What it looks like when your eyes burn off!

Hide and seek with art you can touch at the NCMA.

Back before the holidays, Mom and Katie and Penny and Veda and I all went to Cancun for a week.

Awesome, right? Mom pushed for it to happen, since she had so much fun on our beach vacation *last* year, and of course we were all happy to spend some time together now that we don’t live so close anymore.

There are so many stories to tell from that trip. But rather than go through all of them here, I thought I’d let you pick.

So here you go: Browse through these couple dozen photos and tell me which one you’d like to hear the story behind. I promise I’ll tell it.

Deal?

On our recent vacation, I took pictures of sunsets, crashing waves and Mayan ruins. And those are all coming soon.

But I think this one is my favorite. Just kiddo, sacked out in the hotel bed, watching Curious George, eating her raisins.

Fun with automatic dispensers at the Atlanta airport. (We went to Mexico on vacation last week… look for a deluge of additional images soon.)

It’s technically only nine seconds, but they’re good ones.

But.

There are some things you get to do here that you just can’t do anywhere else. And I like to think they enjoyed those things enough to make up for all the things they “had” to do. Like going on a sunny morning walk with Veda, who rode her bike about 23 feet and talked us into carrying it the rest of the way. Then carrying *her*. And walking alongside a gorgeous, sun-streaked stream that dribbles over the rocks here in the neighborhood and makes everybody happy.

They got to dine on a fantastic veggie grilled cheese at the local cafe, along with fried green tomatoes and fingerling sweet potato fries and other deliciousness I can’t even rightly describe to you.

They got to check out the Handmade Market here in Raleigh, which is likely the best place around to spot vintage-looking jewelry, home-built pinhole cameras and woven yarn jellyfish that have soft, fuzzy tentacles. And a two-pound dog outside that lets you pet ‘im.

They got to sample local draft beer, Carolina tomatoes and a fun run on local trails. They got to hear Veda play her new “piano,” a mini-Yamaha keyboard I got at Goodwill for four bucks. They got to see Vince run through leaves chasing squirrels, a fine Fall sight if ever there was one. They got to find out firsthand just how good Veda is at stalling during the bedtime routine. (Asking the detailed back story of every character and object in the final pages of the second book is a classic and effective ruse.)

They got to do hot yoga in a local studio and nearly pass out on the floor, repeatedly. (*I* didn’t get to do that personally, having had the good sense to skip it.) They got to come with me to Southeastern Camera and see me dork out over a bin of expired film, hunting for the hidden gems. They got to go to the North Carolina Museum of Natural Science and hang out with big-eyed butterflies, who flapped their giant wings in slow-motion and landed on damp leaves right in front of their faces. Oh, and a turtle with a mustache.

And they got to have big, crowded meals with us in folding chairs at our ridiculous kitchen table, which still has white paint threatening to flake or peel off the top and into your ziti at any moment. They got to face off against me in smartphone Scrabble, losing pretty consistently I might add.

By the time I drove them back to the airport on Monday morning, they’d had and gotten to do a lot of things. But I hope the main thing they did on the way home was a “got to,” rather than a “had to.” And that’s to think back on all the fun we had.

And it’s coming time for me to start thinking about what to do for this year’s mini-movie. Now, you already know what little redhead is going to be featuring prominently throughout the presentation, but I also thought I’d try something I haven’t done before: Taking requests. Are there any scenes you’d like to see included in the 2011 edition? Any features I left out of last time that you’d rather not live without?

I can’t promise I’ll accommodate every request, but I’m interested to know what those of you who were in the last one – or who weren’t, but should have been – would like.

(You see, I just started looking through the iPhoto library for videos taken in 2011, and it comes to 1,108. So far. If you happen to remember something we did together this year and can kindly remind me, I can hop right to that event and see if I have any good clips from it!)

Thanks.

Last week a fine fellow from the local photo shop (that’s two words, note) invited me to take pictures with him and some friends at the North Carolina State Fair. We went, walked around with gigantic tripods, confused passersby who assumed there must be someone famous around, and generally had a fine time. I went back the next day with Penny and Veda, of course.

And since I see that that sneaky, beautiful chicken commercial I was talking about seems to have been taken down from the site I linked to, it’s extra time to present this new mini-film, featuring Willie Nelson singing a Coldplay song.

I promise, this time the ending is more satisfying.