Breakfast at Aunt Martha’s Pancake House (365:063)

Jim and Carol were in town early today.

Last Sunday we drove past Aunt Martha’s coming back from installing the house sign and Jim said he’d never been there. When we learned they had to be in Springfield early today we told then not to eat a hearty breakfast before coming, and took them to breakfast at Aunt Martha’s. That’s where I took today’s picture of Ginger and I.

I took some pictures of Jim and Carol, though neither of them like my photographic attentions with the camera, which is a shame. Chimping the first set of pictures I took, I knew I needed to make major changes to the camera settings to get the results I wanted. By the time I’d set the camera up for a second run Jim was getting fairly tired of my picture taking – in the nicest possible way, but enough to spoil the poses. I ended up having to try and rescue the earlier shots in post processing. I’m quite pleased with the results, it’s just a shame I couldn’t get the camera setup right for the first few pictures.

The picture taking conditions at Aunt Martha’s can be quite challenging, bright background lighting, dim internal lighting, and today they had the shades half drawn which cast a nasty yellow tinge onto the pictures. Normally I’ll go straight to black and white when faced with such variable lighting conditions, but Ginger wanted colour pictures of her parents, and how could I turn her down? I will admit I did do a fair bit of grumbling and moaning about the amount of processing required.

Other excitement for the day included a trip to Walmart to get prints of the house sign pictures for Jim – I was quite impressed with the quality ‘off the shelf’ as it were. Harbor Freight to take advantage of their ‘Dollar days’ sale. I spent less than $10 and got a load of useful bits and pieces. All cheap and nasty stuff but it’ll do for my purposes. After dropping Jim and Carol back at their car (in for repairs) we spent a bit of time in Dynamic Earth checking out some odds and ends of gear we need for our next back packing trip; we’re hoping to try going out for over a week during the spring break. We managed to come away without spending a lot (always a danger in that sort of store). Though we did get some waterproof paper for printing maps on and Ginger bought a Platy bottle, not bad considering we went in to look at sleeping bag liners and single person backpacking tents.

I fitted a new blade in my scroll saw and made Mark V Huaraches. I think I’ve finally got the shape of the footbed right. Now I can’t wait to try ’em out.

Tonight we watched Revolutionary Road. Very uncomfortable viewing.

Today’s extras

Copyright © 2011 Gary Allman, all rights reserved.