With a beautiful baby girl on the way and an eight-months pregnant wife who probably shouldn't be forced to ride thru obscure, windy, wilderness backroads I decided to keep this vacation close to home. In fact it was all at home, for four weeks. Sounds a little boring, or relaxing depending on your point of view, but it was exactly the time I needed to finish a project worthy of a good blog post.
After a few days of drawing up some plans, and being a little lazy as any good vacationer should, I headed up to the lumber yard to pick up some hardwood...
and started making a mess of the garage.
I took a few breaks to do some painting inside the house. Here's Dexter helping me show off the homemade stenciling in the nursery
The beginning woodworking class I had taken on campus a couple years ago made building projects seem easy. But tackling corner joinery for the first time without any training chewed up a whole week of the vacation. And little did I know that after meticulously cutting everything down to a hundredth of an inch the hardest part would be trying to put them together before the glue hardened, which can happen very fast on 100ยบ+ days.
I pieced together a frame...
and tested everything to make sure it all fit.
Somehow I actually measured everything right. I guess some of that money I gave UC Davis for an engineering degree payed off. The original plan was to paint the dresser white to match the crib we bought. I almost felt bad painting over some of the nice grain on the wood..
but seeing the final product in all white left no doubt it was the correct decision
It might not be as beautiful as Multnomah Falls in Oregon or Bryce Canyon in Utah but it was a rewarding and useful vacation that Abby will hopefully be able to cherish for a long time to come.
Of course, being a dedicated photographer I still found time to take a few photos worth sharing from the past couple months as well as building furniture.
In late May we were still getting rain here in NorCal and I wanted to incorporate those skies with the agriculture here in the county. I was on my way to this freshly planted tomato field near Conaway Ranch...
when nature surprised me with a rainbow over the growing corn fields I had photographed earlier.
Yolo county almost looks like Hawaii in that shot, something you really can't say too often. I few days later, while bored at a rivercats game, I was treated to another kind of rainbow. I was lucky enough to look up after a jet has passed high overhead, its contrail leaving a shadow on the clouds below it that were creating the sun halo, a very strange thing to see.
Of course my favorite thing about Rivercats games are the Saturday fireworks. The trusty photo near the bridge:
Wanting to try something different I headed out again the following week when they were doing Friday and Saturday fireworks. On Friday I tried a shot along the river further away from the bridge...
but really didn't like it. So Saturday, July 3rd I tried a really different angle, to shoot the fireworks from Davis. Miranda tagged along since we wouldn't be going too far and we headed into the fields east of town. Those were still just a little too far away so we went to the edge of the causeway and set up on top of the levee. For some reason several other places decided to have fireworks on the 3rd of July, too. So we got to sit and watch two distant shows in Sac and another, closer one in Woodland while waiting for the Rivercats game to end. Despite the mosquitos it was a fun place to sit and watch the show and the city skyline.
