SS: Intense

October 31, 2010 By 1 Comment

Sunday Scribblings #239 Intense: I tried to think of a prompt that took advantage of the fact that this week’s Sunday Scribbling falls on All Hallows Eve, but I didn’t want to put anyone off who may not be a Hallowe’en celebrant.  Either way this point of the year always feels a little intense. Colours seem brighter and the days just feel like they are about to be different. There’s Hallowe’en, Guy Fawkes, harvest festivals, farmer’s markets and changing clocks.  So whether you choose to write a horror story, a creepy tale of goblins, the recipe for a witches brew, a rich chocolate fantasy, or a completely unrelated tale, make sure it is in keeping with the season wherever you are..

Intense- I’ve got about 5 minutes to write this while H is in the shower & before we do our Halloween festivities.  I’m intense.  I’m a type-A, left brain (logical, sequential, rational, analytical, etc), has ever expanding to-do lists, multiple calendars, about 37 current goals for myself, a handful of projects at any moment,  tons of commitments & an unnecessarily high stress level.  It drives my poor husband nuts that I can be up running so early in the morning & have a constant need to be “in motion, accomplishing something/anything.”  He has taught me how to chill out, be a little less intense, smell the roses.   I’m obviously a believer in the “life should be lived out in a high intensity level”.  We watch little TV, we work hard & play even harder.  We spend our money on experiences & friends, not things.  It’s life in the fast lane that also lets me enjoy the periodic, but necessary time outs- to lay on a beach without book in hand or music on the iPod, to sit for an afternoon sipping wine with my husband watching the city stroll by our table, to take naps on a lazy Sunday afternoon when I should be going through photos or catching up on work, to lay on the ground & roll around with the puppies.   Life is intense, but I want to work more on focusing on the important, life-changing & life-enhancing intense things & not the it-doesn’t-really-matter type of stress and worry.  Time’s up!  Gotta go enjoy Halloween!

GOOD NEWS OF THE DAY:  Besides church & the gym, a very low intensity day!  Getting ready for a VERY busy month though….

Filed Under: Sunday Scribblings

Cousins at the Oil Ranch

October 30, 2010 By 1 Comment

Two weekends ago, we took H’s cousins to the Oil Ranch a few miles outside of Houston.  We haven’t seen them as much lately as we’d like, but they are such great kids.  Since Halloween is on a Sunday night this year, we’re not going to take them again (like last year)

First stop was to feed 5 boys lunch after church on Sunday.  It’s funny how many things you take for granted when you don’t have kids & then trying to order, get drinks, clean up after 5 is quite an undertaking!  Some eat slow, some eat fast, some are messy, some want seconds & some barely finish their first round.

Of all the exciitng stuff to do at the Oil Ranch, their first stop was the basketball court.  I think they would have been happy just to play basketball, volleyball and soccer all day long.

I took the two younger ones, Joe & Fernando, and went to do some more exploring after they couldn’t hang with the big kids on the court.

I felt a little bad for the oldest, Mark, as the Oil Ranch wasn’t all that exciting for him & he kept wandering off to explore new stuff, leaving the other 4 following after him.

We did play around a bit in the barn.  The young ones entertained themselves on the rope swing quite a while & were covered in hay.  I told them I’d give them a $1 each if they tried milking the cow & with a few quarters they bought some feed for the goats.

At the end, we asked them the highlight of their day & they said “learning to skip rocks”.  They’d never done it before & were so excited to try to make theirs skip across the lake.

Mark had never rode on a horse before, so the guy was kind enough to take him for a lap even though he was too old.  They all played around, a bit mischievously, at the putt putt course & each boy got to take a pumpkin home with them.

I had a blast playing with my rented lens & just watching how energetic and curious all the kids were.  They play so well together & are so happy just to be outside running around.


Note: Apologies if you are reading this on the blog & not a feed reader.  I was anticipating my blog being re-sized to accommodate 900 pixels by now & the photos were formatted as such when I created them.  They don’t fit right now, but hopefully they will appear normal in the future when the blog is updated.  Sorry!

GOOD NEWS OF THE DAY:  Collages saved me on this one- I narrowed it down from the 700 photos I took & the 65 I shared with their grandma to a few for the blog.

Filed Under: family, Married Life

Beautiful Haley

October 29, 2010 By 6 Comments

Nikon just released a super-sweet new lens- the 85mm f/1.4 G lens.  Since I don’t do any portrait type of stuff & have no need to own one such a lens that everybody raves about, I thought I’d rent one for 2 weeks- including our weekend with the cousins & the wedding last weekend.  I wanted to hang out with my sister and practice a bit of photography, so she was more than happy to model for me 2 weeks ago.

It was so fun to have such an amazing lens- sharp & beautiful photos- guess that’s what you get for $1700!   The weather was great & we caught the light just at sunset.  I had a little learning to do about harsh & back lighting, but it was a learning experience.

I was also playing around with some new Lightroom presets & enjoying some different post-processing types of things with these.

Haley is doing well- finding her way through the maze of high school, learning to manage all the work  & the social pitfalls of the teenage years.   We only had about 15 minutes to hang out, but I’m hoping we can do some more stuff together this winter.

GOOD NEWS OF THEY DAY:  Fabulous Friday- no real weekend plans, gorgeous weather & I don’t *think* either of us are going to have to work (well, besides working on those 1700 photos I took last weekend!).

Filed Under: family, kidz, photography

September Reading

October 28, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Book Cover- The Age of the Unthinkable

I somehow managed to read 2 books in September!  My first book was The Age of the Unthinkable by Joshua Cooper Ramo.  The subtitle was what interested me- Why the new world disorder constantly surprises us and what we can do about it.  I do a little bit of mathematical modeling for my job & was especially interested in the chaos (sandpile) theory of life.  We can predict and anticipate extremely complex systems, but at a certain point, critical mass, all sorts of unpredictable and seemingly random things being to happen.  Remember- we thought we know how the financial markets would react, how to prepare for Katrina, how to successfully execute a war & rebuild a country.  With the speed of life (more importantly information and communication) increasing at exponential rates, the ability to make a bigger and worse mistake happens at lightening speed.  My big take away from the book was that we can’t prepare or prefect everything (war, financial crisis, terrorism, natural disasters), but what we can do is be resiliant and flexible enough to prosper in the after shocks of such a major shock to our life.

Editor’s Review:

Today the very ideas that made America great imperil its future. Our plans go awry and policies fail. History’s grandest war against terrorism creates more terrorists. Global capitalism, intended to improve lives, increases the gap between rich and poor. Decisions made to stem a financial crisis guarantee its worsening. Environmental strategies to protect species lead to their extinction.

The traditional physics of power has been replaced by something radically different. In The Age of the Unthinkable, Joshua Cooper Ramo puts forth a revelatory new model for understanding our dangerously unpredictable world. Drawing upon history, economics, complexity theory, psychology, immunology, and the science of networks, he describes a new landscape of inherent unpredictability–and remarkable, wonderful possibility.

My second read was How to Rig an Election: Confessions of a Republican Operative by Allen Raymond.  An interesting, quick read on history & politics about one campaign director who quickly rose up through the Republican ranks.  It’s not so much a historical narrative about fraud or unethical activities on a large-scale, but it is his personal auto-biography of how he got caught up in winning and eventually went to jail for his actions.  The internal dynamics of the Republican party was the most fascinating part
- the powerhouses in the South, Newt Gingrich’s Contract with America, the New England Republicans all vying for control  and power.

OCTOBER’S READ: Godmother: The Secret Cinderella Story (hopefully can finish it this weekend!)


GOOD NEWS OF THE DAY: First night at home with hubby at week- going out for sushi!

Filed Under: book, politics, review

Collages

October 27, 2010 By 5 Comments

Thought I’d pass along some information that helped me get started! I loved doing the collages & I’m so happy now that I’ve figured out a good way to do them. I get to show more pictures per post & some details without each post having dozens of photos. (above boards from Design Aglow rounded set)

I started out with MCP Actions. They have tons of Photoshop (CS5) & Photoshop Elements (PSE) actions to do processing, retouching & collages. They have 2 sets specifically for blogging & 1 set for printing (plus a brand new set with rounded corners). I bought the Magic BlogIt Actions PSE (also available for CS5) set for printing at the time, thinking I’d make my annual My Publisher pages with it & I could just shrink them down to blog size. $70 for 15-16 layouts + a few blogging tools (re-size, sharpen, remove border, etc). My complaint about these is that you get one shot & if you pick something wrong or decide you want to change a photo/position, I haven’t figure out a good day to do it yet. I was lucky enough to upgrade to the full Photoshop CS5 & I’d bought these actions for PSE so I’m not using them too much anymore.

My next stop was the Becky Earl BeART Blog Your Art Templates. They are PSD files that are set up where you simply cut & paste your other photos into the correct slot. They take a few steps, but are pretty flexible & let you make changes. $25 for 20 layouts for CS5.

Creative Blogging Actions by Jessica Feely

My next was to try the Creative Blogging Actions by Jessica Feely $35 gets your 33 actions with about 16 layouts & a few tools (sharpen, resize, color boost) for your blogging photos. These are for CS5, but PSE actions are coming soon. These are my favorite so far! I have re-assigned a shortcut key to do the “Place” command, so I can insert photos with 1 step, transform/size them, move them around and be done! The flatten, sharpen & re-size actions are also great & super quick.

Finally, I hope to get Moirai’s Compistor in the near future. I’ve heard really rave reviews about them from numerous photo friends. More powerful than actions, they are CS5 scripts that look at the pictures you have selected & the size to offer the best layouts. $80 – unknown number of layouts, but overlay options. I’d also like to try this set as it will allow you to do a portrait (tall) collage with many photos up/down.

I have also run across these blog/web boards from Design Aglow. They have some different fun setups with frames/windows instead of just the plain squares/boxes and a fun set of rounded boards. I haven’t purchased any of these (yet!), but I will be putting them on my Christmas list for sure. $50 for ~15 layouts & a few other helpful tools.

The Coffee Shop offers tons of freebies- including several web boards such as the one above (Rounded Corners 1). The Storyboard 1 is also a great collage, but these are fully automated actions, so you can’t change them around later or interrupt them. They are all compatible with Photoshop Elements too. These were just a few random photos I had from our first few months of dating in 2004.

EDIT TO ADD: I finally purchased Moirai’s Compistor and that’s what I use 95% of the time since 2011.  It’s super fast & allows a ton of photos at once.  I occasionally still use the  Creative Blogging Actions for 2, 3 or 4 photo layouts that I like a little better and want more diversity in arrangements. 

GOOD NEWS OF THE DAY: Sneak peak at an amazing wedding from last weekend- I am so excited to see more beautiful photos!

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