Pygmy Goats? Really… There’s A Contest For Them And I Went

Yes, that is a little goat, and yes it is in a competition. Yesterday, at the Evergreen State Fairgrounds, there was a Pygmy Goat Show and contest. I’m honestly not 100% sure what they were judging them on, or maybe not being 100% sure of the criteria they were looking for is more accurate, but there were some really good ones, and some that didn’t seem like they were quite ready for prime-time.

The little guys (and girls) lined up at the outside of the ‘ring’ and stood patiently as the judge looked them over. She then checked for structure and watched them walk. This narrowed down her selections to just a few. She then double checked them and picked her winners.

Of course, during the class switches, we had to have something fun to do, so we improvised with our friends and made some awesome funny faces for the front facing camera. I happened to capture a few of them. This was one that wasn’t nearly this cool straight out of my Lumia 925, but I found a new feature last night that I was so impressed with… Editing in the Windows 8 OneDrive App!

That’s right, when viewing an image in OneDrive on my netbook, I could right click and perform quite the basic edits on the image.

Here is the original image as captured by the front camera on my 925…

Here is the edit, just like the image at the start of this paragraph. You can see the quick flip to black and white, the toning down of the bright light above the head and the focus blur for everything but her face really brings out quite a bit in the image.

The editing capabilities are pretty advanced for a built-in editor and usage couldn’t be easier. I would love to get a full Windows 8 tablet to give the OneDrive features a run on, but for now the netbook will have to do.

As the day continued, more goats were seen and the kids had more and more fun. We only stayed for two cycles as the girls had a birthday party to get to. Of course, that didn’t mean that there still wasn’t an opportunity to make a few more silly faces before we left!

Published from my Acer Aspire One Netbook.
Images taken with my Nokia Lumia 925 Windows Phone powered by www.4gfastdata.com.

An Afternoon At Elevated Sportz

The Foam Pit at Elevated Sportz in Bothell, WA.

When you have extra kids around the house and it’s raining, there are limited options available for you to keep your sanity. One, you can put a movie on. This works until boredom kicks in. Two, you can pop them in the car and take them for a ride. This works until they begin asking, “Are we there yet?” And finally, you can grab them and take them somewhere that they can run off all that energy. After option one didn’t work out, we opted to go straight for number 3 and headed to Elevated Sportz in Bothell.

Elevated Sportz, for those that don’t know, is an indoor trampoline park located on the Bothel-Everett Highway in Bothell, WA. It features party rooms, a trampoline area, a trampoline to foam pit area (see below), a trampoline dodgeball area, a trampoline basketball dunking area and a giant ‘climber toy area’ for kids as well. The climbing area even has some great slides at the end of it for the kids to play on.

I captured the image above using the Nokia Camera software. Using the “action shot” setting, I was able to capture Evie running down the trampoline, which when I added the ‘fade’ setting to it, produced a really fun image. This area of Elevated Sportz has three different lanes that have about 20 feet of trampoline to bound down before hitting the edge where you jump into a pit full of giant foam blocks.

The kids had a great time jumping in, but they did not have quite as much fun getting out.

After finally climbing out of the foam pit, it was back to the trampolines. This area is awesome. You can’t say it much better than that. It has a ton of 10x10 areas for the kids to bounce and play on. Even the walls have trampolines on them for fun bouncing!

For first timers, the blue area to the left is for little kids and the green area to the right is for bigger kids, and parents…

The afternoon wrapped up with 2 tired kiddos racing the Little Tikes Cozy Coupes around the play area. All in all, it was a successful child-wearing-out session. It was a nice break for a tired Daddy and Mama too.

I had to close with one last shot from my Nokia Lumia 925. This was from the end of the trampoline run going into the foam pit. As you can see, in sports action mode, the camera practically froze my kiddo in the air. Make sure to check out Elevated Sportz if you are in the area and bring your camera.

If you would like more information on Elevated Sportz, you can check out their website here: http://elevatedsportz.com/#sthash.u6NPkIq5.dpbs