HoodedHawk

This year was easiest yet. Amazingly, before and after the “shoot”, Olivia was running around all over the place like a skittish rabbit. But for the fewer than 10 minutes I took pictures everyone was calm! Wonderful. Setup was simply putting PJ’s on the kids and putting a chair in front of the tree. I used an external off-camera flash sitting on the kitchen divider with a diffuser.

The only complaints were from Preston, and were along the lines of “Hey, tell her not to kiss me again!” (which resulted in another kiss) or “She’s hugging my neck!”

One of the shots I turned off the flash control by mistake – and that was quite nice of just Olivia, with flattering outdoor light streaming in the sliding glass doors to everyone’s right side. I turned the flash back on and took another. I liked the no-flash one.

I’ll let you figure out which of the pictures below was NOT used on the card this year…

Kids relaxing after Thanksgiving dinner. Before dinner we played physical board games (though I forgot to take pix). Good times!

First play of Carson City tonight, with Dylan. As usual, he professed to hating board games and then went and beat me, 48 to 36. I, on the other hand, enjoyed the game regardless of my victory point deficit.

This is a tile laying game, where you have to buy land around Carson city and build various buildings (Saloons, Hotels, Mines, Ranches, etc.). These give you varying incomes, which you use to expand your property holdings. Easy mechanic, and the game should go faster now that we know the rules. This one took about 90 minutes. Would have been shorter without a certain 3-year old absconding with playing pieces.

Pat was hosting an extra game day (started at 12p, though I didn’t arrive until 8:30) (Happy Birthday!). We played Baltimore & Ohio, which is basically an economic game. You are the president of a railroad, and your goal is to expand the railroad as well as increase it’s stock value. You can also invest in (or own) more than one railroad, so you have to figure out the best strategy for capital investment, etc. The game lasted 5.5 hours; this is the first board game I’ve played where a calculator is very handy!

Charles won with $2851, followed by Pat ($2691), Steve/Rob [Rob took over for Steve at 1:30AM] ($2080), Phil ($1526), and me ($1338). This was just an ok game. I’d play it again, but only if something else wasn’t offered. :)

First play of Merchant of Venus (the second edition). We played the “Standard” game (the new version). The opposite side of the board has the “Classic” game, from 1988! We only got through about 17 of the 30 rounds before calling it. Fun – and will go significantly faster now that we have the mechanics, etc. down.