Saturday was, among other things, the bithday party for my nephew Mitch, who turned 3 last Tuesday. It was a great day, a good time was had by all, and some difficult-to-understand-without-context pictures are available here.

It would have been a nice day even if it had turned into a baby screaming fest, because the weather was wonderful, and it introduced me to a public park that I have absolutely no doubt I will be back to frequently. It's got waves, and open sky, and everything. This is why there are as many pictures of the scenery as the participants in that gallery. I needed a new place like that to go, so that was excellent.

I can't remember the name of the park, so this is a largely worthless warning, but I will say this - if you ever go there, and want to feed the geese and ducks some bread, BEWARE. You show up, and its a nice a pleasant lakeish area with sporadic geese and ducks - but they are not normal geese and ducks, for they have developed a taste for the yeasty glutenous bounty that the foolish humans that venture toward them offer. If you come to them with bread, they will be on you like a HORDE OF LOCUSTS. I'm not kidding. I took many pictures of this, but they sadly fail to tell the story properly, because I didn't think to take a "before" picture. If you go out there and start tearing up bits of white stuff, the entire lake's worth comes screaming at you, like the soccer ball in a 6 year old youth soccer league game.

We also had a problem where the youngins would throw the beach balls into the water, in some cases a little too far out. Thankfully, the current was such that they were all eventually retrieved. Sadly, the same could not be said for a couple of the balloons - there is a speck in the center of this picture that if blown up many times would reveal Mitch's special green balloon that got away. My inner Cartoon-PSA-watching self was worried about this in an ecological sense until someone told me the balloons are engineeered to degrade from sunlight. How freaking cool.

All the rest of the pics are probably self-evident enough, so I won't jaw about them, except to say for my own edification that when I try, I can still take some fantastic damn pictures - 1 2 3.

3 is my favorite.

Some other stuff happened this weekend, but since it mainly consisted of stuff not happening, it gets no coverage here.

[it took you]