Basketball road trip

After finishing 2nd in the regular season the UCD women's basketball team advanced to the conference tournament in Anaheim. Being the aggie fanatic I am I couldn't miss a chance to see the ladies advance to NCAA March Madness. But, of course, a road trip to SoCal wouldn't be the same if I didn't do some sightseeing as well. I headed to my favorite national park, Joshua Tree, before going to the tournament. Although extremely crappy LA traffic added 3 hours to the drive, causing me to miss sunset and not find an open campsite, I still managed to take some nice moonlit night photos, again.

backlit by the moon –


moonlit –


A car drove by and added some nice sidelighting to this one –


And for what it's worth, the ladies won today and will now play tomorrow for the conference championship and a postseason berth.

Project products

So I haven't done much freetime shooting lately. But I have finished a couple other projects.

I took a beginning woodworking class at the ucd craft center and got to build a super exciting cutting board. Now, besides cutting the cheese, I don't do much cutting. But it was simple and I didn't have anywhere near as many problems as all the other folks in the class so it was a decent accomplishment. Here's the finished product in all its oak/walnut glory


At the Enterprise there was a large hedge that used to be trimmed into the shape of an old steam train. Unfortunately the guy who started it died over a year ago after he fell into a lake while ice skating in the sierras. It had gone unfinished and overgrown ever since so I got tired of looking at it and decided to take the matter into my own hands. After cutting a few feet off in most spots it kinda looks like a train again. And now that the smokestack has finally had time to grow out it looks pretty cool.