The Think Tank

What better reason could there possibly be to route for the ducks?

The holiday season has come and gone, along with the whole of 2010.  For me,  it did so in a blur, the last month of the year passing so quickly that I am just now ready to settle in and have our annual Holiday party (which, of course, took place a month ago).

I’ll try to give a quick rundown the goings on.  I will also put photos of the events up on friends.thinktankgallery.com throughout the day, but in the mean time, click through for all the details.

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Here is a video of our fireworks from last night.  I apologize for the wobbliness: I shot it one-handed on my phone and as such it turned out a little Blair Witch-ish. Still, I think you can get an idea. If you want to get a better experience, you should come celebrate with us next year!

We picked up our Christmas trees this weekend.  As always, we picked out and cut trees for a whole group of people, including several friends who would otherwise not have any Christmas Tree at all, Maure’s nursing home, and Aunt Becky picked up two trees for a homeless shelter in Corbett.  The grand total came out to 23 trees.

We  cut all of the trees yesterday morning and then set about manually baling the largest ones so they would in the the Janes’ truck, Judy’s truck (which she loaned us for the occasion), and a U-Haul trailer we rented.  Jane thought we should try baling the trees like you would string up a roast, which sounded like a reasonable idea, but in practice failed miserably.  Next we moved on to the Thigh Master method that I cooked up, where I would straddle the tree and squeeze the branches up so we could bale them, but that also failed.  Finally I noticed that there was a trailer sitting empty which had tall walls made up square steel tubes spaced about two feet apart.  I drug a tree over there, and pulled it partially through the bars, compressing the branches up so we could tie them.  That worked much better.  It was nowhere near as fast or effective as a real baler, but it worked pretty well and allowed us to fit all of the trees into the space we had available.  Plus, it makes getting the trees in the house much, much easier.

After loading the trees up we discovered a small snafu in our plan: Mom had gone with Aunt Becky to her house to prepare lunch, but she inadvertently took the keys to Judy’s truck with her.  Naturally I did not discover this until I went to start the truck.  We called Mom and she and Becky came back, but Corbett  to Estacada is about an hour’s drive, so that pretty much sucked for everyone involved.

After we got the keys, we headed back to Becky’s for a great lunch, then we had to scoot so we could get the trees dropped off here at home and Maure and I could get to the Blazer game.

This was the first year in many that I forgot to bring my camera, so I did not get any pic’s of the cutting.  I did link to some shots of us picking them out, a couple shots of the portion of the trees that are here.  Mom and I will don our Christmas Elf  hats and deliver the trees to their appropriate locations this afternoon.

According to the official countdown clock, we we have 13 days and 3 hours to get the house ready for the Christmas Party.  We’ve made some decent progress so far, but its time to get a crackin’!

Over the last couple of months I have been working on creating a new, sleeker design for Think Tank Gallery, the site where we are hoping to sell some of our photography as well as framing and matting services. It’s more or less functional now, and even has some content on it. I am continuing to refine the site and add more content and products to it, including a photography related blog.

My plan is to update that blog every couple of weeks with some of my favorite shots, and maybe some additional info on photography related topics.  I’m still figuring all of that out, but I decided to kick it off with a Photo of the Month.  I chose this picture for the month of November.

I have stuck an RSS feeder in the sidebar on this site which will show the most recent post at Think Tank Gallery.  You can click on the link to the right to see the full post on thinktankgallery.com

Friends.ThinkTankGallery.com is still the same as it always has been, a photo-sharing site for friends and family. I decided to build the new site simply so that we would have a more professional looking site where we can sell photos and framing to people who may or may not know us.

I know its gets a little confusing having all the sites with similar names, and I apologize for that.  However, all of the various Think Tank sites can be accessed from here.  Hopefully my friends and family will use this site as the central hub for all the others.