Getting Ready

We’re getting ready for Halloween.  Before we know it, it is going to be 10/31.  Time has been flying like crazy.  Haley has crossed the 7 month mark and is well on her way to 8.  Life’s been pretty good around the Simons home. 

Laura got a job a few months back as a preschool teacher at our church, Hope Pres.  She taught about 6 hours a day, two days a week.  We decided a few weeks back that there are probably other things she can focus her time on that are more important.  She let her boss know this past week that she’d continue to work as long as needed, but she’d like to leave when possible.  Tuesday of next week is her last day.  She is pretty excited about being done with “work”.

She’s still going to be working a little bit, though.  We are going to try out a new venture.  We’ve got a connection on getting cheap merchandise.  She’s going to attempt to list some of it on ebay.  She is really pretty adept at listing items on ebay.  I’ve been impressed so far. 

Outside of that, not a whole lot is going on.  We have a few Halloween parties coming up.  A pumpkin carving party this weekend and a baby party one day next week.  I’ve been drafted as the photographer.  I’m not complaining.  It should be pretty fun.  I’ll leave you with this photo below.  This is of Haley when she got her shots.  Apparently, if you put pants on this kid’s head, she absolutely loves it!

Natchez and Stuff

 Well, I wrote about the football game and what a blast I had taking pictures.  So, what else is there to do but buy the lens that I used.  After all, I really “NEED” it, right?  The lens I used is a Canon 100-400mm L series lens.  It was really nice, but I was also interested in a lens that was similar made by Sigma.  The Sigma supposedly focuses a little slower, but is supposedly a little sharper throughout most of the range.  Another benefit of the Sigma is that it is 80-400mm, which means it zooms out a little more.  Tough decision.  I read and read about which to buy.  I ultimately came up with this answer:  I couldn’t go wrong with either.

I got on ebay and started looking around.  I was in no real rush to buy.  I went to a website I use to put in bids on ebay at the last second, justsnipe.com.  I put in bid amounts that were pretty low for a handfull of Sigma and Canon lenses.  When I say low, I mean over $50 less than what any of these had sold for on ebay in the past 2 months.  To my pleasant surprise, I won the Canon last Sunday night!  On Monday around lunch, I checked my email to see if the seller had emailed me.  To my surprise, I’d also won the Sigma lens.  Yep, I forgot to go to justsnipe and cancel my other bids.

So now I’m the proud owner of both lenses.  I’m going to use them both for a few weeks and sell one back on ebay.  The beauty is, I’ll probably end up making money on the sale due to getting them at low prices.

We went to Natchez last weekend.  We went with Blair and his girlfriend Jen for David and Jennifer Payne.  We had a great time.  Blair is from Natchez so he gave us the grand tour.  There is a TON of history there.  We saw this gravesite that was really interesting.  A young girl died and was buried.  The mother got them to dig down and put stairs six feet underground so she could sit by the casket.  Pretty creepy.  We also saw the turning angel that Greg Iles writes about in his book.  Greg is from Natchez and his writing house is about a half mile from where Blair’s dad lives.  In fact, his writing house used to be one of my fraternity brothers’ house.

Other than being out of town a lot, all is going pretty good in our neck of the woods.  We’ve been having a ball watching Haley get more interactive.  She got her first cold, but she’s almost over it.  It is so tough to listen to that sweet girl breathing hard with her stopped up nose.