Agawam’s Ridgeview Park Meets The McColleys

At the back of Jen and Patrick’s home in Agawam is a large section of conservation land. There’s a stream that runs between the two, more or less, and during a visit there, today, Big Casey, Kaycie, Jessie and James wandered down to make a couple pictures…

This first one is almost directly at the back of the property line. The next one is a bit to the south, behind their neighbor’s line. The kids seemed comfortable running around in these woods, especially the neighbor’s kids who’ve lived there much longer. Big Casey was going a little crazy watching all of them because the terrain was still squishy and they could slip. But all went well.

Big Casey brought a camera and tripod, a jacket and heavy camera bag. Kaycie offered to carry the jacket. James offered to carry the bag. (He got as far as 10 feet and gave up.) All three kids seemed tired climbing up the hillside. They’ll get used to this over time, of course. They just need more running around time.

FYI – the photos were processed using some effects to punch things up. Otherwise, the images would be kind of boring. There’s not much color in the ground at this time of year, although we could see new plants coming up. Soon, it’ll all be green and buggy again and Nature’s own coloration will be all the special effects needed.

Mid-Winter Update

The blog’s been quiet for a while and, now that we’ve passed Valentine’s Day, it time for an update.

• We had a pretty good Valentine’s Day at Ooma’s Cookie Jar. We met a lot of new people and sold a lot of pastries. V-day was good last year, too.
• Lee is recovering from minor eye surgery. She said that at the Eye Clinic, they called her “the baby” because she was the youngest of the patients, by far, having this type of procedure done during the day. A couple of the medical folks recognized her. One said, “Hey, aren’t you the one with the bakery in Spencer?” …and the other said, “Didn’t I see you on Phantom Gourmet?”
• Patrick and Art have entered into a month long project called Thing-A-Day. It’s where you are challenged to come up with, and post, something creative each day during February. You can see all the TAD’s at the main site or you can check their individual efforts here: Art’s Eyecup pageor Patrick’s Mojogoing page.
• Casey started Project 52. This is similar to Thing-A-Day, but is weekly and lasts a year (52 weeks, hence the name).
• One side benefit of trying to sell a house is that it’s always clean because you’re never sure when a prospect will want to see it. We like having a clean house all the time.
• Sales of Casey’s music CD, “Really, I Can’t Sing” are doing about as expected. Zero. That’s because it ‘s not something that was never intended to be sold. In fact, the original mission was to simply make a permanent recording of last year’s musical projects. It’s easy to forget songs if you don’t write them down; it’s easier to just record them. Casey’s working on a new batch of songs for 2010. Maybe there’ll be a Can’t Sing 2 sometime in the future.

Congratulations to Chris and Karen

Click image to view a web gallery and slide show page...photo by Art Danek

July 18: It was a wonderful weekend for a wedding and, for sure, a couple wonderful people took advantage of that exact thing. This year’s weather pattern has had cool nights and comfortable days, but there have been some afternoon thunder showers teasing everyone for the few days before. Karen and Chris hit the jackpot, however. The storms decided to visit in the early morning hours and left the rest of the day perfect – picture perfect. Speaking of picture perfect, Art, Jeanne, Caz, and Patrick did the heavy lifting with photo and video services. It looked like a movie set. There were lots of other cameras in use, too, so Chris and Karen will have a lot of images to remember the day.

Click here to see some of the images. Read the rest of this entry »

Who’s just turned 70?

Hint: he loves beagles.

Yep…Bob Milewski recently made it past that timeline milemarker and Susan and Bruce set up a nicely run surprise party for him. We’ll have some pictures…

Click anywhere in the image to go to the Flickr site, or click here.