Orange Groves...

We drove into Bakersfield today to do some running around with the intention of meeting up with Denise’s sister Michelle and her family, meeting my brother and his wife and going out to a nice dinner. As it turned out we were only able to do two of those things which was connecting with Michelle and going to dinner. My brother was out and about and we couldn’t make it happen.

I’m not sure if I mentioned this previously but Michelle and her family came out to California to pick oranges. When we met them they were actually working at the orange orchard doing their thing. So we had the opportunity to check out that process and it was pretty neat to see. It is really amazing though how much hard work that really is. When they said before that they were paid by the bushel I thought it was something small... Nope, it is pretty darn large and it takes about 18-20 very large harness bags to fill one up. So about an hour to two and a half to fill one up. WOW, kind of makes me appreciate my day job. The kids really enjoyed running around the place with their cousins though and no one wanted to leave when it was time to go.

For dinner we went to the Macaroni Grill and it was pretty nice. We always like their food there and they put on a pretty good spread! I ended up having a salad that was really good and everyone else had the normal thing (which means I can’t remember right now what everyone had).

Oh, on a side note. I was reading one of the stock-photography forums where someone had posted a thread about “what didn’t you use in 2009”. It was an interesting thread and one person (Bobby from that seminar I took a while back) posted that he had a Nikon 80-400mm f/4.5-5.6 AF VR ED lens that he hadn’t used and said that he would actually trade someone a Nikon 80-200mm f/2.8 AF-D ED for it straight across... Since I happen to have one of those in my gun safe that I haven’t used in like 2-3 years (since I bought my Nikon 70-200mm f/2.8 AFS VR ED) I was like, “hmmm, seriously???” So as it turns out we traded lenses! We’re cross shipping and we both should have our “new” lenses next week. It was really amazing, especially considering I’m not really active on the forums and I just happened to read the thread because I was bored surfing... So hopefully it will be good too go and we both will be happy with our trade!