Declan’s Blog

Erin’s officially a high schooler! On Wednesday, she got an award for her work in the Drama Club:

Here are the happy parents!

Nice work Erin!

(with Mr. Sykes, the drama coach)

Then on Thursday, Erin walked for her promotion ceremony:

There was pretty music:

which caused a lot of hugging:

and smiles:

and posing:

Last Sunday I attended the 2009 Maker Faire in San Mateo, CA.

I’ve always wanted to go and Elaine and I were up in SF for the weekend, so I made it! I walked into the building above and assumed that was the whole thing. It was an enormous place with tons of exhibits.

The first one that caught my eye was a dude polishing a piece of glass for a telescope mirror:

I didn’t quite get how it worked, but it was fascinating to watch.

Next I saw a huge living sculpture of old plastic 2 liter bottles:

There was a line and pulley system that caused the ring of bottles to undulate in a wave.

There were many robot sculptures:

and scary vacuum guns!

These bike wheel LEDs were very cool! I almost bought the kit, but resisted… My birthday is coming up, hint hint…

I think this was part of The Long Now’s 10,000 year clock. I just thought it was cool:

Next I saw Tesla coils! They set up a board with hot dogs along a wire for the current to pass through:

Then there were more robots:

Some of the robots got all evil and started decapitations:

SOLDERING IS NOT A CRIME!

I was getting hungry by this point, so I stepped out of the building to get some food and discovered that there was 4x more Faire to cover:

This one was giving me the eye:

I want to try hanging a camera from a kite! Can I borrow your camera?

The robots were really being mean to children even…

Then they went all cyborg on this poor innocent:

This is the robot conversion factory:

The humans allowed to live had to pass through a life sized Mousetrap Game:

One hall was full of crafts and the witches who ply their trade:

and odes to their false idols:

ok, that’s a pretty cool ode - a yarn FSM!

And what would a trip to NoCal be without hippies and their dirty habits:

It’s sad what happened to some of the humans:

but I will admit to eating all the chocolate and vanilla ribbon off of the Hostess Cupcake car! Mmm, delicious!

Sheep lady’s twittering about seeing something stranger than her:

What could it be?

WOOP, der it is:

Some brave humans fought back the robot horde:

But in the end, who can fight robots?

Especially when they use child sympathizers:

I blame the XBoX generation for this madness.

But wait! There’s hope!

Mentos and Diet Coke save the day! And we all fly away:

and eat mushrooms:

and wear awesome coats:

Oh yeah, I ran into Andrew, Kim, and Site Con #3 (dammit, I can’t remember his name. Nice kid… )

More pix here:

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I’ve been using this interface for the last few weeks, and it’s making me physically ill:

It boggles the mind…

We got up, had some good Mexican food, then hit the road to AZ. We stopped at too many “trading posts” where Erin was overwhelmed with the selection:

In the whole trip, the only place we ran into a little weather was outside of Flagstaff where we picked up a light dusting of snow:

which broke as we came back down to the desert:

and gave me my only half-decent sunset picture of the trip:

I got to shoot London Bridge at night, something I’ve wanted to do for a long time:

Day:

Night:

Erin got bored, so we experimented with light writing:

Sadly, this summoned a monster which ate us. the end.

Actually, I kicked its butt:

We drove around the lake back into California:

and made a very important pit stop in Julian, CA:

In the time it took to take this picture, and it being Easter Sunday, Mom’s actually locked the door and denied us crumble topped apple pie goodness! So we went across the street to the malt shop and got a lovely piece of pie!

Erin looks shocked because I got her drinking a glass of ichor. Yep, she’s a vampire. See how sparkly she is in all the pictures.

Nine days, lots of bug guts, and 3000 miles later, we made it back home!

Yep, pretty much sums the place up.

Man, it’s taking me forever to finish writing up this trip… I gotta stop taking so many pictures…

My sister Diardra and her hubby Doug live in Arvada, CO right next to Denver:

Diardra gave us directions to the 16th Street Mall

which is right by the capitol:

Erin Yelped and found us some awesome Gyros at Shish Kabob:

We used Yelp a ton on this trip. With the location based iphone app, it worked very well!

I’d done some research before the trip and found that one of my favorite brewers is very close to Diardra’s house, so we took one evening and headed to Oskar Blues’ restaurant in Lyons, CO.

They are one of the first craft brewers who can their stuff, but I wanted to taste it from the tap. So I did:

God Bless sampler trays… Lotsa of lovely flavors and no huge hangover the next day

The place is very festive:

The staff was super nice. I was disappointed that the can price was no cheaper than our local places in San Diego. I had dreams of filling the trunk with cases of Ten Fidy and ruling the SoCal market.

The next morning we were supposed to drive to Albuquerque but how do you get THAT close to Rock Mountain National Park and not go take some pictures… This pattern seemed to rule the trip and make for very late night arrivals…

It’s a very dangerous park:

filled with scary creatures:

As usual, I’m ignoring the “thin ice” signs, although I think I was safe this time:

See the pretty lake behind us? Use your imagination. Or a large blow dryer…

Again, it was so hard not to just sit in one place and watch the light change. I like this shot, but imagine it at sunset…

“Welcome to Bear Lake!”

Six hours later we were on the road to AAAAAAaaaalbuquerque. Erin shot some neat weather:

Then it got dark and I made her listen to REO Speewagon for 8 hours straight!

I think I only have one picture of her with a closed mouth. This isn’t it…

Bryan’s learning how to count:

We saw Wolverine and didn’t go out for sushi.

Erin’s school play opened last night and I got some nice shots:

Erin and her short Mom:

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My brother Aidan and his wife Renia live in Edwards, CO:

But let’s be real, the real reason for the trip is JACK!

Jack is our new nephew and I hadn’t met him before this. He’s a wonderful little dude with a great disposition. Looks like he’ll have our sense of humor too:

He’s very curious about funny looking faces:

and he knows how to be cool:

Let’s just face it, this is a cute kid…

I didn’t really get to do much concentrated photography on this trip since we were on the move so much, but I did shoot this one night and was pretty happy with it:

I’d have been happier if the netting wasn’t there, but it was cold and dark and I didn’t notice it until I had the tripod all set up.

Aidan, Renia, and Jack live in a beautiful area, very close to Vail. We walked around their neighborhood quite a bit:

and took a side trip up to Vail to see the village and commune with the residents:

This dude was WAY into me:

After 2p, you can ride the gondolas up the mountain for free, so we did:

and enjoyed the beautiful views:

Erin made some sort of Ice Princess Shrine…

Then we all went out and enjoyed some “waters”:

and green goop:

We had a great time getting to meet Jack, and reuniting with Aidan and Renia!

I’d booked us into the motel just outside of Bryce. It turns out that it’s a huge complex of buildings, but easy to navigate and quite close to the park. We woke the next morning to a mysterious substance coating the car:

I haven’t owned an ice scraper since Illinois, but thanks to my genetic influence, Erin’s a genius and we used the room key cards to scrape the windows.

We had a 7-8 hr drive to Denver ahead of us, so we swore we’d just spend an hour or so in Bryce… how hard could that be?

Erin wanted to prove she’d been in snow:

I made the world’s smallest snowman:

Erin shot a lot of our pix from the passenger seat, so she wanted a clean window:

Bryce is full of scenic view of hoodoos. What’s a hoodoo?

Those are. The way I understand it, the area used to be 3000 ft sand dunes, then a sea settled above that. The minerals in the sea seeped down into the sand, inconsistently, forming columns of cement in the sand. As the land was pushed up and the water ran out, it carried away the loose sand, leaving these amazing columns of fractal sand and cement.

There was usually someone at any stop who would trade a group shot if you did one for them:

The variations on the formations were beautiful:

I need a week in just this one spot to do it justice with a camera:

Ok, you get the point - it’s beautiful and everyone should go see it!

Six hours later, we dragged ourselves out of the park to start the 7 hr drive to Edwards, CO to see my brother. We lost the light soon, but I’ll never forget the drive: