Thanks to the great SJ, I had all of last week off, and in true american style, the family went to Disneyland, Knott’s Berry Farm and California Adventure instead of staying home. Our families all live on the other side of the country, so why not! It was a great trip overall, one of the best family vacations that we’ve ever had (by my judgement). I took beanie on her first roller coaster (Sidewinder), as well as Space Mountain (She hated it.) McGough got to ride the monorail in the driver’s car, and that was awesome.

On another note, I was talking to a friend of mine who’s a budding photographer (she’ll remain nameless for embarrassment’s sake.) We were talking about some of the pictures that Kelly & I had taken at Disneyland and she mentioned that she had been having trouble with one of her lenses, that the photos that she’d been taking had been a bit blurry, not quite sharply focused, and she thought that something might have been bad in the lens, an element out of place a tiny bit or something wrong with the autofocus mechanism. I told her to try another lens and the pictures came out razor sharp, so her diagnosis seemed likely. Later I was looking at her camera bag and lenses, admiring them, and looked at her range of filters – UV, Polarizing, Diffusion, etc. I asked her about them, and she filled me in, but I noticed the diffusion filter wasn’t in the box. I asked and she said “Oh, it’s on my lens (the ‘broken’ one) – I put it on a few weeks ago to play around with it.” I replied something to the effect of “right around when it ‘broke’?” She stared at me for a minute until it set in… and now the lens takes sharp pictures again.