So here he is:

Evan Andric Gazewood was born on November 29th, 2008. He is a Giant Baby, and at the age of 3 months was wearing clothes for 9 month old chilluns. We call him the “Bobblehead Buddha” because he likes waggling his head around sometimes.

We are happy to report there are no signs of pumpkin paint on his headbone.

So the family headed out for what is probably our last picnic for the season…once the snow starts, you can’t get up into Lamoille Canyon without snowmobiles.

Click the image below for pics…(then hover your cursor over the right side of the pic to advance.)

We used acrylic paint, which I heard peels off pretty easily afterward. So there you have it!

We’ve had a few in our area, and a few nights back had one in the foothills of the Ruby Mountains, which can be seen from the back of our house. I grabbed a tripod and my camera, and got some time exposures of the fire. In this shot, the fire engines and rescue vehicles in the foreground work to get everything under control, while more lightning strikes in the mountains.

It’s a creepy feeling watching brush fires burn away so close to your house. We’ve got a good fire department though, including a lot of volunteer fire fighters, and they usually get them under control pretty fast. More strikes after the fire is pretty well under control:

We’ve got some rain coming, so hopefully we’ll be seeing less of this soon.

We used to have a Ford Explorer. I say used to, because of course, we don’t anymore.

My wife bought that car before we met, and went on many road trips and adventures with it. If she was driving and hit a bad bump in the road, she would say “sorry!” and pat it on the dashboard. It served us well for a number of years, but the repairs got to be more frequent, and more expensive.

You reach a point when you’re spending more on repairs than you would be for payments on a newer car, and it’s time to trade up.

We ended up at a dealership here in Elko, and bought a used Jeep. As we were finalizing the paperwork, I think it was really starting to dawn on my wife that she was going to be leaving her car behind now, and she was visibly disturbed by this. Although she had spent more time with it than I had, I realized that I felt saddened at this realization as well.

After the paperwork was finished and the new keys handed over to us, it was time for the final check to make sure we had all our stuff out of the “old” car. As we got everything out and were walking away, my wife was trying not to cry, which affected me as well, and I thought “How does this happen?”

How do we assign a personality to, or experience loss from a machine? Rationality tells us this is nothing more than a collection of parts, a compilation of chrome, plastic and steel. We tell ourselves it’s silly to get worked up over an inanimate object, that we’re not abandoning it or being disloyal. The problem of course, is that it’s not the machine itself, but the memories that we have woven inextricably into it, of the times we have had together.

We slid through blizzards in icy mountain passes. We crawled through hostile, cracked deserts. We drove along coastlines, edged around rocky precipices and crept through dark forests. These trips, these memories, where do they go?

We have a Jeep now, waiting for it’s adventures and memories of it’s own. We move on with the sensible, practical knowledge that we’ve done the right thing.

But somewhere back in the gray distance, a ghost in the machine forgets for the last time.

These were a lot of fun to shoot and put together. I had to keep the dogs and children away from the tripod as the camera fired off it’s magical sequences. The “click…….click…….click…….” sound was quite fascinating to the rugrats, who on at least one occasion tried to figure out what was going on by staring into the camera lens, which as you might imagine makes for a less than optimal photograph.

Hope ya like them…check them out here.

Hey, one can hope, right? The stores are starting to get in bags of soil, mulch, and all that good gardening stuff. I see more trees being planted in my near future.

I am currently depressurizing from 2 1/2 years in Los Angeles, and adapting once again to a quiet, slower pace of life which I’ve been missing for a while. Gone are the police helicopters, freeway madness, acid rain from burned off aircraft fuel, and praying for a decent parking space.

About the only thing I can complain about here is that my allergies are acting up a bit because of all the Rabbitbrush and Sage that surround our property.

At night, the sky is so frighteningly clear that you can easily see the Milky Way against a black sky teeming with millions of stars. The silence is almost deafening, broken only occasionally by coyotes or one of those crazy birds that still chirps at night. Of course, there’s a price to be paid for this kind of peace…winter is on it’s way.

And when I say Winter I don’t mean “it’s a little cooler”, I mean break out the snow shovel because it’s not unusual to have snow on the ground for extended periods, sometimes pretty deep. Lots of people can’t stand snow at all, but it’s something I grew up with in Ohio, so it’s not a big deal. I actually prefer a sharp contrast of seasons as the year goes by…the cool snap and colors of Autumn, followed by the slumbering earth beneath a white blanket. Then the celebration of Spring, followed by long Summer days and warm evenings.

Everybody’s got their preference, and I’m just glad to be back home with my family to enjoy those little things and celebrate the seasons in a beautiful place.

Even the dogs were happy to see me.

Burbank, CA

Spring Creek, NV

I guess I better start packing!!

I have been living away from my family for 2 years and 3 months, and in two months I move back home to Spring Creek NV. While I love my job at Insomniac Games, I am really getting tired of living in the city. I am crazy busy at work, so the next two months will fly by pretty fast.

I am soooo looking forward to getting away from the traffic, the airport noise, the trains, the congestion, the police helicopters, the smog and being shoe-horned in next to my neighbors. My *real* house in Spring Creek is a 4 bedroom on 4 acres, with a two car garage and a full basement, and my mortgage is less than what I’m paying here in Burbank for a crappy 1 bedroom apartment that’s over a garage, and has a dumpster by the front door with lovely odors wafting up.

Get me outta here.