Well, I have had an incredibly busy last five days! Colin, my old college roommate, was down here for the weekend and we had a great time. We just hung around Santa Cruz on Saturday for Saint Patrick’s Day. We had Irish food and Guinness at 99 Bottles, a local restaurant on Pacific Ave. Then Sunday we went over to San Jose to hang out with some of his car friends. It was fun to have things back like they were in college for a few days. George out having great adventures! Colin talked about coming back down during the summer for the classic car races at Laguna Seca and that would be fun too. I just need to get Adam down here now!

Monday morning, after Colin left, we took off for the Mount Hermon staff retreat at Tenaya Lodge just outside of Yosemite National Park. It was a total blast! The chance to just hang out with people was awesome. I spent much of the time with Danny and Marci but I had a chance to talk with some other people too. I think the three highlights were playing card games each night, going into Yosemite on Tuesday, and having breakfast with Roger Williams (the director of MH) and his wife Rachel on Wednesday.

Then, as if all that wasn’t enough excitement, I got back and started poking around the net and discovered that Circuit City just dropped the price on the 30D package I’ve been looking at for a few weeks now! So I jumped back in the car and headed down to Soquel to buy a new camera. I am now the proud owner of a brand new Canon 30D dSLR. It is an 8.2 megapixel digital SLR (the kind with the changeable lenses) and I’ve already been having fun taking pics with it. After buying it and discovering that the battery comes charged (big props to Canon for that) I went down to Lighthouse point and started snapping away. After taking maybe 20 shots of random things this family asked me to take their portrait with the dad’s camera. He had a D80 so we chatted for a few seconds about the differences. I was kind of 50/50 on which camera I would end up with but I think I’m glad I stuck with the Canon. Not only does it have the compact flash compatibility so my 4.0 gig card works with it, but it is also so similar to the 20D I was using last summer that the learning curve is pretty easy to get used to. Anyway, I wanted to get one before Zach’s graduation so I could take pics with it there. Now I have one and I’m ready to go! Anyway, enough for now. Head over to my Flickr page to check out my first round of pics. You can find it here. Enjoy!

Filed under: life by Jonathan Assink