A house full of nerds

I’ve mentioned on more than one occasion that Steve’s a little geeky (in particular here and here), but I haven’t fully expressed my own nerdy side.  I like a lot of comic books and pretty much anything sci-fi.  I’m a huge fan of Joss Whedon and lately Steve and I have been watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer (re-watching for me, first time for him).  But it’s Joss Whedon’s other amazing tv series that I’m going to nerd-out on in this post.  I love Firefly.  Ok, I might even be slightly obsessed.  I was pretty upset when the show was cancelled.  And then I was elated when they made the movie and there was a chance that the sales from that would help get the show back on the air.  And then I was depressed again when it didn’t.  Now I just console myself by re-watching the series every year, including the movie, and then finishing off by reading the comics that were created after.

Last May, Ottawa hosted its first ever Comic Con and of course Steve and I had to go, especially after we discovered that one of the guests was going to be Adam Baldwin (Firefly’s Jayne Cobb)!  In the show, his character Jayne receives a hand-knit hat from his mom and being a rough and tough red-neck-type man, it’s a hilarious hat on him:

I decided I wanted to make a Jayne hat and get Adam Baldwin to sign it.  We didn’t know that they charge a ridiculous amount of money for a signature, but I guess that’s what motivates the actors to go to these things.  I was going to get a picture with him but since that cost more money, here’s a photo instead of a very pregnant me in my hat with Steve at Comic Con in May:

I didn’t know what to say to Adam while he was signing my hat so I asked him if he had any advice for first time parents (I knew he had kids).  He grabbed my arm (swoon!) and looked me intently in the eyes and said to “sleep when the baby sleeps” and then he looked equally intently at Steve and told him “and you, do whatever she says.”  Yes sir!

It says “To Krista with love, Adam Baldwin”

We ran into our photographer friend Mike at Comic Con (he’s a fellow sci-fi enthusiast) and I giddily showed him my signed hat.  When Mike came and did our first photo session with Wesley, he made sure to get a cute photo of Wesley wearing the hat:

Look at that cute little naked butt!  We probably could have fit Wesley’s whole body in the hat!

And there you have it, a house full of nerds.  Watch, little Wesley Crusher’s going to hate all things sci-fi just to throw us through a loop 🙂

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A Year in the Life

Photo by Photos For Life

Before we even got pregnant we knew that we would hire Mike to take photos of our little one.  Wesley is a well-photographed baby already but we really wanted to make sure we got photos with all three of us together as well.  Yesterday we had our second session with Mike in a series he calls “A Year in the Life”.  It was such a gorgeous day – 18 celcius! (we’ve already had a sprinkle of snow so that’s pretty gosh-darn amazing!) and there was still some gorgeous foliage left on a few trees in the Arboretum.  Wesley was a little champ considering he’s fighting off the same bug I’ve been fighting for the past couple days, and he missed his nap.

Mike just posted some of the shots this week from our first session, when Wesley was just three weeks old!  You can check them out on his blog.  I cannot wait to see the shots from yesterday!

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Mission complete!

I finished the photos and got the book done in the nick of time.  My prepaid voucher expired Wednesday and I got it all done Wednesday evening – phew!  I’m so excited to see the hard copy, but it’ll take a couple weeks before I have it in my hands.

For those of you in Canada, I used Photobook Canada.  They’re the same company I used for our wedding album and I was happy with the quality.  This time because of the voucher, I got one of their most expensive books, the Pro Series XL Imagewrap.  I’ll let you know if I’m happy with the results once I have it in my eager little fingertips. I will say that I didn’t really like the layouts that came with their software and because of the size of my photos, the program crashed a lot.  I ended up doing my own layouts through Photoshop and then importing them into the Photobook Designer software.  This was easy enough to do but I had a frustrating couple hours where I tried to make their layouts work, even with all the crashing, and that’s a couple hours of my life I’ll never get back!

Does anyone have a different company they are particularly happy with for photo albums?

 

 

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I forgot the best one…

❤

And while we’re at it, here’s a message found on a wall in Stone Town:

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The colourful windows and doorways of Stone Town, Zanzibar

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Old Town Mombasa, Kenya

From Fort Jesus, we followed the directions and landmarks laid out in Lonely Plant through Old Town, Mombasa.  We picked up two locals along the way, a shirtless boy and a young deaf man, both eager to point out the way to us. There were so many winding alleyways with intricate doorways and people going about their daily business, we lolly-gagged with cameras clicking away.

We took a break halfway through to get out of the heat and perk ourselves up with some delicious coffee at Jahazi, a coffee house recommended to us by an expat we met earlier that day.

More photos on SmugMug.

 

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Fort Jesus, Mombasa, Kenya

Other than one hair-raising pedicab ride (mostly for Steve who hung on for dear life sharing the small front seat with the driver), we explored Mombasa on foot.  Our handy Lonely Planet guide laid out a walking tour of Old Town, starting at Fort Jesus (built by the Portuguese in 1593).

Fort Jesus

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Giraffe Centre, Nairobi, Kenya

The Giraffe Centre in Nairobi was founded in order to save the quickly diminishing population of Rothschild giraffes.  Now it is open to visitors to go and learn about this non-profit organization and get up close and personal with hungry Rothschild giraffes.  You can get so up close and personal with them that they’ll kiss you with their big slobbery sandpaper tongues!  That is, if you put the pellets they love so much in your mouth.  We opted to just feed them from our hands 🙂

There are a few more photos on SmugMug

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Maasai Village, Kenya

While in Masai Mara, Kenya last year (almost exactly a year ago!), we had the opportunity to do a tour of a Maasai village. We have no clue whether the people we witnessed actually still lived the way that was described to us, but certainly it was an impressive demonstration of Maasai customs, regardless if it was staged or not.  Their digital watches matched quite well with their colourful traditional garb 😉

Here are some photos from the tour:

Our guide, Wilson, demonstrating how to throw a spear

Maasai warriors performing a ritual

 

Child in the doorway of one of the mud houses in the village

Maasai women performing a welcome song

Maasai warriors lighting a fire using friction

Maasai woman and children in front of their home, Maasai Mara, Kenya

All the photos are on my SmugMug site.

I am hoping that Steve will have the videos edited and ready in the next little while because the ritual and song were captured much better on video!

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Lake Nakuru National Park photos

The second park we visited in Kenya was Lake Nakuru National Park.  We knew that we would get to see hundreds of pelicans and bright pink flamingos, but we hoped we would have the privilege of seeing a leopard.  They’re super shy cats and not everyone who goes to the park gets to see them.  In fact, it had been some time since anyone had seen one in the park and so when our guide spotted one relaxing camouflaged in the shade back from the road, he got on the radio right away and let all the other guides know the location.  We were hushed several times in our excitement at seeing the leopard, lest we scare him away before the other tourists got to see him.  And in fact after several vehicles pulled up, the leopard decided it didn’t like being in the spotlight and retreated deep into the forest.

I’m still in awe of that one – how close we got to this shy and beautiful animal…..how close we got to all these animals!  Such an amazing experience.

Here are some more photos from Lake Nakuru:

You can see all the photos (and larger versions of the ones above) on My SmugMug site.

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