...and MORE LOOT. I saw some major prizes like CD player boom boxes, scooters and the Nintendo DS fly out to the winning kids. In between gulps of ice cream, I managed to stage a Flickr slideshow of the kids' digital photos. The day was fun, but I'm beat.

- mike lee - washington, dc

Here's the 9-9:30am kickoff of Take Your Child To Work Day at AARP Headquarters. Some executives did energetic welcome speeches, and we raffled off the digital cameras to some very excited kids. I helped a bunch of them install batteries, and hopefully they will arrive at 1pm to our offices with some pictures from the morning.

- mike lee - washington, dc

Experimenting with red and blue automotive neon tubes like these as my photographic light source last Monday night produced some striking results. And it didn't hurt that model Kara Mae is very talented at posing.

- mike lee - baltimore

For tomorrow, which is Take Your Child To Work Day, the president of our division decided to raffle off 50 digital cameras to the kids. So I found that Aiptek was selling refurbished units of their Fidelity 3200 2 megapixel camera with flash, SD card slot and LCD screen for only $49.00! The 8-15 year old kids will take photos in the morning, and then, amongst other activites around the building, come to the web team area after lunch to learn how to upload them to Flickr. We have the biggest overall prize offering, but we heard that another group is raffling off some Nintendo DSs. Tomorrow's event should be renamed Take Your Loot Home Day.

- mike lee - washington, dc

Cianna now uses the chinese word bwah to refer to her rubber playground ball. Since my chinese-speaking mom watches her while we are at work, Cianna is learning both english and chinese. Lately, I've had to tap into my rusty chinese to catch and translate words that come out of Cianna for her mom, who doesn't speak chinese.

These pictures follow Cianna as she repeately shouts "bwah, bwah, bwah." While it's unclear in the pictures, the child is actually bouncing more than the bwah.

- mike lee - langley park, md

I picked up a 20" blue neon tube at Pep Boys auto supply today, and am testing it out in the car. This one creates a nice Jedi lightsaber effect. These 12 volt tubes are used to pimp-up cars and to mod computers cases. But, I'm going to use it in a photography project.

- mike lee -

Cianna, who is almost 18 months old, visited her almost 103-year-old great grandmother today. Both were in a good mood, and for the first time, Cianna wasn't shy. While passing green bananas back and forth, she even made g-g-ma laugh out loud, which probably hasn't happened in years.

- mike lee - langley park, md

...sans child: Azalea in my mom's front yard blooming in the rain (1), new microfiber jacket from Men's Warehouse (2), atrium of the Majestic 20 Theater (3), poster for Sin City, which we just saw (4). The hypergraphic visuals and violence from Frank Miller's graphic novel were faithfully adapted to cinema. Our retinas were completely hosed down with black, white and red by the end of the film--almost making us forget that we enjoyed the show.

- mike lee - silver spring, md

The other two houses we saw today were in the rapidly growing Silver Spring area. The first of the two (1-3) was the best of the day: beautifully landscaped split-level with hardwood floors and a big enclosed porch. But the basement wasn't quite layed out to our needs. The second house (4, 5) was right on a noisy main road and only 12 feet from an adjacent house. Not. It's begining to boggle my mind that we're soon going to fork over half a million dollars for a house.

- mike lee - silver spring, md

The first house we saw was 36 miles southeast of DC in Huntington, MD. It was on a very nice acre of land, but the house itself, while offering a nice second cottage we could use as a granny apartment, was very small.

The second house (pictured here), about 20 miles out in Dunkirk, MD, was much better with 5 bedrooms and 9-foot high ceilings on the first floor and basement. The big minus was the incredibly long and steep driveway. Our agent quipped that it would rate as a "black diamond" slope in the winter.

The unqiue driveway explains why an otherwise fine vintage 2001 house has been on the market for 42 days. Price, by the way, was a real "deal" at $550,000. This house--without the funky driveway--would go for closer to a million in or around the beltway. That's way, way out of our range.

Now north to Silver Spring.

- mike lee -