Christmas Eve evening was interesting. Oh, it started out normal enough… after Mister awoke from his nap, we took a few pictures before heading to church.
Isn’t he a handsome boy! I love you Mister!
The remainder of these images were taken when we got home from eating dinner at Mom and Dad’s after church. I didn’t take any photos of church or dinner, and church was wonderful, but dinner… uhm, it was special. My dad decided that we needed to celebrate a traditional Italian Christmas Eve by having seven fishes. It should be noted that we are not the least bit Italian, except we do enjoy their cuisine. So he ordered sushi and picked it up earlier that day. The thing is, my dad is not familiar with sushi, or the menu, or the challenges one sometimes faces when attempting to communicate with the people at the sushi restaurant. He had no idea what he ordered, and neither did anyone else. I love most sushi, but I was a bit flummoxed by this tray. We needed a skilled sushi interrupter. No matter, we ate whatever it was and we were all fine.
Prior to enjoying our mystery dinner, I attempted to open a bottle of wine for my mom because Craig and my dad were still at church. I wasn’t paying attention as I was turning the corkscrew and caught a small piece of skin in the screw mechanism. It hurt a little, and because I was unable to use my left hand to free my right hand, I calmly asked my mom to help me. She came over and was starting to panic. I explained how to turn the corkscrew so that my skin could return to its rightful place on my finger. Here’s the issue: my mom does not know her right from her left, and even as I was saying lefty loosie, I knew it was a mistake. And remember, she’s kinda panicked, so with all of her strength she turned that corkscrew TO THE RIGHT. I screamed as my finger was forced further down into the mechanism and had to just pull it out as hard and fast as possible. HOLY MOLY!!!!! I was running around like a freak shaking my hand screaming, Mister became frightened and started crying, blood was flying, mom was still panicked. Oh my. What a scene. It’s been over a week and it still looks and feels kinda funky. I think I probably should have gotten stitches, but I’m ok with a scar on my finger as it will give us something to talk about every Christmas Eve from now until forever.
Ever get one of these? Well, as I was firing away Christmas morning (while the kiddos were opening Santa presents), the compact flash card in my camera went corrupt. Some horrible error appeared on my camera indicating the card was toast. I had kept the same card in the camera from Christmas Eve, so all of these pictures, including Christmas morning pictures were in peril. I immediately popped out the card and set it aside so that I could put a new card in and continue photographing the festivities. But in the back of my mind I was thinking… damn. The next day I decided to see what I could manage with the card, knowing that less than 1% of card failures actually result in the loss of images. In most cases, you can retrieve the images via photo rescue software. Of course the card wouldn’t mount, operating system didn’t recognize it, etc. So I downloaded a photo recovery application that ran a scan and said it recovered 425 images. The problem was that not a single one could be opened as they were all reading, “format not recognizable.” At this point I started to get nervous, first attempt was a failure and I was starting to think that this might get serious. I won’t lie, the tears started. Moving ahead, I downloaded another application and let it scan and run a recovery process that took about an hour. A very painful hour. The entire time I kept reminding myself that they are just photos, no one died, everyone is healthy, etc. But I would have been really bummed had I lost these images. Thankfully, that scan worked and most of them were recovered without the funky lines seen below. That compact flash card is now in the garbage. I rotate the cards that I use for weddings out of service after a certain period of time and buy new ones… a process that will not be instituted for personal cards as well. And if you shoot digital, be prepared, this will happen to you.
Whew, back to handsome pictures of Mister.
And my gorgeous girl.
In the end, everything was fine, although I ended up a bit tipsy from a wonderful Cosmopolitan mix that I made. I had to drink to numb the pain of my finger and kill any parasites I may have ingested from the mystery sushi. Good times.
Every year I like to take a dark picture of the tree lights on Christmas Eve.
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