I've neglected to blog recently, and rather than go and backdate posts like some people I know (which screws up my RSS feeder by the way), I'm just going to provide a quick summary of the goings on.

First, photography is becoming a primary hobby of mine. I'm finding my physics/optics knowledge is playing well to my understanding of photography, so I've been taking a lot of pictures.

Hence, Christine and I are finding more and more events to go to and cover. I mentioned the Johnette Napolitano and Noah Stone concert I went to. I also mentioned I bought Noah's Stone's album, but because of a mistaken shipping address, it got sent to the wrong address. When I asked Noah if he had sent the CD yet (how cool is this?) he just sent me another one to my correct address, and told me to give the other one away if I ended up getting it. I called the tenant in my old condo, and sure enough, he got it. I gave the CD to a friend at work under the condition that "if you like it, you have to tell someone about Noah".

On Sunday, May 6th, Christine and I got up early to go to the Seattle Art Museum's grand re-opening. We literally got up at 7:30am and drove into Seattle. We were browsing exhibits by 8:30am, and visited and took photographs of Pike Place and left right after lunchtime.

Otherwise, last Friday May 11th, we ended up going to the Mariners game in Seattle. Turns out it was the same night Blake Lewis (of American Idol fame) was singing the National Anthem. Sadly, horrendous Seattle traffic made us miss everything but the "and the home of the brave". Still it was a decent game, and I took some pictures of Ichiro at bat and fellow co-workers with my 70-300mm zoom lens.

On Sunday, we surprised Christine's mom down in Vancouver by greeting them right outside the movie theater where they had gone to see Spider Man 3. I took some pictures around the house while we waited for the family to gather, including some macro photography (handheld, didn't bring my tripod) of some of the flowers and leaves.

In other news, I was elated to hear that Comcast is dropping the shite that is the Microsoft DVR software which apparently only scourges those of us in Washington state. It's about time!

Finally, Gavin suggested checking out My Google Maps. This is precisely what I wanted to do for our upcoming European vacation, but I hadn't yet done the research to find out who (yahoo, msn, google) offered such route planning features on their respective mapping apps. I created one for Paris day 1 and Paris day 2. Stay tuned for Barcelona day 1, and Madrid day 1.