I’ve been trying to decide on a compact camera to accompany my 40D SLR for a while. I finally decided on a Panasonic DMC-LX3 recently, mainly due to its very wide angle fast lens (compared to most other compacts).  So far I like it, ideally it would be a bit smaller, and ideally it’d have less noise. So far I really like the wideness and the explicit flash switch. I’ll see if I do carry it everywhere/take a lot more pics which is the goal. Last night we went to Steve & Christine to for a quick bbq and then watch Religulous (pretty entertaining)

Here’s Steve carrying some steak that caught fire

Christine and Thomas

Then today we went to Boat St. Cafe with Keena,Jorge and Gabriel… Keena got Lasik and now has debris under one of her eye flaps..eww. Anyway, the wideness is handy for self portraits.

The macro is decent too

The other question I have in my mind is whether to upgrade my real camera to a 5dmk2 or just buy a wide lens for my 40d..(which would have to be EF-S..bleh. 

Someone hacked into my paypal account on thursday and tried to withdrawl $600. It wasn't a "Pallin" attack as my password wasn't re-setted.  Paypal was great, called me right away asking if it was my transaction, locking my account and marking the transaction as unathorized (the withdrawl from 1st tech was still triggered so i had to call them to block that as well).

My password wasn't trivial so i'm really curious how exactly they got it....

We spent the weekend in Banff for Steve's wedding and it was super fun, all of Sunday was spent driving around taking pictures; I have a LOT of post-processing and rating to do but I figured I'd post at least one picture today.

When we were driving back from Lake Louis fairly late we were lucky enough to see a Grizzly rolling around and then eating dandelions

Tons of people stopped and he ended up running across the freeway (I'll post some pictures of that and the rest of the trip later).

Gabriel and I went up to Skagit flats today. We were hoping to get some good pictures but totally weren't expecting the crazy cool gazillion Snow Goose we saw. We ended up getting really really close to them and saw them fly around quite a few times (there were a few bald eagles around and the goose were spooked by them).

Here are a few pictures

We played quite a bit on saturday night at lota's, it's awesome, of course my favorite thing was to sing, I got a 100% on Radiohead's Creep on medium. Oh i also played around with my new flash.

Earlier today I was ultra nerdy and went on a bird watching tour in Marymoor Park , I'm not really into the just watching the birds but I definitely like the picture taking (and trying to figure out what they are).  Anyway, here are some pictures:

A great blue heron flying away

Two little guys, a Spotted Towhee and a Golden-Crowned Sparrow

And a cute pic of some canada geese walking away

For more information on birds at Marymoor park go here : http://marymoor.org/birding.htm

I went to the Juanita Bay Park today and I was lucky enough to see a cute Otter eating a fish, unfortunately I wasn't in the best position to take a good pic (and i really need a zoomier lens). Here are the two better pics:

On the bottom left pic you can kind of see the pink fish if you squint just right.. there was also a cute turtle hanging out.

We've spent the last few days in Rome, this leg of the trip started out pretty rocky with a craptastic "bed and breakfast". Their definition of B&B is a bit different than ours (this wasn't actually a house/small inn but a set of rooms managed by a company). Anyway, this was their definition of a double bed

The moment we got in we were a bit weary (specially since for 120 euros/night we were expecting something decent) but the fuckers told us our reservations had to be switched 72 hours prior, we decided to give it one night try and go from there. The next day (after me almost falling of falling off in between the 2 beds) we went to shower and there was no hot water!!!  So i called them, told them i would pay only one night and if they charged us anything more I'd contest the whole thing with our credit card company and promptly moved to this super cool ultra modern Radisson SAS place. It's awesome, the shower is in the middle of the room.

Anyway, the actual trip, we've had a lot of fun, here's Val being impatient in the metro (the metro is quite efficient, the only downside is that it closes a bit early and is very graffitied)

The Circus Maximus is more like a glorified giant dog park (but the dogs were quite cute)

Now for the awesome parts; the roman forum is very cool

The Colosseum definitely met my expectations, it's Huge.

 One of my favorite things in Rome so far is the color of the Sky. It has this very very particular blue you'll be able to see in some of the pics. We were also very lucky to get a great sunset.

The monument to my pal Vitorio Emanuele II was undergoing some repairs, it was still quite cool

Other sites we've seen so far... we went up Capitoline Hill (hmm Gelato)

And into the Capitoline Museum, in there Val was very sad that a lot of statues were missing important parts

The view of the Forum from up there was awesome (there's that cool blue again)

They also had big cool statues, including some Lions (no Ligers :( )

Some guy really wanted a pic with us so we let him

Afterwards we were looking for something to eat and found this menu; we didn't eat here (look at the 2nd item)

Val really liked the Trevi fountain, unfortunately i wasn't carrying my tripod.

Finally today we went to the Vatican where Val vogued because we were getting Madonna headsets for our tour.

More of the Medusa whacker, who you'll remember from Florence

There was the cool hall of maps and my only Sistine chapel pic (pictures weren't allowed and i was a good boy and actually didn't take any pics until we were out the door (as opposed to the idiots taking flash pictures in the middle of the room and almost getting kicked out)). And also here's Michelangelo's piety from st. Peter's cathedral

There was more stuff but this is the longest blog entry in history so I'll close with the Pantheon (very cool too). The light you see on the left was a car, it was a long exposure pic.

 Yesterday we spent all day (all day being post 2pm since we woke up late) walking around in Florence. It was pretty fun. You can't throw a rock without hitting a church

This one was Dantes church, it had a big rock in the altar, we couldn't quite tell what the deal with the rock was, if anyone knows, let me know :)

Self portraits, yey:

They were cleaning up a statue of Perseus (the guy who whacked Medusa), he seemed pretty badass

Street merchants' stock:

I'll post some more pics in an actual album later.

 We've been in Florence 2 nights so far. On the 1st day we got here latish so we just went to the Piazzale Michelangelo where i proceeded to take a bazillion pictures

Then the 'funniest' thing happened, we proceeded to lock our car keys inside of the rental (that's the keys in the trunk:

We called the rental company who told us they could tow the car and we'd have to wait for the key to get our stuff out (5 days) or we could break the window 'or get inside however you can'.  Luckily the people in a restaurant near by knew someone who happened to know how to break into cars.. they called the guy and he came over, he used some inflatable bags to create room between the door and the hinges and used a wire to get a door open. Pretty cool stuff.  We were thinking we'd be nice and give the guy 20-40 bucks so i asked how much it was, it turned out the guy was actually legit and worked for some company and he charged us 70 euros..very sad.

On the bright side it was now later and i got to take more nighty pics

We spent 3 nights in Santa Margherita Liguere, it was a very sleepy town, someone recommended a terrible restaurant the 1st night but besides that the food (and the 3 times a day Gelato) have been great.

This place is very close to Genova, and that's where Christopher Columbus was born so they had statues of him everywhere (the birds are big fans)

We took a boat to a town next by called Portofino, where we discovered that restaurants here have a cover charge (which is ridiculous), anyway, we ate in a very nice  but ridiculoudly expensive 6 euro per person cover charge place

It was also pretty wierd that a DHL guy walked right in front of it just like in the commercial.

Finally we went to another nearby town called Rapallo with a neat little castle.

Very quiet overall, eat, sleep, walk around and watch stupid 1st season of Prison Break at night after hunting for a power adaptor (Prison Break is now highly recommended).

We spent the last couple of days in London, it was fun(we did sleep for way too much day time but oh well :)

Here's the London Eye and Big Ben

The monument thingy in front of Buckingham palace

We watched Wicked, it was great (much better than I expected),subway was fun as usual, I really wish we had a good equivalent in Seattle

We also went to the natural history museum, the portrait gallery and the photographer's gallery

Now we're in Santa Margarita Ligueri (and finally getting online) It's very nice and calm (and we slept most of the day again!) ... We drove from Milan to here (thru Genova) and the drive was completly crazy,... totally curvy, lifted from any cool driving game i played..we were in a sucky rental and were very sad when a cool red ferrari passed us very very fast while we were trying not to die taking the curves very slowly.

As some of you know, our adorable kitty Sebastian was attacked by a Coyote around 10 days ago (Thursday before last at 4am).  Today, after tons of xrays (she had a broken skull), an MRI and getting all her bites opened and drained (oh and a ridiculous amount of money); she's finally back from the Kitty hospital.

This is her while still in the vet with a catheter and not in very good shape

This is her today, her wounds look icky but she has a great attitude

Both of her front paws were shaved for her I.V. She looks really cute

 I post this now or never:), the funnest day in Cabo by far was the day we got there, it was Gabriels bday and we all got wasted.

Jello shots @ El squid roe

Some for Jorge too

And Lota

Val likes margaritas

Some chickie on the table next to us was wasted... her boobs feel off her dress once(I unfortunately missed the shot by a split second)

It was also her bday so Val convinced her to have a bday dance with Gab; he was excited

And drunk enough to get on the table(and take his shirt off)

Cheers!

ps. I read this great blog (extremely not safe for work so I won't directly link to it in case you're at work and accidentally click on it): www. davenaz. com/ ashleyblue/(just remove the spaces)   Anyway, it had a similar format to the one i used in the entry above, i think it makes for way more entertaining reading.

So we came to Cabo for the weekend (It was Gabriels birthday and he bugged us about it)... Anyway,  we were lucky enough to be exactly on the way of hurricane Henriette.  We're in this makeshift emergency thingy in our hotel (actually they're doing a great job, with the exception of making us pay for internet access or use it in restricted time slots).

Here are some pics, i'll be going out and taking some more later. It's just a category 1 so no worries

I just found this cool satellite picture of the storm:

As part of a summer concert series at work we had the Presidents of the USA come over and play. I'm not actually a fan but they put an awesome show.

The best part of course was that I was able to take pictures from the front row :)

We had a super fun ship party on Thursday in Vasa Park. I took a large number of very unflattering pictures(particularly while people were playing oversized volleyball).  Here are a few :