When it takes a week to celebrate a birthday, it takes a while to get all of the various media taken of said birthday together. So here are more photos of our biplane ride over Carlsbad, taken with our Canon digital SLR. These are really spectacular shots, and as we had the big telephoto lens, Chuck was able to catch some very neat shots of a hot air balloon that passed us while we were flying. I also did a little movie-making, and have a Flash movie of the takeoff. Yes, it was that noisy. It’s an open cockpit, don’t forget!
This past Saturday we had the final leg of the celebration: a run in the morning in Angeles Crest National Forest in which we crossed 60 streams (to be honest, there was so little water that we ended up pretty much crossing one stream 60 times). it was a lot of fun and a very soggy affair. I bravely took a camera and got very wet trying to keep the camera dry. At the last crossing, I made Chuck go back across the stream so I could film the historic moment. Mia faithfully went back with Chuck, even though she doesn’t like water all that much. The other dog you see running with Chuck is Paris, a black Lab/Golden Retriever mix, and she ran back because she just really, really likes water – any water, anywhere. You can see from this movie that there were a lot of dogs attending (I counted six total, though only four appear in the movie, including one toy poodle puppy who was carried almost as much as he ran bu showed a lot of heart and looked like a drowned rat when wet).
Later that afternoon we had a bunch of people over to the house, and drank a lot of wine and ate a lot of food and generally toasted Chuck’s new decade and new age group (this latter relates to running – a new age group means you theoretically increase your chances of placing higher in races; or not, as a whole lot of Boomers are turning 60 along with Chuck and are a whole lot faster than he is). All in all, a fabulous time was had by all. Photos are here of the party and whatnot.
The celebration came to an end on Monday, when we got a notice from Blue Cross that our health insurance premiums were increasing $200 a month because Chuck had entered a new age bracket. Old Man O’Shea, indeed.