Lighting Strikes!

I must've taken nearly 200 pics to catch about three good imageas of lightening striking, this being the best shot. I know... looks horrible. I was holding the camera on the sill of my bedroom window with a 2-1/2 second shutter time (f/3.5). Trying to stay steady for that long caused obvious camera shake. But it's an amazing shot (for a rookie's first time)!

Mother's Day

Happy Mother's Day, mommy!
:-)








I saw my Gr'ma and Gr'pa Kenyon on Mother's Day.
:-)











Here's my mommy and Kris in the parking lot of IHOP where we went for a pancake breakfast.



And here's my friend Payton, Kris' li'l jewel.



And here's Greg, always ready with a quick joke or some interesting trivia.


Here's Nick flexing his muscles doing this crazy balancing trick with me.

SCUBA

Like I said, this was a business trip for Laurie, and a vacation for me. So I persued a life-long dream to go SCUBA diving.

Here I am in the SCUBA pool learning rule #1: BREATH!! There's like 5 rules... really, I can't remember 'em, but bottom line is when you're out there you need to pay attention to the instructor's visual signals and don't touch anything not handed to you.
My instructor handed me this sea creature. It's called a Pencil Urchin. It's very stiff. When turned upside down (and the right side up), it's spiney arms move so fluidly, like a flower trying to face the sun light, only faster).




Notice the rusty color. You can see in the next photos that my fingers are stained with a chalk-like substance that rubbed off while handling this creature.


This is so awesome... to feel practically weightless and soar through the ocean like I'm flying.

Guess what? I ran out of air!! I looked at my air guage and noticed it was in the yellow zone. Not to worry. That means "10 mins of air left... turn around and head back." So, we started heading back. Breathing felt harder, and I looked at my meater again and noticed it was in the red zone. That means "5 mins of air left... get your head above water." No worries. I reached for my instructor's extra resuscitator and shared his air (like I was trained to do (twhoo!)). After a while he gave me my reciscitator back when we were just a minute or so from the spot where we disappeared into the deep blue. Yeah... breathing felt real tough! Then, my instructor pulled these valves to add air to my vest so that I would float to the surface. There wan't much air left. When I surfaced, I had to manually blow air into my vest to keep me boyant. :-)

It was the end of the dive anyway. It was one of the most incredible experiences of my life, and I can't wait to do it again one day!!

Aloha!

We're in Hawai'i!! Laurie had a business trip to Wailea, Maui for a convention with the Idaho and Oregon automobile dealers. I couldn't pass up the opportunity to tag along, so I booked a flight to be with my wife in paradise (she worked, I was on vacation). Enjoy the photos in the gallery (I apologize in advance for the quality of some, as this is the first few days I got to use and learn my new Canon 30D).