Looking Through Some Old Photos

Well, not "old" per se, just not new.

June 2011.
Lots of great things happened in June that I documented with my camera. It's times like these that I'm grateful for my camera-journal. I forgot half of this stuff even happened, let alone that they all happened in June!

• Family portraits of the Ploeger Family (not pictured below)
• Girls Camp (not pictured below)
• Company golf tournament (not pictured below)
• Katie and Eric's wedding (not really pictured below...just shots of the temple)
• 1-year birthday party at Rock Canyon park (for June, I think)
• A visit from the Vic & Mona fam (shots on the Heber Creeper)
• Haskin family campout (this technically happened in July, since it was for the 4th of July, but it's in my June pictures folder, so I'm keeping it on the list)

Salt Lake Temple

Salt Lake Temple...AT NIGHT

That's Jeff and Dan making it a team effort to roll down the hill. And if you want to see some seriously sweet hill-rolling daring, check out Jeff as he takes a head-first leap down the hill, Princess-Bride style!

I call this: Waiting For A Train That Will Never Come

But mainly that's because they were waiting for the "men" to finish buying the tickets, and because the train was on the other side of the station, so technically, it never would get to where they were.

Playing an intricate game of dirt bingo. The rules are top secret, so I'll only say that it involves shovels, two toy cars, and a banana. And I've already said too much.

This is a still from Look Who's Talking 3.

And if you believed that, wait till you see my still of Home Alone 5.

Family, Food, and Fireworks!

Here are some shots from my day today. Minimal explanations needed.

My niece Becca got baptized today! This was taken at the family potluck at Sherry's house afterwards.

Apparently Paul can't look normal in any photograph, ever.  Chris is working on helping him with that. ;)

At dinner earlier this evening.  Unfortunately it's out of focus, but Dad did his usual dinner trick with balancing one fork off the knife another fork.

Sparkler parade!

Accidentally over exposed the photo, but I got a cool shot out of it!

365 Reject #1

365 Reject #2

Easter

I didn't really "celebrate" Easter this year...at least not in the sense of the Easter Bunny.

But my brother and his family did come over to watch conference with us and dye a few Easter eggs.  Of course, I forgot to get a single shot of the cool eggs we colored, but I did get these awesome shots of my niece after she rubbed easter egg all over her face:

Priceless.

My Christmas

Sadly, I hurt my back on Christmas morning, so I took a sparse amount of pictures during my 10-day break.  Still, there's something to be said of minimalistic photography...

I may not have taken many, but I got a few good ones (when they weren't blurry):

Us on Christmas morning eating our huge breakfast before opening presents! (BEFORE I hurt my back)

Baby Lauren's first exposure to Christmas Crackers (her parents' as well, I believe).

I love babies in big hats...and they usually like them too!

My brother James and his family came to visit the week after Christmas, and his youngest son was a crack-up.  Here's one of my favorite shots of William watching The Iron Giant for the first time...CLASSIC!

I never got any good shots of James and Rachel, or many of their kids, but this one of James makes me laugh (and actually, Christine took it):

Christmas!

As I prepare another post of a few of my photos from Yosemite, I have to say how much I'm loving the Christmas feeling in the air right now!  I'm not in to listening to Christmas music 24/7 this year, but hearing it in the background at stores and occasionally on my iPod when I shuffle the songs just gives me a warm fuzzy!

In honor of the upcoming festive season, I'm going to add a song to this blog post.  This is one of my favorite Christmas songs, but I prefer the version by The Waitresses.

Music Playlist at MixPod.com

Ok, on with the pictures!

Visiting Family

So...in the theme of the Yosemite trip, I'm posting the choice shots I took while we visited James and Rachel's family in Patterson. Again, this is out of order because we hit Yosemite first before visiting family, but these are the shots I got to editing first, so there you go.

After we arrived Saturday afternoon and had lunch at James' house, we all took a field trip to the local corn maze and pumpkin patch in Patterson. The original idea was to pick out pumpkins for the kids to carve, but after paying admission just to walk through the 'gate', we ended up just playing around with all the fun things they had for kids. First up was the giant pyramid of hay bales that the kids immediatey ran to when we arrived:

After conquering that 'hurdle' the kids made a b-line for the kids maze made out of hay bales.  The hay bales were tall enough for the smaller kids to actually navigate blindly through the maze and small enough for the older kids to climb on and play leap frog with each other.  It was so fun to watch all the kids try to jump from one "wall" to the other.  There were a few misses, but no injuries...and they had a blast. 

Pooped!

Here's my favorite shot of Josh leaping across a larger gap in the hay walls, while his younger brother Will sat staring into the sunset with what can only be described as a casually unaffected demeanor.

Priceless!

After a few more falls and some pretty cool sucessfull leaps, the kids moved on to the 'sandbox' of corn kernals (pictures to follow in another post).  While most of the children gleefully stuffed their shirts full of the feed corn in the boxes, James took little Will to the pyramid to race to the top...

James, being the awesome dad that he is, made a very convincing attempt at beating Will to the top without actually beating him there. 

The king of the mountain shot was awesome!

[Insert sarchasm font here] Then came time for the much-anticipated pig races!  It's a time-old tradition at corn mazes such as this one to starve poor little piglets all afternoon and then set them loose in a track-like pen while they all run as fast as they can to the other end for their dinner.

Even if I don't belive in the game, I still enjoyed watching the kids...

All-in-all...a great day at the corn maze!

Halloween!

I'll get back to the Yosemite posts after Halloween. 

My sister and I were so excited about our costumes this year.  We put tons of time, planning, effort and money into these suckers, and then had nowhere to go to show them off.  Of course we didn't start out with that plan.  In fact, we had a few different parties we planned on hitting once Halloween rolled around, but it didn't end up working out.  Long story short, we ended up driving around town, checking all our old Halloween party locations in hopes of finding somewhere close to home that we could show off our flashy costumes.  Alas, we came up empty-handed and found ourselves parked in a creepy deserted parking lot at 10pm, wondering what to do. 

In the end, we merely went to dinner and saw a scary movie with a few friends...
Not the best Halloween plans ever, but at least we left the house. :)

If you can't tell what we are...that's actually not that shocking since it seems that no one has even heard of the movie, Whip It. 

We are roller derby players from the above-mentioned movie, and we made up names for ourselves to go with our outfits.  Also, you can't tell in these pictures, but we had the full roller derby outfits on, including the knee pads and roller skates...AWESOME!