May was also the month of festivals, first with the famous Scarborough Faire Renaissance Festival and later in the month the Grapevine Main Street Days. The girls love seeing all the 16th century costumes and culture. And they just can't resist getting a kiss from a tall cowboy!
With May came sunny weather, lush grass and blooming gardens. Susan completed a "little gardening project" comprised mainly of liberally distributing about 7 tons of rocks around our front and back gardens (or "yards" as they call them here in Texas). She did most of this on her own while I kept busy taking photos!
In april Grandma came to visit us and that, of course, resulted in another visit to Cow-Town and, this time, the Cowgirl Museum. The dinosaurs over at the Fort Worth Science Museum were very scary too!
Later in March we made our (now annual) trip down to Fossil Rim to see the giraffes, emus, ocelots, bison, ostriches, deer, antelope and, the scariest thing of all: Sarah's driving.
Hi folks, due to a hastily planned trip to England last week we're a little behind with our Christmas arrangements this year. As a result, we haven't posted our pictures yet.
However, we're now catching up and we should have some new pictures posted here over the next couple of days (by 3rd of January 2005). So please return to the Shrimpton Family blog soon.
Thanks. The Shrimptons.
Thanks for stopping by to visit our little corner of the world wide web. We hope to keep our family and friends up to date with what we've been doing, with a few pictures thrown in for good measure.
For the less "web-savvy" amongst you, try clicking on the pictures, to see more of our photo albums and larger images. The titles of most blog entries are also links to our photo albums. For those who know their way around the web, we've noticed that the wonderful Firefox seems to do a far better job of displaying these pages than Internet Explorer. For a very cool near 3-D, full-screen picture experience over a broadband connection, try downloading PicLens before browsing our albums. We're sure you'll be amazed.
If you know us then don't hesitate to eMail us if you like what you see. You can reach us using the following address: Surname [dot] Family @ GMail.Com where Surname is, you've guessed it, our surname, Shrimpton! Yes, we've made it this convoluted to keep out the email spammers.
Most pictures taken prior to May 2005 are from a Canon PowerShot G2 (with a few from Lionel's Canon PowerShot S30). Most pictures taken after that are from a Canon EOS Rebel XT that continues to produce fantastic images. Since 2009 we've also added a Canon Vixia HF10 Camcorder to our arsenal, along with a smaller Casio EX-Z90, that the girls often use. To manage the thousands of photos we take every year we use: - Microsoft SyncToy to move files around between laptops, desktops, flash drives, compact flash cards and SD cards. - A homebrew Java program to rename photo files. - Microsoft Pro Photo Tools software (on Windows XP Professional) to label our photos. More recently Windows 7 has served this function well. - Google's Picasa to categorize and upload our photos. - Multiple Google Picasa Web Album accounts to host our photos online. - Firefox for most web browsing, with some Google Chrome usage too.