Christmas' Last Gasp & Happy New Year!

The last of the Christmas pics.  I just love how the outside lights look in the rain.  Since I was planning on taking everything down between Christmas and New Years, I had to take the opportunity to shoot them.

These two were through the kitchen window.

We had the kids over for Christmas Day and we did munchies and deli sandwiches.  I also baked up some Italian knot cookies and I was dying to try these brownie trees.  They came out pretty good!

I should've taken a pic of the table with all the food on it but I was so busy putting everything out and everyone was digging in so all I got was a pre-visit picture of the Christmas crackers, cards and scratch tickets.  No one but me ever heard of crackers before, but they seemed to enjoy them, and we all wore our paper crowns the rest of the day.

Later that night, I went back outside to take a couple of pics of my neighbour's laser lights up in the trees.

This is with the brightness boosted quite a bit, as it was roughly 8:00 pm when I took them.

Another house down the street had them as well.

Couple more pics of the kitchen window.

I hope everyone has a happy and safe New Years Eve!  I always attempt to stay up for the ball dropping in New York but the past couple of years we were well on our way to sleepydreamland by 11 pm.  Gone are the days of all night Dead shows at the Oakland Coliseum! 

Happy New Year!

Light Shows

Oh must show you this gorgeous sunrise from November 19.  It was beautiful.

I wanted to try this technique and was surprised that it actually worked really well.  That cable shutter release was a good investment.  

Got up at the crack of o'god thirty one morning and was delighted by this pretty scene, even though there were some high clouds making it a little fuzzy.

Then the sun came up.

My next door neighbour got one of those cool laser Christmas lights thing that shoots thousands of points of green light all over their lawn, house and even the trees.

Accidentally left the shutter open when I was moving things, but it came out cool.

Out of focus, but you can see the lights up in the trees.  I really want to get one of these, but in blue.

In the course of surfing around to find one of those laser lights, I stumbled on a projector with  prism that shoots moving lights onto your house.  I went down to Home Depot and picked one up...it was only $20.  The pics don't do it justice cause all the lights swirl around.  All I need is a disco ball and Saturday Night Fever soundtrack and I could have an awesome par-tay.

Best twenty bucks I've ever spent!