So now that most folks know Natalie and I got engaged last weekend, it's time to tell the story of how it happened.
A little bit of info on this past weekend, Natalie's mother's birthday was on the 7th of October, so we were all headed out to So Cal for the occasion. Her parents live about 17 miles from mine, but by California's roads that's about a 45 minute drive. We, Me, Natalie, her sister, brother-in-law and neice all went out to California for the weekend, to visit with her family and mine.
We planned on everyone going to my parent's house on Saturday at 6:30pm, kind of a family gathering, have both sets of parents meet, and just have dinner and hang out all evening. I however had other plans and had Mom scope out locations on the beach for me a few weeks back. The requirements were a good view of the Ocean at Sunset, easy accessibility, and somewhere that 18 people could watch, without Natalie seeing those 18 people until after I asked her to marry me. Dog Beach down in Huntington beach was the perfect location, with two seperate parking areas so that Natalie and I could park, and walk ~1/4 mile to the sand below the cliffs at the second parking area. So the plan actually was for everyone to show up at my parents house at 5pm, and head down to the beach. Natalie and I got to the house around 4:30 and picked up the Triumph so we could drive down PCH with top down, sight seeing a little was the cover I used with Natalie.
I had to double check on the location mom picked out, as dad early Saturday morning said the two parking locations where too far apart, after seeing they were nice and close to each other I let mom know via a cryptic phonecall we would be in the same location as planned. Natalie and I drove around Huntington Beach a bit, stopping to watchi a few kite surfers (probably the wrong term) and then headed back up to the first Dog beach parking lot. I took her down for a stroll along the beach, all along looking ahead to see if I could see anyone at the rendevous point yet.
We ended up at the point I had planned probably 5-10 minutes before everyone else showed up. Not exactly on time as I had planned, but I think that worked out best as no one was around when we were walking towards where they would all be standing, I was hoping she wouldn't see anyone before I asked her. This whole time Natalie was freezing, the weather the day before had been 83 and sunny, but the weather saturday was getting overcast and windy, probably somewhere near 55-60 with a 15-20mph wind from the ocean. Though, even with the clouds and wind, we had a pretty good view of the sunset, which I had planned everything around, a 6:19pm sunset.
We stood there for what seemed like an eternity, finally the family showed up, I had to wave at them behind my back to get them down to the area near the life guard stand (stand 22) that would give them the best view. Natalie actually asked me if I was waving at someone, I said no, I was just cold and shaking out my hands. :) Once everyone was in position I suggested she put her shoes down, she'd been carrying them since we got to the sand. After a few moments, and her wiping her runny nose from the cold wind on my shirt, I got down on one knee and asked her to marry me. She teared up, not saying a word, in shock. I had to ask her, "well, will you?" to get her to knod yes! I rose and gave her a hug and a kiss and then the crowd cheered, she turned and saw 18 people standing up on the bluff cheering for us. It took her a bit to realize it was all of our families up there watching :).
Everything turned out great, Greg (my brother) and Dad had my still camera and video camera snapping and shooting away the whole time. We walked up to the bluff and took lots of photos together, with all the family in various arrangements. Afterwards we all headed to Mom and Dad's house in Long Beach for a few hours of socializing. It was a great evening, and special thanks to Mom for getting everything together...
Hurricane Rita is up to a Category 4 last I heard, headed towards Texas. It's Hurricane seasons like this that I'm glad I live in the middle of the country! Katrina made for some great sunsets, of which I didn't get any good photos. If Rita does the same I'll be sure to have the camera...
Photos from Topeka are posted.
Thanks to James Elterman for taking most of the 5th heat photos while I was...
Photos from the University City portion of the Gateway Cup are posted.
http://chrishammond.com/photos/2005_gateway_cup/default.aspx
I only took Cat 5, Masters, and Cat 4...
I had an adventure to make it to and from the game on 8/25 in KC, but managed to take a few hundred photos at the game. Please feel free to give me any comments. I'm by no means a photographer, just a guy with a camera, so any tips/suggestions appreciated.You can see the photos here http://chrishammond.com/photos/old/category1068.aspxHere's my story about the darn ride back to St. Louishttp://www.chrishammond.com/archive...08/27/1502.aspxAnd then, of course my 2004 Game 4 World Series...
Natalie Ottiger and Florian qualified for the 2005 Markel Young Horse Dressage National Championships in Lexington Kentucky in...
Well, I made the trip back from Salina Kansas yesterday afternoon. 410 Miles in 5 hours and 10 minutes. You do the math. Stopped at the toll booth to get my ticket, then at the next booth to pay my toll, didn't have to stop for gas or any other breaks to the whole trip home.
The weekend was good, hot 95-100 all 3 days, but at least Salina gets that good Kansas wind, it kept the heat bearable. I ended up winning my first Divisional of the year, and only the second win I've had over Andy this year, the first being the Walnut Ridge National Tour.
We do it again this coming weekend. We'll be headed to Peru Indiana for the National Tour out at Grissom. Looking forward to making that trip again, it's quite a bit shorter than...
Microsoft has just released a beta for their pixel/vector based graphics software package called Acrylic. I'll have to download it and try it out this...
Check out the great photos that Chad got of my last run at the Midiv Solo II event this weekend.
Here is a link to all of the shots he took.
http://www.solo2.org/gallery/albums/57.aspx
And a...
If you're looking for a dressage trainer, clinics or private lessons in St. Louis Missouri and the Midwest check out Natalie Hammond (Ottiger) Dressage at NatalieHammond.com. Natalie is the premier professional dressage rider in the St. Louis area and is available for clinics and private lessons. Use the contact form on her web site for more...
Why in search results is this web page dropping?????
Who is Chris Hammond? He's currently a 28 year old software developer in St. Louis Missouri. He likes photography, baseball, automobiles, autocross, and programming!
Chris Hammond is really trying to bring his ranking up, thus you are reading this...
A quick (longer than planned) writeup, from a BS perspective
The surface was concrete, VERY rough on tires, kinda slick but still not a bad surface over all, a little breakup after day 1, patches before day 2. The weather was pretty windy on Friday, not as much wind on Saturday, by Sunday the wind has switched and was blowing form the east. Not near as strong as Friday though. Both mornings were chilly, saturday was 36 degrees when Heat 1 started at 7:55am. By 1:30 it was ~60 degrees out, Sunny, with a light wind.The event ran very smoothly, great job by the Arkansas Region and SCCA staff. Only two event recommendation I would have, the front gate didn't appear to be staffed very well during the non-heat times (not sure during heats). The other being the choice of Saturday night dinner locations. It was a little too small for the number of folks we had at the event, just a thought for next year
There were 185 drivers, I worked first heat in the trailer doing radio, which was nice because I got to stay inside where it was nice and toasty
BS ran Second heat both days, there were 10 drivers (2 M3s (4 drivers) 1 RX-8, a Red 350Z, a Brickyard 350Z and my Daytona Blue 350Z with myself and Andy driving). Andy and I were trying out some Kumho 710s, some very large Kumho 710s! We managed to squeeze 275s on all four corners, including the 7.5" front wheels, I ended up installing a spacer up front just to be sure we didn't rub, I don't think it would have been an issue though even without the spacer.
After first runs on Saturday I had a mid 46, with Ashir (sp?) running a 46.8 though I thought I had about a 1.5 second lead on the class. Andy, my codriver, I believe had a cone on his first run. Second runs Andy ended up with some car troubles. Just before the big sweeper (turn around) the car died. We're not sure how, or why, but it wouldn't start back up right away. The first though people had (course workers) was that it ran out of gas, which wasn't really an option as it had 1/2 tank of gas. I generally run with little to no gas in the car, but didn't plan so well for this trip and filled up before making the 240 mile drive to Walnut Ridge, which left me with over half a tank. I tried to burn off some gas driving through town, and then hoped to use up some at the practice event on Friday.
Andy got the car started back up and came off after his 2nd run with a DNF due to the mechanical difficulties. We looked the car over, revved id, smelled it, looked underneath, nothing appeared out of place or missing/broken. I went out on my second run and the car ran fine, though I was a bit slower, I think due to worrying about how the car would react. Andy went out for his third run and jumped in front of my first run by about .15 seconds. I went out on my third run hoping to best his time, which I was unable to do. I knew this would happen, as I seem to have problems improving runs at big events, I almost always have my best run up front and then I guess over think everything else. Ashir ended up dropping some more time on his third run and finished behind me for the first day by .066 seconds.
Sunday brought a new day. I went out on my first run and put about a second on the field, but got a late cone call in the final slolom to put me back into 2nd or 3rd I believe. Andy's first run was one of the fastest in the class, and unfortunately for him was his fastest clean time of the day due to other difficulties. 2nd run he went out and blew the course away, he knocked off 2 seconds from his time and about 1 second from mine, but yet again, a late cone call came into play. Ashir didn't quite seem to be able to get a good handle on the car on Sunday, I believe due to some changes they tried making to the sway bar the night before.
My second run I went out, sped up a bit, and cleaned up my run, enough to actually take the class for the day. Andy went out for his third run intent on whiping the floor with me, and he may very well have,...
Since I posted the video it's been downloaded over 12k times, sucking up more than 80gb of traffic on my interland hosting account. Tonight it appears to be moving rather slow, either from lots of downloads, or they've throttled my bandwidth.
I've got incoming links to the video ALL over the place. The MJ Morning Show even picked up the link! Plus 100's of other web message boards. I'll try to post some of the other links...
Yesterday afternoon I was trying to search for something on my PC, I couldn't find it. I checked my settings in the MSN Desktop Search and realized it was only indexing Outlook and my My Documents folder. Well, I rarely keep anything in the My Documents folder, so I setup the search to reindex my machine.
15 hours later it finally finished indexing. It indexed close to 500k items on my machine.
During that process I figured out there were some virii on my machine as well. So I had Norton do a full system scan last night and it came up with 9 files on my old harddrive which is hooked up as an E drive.
Now I guess I should run a disk defrag and try to clean up the drives a little. I think I'm going to write an application to help me archive my many thousands of images. I have probably 100 gigs of photos taken with my cameras, so I need to figure out a way to archive them on DVDs and have a thumbnailing application on the PC so I can tell what images are on what DVDs. That could be a fun little project to start on this...
My 2004 World Series Photos DVD is for sale again on Ebay!
2004 World Series Photos...
Well, this is the first post about a great weekend!
Friday night Roger and I went to Mississippi Nights to see Papa Roach, Trust Co. and Chronic Future. When we got there we noticed the guys from proach were standing out on the side parking lot talking to fans. So we parked and walked around there to say hello. I said hello to Jerry, the guitar player, and told him we'd met before, at Pop's in Sauget Illinois in 2001, and that I went to school with his brother. He faintly remembered meeting me, or at least acted like he did.
After saying hello to Jerry I walked over to Jacoby, the lead singer, and said hello, told him I went to high school with his wife. To which he replied, “She's here, on the bus.” So I went over and waited by the bus until they were done with their signing, which I came to find out later was an invite only signing. I guess Roger and I just looked like we belonged there? :)
After the signing Jacoby got Kelly off the bus, she came out and said hello, asked what the hell I was doing in Missouri (I know, it's not the most exciting of states, but it's been home for 9 years now). Roger and I went in and watched the first two bands, I am not much of being right up in the crowd, so at Mississippi Nights it is nice because we could grab a chair in the back and still be able to see.
Later in the evening I noticed Kelly was inside watching Papa Roach play, I went up to her and another girl (kelly is in black, jennifer in the striped shirt) at the bar to say hello. We talked for probably an hour to an hour and a half. We got caught up on all sorts of things. Kelly just had her second son, 6 weeks ago, named Jagger. Her and Jennifer had flown out and met up with the guys in Wichata the night before, they were on tour with them until Monday and then were heading back to California and the kids.
Jennifer also went to Vanden High School and was in our class (95). Jennifer married Tobin, the bass player for Papa Roach. Jennifer also has two kids now. All the kids (4) were staying at Kelly's mom's house while they were out on tour with the band. Kelly told me about everything that's been going on, how life still is very regular for her, even though she's married to a rock star!
It was a great evening, getting caught up with Kelly and Jennifer, getting to hang out with the band members afterwards. I didn't know this, but Dave, the drummer, is married to a Tyler, as in one of Steven Tyler's daughters, Mia to be exact. Seeing things from the otherside, you realize how real people are, even though they look so far away, they are just regular people to, it's nice to see that.
Best of luck to the band, and to Kelly, Jennifer and the kids. I hope to see them all again soon, who knows, maybe they will show up at our 10 year reunion next year at Vanden!
Here are some photos taken that...
If you are looking to purchase the DVD of photos, you can get it on ebay.
I'll be touching up all the photos I took at the World Series and compiling a DVD for sale in the next few days. I'll post more information here when it is available!
If you are looking to purchase the DVD of photos, you can get it on...
If you are looking to purchase the DVD of photos, you can get it on ebay.
Sent this out to a whole list of folks today, in case I missed anyone.
Hello Friends and Family!
Many of you I haven’t talked to in a long time, so here’s a quick update on where I am and what I am doing. I’m in St. Louis working for Emerging Technologies Group, programming web sites, loving what I do every day. I’m moving on November 1st to a new place about ½ a mile from work, if you want the address reply to this email and I’ll send it to you.
Now for the reason I am writing this email!
I bring to you good news!
I must say, I NEVER thought I would get to see a Red Sox World Series Championship, much less get the chance to see it in person!!!! I’ve watched more baseball this year than I have since I was a little boy, and probably even more than back then too.
Monday night I called Auntie Carol in Lexington, Mass. and told her to a flight get to St. Louis because I was going to get us Game 4 tickets. I got tickets from a season ticket holder here in St. Louis, got Carol a flight setup for Wednesday, and then proceeded to watch game 3 on Tuesday night from the couch. Throughout the whole series Sox fans have been nervous, the nervous wait, waiting for the Red Sox to screw it up, lose, and end the historic season in a miserable way. Game 3 was no different.
Watching Game 3 all I wanted was for them to win, so that Auntie Carol and I would have a chance to see Game 4, and see the Red Sox win it all here in St. Louis. They pulled it off and the World was abuzz about the Sox, and the fact that everyone thought it was a guarantee they would win it all. Maybe I was more nervous than most because I went to six Cardinals games this year all in which they won. Including Game 1 of the NLDS and Game 6 of the NLCS, and I know what the Cardinals bats can do, they can hurt you, and they could have hurt the Red Sox.
Carol landed about 3:30pm yesterday, I picked her up at the airport and was high fived and thumbs up’d by all the Sox fans walking around the airport, a change from the harassment I’d received from Cards fans on Saturday while walking around the mall in my Damon Jersey (see my blog link below to read about that)! We drove out to the stadium and found a nice free parking space which Josh Colwell showed me back in August when we saw the Cards beat the Mets, (http://www.chrishammond.com/gallery/albums/38.aspx). We walked up to the stadium and around to gate 7, near Stan the Man. We spent the next 45 to 60 minutes taking in the atmosphere, waiting for the gates to open. I also got a cool World Series blanket for signing up for a credit card, which will promptly be destroyed and cancelled when it arrives (you’re welcome mom).
Once the gates open we headed in to watch the Cardinals finish off batting practice and see the Sox take their practice. We got close to a few of the balls hit to right field, but nothing close enough to grab a hold of. It’s interesting watching people scramble and fight for a ball. We ran into Santa Clause there, he had a gift to be handed out later ( )! After watching most of BP we decided to venture up to our seats, 3 rows from the top in section 334. Not bad seats, but I can’t say that I’ve ever really had a bad seat at Busch (stadium). Before the game I took a photo or two of Albert (), I used to work with him at The Sporting News, he is the head photographer there, I also still occasionally play roller hockey with him.
I won’t go inning by inning, or pitch by pitch, but I will point out the photo of Johnny Damon, in his at bat that Won the World Series! () Johnny’s first inning, first at bat, home run won the game which ended 3-0 after nine. It was surprising the number of Red Sox fans at the game, there were probably 2-3 thousand, I think all of them stayed after the game to watch the celebrations. At the end of the game, everyone in the...
Since that last entry is so long I wanted to relink to the entry before that for the two Boston fans who were sitting beside us at the game last night.
Also to link to a photo of me and Auntie Carol at the game....
Who do you want them to win it...
We ordered Chinese yesterday for lunch. It took 2 hours to get here, so it ended up being free.
In my fortune cookie it said “Your everlasting patience will be rewarded sooner or later” I don't think this cookie meant lunch yesterday, cause it had happened prior to opening the cookie. This cookie is for all of the Red Sox fans out there!
“Your everlasting patience will be rewarded sooner or later”
It's late enough, game...
If the 2004 World Series goes to Game 5, I'll be...
Cardinals Red Sox in the World...
A few days ago I lied, it wasn't the best day in baseball. Up to this point YESTERDAY was the best day in Baseball!
We spent yesterday afternoon at the Cardinals game 6 VS. The Astros. I took a couple hundred photos that I am currently uploading, I'll link to them in a bit when they are all uploaded.
After the game I went to the Sports Page out in Columbia Illinois for Krista's volleyball game, and to watch the Red Sox win game 7 of the ALCS! Johnny Damon sure woke up yesterday, 6 RBIs for the hairy man, a 2 run shot, and a 4 run dinger!!!! Go Red Sox!
Hopefully the Cardinals will win Game 7 of the NLCS tonight and then the Sox/Cards series will...
If you are looking for your Critical Mass passports for 2004 you can download them from ChrisHammond.com!
campassport2004.pdf (2.1mb)
campassport2004lr.pdf...