On September 13th my family and I attended the annual Festival of India at the Sri Sri Radha Krishna Temple in Spanish Fork Utah. The first time I attended the festival was in 1996 and I have returned seven or eight times since then to observe the proceedings and learn about their culture.

Here is a slideshow of photos I took at this year’s festival, including explanatory captions to give those of you who have never been a taste.

http://picasaweb.google.com/jmaxwilson/FestivalOfIndia2008#

The temple building itself is an interesting addition to the Utah landscape, located across the street from the Kingdom Hall of the Jehovah’s Witnesses.

A few month’s ago, I arrived late to church and as I scurried across the parking lot with three small children to try to make it in time to take the sacrament, I noticed something so awesome that I just had to stop. Despite our tardiness, the freezing cold, and the fact that we were probably going to miss the central purpose of attending church every Sunday (again!), I fumbled around in my pocket for my phone to snap a picture, trying to ignore the children’s whining remonstrations and arm tugging.

I think that this photo is nicely symbolic. Or it at least implies a story. What it symbolizes, however, or what the story is, is up to you. Submit your photo caption suggestions in the comments or by email.

The winner will be announced next Week.

Just after Christmas, my wife was looking through the more than 300 photos on our digital camera that we had taken between Halloween and Christmas. Our four year old daughter had snapped about 30 photographs the day before and the camera memory was getting full. The battery was getting low too and the camera wasn’t responding well to the controls. My wife mentioned that she still hadn’t downloaded many of the pictures from the camera to her computer and that she better do it just in case something were to go wrong and we were to lose them.

She was struggling with the uncooperative controls, when all of a sudden she cried out “Oh NO! I think I just accidentally deleted all the photos!”

“What?” I responded. “How did you do that?!”

She didn’t know exactly how it had happened, but she was right. There wasn’t a single picture on the camera. All the pictures of Christmas Day, the pictures of the snowman I built with the kids before Christmas, the pictures of our family Christmas party, even the pictures from Thanksgiving—ALL GONE! She was devastated.

I panicked for a only a brief moment, but then the computer geek part of my brain clicked on.

“I think I can recover them,” I told her.