3-Day weekends. I live for those. In fact, I like to add on a vacation day from work to make it a long 4-day weekend. That’s just what I did for Labor Day. I got back Thursday night from Boston, slept in until 8:30 on Friday morning, and then took the wife and kids to the mountains to visit my family for the weekend.

Two things made the 4-day weekend especially manly: speed and technology.

Speed – my brothers brought their Yamaha Rhinos (and one Polaris Ranger) to the mountains. On Saturday a group of guys (and my sister) went for a long ride to the top of a nearby mountain. The ride wasn’t dangerous or tough, but the roads allowed us to get the Rhinos going a pretty good speed. It was fun. I took my DSLR along for the ride and got some good shots. The photo above is my brother and dad speeding ahead in the Ranger.

Technology – My wife literally witnessed this scene when she walked into the kitchen: I was playing craps on my iPhone 3G, one brother was playing craps on his iPhone 3GS, my other brother was playing Plants vs. Zombies on his iPad, and my dad was listening to music on his Motorola Droid. No talking. Just four guys with their eyes focused on tiny monitors in their hands. Nerdy? Sure, I’ll admit it was. Manly? Very.

101.  Simply amazing. My wife’s family called her Grandma Great.   She lived up to that moniker.  She had 6 children, 20+ grandchildren, 80+ great-grandchildren, and 20+ great-great-grandchildren.  My wife is one of the great-grandchildren.  My two boys are part of the great-greats.

My wife and I married a little over 9 years ago.  In those 9 years I had the pleasure to meet and talk to Grandma Great on several occasions.  The most recent was at her 100th birthday party.  Even then she still remembered my wife and asked about our family.  I remember that my son was fascinated with her jewelry and she was kind enough to let him fiddle with it.  What an amazing woman.

Our road trip this weekend is for her funeral.  The last minute planning, packing, and scheduling is worth it to honor her memory.

I’m taking all of next week off of work, and the family and I are headed to my parents’ house for Thanksgiving.  It’s a long drive…too long for two small kids in our small car.  So, we rented a bigger car for the week.  Tonight we picked up that rental car: a Dodge Grand Caravan.

Yep.  A minivan.

The minivan has one feature that totally blows the mind of my four year old: automatic sliding doors.  I told him the door are magic and they will open when you say “abracadabra.”  He tried it out, and the magic worked perfectly.

We start out on our long journey tomorrow.

This photo project just won’t die.  This is probably the most work I’ve done for photos.  Normally, I just shoot the photos, upload to iPhoto, and print as needed.  Sometimes I’ll do some minor adjustments, but nothing that takes more than a few seconds.  My goal is to take photos that need as little processing in iPhoto or Photoshop as possible…mostly because I suck at Photoshop.

For the in-law photos I did my usual thing: I uploaded to iPhoto and deleted the terrible photos.  I was left with 75 decent to great shots and I selected 21 as my favorite.  At this point, I thought I was done.  My wife had other thoughts.

Now, my new assignment was to convert the 21 favorites to black and white.  Converting to black and white in iPhoto is decent, but I opted for Photoshop because I have much more control and the end product is noticeably better.  An hour later, the black and white photos were ready.

Then I made the big mistake: I showed my wife a 2 minute slideshow in iPhoto using the 21 best photos.   That one act cost me two more hours.  Now, she wanted to make an official slideshow and burn it to DVD.  I probably could have done it in 15 minutes, but I’m a perfectionist.  So, I meticulously put the photos in a pleasing order. I studied the different slideshow themes in iPhoto.  I dug deep into my iTunes library to find the best music to go with the slideshow.  Each time I made a change, the perfectionist in me had to preview the slideshow to make sure it was just right.

After all that tweaking, the slideshow was ready to burn. I moved it over to iDVD, selected a theme, and hit burn.  I tried out the DVD in on my TV.  It looked good.

My wife is giving her aunt the photos and slideshow today.  I have a feeling that I’m still not completely done with this project…

Sometimes you gotta take one for the team.  That’s what a good man does.

My mother-in-law struggles with giving Christmas gifts to her siblings.  Every year my wife basically tells her mom what to get for her sibling (they mix up the gift exchange each year).  Usually, this doesn’t affect me, so I really don’t care how the whole thing goes down.

The 2009 gift exchange added a wrinkle.  As per custom, my wife gave her mom some ideas for some gifts for her sister (my wife’s aunt).  Again, at this point I really don’t care about the proceedings.  It’s just the M.O. my wife and mother-in-law have worked out.  After weeks of discussion, they settled on the perfect gift.

And what gift did the decide on? Good question.  Apparently, they are giving my wife’s aunt a family photo session to get a new family portrait taken.  Cool, right? Well…yes and no.  The photographer they chose was me.

It’s not that I don’t mind taking photos for family.  Quite the contrary, I love taking photos.  It’s just that I’m not confident that I can live up to others’ expectations.  I’m not a professional photographer. I’ve only had my DSLR for 2 years and I’m just now feeling comfortable with doing the manual settings.

Monday night was the photo shoot.  I shot about 100 photos in a 30 minute window.  I think I got about 15 solid shots, but I still need to print the proofs at Costco or Sam’s Club to see how they turned out.

I did get one shot I liked: one of the header photos for this site.  It’s the one with a sign that reads, “#2 Tee —>.”

Oh, and I earned points with the mother-in-law and big points with my wife.  Well done, sir! Thanks.