thrall.net

Leah Katherine Thrall

August 11th, 2008

Hi everybody! Leah Katherine Thrall was born at 6pm on Tuesday July 29th. She weighed 7lb 10.5oz. We are taking a lot of pics.

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It’s a Baby!

March 24th, 2008

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Caribbean

March 11th, 2008

We went to the British Virgin Islands for a week. It was awesome! I’ve uploaded some pics.

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Snow

February 26th, 2008

The weather is here

Glad it’s not beautiful

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Yesterday we left a car at the Coal Creek parking lot off Teton Pass, then drove up and parked at the summit of the pass. We hiked to the summit of Mount Glory, then traversed out past Little Tuckerman’s Ravine and dropped into the Coal Creek drainage. Here’s a sample, I will post more later.

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Grand Targhee Trip

February 20th, 2008

View from the porch:

Moonlight hike:

Taken around 11pm. Shooting at night is a lot of fun. I borrowed Dan’s portable tripod. There were two problems. Auto focus is hard at night, and manual focus isn’t really a feasible alternative with these cameras, especially lying in the snow in the dark. Also, I need to figure how to set the exposure settings to take a clear picture that is lit without making it look like daylight.

If the camera doesn’t detect enough light to auto focus, it will use the flash to light the scene for focusing purposes. So I was popping the flash, focusing, then closing the flash again. That seemed to work. I took a pic that had potential but put a low f stop on it, so I ended up with an unfocused background.

This is a lot of fun!

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Pebbles: a Study

February 15th, 2008

I recently realized that I would never get around to repairing my old cheap Chinon film SLR and decided to replace it with a Digital Rebel XTI.

I had been wanting a digital SLR for a while. It is really fun to shoot in RAW mode and then tweak the image before converting it to a JPEG.

Pebbles sits still and is very photogenic.

Sammy is not as easy to catch. Her chair is not in a well lit part of the room, and she has almost no contrast compared to Pebbles.

I really wish I had this camera when Sammy was a pup.

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Farewell My Lovely

February 15th, 2008

(With apologies to E. B. White).

I traded in my car the other day. To the unknowing observer, it looked like a 1998 Subaru Outback with about 160k miles. Maybe needing some rear suspension pieces, definitely needing a new clutch, power steering pump and valve cover.

Near Sand Dunes National Monument

But a closer look would have found dust from trips to Moab, a receipt from the car wash in Boulder where I used to go multiple times a month during the ski season and scars on the underbody from pushing maybe a little too hard on trips over Ophir Pass and the back of Bartlett Wash.

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Farewell Lucy

September 10th, 2007

We lost one of our ferrets the other day. Lucy had been sickly almost from the day we got her, but she was also the more lively of the two.

Back when we lived in Boulder, Alyssa’s ferret Tasha passed away. Tasha was a superb ferret, the kind of animal that is kind of an ambassador for the breed. Alyssa was missing having ferrets about and suggested we get a couple. At this point, we were living in Boulder so we went to the local mall pet store and picked out a couple that could have been (and quite possibly were) twins.

They came home with us in a cardboard box. Containing ferrets in an open-topped box is not easy. Especially not young ferrets. We had purchased a cage on wheels for the apartment. The designer of the cage had apparently not known ferrets very well, as the openings between the bars were easily navigated by our two girls. So they had the run of the place for the first two or three weeks.

Ferrets spend a lot of time sleeping, but when they are awake they are very playful creatures, especially when they are young. They love jumping around, and have been known to bite a toe or two when feeling especially frisky.

Lucy, you will be missed.

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