Creative

  • Gardening,  Photography,  Thoughts

    Monday Musings: Tomatoes, Jobs and Photos

    This cool weather has me missing tomato season in Florida. This time of year we would have already started our seeds and they would be growing and starting to bloom. Our biggest harvests would be from December to February. Chiot’s Run was showing some seed saving recently and it had me dreaming about tomatoes. I miss the Ball jars lining our sink and kitchen window, fermenting and cleaning off the left over tomato bits. Oh, they stunk to high heaven when you took the plastic off, but the beautiful little seed pearls were what we wanted for growing next year. All of my seeds are tucked away in our storage…

  • Friends,  Photography

    Little Ones—Portrait Session

    In my quest to find other kids to take photos of I thought about my friend Candace (Annekind to you forum folks) who had moved to the area near where my in-laws live. I met her at a local park yesterday and took some shots of her 2.5 year old and 3 month old. It was really fun to catch up with her and to hang out with some sweet little kids. In a ‘small world’ sort of deal, a few months ago my friend Amanda from highschool put out an APB for people to come to her for some free portrait sessions while she was portfolio building. I’d just…

  • Creative,  Photography

    Miss Kylen

    I’ve been wanting to take pictures of someone other than my niece for a long time. Not that anything is wrong with taking her photos, but I need to practice on someone else! My opportunity was with one of my bff’s, Michelle and her daughter Kylen. Today I finally got my chance and even though I was not taking money or was it even a ‘professional’ gig, I was nervous as hell as totally screwing up. For one, I don’t have kids. I have no idea how to entertain them very much and two year olds certainly have the audacity to be bored and uninterested one minute and screaming the…

  • Creative,  Family,  Shameless Stuff,  Thoughts

    *Bling Bling* on the Blog

    My cousin Elizabeth recently re-did her webpage and coincidentally I got the urge to work on mine Saturday. I sat down last night and came up with the banner. Initially there was white space where the butterflies were but I couldn’t think of an appropriate photo to stick in there and then I found the little wingdings and the butterflies just ‘became’. Voila! The biggest pain was going through every page I have to fix it all. The photography link above does not work currently because it will eventually link to our photo website. We have a potential name, to be announced later, so once we finally decide on the…

  • Creative,  Thoughts

    The Power of Now

    While out hiking there is only one thing you have to do. Walk. Ok, so you set up camp, eat and use the privy, but your only goal for the day is to walk to your intended destination. It’s easy and your mind is in general ease. There isn’t a bunch of clutter in your brain, or maybe there is, but it isn’t pressing and can’t bother you too much. And then somehow you come back into the real world and you are bombarded with so many options. You can do this or that or both and then throw in something else and it is easy to get overwhelmed. I…

  • Creative,  Crochet

    Whipping things up

    One thing on the trail that I really wish I could do was to crochet. Along the way I switched from listening to books on my mp3 to actually carrying books because it was so much nicer to have the pages in hand. I read a fiction book about a yarn store owner, actually this was part of a series, and it had me itching to have a hook and yarn in my hand. When we were in Salem I spotted a yarn store and had to go in and touch some yarn. I skipped buying yarn but ended up buying an Interweave Crochet from last fall because of the…

  • Creative,  Outdoors,  Thoughts

    Reverse Macro Love

    On Monday we went to the Dallas Arboretum with Chris’ dad. I had never been so it was a nice experience. After being so used to Fairchild Gardens in Miami, it’s hard to get used to non-tropical plants. There are some nice tropicals such as this Pride of Barbados, but a lot of them are temperates. They also have a great test garden where they do try some of those tropicals like mandavilla and tropical hibiscus. It was blazing hot and though we didn’t walk fast or far, we were sticking to our clothes pretty quickly. It was 107* for a high here on Monday. Yesterday it was about 12*…

  • Creative,  Photography

    Trout Lilies in Macro

    Some of the other photos I never processed last March were trout lilies that we took at the Heard Museum. On our hike we saw quite a bit of trout lilies in the south. I can’t remember where they stopped growing, maybe Pennsylvania? Anyway, enjoy the photos. I was happy with how some of them turned out, especially the reverse lens macro ones! Yesterday I went for a run with my brother, the first workout post-hike. I kept up and my lungs felt good, but my knees did not enjoy it when I stopped. I was also disappointed to know we only went 2.1 miles. It went fast, but it…