Al Maynard

I've not been posting here for a while, because we now have a "private" blog a little more amenable to photos of the family. Drop me a line if you'd like access.

We hosted a baby shower for Mark and Emily's impending arrival. It was also the first baby shower we had ever attended! There was an unusual twist with a stork piñata which Al managed to destroy. To the uninitiated this is a Mexican tradition where you fill an object with sweets and hit it with a stick until it breaks. As you can see in the Baby Shower pictures the sweets go everywhere!

Here are the pictures from the latest holiday. It was a mountains theme this time, we drove from San Diego through Arizona to The Grand Canyon south rim. From there to Zion National Park and Bryce National Park. All places we visited were beautiful but Zion was the most outstanding. We condensed our 300 pictures of rocks down so hopefully you won't be too bored!

Click here for the Zion trip photos

Al and I finally gave in to the geek urge and went to Comic-Con this year, and fantastic it was too! It happened to be Star Wars Day when we went but that didn't deter about a third of the 100,000 or so people there from dressing up in all sorts of costumes. Made Al and I look positively normal :-)

I managed to get in some celeb spotting, though didn't meet Kate Beckinsale as I'd hoped. Saw a live reading of American Dad (creators of one of my favourites Family Guy) which was hilarious. There was a whole stand devoted to Dr Who (see pictures below) and Al managed to resist the urge to buy a TARDIS USB hub.

All in all a fantastic day and I'm sure we'll be back for more next year.

We had a great time in Catalina. We spent the whole weekend in and around Avalon with a couple of short walks up into the hills.

You can see some of our photos here.

OK, so it's been a while since we have updated the blog! Excuses aside we did lose our camera for 6 months which we have now replaced. We have put some pictures of the major events that have happened in the last year, leaving out some of them less flattering occasions (usually when alcohol was involved!). You'll have to ask us for those personally :-)

Al and I recently had a trip to Catalina, a small island 26 miles of the coast of LA. Those photos are to follow shortly...

We'll try not to leave it so long next time!

Congratulations to Lisa and Spencer of the safe arrival of our niece, Ivy Jacqueline Maynard, in May 2007.

Mum turned the big 6-0 in October 2007 and had an equally big party to celebrate. Al and I flew back and it was great to see friends and family. Here are some of the pics:

With 3 1/2 years of use, a few times around the world and several memorable drops (the one down the steps on Bondi Beach especially) our old Olympus Stylus 300 finally bowed out and died. The lens cover came off at Rik's birthday party. Although the camera still works (by sliding the little black thing around for a while) we thought it was about time we upgraded.

After a record short research and decision making period (2 weeks) we finally decided to buy the new Olympus Stylus 270 SW. The "SW" stands for shock and water resistant. You can drop this camera 5 feet onto concrete or take it down 10 feet in the ocean and it still goes - sounds perfect.

Heading out with a few test shots from the kitchen sink or a pint glass under our belts, we took the camera down to Torrey Pines state beach on a perfect post-labor day Saturday at Torrey Pines. Well, the camera lived up to its spec. and survived being in my pocket surfing for about an hour. It takes a pretty good picture too, though many are over exposed due to the large amount of white water that always seemed to accompany Sarah coming by on a wave. Still getting used to all the options but in general it is very easy to point and shoot. The "motor-drive" feature is very useful which helped me get the one good surfing picture (out of about 20).


You can see the rest of the shots in my picassa album.

I recently got an invite to joing Google's new picture sharing service from picasa.
It is really easy to use as a plugin to picasa, which if you don't use already you should get it today. I use picasa to upload photos to the blog but you can only do 4 at a time. Now you can upload entire albums for all to see! Check it out:
http://picasaweb.google.com/al.maynard