My favorite day in Morrison is Harvest Hammer and Paint the Town day! The Harvest Hammer is a 5K and duathlon. The Scott family was well-represented this year with Chris, his mom, and me running the 5K and Evan and his grandpa being partners in the team duathlon (Evan ran, Grandpa biked). On my side of the family, my aunt and cousin walked in the 5K, and of course we knew a lot of others in the race. It was great fun!

I won’t bore you with all of our family photos, but here is one shot of Evan finishing his race. Chris was first overall in the 5K, but ran back to run the last mile or so with Evan. To the far left, you can see me in the white tank top. Yes, my 7-year-old beat me! I ran in 29:03 (I was going to blame my slow time on the fact that I just started running in June but honestly I’m just a slow runner). Evan’s time was 6 or 7 seconds faster than mine, which is pretty good for those short legs! He will take after his dad, I guess! He beat his PR by about 30 seconds for the 5K.

Here’s Evan posing with his Grandpa after the finish of the bike portion. We are not sure if they placed yet as there was a mix up with the timing chips and I can’t figure out from the online results posted which duathlon teams are male/male teams.

This year for Paint the Town, Evan painted trucks at night.

Campbell painted mostly herself but some little blobs of paint did end up on her square.

 

 

 

 

On Sunday, we went early before the rain hit and took pictures of a few squares. Here are a couple of my favorites. I put an album of all of the images I took on my Facebook page. Note to future PTT artists: I really love it when you sign your work!

I am partial to Dr. Seuss.

This one is just wow.

My master’s is from NIU, but I really like this square because it’s really well done! Love the intense colors.

The rest of my favorites are here: PTT Pictures and also a bunch of Harvest Hammer pictures are here: HH Pictures

Obviously I have camera gear capable of taking more than your average snapshot. However, as any of you with an SLR camera know, these cameras are not exactly easy to tote around. Even with my most lightweight lens, my camera still weighs about 400 pounds. Okay maybe 5. But still, when I have the gear of two kids to carry around, the last thing I need is something else that is heavy. Therefore, I own a small point and shoot camera that I got on sale for $90 at Office Max.  It is about the size of my smart phone, and I take it whenever I want to travel simply. I can take pictures with one hand. I can stuff it in my pocket. I can drop it and not cry.

But it takes crappy pictures.  I have actually owned 4 pocket cameras, and I’ve never been happy with any of them. A couple of them cost close to $300, but they still were not great. I guess once you have an SLR camera, nothing else compares.

On the Facebook newsvine (which frankly is about all the news I get lately), I have been seeing several people with really cool i-Phone picture apps like Instagram and Hipstamatic.  I do not own an i-Phone. The service in this area wasn’t good until recently, and I have been happy with my non-iphone-carrying cell service and don’t want to switch. But, I have i-Phone picture app envy. These apps make everyday snapshots look a combination of retro and interesting and artistic and just all-around fun.  Today while reading a blog that I love, I discovered a link to some Instagram actions for Photoshop. I used them to convert some of my crappy point and shoot and cell phone pictures to fantastic pictures. Okay, maybe fantastic is a stretch, but they are better. Much more fun!

 

Here are a few crappy point and shoot camera pictures (I wrote the name of the action on each image). Several of them have a white border, which doesn’t show up on this white-background blog. Oops.

Cell phone pictures: