jonathan’s photos |
one per day, from my cellular telephone. |
i am leaving for south africa on a missions trip on tuesday (that is the day after tomorrow) and this afternoon we had a packing party for it. we are helping to run some holiday clubs (sort of like vbs) and needed to pack enormous amounts of craft supplies. we are going down to serve with ithemba lethu, which you should look up because they are doing some amazing work in the shantytowns outside of durban.
this morning there was a baby shower for champ at kelly's parents' place. our friends and family were very generous and here you see some of champ's first things beginning to collect in his or her room: a cradle (handmade by a lifelong neighbor), stacks of books and outfits (many featuring ducks), and a quilt we bought for our little champion yesterday. it is looking more and more like a baby's room.
this evening we drove to seattle for our annual day after thanksgiving tradition: the lighting of the enormous christmas tree at westlake center in seattle. the event includes singing from local choirs and visiting artists, an address from the mayor, and fireworks. afterwards, we go to pacific place--another downtown shopping mall--where they make it snow indoors using machines that blow tiny soap bubbles that float from the towering mall's upper stories.
today was thanksgiving! it only comes once a year and it is very nearly the perfect holiday: there is very little commercialization (it is hard to make money off people being thankful for what they have) and there is family togetherness and good food and friendship and pumpkin pie without all the stress and expectations of other holidays--christmas, i am looking at you. anyhow, l to r: dj (friend), david (brother in law), megan (sister), tim (sister in law's boyfriend), rusty (brother). these were but a few of the guests that graced our table. kelly made a veritable feast, ron barbecued the turkey, and we closed the evening with the traditional kickoff for the christmas season: a viewing of national lampoon's christmas vacation.
today at the office i took a break to give tim (my sister-in-law's boyfriend) a tour, which involved a visit to the visitor center, which lead to a mutual fondness for its life-size photographs of the nerds who founded the company, which became a good place to have one's photo taken, which wound up being the picture of the day. also, tim and i enjoyed some lunch at the commons and later we all had a lovely dinner of soup and bread, all homemade by the beautiful and talented kelly.
tonight was the night that i realized that i liked goat cheese too much. i did not realize this while actually enjoying this delectable entree; i realized it minutes beforehand when kelly had finished with the cutting board and, without thinking, i began to scrape off and eat the remaining slivers of cheese, abandoning my dignity and probably looking a bit like a child licking a beater full of cookie dough.
this evening, we were having satsuma mandarins after dinner--as is our custom as the holidays approach--and i removed the peel from mine carefully, without damage, into this long, curly rind. i felt very good about myself for a few minutes, remembering the scene in "sleepless in seattle" where tom hanks says "she could peel an apple in one long, single strip..." while the camera shows meg ryan peeling an apple in exactly that way. then i remembered a web site where someone made maps of the world using flattened orange rinds as models for the three-dimensional spherical projections. and then we bought some carpet, but anyone can do that...
this morning at church we had a lovely celebration--beach balls, children dancing and rapping, and, yes, kazoos. it was fantastic. the occasion? the kickoff for the work laid out in the "occ 2012" campaign, which in addition to the usual building updates, includes little things like, i don't know, freeing hundreds of slaves around the world? oh and bringing orphans into families. and that sort of thing. it's quite humbling...
rachel, my sister-in-law, and tim, her boyfriend, are visiting from england! the astute reader will recall that we visited them in england earlier this year (late may, to be precise) and thus have not seen them for half a year, which is a very long time. welcome home!
today we went thanksgiving shopping! it is like christmas shopping only quicker, less stressful, and more delicious. our first stop was the new trader joe's in downtown redmond (pictured), which we truly enjoy because we had been making a near-weekly pilgrimage to bellevue just to visit this fine retailer. we hit three grocery stores in one night, walking away from each with 40-60% savings thanks to kellly's superior coupon and sale skills. see you soon, thanksgiving!
hi, i'm jonathan! i am a software engineer and amateur photographer living in redmond, washington (you may, correctly, guess the large corporation that pays my mortgage).
i post one photo here every day, which documents my life, or my friends' lives, or what i ate for lunch. these photos are taken with an aging cellular telephone and completely untouched.
think of it as a stream-of-consciousness sort of thing.
