A few catch-up items before we get to the most recent events…
In mid-January we took the kids to see Frozen on Ice, which made at least the third different telling of the story we’ve seen before us. The kids were totally into it, and it made for a nice evening out as a family.
I started practicing with some night photography, using the intervalometer that the Parkinsons gave me for Christmas. This one was a 2:30 exposure that turned out pretty cool.
Mid-February came and it was time for Jenn and me to go out west for some continuing education. Prior to that, though, we spent an evening in Boulder City, NV, a morning at the Hoover Dam, and then a few days in Springdale, UT, hiking Zion National Park. The Dam is nothing short of unbelievable and Zion is simply amazing.
The engineering feat that the Dam represents, and considering that the Dam literally feeds the country fruit and vegetables year round, and not ignoring that it was a project that finished ahead of schedule, under budget, and then paid the Feds back in full with interest… it’s just unreal.
I hired a professional photographer,
Seth Hamel, affiliated with
Zion Adventure Company, to teach me how to be a night photographer and to take good star trail photographs. Seth was not only a good teacher, giving me tips and tricks that would have taken me weeks at best to discover, but he was also a lot of fun to spend those hours with as we took a bunch of photos of the stars. (It would have been a downer to get stuck with someone without a fun personality!)
After we were through in the field, he took me back to his studio and showed me how to use Lightroom (been putting this off for a while, but it’s high time to pull the trigger) and how to
stack star trail photos. Here’s what I got (and the stack is at the top of this post):
We hiked nearly 30 miles in 3 days in very different areas. The first day we hiked to Observation Point at the top of the canyon, the second day was spent at Kolob Terraces, and the third day we hiked on BLM territory at Eagles Crag. We could’ve spent a week there if our feet could have held up, and Zion (along with Bryce & Arches) is on the agenda for our family when the kids get a little older.
Sunrise in Springdale, UT |
First day in the canyon:
Then Kolob:
Then some BLM land:
And all the while, we ate wonderfully. Our breakfasts at
Red Rock Inn were fantastic, and our dinners at
Oscars, the
Whiptail Grill and Amigos were really, really good, as well. And the burgers at Dillinger's in Boulder City were just plain as good as they come.
It was actually a downer to go to Vegas. There was just no way for it to stack up to Zion in our minds. Neither Jenn nor I are really Vegas-type people. After making the mental adjustments necessary, we were able to enjoy ourselves. The conference,
Western Veterinary Conference, was first class, and we enjoyed the speakers. I enjoyed the social media aspect, Tweeting with old friends, new friends, and people I don’t even know, and meeting up with people that I’d only ever interacted with on Facebook was neat, too. It was particularly interesting to meet speakers and others and have them say, “Oh, yeah! I’ve seen you on social media.” Cool! (I think.) I got to meet with a focus group for some research I'm working on (well, I co-wrote the survey and I'll be philosophizing about the results, others who are much smarter at statistics than I am will be breaking down the survey results), and the mix of people was really cool. Then I met up with a guy from Nebraska who contacted me after he read
my article in Veterinary Economics. He had many kind words for how the article helped him personally and professionally. All of these experiences made for a neat and unique continuing education conference experience.
It was a
real pleasure to run into
Dr. Threlfall. He's wearing the green jacket of past presidents of Western Veterinary Conference, but he was as humble and friendly as ever. Jenn worked for a couple of years during veterinary school preparing Dr. Threlfall's lecture slides, and he was the one professor with whom we shared meals outside of school. He and his wife, Barb, even came over to our little place on Melrose one evening for a dinner. Good times, those were.
We walked about 2/3 of the strip (in awful shoes), watched a Bellagio fountain show, people-watched a lot (OMG!), held our breaths walking through casinos, and we had a really good dinner at
Fleur.
It was good to come back, to be with the kids again, and to get back into the swing. Not sure if we'll go back to Western again. It was a
great conference, but Vegas... not sure we want to do Vegas again. But it was nice to get away and to connect with new folks. Many thanks to our parents for watching the kids and keeping up with all that is involved with them. They made our trip possible!
