The Sunday before we left on our big trip was a glorious day by any standard- amazing spring weather, lazy afternoon relaxing before we tried to pack it all in the last week of work.  All of my favorites were outside in the yard soaking up the sun.  Please ignore my pink shoe drying out on the table….

I decided I wanted to play a little more with my 85 lens & especially capture some good shots of Zoe. She has been having some health issues lately & we are trying to get them sorted out to see what treatments she needs.

Mia never sits still more than about 2 minutes in the backyard- she wants to play ball, follow the birds or chase the squirrels.

Or chase the bee that was buzzing around my Coke.  Yup- I ended up sitting barefoot  next to hubby on the glider & reading my Patagonia book.

It wasn’t long before I was clearly cramping his (napping) style & he moved out onto the grass, where the dogs were glad to join him.

Mia’s day got a whole lot better when the squirrel came out & she was obsesses.  Unlike Zoe, who was enjoying rolling around in the grass more.

This was pretty much my idea of a perfect day- great weather, time with the girls, hanging out with H, reading a good book, and generally loving life.

GOOD NEWS OF THE DAY: Husband just scored some HLSR rodeo tickets to see John Legend next Friday!

Before we left on vacation, the dogs got a little wild and feisty one night in the living room while I was trying to watch TV.

Mia is the sweetest dog on Earth & when she gets “mean face” it totally cracks me up!

They play tug together occasionally & Mia still does her patented spin to wrap the toy around herself & get some extra leverage against Zoe.  These two crack me up and keep me constantly entertained with their zany antics.

GOOD NEWS OF THE DAY: My orchids are blooming again!

As an excuse and semi-explanation of why it takes an actual event in my life at least 2 weeks to make it on the blog, I thought I’d share the various steps I go through after I take a shot & how it gets to the blog.  Step 1 is to get to a stopping point on my camera or through an event so I can copy the photos to my hard drive.  I shoot RAW (which would take an entire separate post to explain why), but I keep EVERY.SINGLE.PHOTO I take as as originals sorted by years and with each month having a separate folder as shown above.  All these photos are stored on an external hard drive & backed up to a separate xHD and also to Mozy online.

Step 2 involved importing all the photos into Lightroom.  This step only takes a minute for me to do my part & then the computer starts crunching away on creating full size previews of all the photos and adding them to the catalog for organizing.

Step 3 in my workflow is using Lightroom to do a little organizing.  First I add keywords that help me find photos again when I need them- mostly place names or people.  Then I quickly run through all the photos & set a flag on the ones I want to keep and basically decided to ignore all the rest.  Depending on how many photos there are, the time involved in this step can vary but it is generally a very quick & fast process since Lightroom has tons of keyboard shortcuts that speed things up.

Step 4 is to do the actual developing and  adjustments to individual photos.   There are dozens of free & tons of paid Lightroom develop pre-sets out there that offer a great starting point & the adjustments I have to make are usually minimal.  It still does involve opening up every single picture, waiting for Lightroom to load the 22 MB file and then tweaking a few of the sliders for exposure, fill light or clarity to get the photo how I’d like it to look.  This is generally the most time consuming step since each photo requires 30-60 seconds of individual attention.

After I work my way through developing all the photos I have flagged as keepers, it takes just a few mouse clicks to export those photos to JPG files in the correct size & resolution for the blog.  The brilliant thing about Lightroom is that all of the settings for almost every step can be saved as a preset- so you could add watermarks, copyright data or rename files at this step with very minimal effort.

Step 6 is to create the collages if any of the photos are going on the blog.  I’ve covered other various collage options , but 99% of the time I am using Moirai Compositor because it is so quick and easy.  If I know what photos I want, I can create each collage in under 60 seconds so this step isn’t too terribly time consuming either.  It generally takes me more time to figure out which photos I want at their full-size resolution (900 pixels wide) and which ones I want combined into a collage for the blog.

Next step is to upload all my pictures to Flickr, but original sized and collages.  I know that many people using WordPress host the pictures on their server, but this is just the workflow that I’ve established over the years.  I will generally upload all my photos that were keepers to Flickr as another backup copy of the final “processed” photos since I only keep the original RAW files & the Lightroom instructions that go with them, not the uploaded JPEG files.  After the photos & collages are uploaded, I then view them at the 900 pixel size & right click to copy the photo URL to paste into WordPress.

For the final step, I used the Faster Image insert plug-in to quickly add all my photos by pasting their URL and a title into the blog.  Once all the photos are uploaded, I generally save the blog and then fill in the words and story just a few days before I actually post it.  I wish I was better about scheduling most posts ahead of time, but I just can’t find enough time to get that far ahead.  My workflow allows me to knock out big chucks of this & get all the pictures ready on weekends or one night, then only spend a few minutes a day filling in the narrative portion of the post.   It is time consuming, but most of the work and steps are things I’d be doing anyway to all the photos I take & blogging only adds the final few steps.

I’ll be glad to answer any questions anybody has about my workflow & I’d love to hear some suggestions if you think I could be doing something better/smarter/faster!

GOOD NEWS OF THE DAY: I’m actually excited to be back at work- so thankful I love my job (most days at least)!

Sunday Scribblings #307: Wit-  This came to me as I was thinking about the prompt this week.  I thought about using ‘grace,’ which I might use another time.  Then I thought about ‘wit’ and then I thought about Wit and Grace and what they might be like as a human couple.  That’s the kind of thinking that goes on over here.  So this week, your prompt is wit, but if you like the thought of it as human with a wife, that’s something I’d like to read too.

I’ll start out by saying I’m mostly blank on “wit”.  Although I could describe several people I know as witty, I don’t often use the word wit itself. I also more associate it with the phrase about keeping or losing one’s wit.

I guess you could say I lost my wit on our trip to Argentina.  We’d had a crazy travel day, no sleep, major airport delays, stressed to the max driving across Buenos Aires to make our connecting flight, hot & sweaty from sitting an a cab for almost an hour & a half. Then I lost my wallet. It must have fallen out of my bag & I just about came unglued.  I was so upset & completely frazzled about the whole situation.

I really admire people who are witty- especially with their writing.  I’d love to follow some more witty writers on Twitter- any suggestions?

I clearly feel I have better verbal skills than writing skills- I feel much more witty in person.  Maybe that’s a delusion.  Maybe I can learn to transfer that voice to the keyboard one day….

GOOD NEWS OF THE DAY: Officially going to Philadelphia in May to attend the SITS girls Bloggy Boot Camp & visit my best friend!

After 2 weeks of vacation, I really miss jogging & my regular workouts.  Bear Creek is my favorite place to jog while I am in Denver- it’s close to my favorite aunt & uncle and it is just gorgeous!   I’ve been running through here for several years now &  photographed before, and I am insanely jealous that I don’t have something like this in Houston.

As we were there in early October, all the trees were just turning the most brilliant shades of light green and yellow.

So much of Denver is connected via bike and jogging trails, and this route goes several miles along Bear Creek & even has a horse path.

A change in scenery- running by lakes, colorful flowers, towering old trees and through manicured parks is the perfect motivation to get out of bed and hit the trials, even on a rather chilly morning.

Idyllic little streams are so much more inspiring than running along a bayou- even the bridges are beautiful.

Ok and the most entertaining part of the jog is the flat stretch across a plain area that is home to a protected population of prairie dogs.  There were hundreds of them out there- all staring at me.  It was a bit intimidating and some of them were right along the edge of the trail.

So between juggling phone, camera & gloves, I managed to get some footage of prairie dogs actually barking- I had no idea!  Anyway- I adore the park & always pack my running clothes when headed to Denver so I can jog in such a beautiful & quirky place.

GOOD NEWS OF THE DAY: So excited to be heading home a day and a half early- we need it to recover from this trip!

About a month after my sister turned 16, there was a car shuffle at their house.  My brother was lucky enough to get this new Nissan Xterra and Haley inherited the Yukon.

He was very jazzed about it & I wish I could have taken a picture of Haley in her ‘new” car.  It’s hard to believe he will graduate in just a few short months & be off to college this fall!

GOOD NEWS OF THE DAY: Since we used reward miles to book our flights, we are able to change them & come home early!

A thermostat seems like such a silly little thing, but buying new ones has brought me such unexpected joy!  After researching online, I bought 2 of these Filtrete 7-Day Touchscreen WiFi-Enabled Programmable Thermostat with Backlight from 3M at Home Depot back in November- one for upstairs and one for downstairs.

 After the painful lesson of installing a thermostat in our previous house, I had these professionally installed & then I was able to set up the wireless part in about 5 minutes each.  Logging onto any computer, I can log-in to my account and see both of my thermostats showing the current temperature, the mode (heat/cool), the target  set temperature and schedule.

There are so many options about when to set target temperatures by time and day for both heating and cooling.   I know programmable thermostats have been around for ages, but I really needed something this simple and this online for me to figure it out.

My biggest confusion was really trying to figure out all the times and target temperatures.  I pretty much gave up on the downstairs thermostat ( at least this winter) and leave it off most of the time.  I sit by the fire downstairs or otherwise spend most of my time at home upstairs.  I found turning the downstairs heat on really impacted the upstairs thermostat since the heat rose into the foyer and would make all the rooms colder than the hallway.

Now my really most favorite part that makes these thermostats so wicked awesome is that I can control them all from my iPhone.  I downloaded the Radio Thermostat app and logged into to see the current temperature and I’m often guilty of turning up the heat before I get out of bed!  This is also perfect to switch the mode if I know the weather has changed drastically during the day or to turn them off completely when we are traveling.  I hardly ever touch the physical thermostat now and probably adjust them twice a day from my iPhone & I am officially in love with these thermostats.

GOOD NEWS OF THE DAY: We are loving Santiago so far & we are off to check out some Chilean wineries today.

The last few weeks I’ve had the opportunity to meet-up several times with various groups of ladies around Houston.  I’m so happy to be  connecting with some other gals in town & had  blast with the group above at Onion Creek playing trivia called Geeks Who Drink.  Unfortunately, my math and science skills are much stronger than my pop culture knowledge, but our team did really well anyway.

Then I was back at Onion Creek meeting up with the Htown Blogger hotties a few days later, meeting some fabulous new gals.

Then I had the best time hanging out with 7 other gals talking cameras & photography at the Workshop I hosted.

I’m hoping to do this course again and/or do a few actual meet-ups where we go out and practice all these things.  I am so thankful to have met so many fabulous ladies lately & I can’t wait to get back in town to hang out again.

GOOD NEWS OF THE DAY: After resting by the ocean, we area headed into the big city of Santiago to explore.

In late January, my sister had the best day of her life.  I think her absolute favorite thing about being on the drill team so far is their winter Brigade Ball where she played dress up and was escorted to the festivities by her Prince Charming.

She had one of her best friends come over to do her hair & make-up.  I was blown away by how intricate and elegant she looked & she was even voted best hairdo among all the other drill team girls.

They started off with all their usual photos as Will came to the house.  The (in)famous staircase photos with a little iPhone….all stolen from Facebook.

They exchanged wearable flowers & then headed outside for a few more photos.  The lower right photo completely captures the look my sister gives all the time!

Then it was off to meet-up with all their friends- something like 12 other couples all rented a party bus to take them to the dinner & they gathered at one of the neighborhood parks for a millions more photos.

Not many photos of the actual dance, but I managed to steal a few more.  Sounds like they had a great time & I was just blown away by how fancy all the girls looked.  Guess shes’s got 2 more years of dances and homecomings before her senior prom.

Her boyfriend Will is so precious.  He gave her an adorable book for Christmas & also brought her flowers on their 5 month dating anniversary a few weeks ago.  That’s practically an eternity in high school & they are too precious together.

GOOD NEWS OF THE DAY: Hopefully spending another day poolside or on the beach will energize us enough to make it to Santiago tomorrow.

About almost 2 years ago, when I signed up to run the Philadelphia Marathon, I instantly feared running the hills.  I convinced husband I really needed a treadmill to train properly for that race and for the other Rock n Roll m marathons I was thinking about running in 2011.  I promised him I’d really use it and it wouldn’t turn into the world’s most expensive clothing rack.

Through research I learned the Bowflex Series 7 Treadmill   had great reviews on Amazon  and had the minimal functionality I needed.  I paid $1100 included shipping & white glove from Sports Authority in August 2010 and they even carried it all the way upstairs for me.  The interface is a little dated and not super fancy, but it was all I really needed.  It does fold up, but I always usually leave it in the regular position in the corner of H’s office.

The other thing that makes running on the treadmill bearable is that I purchased this SurfShelf Treadmill Desk and Laptop Holder so I could watch TV while running.  The first few months I watched photoshop & photography tutorials from Kelby Training to figure out how to use PhotoshopCS5.  I eventually go bored with that and decided to go with Netflix, where I watched the entire Arrested Development series.  I’ve finally moved on to catch up with all the rest of America and I am on season 2 of The Office.

My compromise with myself is that I just have to do 2 miles.  With all my races last year, my use was very sporadic, but I did log over 100 miles just last year.  Since I run outside with the dogs on Monday, Wednesdays and the weekend (Friday or Saturday), I try to hit the treadmill on Tuesday & Thursdays, maybe Sunday if I’ve skipped a mid-week run.  I do a fast 0.5 mile warm-up (6.4 mph is much faster than my marathon pace) and then 1 mile on incline at a slower pace (lately about 6.1 mph at 4.5 %).  Then I do a 0.5 mile cool-down at no incline and back at the starting pace.  Although it’s only 2 miles, I really credit it with helping me tackle all the hills on the marathon courses over the past year & for also improving my speed and finish times considerably.  I track it all in a simple spreadsheet that helps keep me accountable & logs my miles as shown above.

GOOD NEWS OF THE DAY: Argentina thoroughly kicked our rear-ends, but we are recovering on the beach in Chile for a few days.