We had a good night last night down at Ocean Grove caravan park with John and Bec and their extended family, who stay down there for 2-3 weeks every year. Fish and chips for dinner, a few beers, some ridiculous conversation and some cards a bit later. Then up early for a surf this morning, and back to the caravan park for lunch and a walk on the beach in the afternoon. We love camping and are looking forward to doing a whole lot more this year.
Didn’t take many photos (too busy having fun) but here’s one of Bec all rugged up last night (it cooled off when the sun went down), and a couple of John, Bec and our godson Isaac on Ocean Grove beach this afternoon.
Just posted 40 photos of yesterday to our Picasa page.
http://picasaweb.google.com/jayneandmarty/ChristmasDay2008
Let us know if you want copies at more than 1000px ……
I put up two new albums: our long weekend in Brisbane/Salt Village/Byron Bay, and some shots of us walking Max at Barwon Heads tonight and one night last week.
There was a dolphin (maybe two) in the river last week and it was still there tonight. It looks like a shark in the picture though!
http://picasaweb.google.com/jayneandmarty
Georgia and Lindsay came to stay on Saturday night. It was just a short stay this time, but we found time to take the boy to the beach for a swim. He’s strained the cruciate ligament in his right knee somehow (like footy players do), so we’re not supposed to walk him but we can swim him, so he’s been spoilt for the last few weeks with frisbee throwing/swimming in one of the channels near the bridge at Barwon Heads. Lucky boy.
Here are some Polaroids from that afternoon. They’re a bit dark but that’s my fault – I had the exposure setting on the camera set to dark.
Georgia throwing the frisbee.
I like Max’s face in this one. He is not amused.
Max fetching the frisbee for Lindsay.
The sun came out for this one.
A great one by Lindsay.
Max is not amused in this one either.
As usual the girls were very good. They even made their bed properly in the morning!
This one sums up the energy and movement required to keep up with him.
And this one is typical of the start of every walk. Hurry up Dad!
Yep, the fluff-monster is 4.
Apparently the age-old rule about one human year equalling 7 dog years isn’t true. Wikipedia says:
No one formula for dog to human age conversion is scientifically agreed, although within fairly close limits they show great similarities.
As a rough approximation, the human equivalent of a one-year-old dog is between about 10 and 15 years.
The second year is equivalent to about another 3 to 8 years in terms of physical and mental maturity, and each year thereafter is equivalent to only about 4 or 5 human years.
If I roughly approximate the rough approximations for Max, he’s 28. Which is 4 x 7. But never mind.
I worked from home today, which was great news for him as it meant that I could take him to the beach after dropping Jayne at the station.
I’ve used the macro setting before but thought I’d snap a few off this morning anyway.
On these I set the camera to macro, then held it about 50cm from the subject, then zoomed in a bit. They were pretty quick shots (because when you bend down to look at something closely on the beach Max comes to see what you’re doing and sticks his big boofhead in the way), so they’re not perfect. But they’re a good start.
Also, that last photo is the 3,583rd one we’ve taken with the camera since we bought it almost exactly a year ago. That’s 149 rolls of film, which would have cost us more than $2,500 to buy and develop if we were still on film. Amazing.
The fact that our camera has continuous shooting mode isn’t likely to elicit gasps of amazement from anyone, but we haven’t used it before so it’s new for us. Here’s a sequence of Max catching his frisbee on our beach walk this morning.
I didn’t bother experimenting with any other settings – I just wanted to play with the continuous shooting. Got some other good sequences of him too. Now we just have to remember to use it when it’s appropriate.
