Random Brain Dump

This past Friday, the preschoolers put on a holiday show by singing a slew of christmas songs. Well, I may be biased but it has got to be the cutest show I ever seen. Katelyn loves singing, but we were afraid that an audience might make her shy so Suzanne encouraged Katelyn to sing the songs out loud. Turns out that wouldn’t be a problem.

When we arrived at the classroom, the children were sitting and preparing for the program. We waved at Katelyn and she excitedly waved back at us. She wore her Santa’s Helper dress Suzanne recently got for her. I was relieved to see Katelyn seemed happy, knowing that at least she wasn’t too uncomfortable to perform. The parents filled in with each ready with a camera or camcorder. The cameras flashed the children almost non-stop— the parents turned paparazzi! I have to admit that I probably was the one who took the most shots but I minimized the flashes as not to startle them during their performance. (checkout the December monthly gallery for some of pics).

The program began and Katelyn started singing on top of her lungs. Actually, she yelled out the lyrics. Very quickly, the entire thing became a shouting match between the kids trying to outdo each other. Suzanne & I just looked at each other surprised & amused. Not exactly the type of renditition we encouraged her, but it was so funny the way the Katelyn strains her neck and screams out each song. We didn’t mean to ask her to yell out the songs. But Katelyn sang/yelled every word of very songs, not missing a single beat. She was so cute, all of the kids were.

The singing lasted a good 20 minutes. My favorite was when they sang It Must Be Santa. After the singing, Santa came for a visit and all the kids got to sit in his lap. When Santa asked what she wants for Christmas, Katelyn blurted out: “I want walkie-talkies!” Well, that was a different wish for sure. 🙂 I had no idea where she got the idea of wanting a pair of walkie-talkies.

Well, we certainly enjoyed Katelyn’s first ever performance. She was wonderful, demonstrated that she can follow instructions, memorize lyrics, work as part of a group and perform in front of a crowd. She definitely made me a very proud Daddy that day. And I’m already looking forward to her performances in her coming school years. Chalk this up as one of those pleasures of being a dad!

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Weather getting colder, malls getting crowdier, workplace getting quieter, my spending increasing… must be that time of the year. Merry xmas everybody! 🙂

We promised the kids photos with Santa, so Katelyn was very excited all weekend long. The line was rather long, but we managed to get to the mall early so we didn’t have to wait very long. I tried to coax Allison into it by giving her a view of Santa and told her of the goodies she’s going get from Santa. This santa looks pretty authentic, real white beard & everything. When it was our turn, Katelyn ran straight up to Santa’s lap. On the other hand, Allison just bursted into tears and screamed when I tried to put her in Santa’s lap. Oh well, next year for Allison I guess…

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I am starting the process of back posting of previous galleries including the monthly galleries and travels/trips.

One of the trips posted is the rafting trip with the Tieu’s and a small group of friends at the South Fork of the American River this past summer. We took the trip the day after I left Vitria. It’s sort of a celebration of a job switch for me. We went with All-Outdoors and were generally happy with their service. I went with them years ago. Our guide was a bit inexperienced and the rapids were class 3 so I find them a bit tame. But all in all, it was a lot of fun. I finally got around to post the pics here: trips/rafting_2005

Halloween is always one fun event the kids look forward to. This year both of the girls dressed up as Minnie Mouse. We took them to Great America (an amusement park) for the Nickelodeon halloween parade. Suzanne & Betty then took the girls for a quick round of trick-or-treating, after which they, of course, gorged on the candies they worked so hard for!

Check out the October pics:monthly/october_2005

I have been using Coppermine to manage my photos last few months. While powerful, its cool features are eclipsed by the overly complex interface. In addition, I had a hard time trying to integrate it with my blog. I ended up with two completely different skins for the blog & the gallery.

I stayed up late last 2 nites redoing my photo gallery. I dumped Coppermine and switched over to Gallery mainly because a plugin called WPG2 that enables photos from Gallery to be embedded within my blog. Finally, I used Peter Near’s theme for get the same look of my blog for gallery.

I had to spent a few hours hacking things a bit to get everything working together. So now, what do I get for 2 sleepless nites?

• Uniform look for both the photo galleries & blog
• Random image in the sidebar
• Albums can be embedded in the blog
• Individual photos can be embbedded in the blog

A few broken links here & there but I’ll get to fixing those later. I’ll take me a while to migrate all the photos. For now, things should be more seamless now. I’m quite satisfied with the result! 🙂

In June, I quit Vitria and we sold our house. Needless to say, it was rather hectic 3 months for me between April and June. I had a week off between jobs and needed to unwind; so I grabbed my camera along with a tripod and took off to Yosemite by myself for 2 days.

Yosemite Valley was just spectacular in June, prettier than I ever remember. The heavy and wet winter fuels the waterfalls, wild flowers were blooming everywhere, bears and deers were out feeding… It was a great place to unwind and take pictures. I finally get a chance to try experiment with my new camera. I did wish that I had a wide angle lense. Though only a few of the pictures came out decent, I was satisfied with the results. Not bad for the first photo trip. I can only get better… 😉

Here’s the photo gallery of the trip:/trips/yosemite_2005

We took the kids on a week trip to Oahu at the end of July. First real vacation trip for both Katelyn & Allison. The kids had fun and didn’t give Daddy & Mommy any troubles, so all in all it was a good summer trip for the whole family.

Here’re the photos:trips/hawaii_2005