Anthony's cousins Josh and Jena arrived yesterday, so today was a day of relaxed play and casual photo opportunities...

My sister arrived yesterday with her kids, Josh and Jena, for a week of summertime play. Josh invited Anthony for a race outside almost immediately, and it was all I could do to keep up.

Four-year-old Josh wasn't fazed when seven-year-old Anthony turned out to be faster, and they raced a lot. I think Josh just wanted to show off how fast he was (because in his dinosaur-loving mind he's a velociraptor).

We were tidying things up before they came, and Anthony helped Grandma fill a bird feeder. At first it was troublesome because the feeder was taller than Anthony...

I've got a lot of Lightroom-related stuff brewing that I've been wanting to release, but have been waiting for the energy to do proper writeups before doing so. But like the Tree Publisher plugin for Lightroom I released the other day, I've decided to just release things as is rather than wait indefinitely for free time that will never happen.

So, I've just added some simple JSON encode/decode routines in pure Lua to the short list of Lua routines I've published. I use these JSON routines in many of my plugins, and thought others might find them useful as well.

In my most recent post about KidZania, Anthony had baked bread at a bakery. After that he did the radio show I posted about in May, just after our visit. Then it was time for a stint as a construction worker....

He'd done this before the first time we came; this was the only job he repeated.

It was getting late, but he was lucky to get one more experience in before KidZania closed for the evening: health-care aid.

And with that his second trip to KidZania was done.

I joined my mom on the veranda for coffee this cool, sunny, exceedingly-pleasant morning, but knowing we would be accosted by all manner of birds looking for their own breakfast, I of course had to bring the camera along.

As I mentioned in "A Few Japanese Swords of Note", the Voigtländer 125mm f/2.5 is challenging for me to work with in a close-up setting that's dynamic, because the focus pull is so long and the depth of field can be so very thin. The chickadees tend to come in an out pretty quickly, but sometimes just stand around for a [...]