Left Brain, Right Brain

September 30, 2011 By 6 Comments

On another blog, I ran across these gorgeous printed ads from Mercedes-Benz depicting the left brain & right brain.  The colors and imagery in these ad inspired me as I have been spending more time exercising my much neglected right side brain.  I spent dozens of years in school getting an engineering degree that super charged my left side and haven’t really done much growing on the right side, but all that has been changing lately.

I love the left side & it so describes me so perfectly:

I am the left brain.

I am a scientist. A mathematician.

I love the familar. I categorize. I am accurate. Linear.

Analytical. Strategic. I am practical.

Alywas in control. A master of my words and language.

Realistic. I calculate equations and paly with numbers.

I am order. I am logic.

I know exactly who I am.

But as I get older, I am becoming increasingly aware of how awesome and wonderful all the left side things can be.  From blogging & photography, to journaling and reading, jamming out to amazing music, meditating in nature.  I am excited to be spending a bit more time using this fun and powerful side of me.

I am the right brain.

I am creativity.  A free spirit. I am passion.

Yearning. Sensuality. I am the sound of roaring laughter.

I am taste. Te feeling of sand beneath bare feet.

I am movement. Vivid colors.

I am the urge to paint on an empty canvas.

I am boundless imagination. Art. Poetry. I sense. I feel.

I am everything I wanted to be.

GOOD NEWS OF THE DAY: It’s Friday of one of the worst work weeks ever & I am spending the whole weekend with hubby at B&B in the hill country.

Filed Under: blogging, photography

Around the World

September 29, 2011 By 5 Comments

Life is still uber-crazy right now & I’m working around the clock, as well as trying to find time to fit in my other commitments.  I’ve been in Philly & Colorado the last two weekends, with work trips to Phoenix and Kansas thrown into the middle of several large projects I am trying to finish. I’ve muddled through my photos, but haven’t had time to make my proper collages and write blog posts while completing the Pathfinder course.

It was good to get away last weekend.  To walk through the brilliant yellow Aspen tress. To lay on the ground at night and stare at the stars from 10,000 feet higher up.  To be surrounded by towering mountains and laughing friends.  To have a few hours here to calm my mind and allow it to open up to the possibilities ahead of me.

Although I did take it  myself, I can’t claim credit for this photo (or this type of photo).  I’ve seen it done tons of times before, but had totally slipped my mind until one of the other creative and artistic gals showed me her beautiful tree shots.  I knew I had to go play in trees myself & didn’t even realize the perfect heart shape that the trees made in my photo. Through Pathfinder, one of my goals/dreams for the future is to be more giving and more connected to the world around me- both near and far.

Amy in Africa

While I was in Colorado, my mind wandered to an incredible blogging friend I’ve made- Amy in Africa.  I am so inspired by her work running an orphanage in Africa and just feel blessed to be so “close” to her though blogging to follow the trials and tribulations of raising babies in the Zambia.  This morning she posted an opportunity for her family to buy chickens for $11 each.  Read her blog to find out how and why each chicken is so valuable and how a donating what you’d spend on one fast food dinner will directly feed their children for years.  There are few places where you can donate and be so close and in contact with the smiling faces and amazing stories of those you are helping, and that’s why her orphanage and blog have such a special place in my heart. Even if you can’t donate right now, just follow her blog and I promise you will fall in love with her mission and laugh out loud at some of her adventures raising babies in Africa.

GOOD NEWS OF THE DAY: That photo is for sure making the favorites of 2011 list.

Filed Under: blogging, faith, nature, photography, Travels ->

30 Days of Lists September, Part 1

September 28, 2011 By 1 Comment

As we near the end of September, I’m going to post my the first half f my 30 days of list posts.  I was doing so good the first few weeks & I’ve sadly fallen behind lately, but I do have first-half pictures ready to blog.  My mom gave me this awesome Dr Seuss notepad for Christmas and I figured this was as good a time as any to use it.  I LURVED Seuss growing up and owned almost all the books that I read over and over as a child.

I started out September, still stuck in August as I wrote about goals.  I’ve done good on many of them so far, but not so hot on things like swimming or hanging out with friends.  I loved the happiest list & it was a good prelude into my Pathfinder study that I ‘d start a few days later.

People I love was more difficult for me- there’s all kinds of “love” and I’m glad to have them all in my life to love in different ways. I’m super excited about Sunday now since I’m taking a break from volunteering at church & can spend an extra hour being lazy and hanging out with hubby and we’ve started to play tennis after church.

Five and six were difficult since I have so many apps and it’s hard to think of me.  And I had no idea what to do with color combinations- grab paint samples or google for inspiring ideas? So I just skipped that one and took a photo of my monthly list.

Things I’m not very good at was easy- since there are so many and taking an in-focus photo was one of them!  I promise I’m working on my photography skills!   There were lots of things that reminded me of my childhood- or at least how old I am.

That weekend’s plan included church & I’ll skip it for the next 4 weekends as I am an out-of-town traveling fool & I even had a weekend work trip.

It hardly felt like fall here in early September, but I pretended like I was the heat was ending & I was getting in the seasonal spirit like everybody else.   I found it ironic that the things that motivate me also fell in line with the topics I was working on my Pathfinder course and provided me with some new insights.

I’m not much of a procrastinator or a fashionista, but I found a few things to fill my lists these days.

Rounding out the first half of 30 days lists, I was stumped for a long time on the list of things I have NOT done and there are few dream jobs that I can imagine I would enjoy and would pay well.

GOOD NEWS OF THE DAY: My gorgeous sister celebrated her 16th birthday today!

Filed Under: blogging

Review: Game Change

September 27, 2011 By 1 Comment

October’s book of the month was an impulse buy as the next election approaches and the political scene is heating up.  I so closely followed and lived in the 2008 presidential election, that I couldn’t pass up all the recommendations from friends to check out Game Change: Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime. It’s co-authored by one of the political analysts I follow and I wanted to get all the inside gossip from the behind the campaigns of the candidates.  Most of the book focuses heavily on the long, bitter Democratic Party primary fight between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, with a few mentions of the disastrous Edwards campaign.  As the stories unfold & are retold, it’s fascinating to me to see what  of the daily drama from the campaign trail really mattered in the long run and who the key players really were in making decisions.

I followed every twist and turn, the dramatic stories and candidate missteps during the primaries, so I loved reliving the excitement of the campaign and getting all the inside scoop on personality conflicts and strategic campaign decisions.  In the end, the Republican primary is a fairly simple story and the book devotes a small section to McCain winning the nomination and how he revived his campaign from the brink and made the fatal decision to choose Palin as his running mate.  The second half of the book focuses on the general election and all the complexities of running a national political campaign to lock in the electoral college.  Since I couldn’t put the book down (even though I knew what was coming), I blazed through this book in a few days and am (sort of) all excited to head into the next presidential election year and primary season in 2012.

GOOD NEWS OF THE DAY: Arrived home last night & I’m headed to Kansas today for my last work trip for 2 weeks.

Filed Under: book, history, politics, review

My Lens Collection

September 24, 2011 By 2 Comments

While I’m away at a photography retreat, I thought it would be a good time to share a bit more about my photo (limited) skilz.  I’ve been in the dSLR game for 4 years now & I’ve finally got a nice set of lenses I’m satisfied with (for the moment being).  Currently, I have the 5 lenses above, but I have at various points had several other ones that I’ve bought & sold- either to upgrade or decided I wasn’t using them enough to justify keeping them.

First lens up is my workhorse & what stays attached to my camera 95% of the time- the Nikon 18-200 VR lens.  This is the first lens that I ever bought & it cost as much as my first dSLR (the D80).  It’s an all-around super useful lens because of the huge range: 18 is wide enough to get most wide angle shots & 200 is a really long reach on a zoom.  To have them both & everything in between on the same lens is killer- no swapping lenses out and no  missing any shots.  The VR is feature stands for vibration reduction and lets me shot shot a slightly lower shutter speeds while reducing the shaking.

My next lens is the Nikon 85mm f/1.4G which I recently purchased and is my first really nice lens and the only prime lens in my collection.  It’s a portrait lens that creates beautiful photos & has a huge aperture that lets me shot in lower light.  I’ve only used it a few times so far (Dogs at 85mm) & it will be mostly for taking portraits and doing specific types of shots.

Third up is a Tamron 10-24mm wide-angle lens that I got for Christmas a few years ago & I’ve really been enjoying it lately.  With as much sightseeing as we do, it’s so nice to be able to get the whole shot in the picture & makes for some stunning photos- from inside the ballpark to wide open landscape spaces like Olympic National Park.  Although Photoshop makes it easy to create a pano from several shots, it just can’t replicate the straight-out-of-camera beauty you can get with this wide angle.

Next up is my least used & cheapest lens, the Nikon 70-300m.  The optics aren’t great on it & it shares much of the same focal length as my 18-200.  I bought it for our safari in South Africa so I could get an extra 100mm of zoom to capture animals.  I learned that you need lots of light at 300mm so that you can keep your shutter speed high enough to avoid camera shake since it’s not the VR version.  I only take and use it for special occasions where I know it will be really bright & I want to really zoom in on something far away.  Since my new camera has so many MP, I’d often rather take my chances with using a crop to zoom instead of carrying around an extra lens.

My final lens is the Sigma 18-50 f/2.8 macro lens that gets quite a bit of use at night or inside for photographing people or events where I want a larger aperture to let in more light & the 85mm would be too long of a focal length for close-range photography.  I don’t do too much macro photography, but it does come in handy for close up shots like these tulips.

GOOD NEWS OF THE DAY: So excited to spend the day chatting photography and exploring beautiful Breckenridge.

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