miracle chip

Over the weekend following Christmas 2012 a small miracle occurred.  It took me these past two months to finally get around to taking this picture so I could post about it properly.

After a good day of skiing at Snow Basin, I sat with Maddeline at the bottom of the hill waiting for some of our other siblings to finish their last run.  We found some chairs and we sat down and relaxed a bit, loosened our boots, took of our gloves.  ....

Thirty minutes later we were in the car driving home when I realized that my wedding ring wasn't on my finger!!  Freaking out I soon realized that it must have come off when I took my gloves off there at the base.  There was zero chance of just looking around and finding it since I had taken my gloves on and off several times at the end of the day.  I resigned my self to just crying over it and telling myself that we'd check the lost and found the next day.

Well the next day we didn't actually go to Snow Basin, but to Powder Mountain, which was a really awesome ski day.  So the following day we were back at Snow Basin and as the day ended I went over the the lost and found and asked if they had my ring.  The conversation went something like this;

"Was there a men's wedding ring turned in here a couple days ago?"
"A silver one?"
"Well it's actually cobalt, but it looks like silver."
"When did you loose it"
"uh... 2 days ago"
"Yeah, I saw it here earlier today"

at this point I got really excited, but then he spent like 4 minutes rummaging through boxes and lost items saying, "I thought I saw it here...."

Finally they found the piece of paper they had taped it to, told me that someone found it on the ground near the base lodge.  The base there at Snow Basin is not just snow like many other resorts, but paved with bricks, so my ring picked up a souvenir of being kicked around on bricks, and I call that souvenir my miracle chip.  You can see it on the rim at about the 8 o'clock position in this picture.

On a slightly related note, my ring is made out of Cobalt, not as ridiculously hard as tungsten or as strong as titanium, but still hard and very strong, and it has a more silvery color that matches white gold well.  On the inside is lightly etched 'Cobalt 24" which you can partially see here:

I love my ring.

Mutual Gift

This past weekend Stephanie and I celebrated our first anniversary!!  Our time was occupied with babysitting stephanie's cousin's kids, but we did go to Seven Peaks for the day.  One great thing we did was buy an anniversary gift for each other together.  Since getting our wonderful new camera for graduation we've been wanting to get some lens filters for it.

A month or so ago we went to a camera shop where we were presented with several very expensive filters.  Last week and I browsed around on the internet I found on amazon.com a whole set of filters for about the price of a single filter in the store.  We did a little investigation, shopped around the world wide web and placed our order.  The set we chose came not only with three standard filters, but also four macro lenses, somewhat of a bargain package.

Today I set out to test the filters to see just how effective the were and just to have fun in general:
The whole set (I also used the fluorescent light filter even though I shouldn't have, hence the purple-ish hue)

Polarizing Filter on, not polarizing

Polarizing filter, twisted 90 degrees (polarizing)

The fluorescent light filter again outside

The macro filter set (really just magnifying glasses, also useful for burning ants and leaves...)

Another example of the polarizing filter

 4x picture of my shorts