The video of the recital by one of our organists at church is finally completed! This was by the far the most complex event recording I’ve ever done. There were 4 video recorders and a professional audio track. Getting everything synced and color corrected proved to be quite the challenge, but I’m happy with the result. It’s just over an hour long, but you can jump to specific songs if you look for the links in the description. Dave has the audio tracks and recital program notes available on his DropBox account. Congratulations to Dave for finishing is graduate degree!
Happy Birthday Elijah!
Today marks Elijah’s first year since his birth. In that time he’s grown from a tiny little baby to a little man running across the floor. It has been a wild ride for all three of us but I’m so thankful that he’s in our lives. This video captures a few moments from the last year. I love you, Little Man!
Yard Project
From the moment we looked at the house, Tyla and I have had some dreams about improving our yard. We’re both used to huge lots in the Midwest so having 1/6th of an acre (which is a big lot in this area!) feels constricting. On top of that, lots of the plants were overgrown and the yard was in two tiers making the useable space even smaller. And on top of that, drainage was terrible so the yard was muddy a lot. Now that Elijah is walking, we really wanted to give him a place that was dry and safe to play in.
Thankfully, TimS does this kind of thing for a living and was willing to help us out in his free time. It’s a massive project but we’re trying to knock a lot of it out in just two weeks. Here’s what we’ve done to this point:
- Remove the trees.
- Remove all sod in the back yard, all remaining bushes and plants, and the fence. This took two dump runs with a big dual axle dump trailer and one concrete recycling trip with that trailer. Thanks to Don for loaning us his truck so we could pull that trailer!
- Build a retaining wall along the northeast corner of our lot. Fill in dirt to raise that corner up about three feet to level out the back yard.
- Build a new fence.
- Add French drains along the west side of our lot to catch water flowing down the hill as it hits our property. Add drains behind the retaining wall. Tie the downspouts into the drain.
- Add an irrigation system.
We’re making great progress. All of the demolition happened last Friday on Day 1 of the project. We rented an excavator, and with Tim at the controls the work got done quickly. Since then we’ve been digging postholes (thanks Don and Logan!), building the retaining wall and building the fence. The goal is to get the wall done this week and then rent a machine to trench and move dirt around this weekend.
It’s a massive project but so far it’s going pretty smoothly. The only set back so far has been cutting the Comcast and telephone lines. They were wrapped around and through a big tree stump that we were trying to remove. Oops! If that’s the only problem we have, I’ll be thrilled!
Tyla has the hardest job of all. Normally when I come home I try to take care of Elijah and give her a break and I try to do a lot of that on the weekends too. With me being out in the yard working every minute I’m awake at home, she’s on full time baby duty. This project couldn’t happen without her. Thank you Tyla!
Below you’ll find a timelapse video for our demolition day. Unfortunately both of my GoPros ran out before we got the stump out, but we did get it before the day was over.
And here is a comparison of what the yard looked like before and what it looks like now.
GoPro FT Flyer
Now that I’m an expert RC pilot (translation: I flew about 10 minutes without crashing), I decided to strap a GoPro onto my plane and take some video. GoPros and RC planes are a very popular combination. You can even set them up to feed the video live straight into goggles on your head so you can fly the plane as if you’re sitting in the cockpit. For this first test, I simply zip tied the camera to the bottom of the fuselage, right at the center of gravity. The camera was pointing straight down so the video is nothing wonderful, but I was thrilled that it worked. As I build bigger planes I’m looking forward to doing a lot more with this type of thing.
That day of flying also had a couple other firsts:
- I got to go flying twice. (I need more than two batteries so that I can just have one longer trip!)
- As I was flying, I saw something float down to the ground. A quick flyby showed me that one of my wheels had fallen off. That made for an interesting landing.
- I hand-launched the plane a couple times since the landing gear needed some attention.
- I completed my first loops.
I’ve included the video below, but like I said, it’s not that amazing. I did fly overhead a few times though. I’m standing right next to a picnic table along the edge of the field. You can spot me for the first time around the 20 second mark in the video. This plane only has three channels (throttle, elevator and rudder) so the turns end up sliding the plane around strangely. I have a couple more three-channel planes waiting to be built but then I’m looking forward to getting/building a four channel model.
Christmas Timelapses
I took the GoPro along on our trip to Indiana and made a few timelapses. I thought they would be good for the video that I put together, but they ended up getting cut. They are still kind of fun to watch though so I uploaded them to YouTube. There’s a video of Dad, Mom, Luke and David walking back up the driveway toward the house, a video looking out the window from O’Hare (gate C17 I think?) and a long video of us unwrapping Christmas gifts.
Christmas Video
Yesterday’s post implied that it might be a while before I got the video done, but that was written late last week and I spent a bunch of time editing video this weekend. Voila! It’s done and uploaded to YouTube!
Pregnancy Timelapse
Somehow during Tyla’s pregnancy we remembered to take a photo of her belly every week. I finally found some time to put it together into a video. Enjoy!
Gun Day
This past weekend, KenC, LoganB, AndyD, TimS and I headed east of the mountains to spend a day shooting guns. While there are laws governing what you can do on federal land, it’s pretty easy to find a safe and legal place to shoot. Ken had already scoped out a good spot so we loaded up a couple trucks and headed east. We ended up down a dirt road with no sign of humans as far as the eye could see (except for some trash left by previous shooters.)
The temps were in the low 90s that day, but we were all having too much fun to notice. Ken and Logan each brought about a dozen guns. Tim and I brought our shotguns and Andy was there pulling the trigger for the first time. It was a lot of fun going through gun after gun that I’ve never heard of before, much less had a chance to shoot. We went through everything from handguns to rifles to shotguns blowing up plastic jugs full of water, paper targets, a couple hundred clay pigeons and even a few jars of Tannerite that Ken mixed. Combine all that with some hot dogs on the grill and it was a fantastic day!
I’m in the market for a new gun so trying out all those guns was a big help. But even with all the new options, I spent a ton of time with my little Remington 870 shotgun. I put about 175 rounds through that shotgun! Thanks to everyone who was throwing clays and shaken up pop cans into the air for me to shoot! I even pulled off a trick shot that I saw on the web: start with a target in your right hand and the shotgun in your left, throw the target up, mount the gun and hit the target before it hits the ground.
I think we’re all eager to head back again, but we’ll have to spend some time collecting more ammo and that’s no small feat these days. Ammo is scarce and expensive. At some point this run on ammo will probably end and then the market can return to normal.
Below you can find a video and some photos. The first clips in the video were shot with a GoPro running at 120fps and slowed down to 30fps. The end is a couple of our shots at the exploding Tannerite.
Three Pass Blast
There’s a popular motorcycle ride in this area called the Three Pass Blast. You combine Snoqualmie, Blewett and Stevens Passes for a beautiful ~240 mile ride through the mountains. I’ve done the ride quite a few times before but I decided to give it another shot in the 80 degree weather from last Saturday morning. I went counter clockwise around the loop with an 8:15AM start to try and avoid the various traffic congestion points and it worked really well. I was home by 12:30AM and still had the rest of the afternoon to work on house projects.
With two GoPro’s, I thought I could record the whole ride. The first camera battery died just after getting through Blewett pass, but when I pulled the second camera out of the saddle bag, I noticed that the bumping around had turned the camera on and drained some of the battery. That second battery died after getting through most of Stevens Pass. I still stitched the video together and ran it at 1000% normal speed. It’s not super exciting, but if you’ve never done the loop before, flip through the various points in the video and notice how dramatically the terrain changes over those 240 miles!
Tulip Ride 2013
Approximately 3 hours after we signed up for a baby class, the annual Tulip Ride was scheduled on the same day. Thankfully we ended up taking a different class and Tyla was ok with me going on the ride without her this year.
This was my fifth time on the Tulip Ride. The first time I went it was about a dozen bikes. This year we topped 200 and raised over $5000 for charity before any company matching! There were police escorts both in Redmond and in Tulalip along with media coverage leading up to the event. It’s turned into a big production!
This was also the first year that we had some celebrities on the ride. Tricia Helfer and Katie Sackhoff of Battlestar Galactica fame were there riding some Harleys donated by Eastside Harley and taking pictures with a bunch of motorcycle riding geeks. And yes, I asked Tyla’s permission before taking a photo with Tricia.
On a sidenote, that’s probably the first time I’ve ever had my picture taken with a celebrity, at least that I can remember. It’s weird. I’m not sure I like it. “Hi, we both know I’m here just to take my photo with you and then we’ll never talk again. We both have jobs and yours just happens to put your face on TV, but we could argue about who’s job has a bigger impact on people’s lives. There’s nothing I can say that you haven’t heard a thousand times before and given the long line of people, you must just want to get this over with.” And then seeing the photo isn’t too encouraging either. Sometimes I look in the mirror and think I’m not that ugly. But then I look at the picture and it’s not hard to figure out who gets paid to look good for a living.
But back to the ride…
We started at Blazing Bagels in Redmond. Tyla and her family surprised me by showing up to watch us all leave. They weren’t alone as we drew quite a crowd of onlookers wherever we went. About 120 bikes left Redmond and we made our way up to Tulalip without staying in a super tight group. At Tulalip we picked up about another 80 bikes and then held the pack together for most of the way to the tulip fields before a car pulled into the middle of the pack and then let enough cars get in front of them that we completely lost touch with the pack. Thankfully between the four or five of us at the front of the second pack, we were able to remember the way to the tulip fields.
It started to rain near the end and since I’ve seen the majestic tulip fields many times before, I drove right past and headed home. It was a fun day but it I missed having Tyla along!
I geeked up a perfectly good motorcycle by putting two GoPros on the bike facing forward and backward. You can see the video on YouTube or embedded below. In most places it runs at 1000% of normal speed. I posted some of my photos to Flickr to share with the other riders.
I wonder if my son will want to go on one of these rides with me in the future?