satsuma:I thought these two little x-mas trees looked cool. I imagine either of these pictures could make a pretty nice winter/holiday computer wallpaper...
Again, I've never been disappointed with a snowshoeing experience.

rhythms

Every morning I wake up at 6:30, shower, get ready, put coffee on, have a bowl-and-a-half of Frosted Mini Wheats, and read with a cup of coffee for about an hour. I'm a big fan of my morning routine. The coffee is a Batdorf/Bronson Dancing Goats Blend (named after the legend that coffee was discovered in Ethiopia by a farmer whose goats ate coffee beans and went nuts). Here is this morning's cup of coffee: (you can't tell by the picture, but today it was just a bit weak)... Here is a close-up of my Christmas Tree:
Here's a close-up of one of my drawings:
It's been raining a ton in the NW the last few days (check out the Konings' blog for a picture of some flooding in Olympia), but it was cool to see a rainbow at sunrise outside my apartment this morning.
I'm back in the habit of drumming pretty much everday again. We're trying to control the volume of the drums at church, so I recently ordered a "Acoustical Sound Trap" designed to eat up a lot of the volume and high end sounds that come from the kit. It seems pretty effective so far, but we'll see how it goes on Sunday with the full band. I was afraid it would be ugly, but I actually think it looks great! Here's what it looks like:

Snowshoeing Saturday

Saturday was the first snowshoeing opportunity of the year. It was awesome to be back out there -- up to our knees in the fluffy white stuff. The crew: the 3 Konings, the dog, and Melissa's sister Michele. We headed south and east about two hours -- and set out directly across form the White Pass Ski area. There were some cross-country skiing trails we could use, but what's the point of snowshoeing if you're gonna stick to the trail?

The trouble with getting sweet pictures from snowshoeing is that whenver you see something you want to take a picture of, you have to decide whether you really want to: take your gloves off, open your back-pack, dig out the camera bag, unzip it in the frigid air, holding the camera still while shivering, feeling the trigger with your frozen pointer finger, and then replacing the camera, zipping the bag, packing the pack, and putting the gloves back on. I know I'm a big baby... but here's a few that I did find it worth shooting:

As always, it was a really great time. I've never not had a swell time on a snowshoe excursion. There's such an incredible peace about being in the middle of the woods, surrounded by nothing but snow, trees, and mountains... with complete silence except for the poof poof of your footsteps in fresh snow. The perfect ingredients: Snow, silence, solitude, retreat, friends, warm coat... and of course burgers and fries on the way home.