Sunset at Heavenly. I’m in Tahoe through the New Year.

Sushi Club was a success. My personal favorite was the Takayama Roll, aka tonkatsu roll. Maybe it’s been done, but I’ve never heard of it or seen it before. It consists of tonkatsu, shredded cabbage and bulldog tonkatsu sauce wrapped up neatly into a sushi type roll. Mmmmmmm. Best served warm.

We were most prepared this year, out of the 5 years that we’ve done it, yet it still seemed like I had minimal time to catch up with folks, and maximal time to worry about all the cutting, rolling and preparation.

Sillily named Klee sucks on some boba at Sushi Club 05. Thai iced tea with boba and green tea ice cream were served for dessert.

Tahoe trips are never just snowboarding. Last year I had a window smashed in and $7000 of stuff stolen. This year’s trip wasn’t out of control, but it was sort of a what the fuck kinda trip. Started with David putting 87 octane regular gas in my car, which rendered the turbo ineffective, turning it into a honda civic, which was unfortunate because we were driving UP to tahoe. The snow base was about 2 feet…the snow was icy in some places, slushy and sticky in others, rocky and dirty in others. On the way back down from the mountains, my battery decides to quit. So we found an autozone somewhere around placerville, buy a new car battery and install it in the parking lot using autozone’s loaned tools. I felt like a true hick…working on my car in the parking lot of an auto parts store.

With the fresh battery and a new tank of 91 octane, the car felt brand new…so I started hauling ass home, only to get pulled over 100 feet from our freeway exit. The chp officer let me off with a warning, maybe because he was nice, maybe because it was the holidays or maybe because he didn’t actually get me speeding on radar. Quite lucky.

My mom and I have a new tradition of doing something unorthodox for christmas dinner–a tradition of no tradition. Last year was an awesome prime rib. This year, because she’s on crutches from knee surgurey, I had to cook the awesomeness. A last minute decision on a rack of lamb turned out to be one of the best christmas meals I’ve ever had. Rack of lamb is umbelieveably easy to make.

Sushi Club is tomorrow (monday). It’s a gathering of high school friends around Moraga. We make sushi, sashimi and such and then eat all of it. We’re trying out some new rolls this year in addition to some new people. Should be tons of fun.

Mmmmmm. Rice and gravy and meat. mmmmmm.

Lamp and lamb on cutting board.

The wedding was awesome. Shooting it was really stressfull but at the same time wonderously enjoyable. It’s one of the few times that I’m able to shoot people who don’t even know me in one of the most important events of thier lives and them not weird out. And then shoot them some more. Amd more. I made some mistakes (defective parts of camera killing batteries, need flash battery pack, gary fong’s lightsphere is dumb, not thinking I’d actually need to dump my 2 gig cf cards, but then dumping them several times to the pd70x (photo valut) which I ended up wearing on my belt). At the same time, I did well. Over all the pics were much better than some legit wedding photogs I’ve seen. Orange gels were key, having 2 bodies was unbelieveably key.

Best of all, it made me go down to Northridge and Moorpark for some good times with the dooooocrew.

Work is over on Wednesday. Tahoe on Friday. Gotta love this time of the year.

Cecille was the bride. My pictures were definitely bride-centric….I think she’s in about 75% of of the 950 pics. I like this one for some reason…technical shortcomings and all (soft, underexposed, noisy). Maybe because it feels filmy.

Happy Birthday Rey.

I know what I want in life but I’m not sure how to get there. Can I google map it? Good I guess not. Google skynet is not up and running yet (terminator reference courtesy of mike). It’s only a matter of time…

I’m shooting a wedding on Sunday. I think it’ll be a lot of fun, and I don’t really feel any pressure, since I’m doing it for pennies and I want the experience. But then again…I hope I don’t fuck up, like forget to load film in the camera.

I used to keep wrapping paper and ribbon around. It was care bear wrapping paper. That was pretty lame, so I threw it away and now I’m forced to use such common apartment items like a Brooks Institute brochure and speaker wire to wrap presents. Not that bad, in my opinion.

The wonder of podcasts. I’d like to give a shoutout to podcasts. They started slow, I tried and proceeded to ignore, but they’re becoming mainstream. Almost all major news orgs have some sort of podcast, if not several podcasts, especially NPR. There are tons of tech podcasts–photoshop tv, DV talk, this week in tech. There are thousands of differnt podcasts. They’re free, and best of all they don’t download as proprietary apple mp4s like purchased itunes music–they come as mp3s, so you can put them on any mp3 player or burn them to an mp3 cd to play in your car. The only down side is that they have to be accessed and downloaded through itunes…itunes could use some work. But they beat listening to clear channel crap, I’d rather podcast it and learn something.

Macy’s, Union Square, San Francisco. Some zooming fun with the glowing green wreaths in the windows of the Macy’s building.