We are in the home stretch to Christmas!

We are well into the Christmas season and all the activities that go with the holidays. Last Friday we took our friends Bonnie and Terry Templeman to dinner (Chinese!) in Milton-Freewater, then we went looking at Christmas lights around Walla Walla. We finished with a "picnic" in the car. Let me explain this: Our last stop was at the Colville Patisserie, a desert cafe in Walla Walla, Wa. To say that the various delights available were really, really scrumptious would be a huge understatement! Not cheap by any means, but very, very good torts, tarts, chocolate this and thats, and more. Here is a link to their website where you can see photos of their goodies and get more information: http://www.colvillestreetpatisserie.com/.

After 2 1/2 months of planning, organizing, and work, my responsibility for providing programs for my Pendleton Lions Club for November and December is finally at an end. As I think I have mentioned earlier, this included organizing programs for the noon meetings for which i choose digital photography as a common theme. In addition to the programs I started a photography contest for club members which ended last night at the club's Christmas Party.

For the Christmas Party I brought a holiday punch which turned out to be very good. Here is the recipe. The original source is the BH&G Christmas Cooking From the Heart cookbook.

CRANBERRY-PINEAPPLE PUNCH
1/2 Cup sugar (I used bakers sugar because it dissolves easier)
1/2 Cup water
2 Cups cranberry juice, chilled
1 Cup orange juice, chilled
1 Cup pineapple juice, unsweetened, chilled
3/4 Cup lemon juice
1 2-liter bottle ginger ale, chilled
1 recipe Citrus Cranberry Ice Ring, broken (Optional; I didn't do this, too much work for an out-of-the home occasion. I was going to float some mandarin orange sherbet in the punch but never got around to doing that either!)

Citris Cranberry Ice Ring
Fill ring mold half-full with water. place lemon peel curls, lime peel curls, fresh cranberries, and fresh mint leavesin water. Freeze until solid. Top with more water and freeze.

You can use the water and sugar to make a simple syrup buy mixing them together and boiling until the sugar is dissolved. As I was away from home I used ultra-fine bakers sugar and skipped making simple syrup.

In a large (punch) bowl combine the cranberry, orange, pinapple and lemon juices with the chilled syrup (or water/sugar mix if you didn't make a syrup.) Top with 1 2-liter bottle of chilled ginger ale. Float the ice ring if you made one. Serve immediately.

I got a lot of compliments on this cold punch - and it was 0-degrees outside! That's how good it is!

Gregg Berlie, the photography instructor from Blue Mountain Community College, presented the first two noon programs about digital photography. Absolutely facinating! Gregg is a great teacher, very personable and easy to understand and to ask questions of. Gregg also agreed to judge the entries in the photo contest so Sunday afternoon I went to his home with the entries and watched him as he wowrked his way through about 70 photographs. He explained the process and his thinking as he went, which was a great lesson in photography and composition in itself. I said not a word, to quote a phrase, about which photos were taken by whom. There were name labels on the back, of course, but this did not enter in any way into Gregg's judging. After looking at a large group of photos, Gregg made the comment that evaluating this group of photos was harder than judging the photos for the county fair! I think that was a great compliment to the work of club members.

I am very proud to say that I won several categories, including Best in Show. Here are my winning entries by category.

Category Winner: Sports/Action
Pendleton Skateboard Park

Category Winner: Landscape
Community Park bridge debris in McKay Creek

Category Winner: People
My grandson Solomon James Willis

Category Winner: Open
Winner: Best in Show
Cabbage near Corbett, Oregon

I guess these photographic honors make me a big duck in a small photographic pool, but I really enjoyed doing this, and worked at getting my photos into the best shape I could. Gregg Berlie offers a digital photography class this next spring term and I intend to take it.

We are in a real snow and extreme cold spell right now. We have about 6 inches of accumulated snow on the ground, and last night our back deck thermometer said it was -3 degrees. Brrrrr. Today things are clear and bright, which means that tonight it will get really cold again. But now the deck thermometer says it is up to a warm +2 degrees so I had better rush out there and try to finish some wood working projects.

As I write this, Linda and I are listening on Pandora.com, an Internet radio service, to Andre Rieu's orchestra and chorus perform the Hallelujah Chorus from Handel's Messiah. I commented that the sopranos were getting all worked up toward the end. Linda asked if I remembered the signal conductor would make to the performers by making a circle with their thumb and a finger, opening and closing the fingers. I have seen the gesture many times but was not aware, as Linda explained to me, that this was the sign for the basses and tenors standing behind the sopranos to pinch them to help them reach the really high notes. All these years of music, and I didn't know that! Amazing, really.

Merry Christmas!

Grandpa T

Dear Readers...

Time to get this blog updated. Lately I've been spending a lot of time organizing several activities for my civic organization, the Pendleton Lions Club. I had the months of November and December to provide programs for at our Thursday noon meetings. (Pendleton Red Lion Hotel.) I decided to follow the general theme of photography for all of the meetings. So on November 6th and 13th, Gregg Berlie, the photography instructor at our local commumity college, Blue Mountain C.C., presented information about digital cameras and how to best use them.

Taking a Thursday off for Thanksgiving, the next program was from E.J.Harris, the staff photographer for the local newspaper, the East Oregonian. THe Club quickly came to the realization that art photography, and photo journalism as practiced by E.J. Harris, are two very different skill sets. E.J. did encourage club members to take LOTS of photos as the more you take, the more likely you are to have something really good. To prove his point, E.J. described taking some 800 photos on a recent minor assignment. In one of E.J. recent photos that he shared with the Lions you could actually see the bullet leaving a rifle.

Last Thursday I did a presentation about using a computer and some free software to manage your collection of digital images. I used Picassa 3 which I find I like a lot! It doesn't get as technical as say Adobe, but for people new to digital photography it is a fantastic tool. Being a free Google product sure doesn't hurt anything either.

Throughout the month and a half of November and December, I have been working to get interest in photography amongst club members by organizing a photography contest. To simplify things, I chose five general categories for the contest (animals; architecture, landscapes, "open" or undefined, people/sports action, and a sixth category for "Lionism.") I have received a lot of entries from club members and will be taking them to Gregg Berlie for judging tomorrow, Sunday afternoon. I think I made one small goof though. I didn't specify that members should identify which category they wanted to enter each of their photos in, and I didn't limit the number of entries per person. But the good thing is that we have lots of photos to look at and choose between.

Winners of the contest will be announced by Gregg Berlie at the Lions Christmas Party Monday night. Here are a couple of photos that I'm entering.

Post Thanksgiving Thanks

Linda and I survived another Thanksgiving! No, it wasn't the visit to see our daughter Karen, her husband Peter, or grandson Solomon. The survival was the traffic. Both east and west bound lanes of I-84 just east of Hood River were narrowed to one lane each direction while the center median is being rebuilt. But the result was horrendous traffic backups in both directions, miles and miles long. You would be driving along at freeway speeds and suddenly realize that the cars ahead of you had not just slowed but stopped. Yikes! Then we would creep along for about 30 minutes until past the construction zone. I-205 between the Oregon City Willamette River bridge to I-5 took over 45 minutes.

But the trip was worth it. Some of the moments I treasure most was preparing a traditional turkey dinner with Karen; I even presented her with her very own roasting pan, even though Karen did make some crude comments about me getting rather intimate with the turkey. Another highlight was shopping on Black Friday with Solomon, who was impressively well behaved, although Costco and Target may never be the same again. Peter and I took Sol for a walk to a nearby school playground where Sol had a great time running around.





Peter is a compulsive guitar player, he just can's be without his guitar for very long. So we were treated to a number of musical interludes. The funny thing was that Sol would keep saying "Daddy stop."









Linda had a good time, but would have enjoyed the trip even more if she had brought her stitchery instead of leaving it sitting on the back porch. On the way home I jokingly asked Linda if she wanted to get some Krispy Kreme doughnuts. Much to my surprise she said yes so we wandered around southeast Portland until we found KK. The doughnuts were OK, but the 5-cent coffee was even better. We took the old Columbia River Highway from Troutdale to just past Multnomah Falls. The field of cabbages were near Corbett.








Elinore, Linda's calico kitty, was really, really happy to see us come home again. So was I.















That's all for now.

My first Blog

To all my readers, I bid you welcome to my first attempt at blogging. Yep, the computer tech has never explored the blogosphere. My daughter Karen started this blogging stuff, and I think that 1) it is a great idea - if maintained, and 2) I don't want to be left too far behind in the technical dust by my kids. So here goes something.

One thing I want to accomplish with this blog is to better stay in touch with my family, my friends, and to explore some ways in which blogging can become more useful to me. For example, I started a photography contest for my Pendleton Lions Club. It is bringing back the fun and excitement of photography for me as I try to develop my creative instincts and see my world in different ways.

Gregg Berlie, the photography instructor at our local community college, said that a good photographer should be able to fill a roll of film (36 photos) with subject matter seen within 25 feet of your front door. I'm going to try that, and I'll post the results here, or with a link to my Picassa albums.

This is enough writing for now; I have to get ready to go see karen, Peter, and Solomon!