30 Day Photography Challenge - Day 7

It's fruit photo day! Grapes....pretty obvious.

Self-portrait ***** What I wore today
Something green ***** Someone I love
Something new ***** Technology
Something I made ***** Something fun
Fruit ***** From a distance
Flowers ***** My shoes
What I ate ***** In my bag
Pretty pattern ***** Trees
Breakfast ***** Clouds
Sunflare ***** Bokeh
Something orange ***** In motion
Long exposure ***** Purchased
Animal ***** Black and white
From a low angle ***** From a high angle
After dark ***** Close-up

30 Day Photography Challenge - Day 6

Today is pretty pattern photo day! This isn't technically a pattern, but I'm going with it anyway. The pink ruffled edges remind me of a fancy skirt :) No idea what the plant is called, but it's lovely.

Self-portrait ***** What I wore today
Something green ***** Someone I love
Something new ***** Technology
Something I made ***** Something fun
Fruit ***** From a distance
Flowers ***** My shoes
What I ate ***** In my bag
Pretty pattern ***** Trees
Breakfast ***** Clouds
Sunflare ***** Bokeh
Something orange ***** In motion
Long exposure ***** Purchased
Animal ***** Black and white
From a low angle ***** From a high angle
After dark ***** Close-up

30 Day Photography Challenge - Day 5

Today is close-up photo day. These are the hydrangeas in my front yard. I think it will be the last of them since it's getting cooler. It's a new bouquet so the flowers are still pretty tiny and green. Interestingly, they are more blue this season. We usually get a bubble gum pink color every year but this year they have a purplish blue hue to them. Not sure what's changed, but I do like the color change :)

This one is also best viewed larger by clicking on it. Probably they will all be best that way!

Self-portrait ***** What I wore today
Something green ***** Someone I love
Something new ***** Technology
Something I made ***** Something fun
Fruit ***** From a distance
Flowers ***** My shoes
What I ate ***** In my bag
Pretty pattern ***** Trees
Breakfast ***** Clouds
Sunflare ***** Bokeh
Something orange ***** In motion
Long exposure ***** Purchased
Animal ***** Black and white
From a low angle ***** From a high angle
After dark ***** Close-up

30 Day Photography Challenge - Day 4

Today is n motion! I walked to the Estancia Hotel & Spa that's 2 blocks from my office today. I had my camera with me and just looked for inspiration. They have a fountain in the middle of one of the courtyards and I walked past it but then went back. I've seen it before and it's....well....just a fountain. But something made me go back and look at it and I'm glad I did. As I watched the water flow, I realized it would be perfect for the in motion photo. I had been thinking I would photograph cars as they drove past us on the freeway, but this is much more beautiful option. And the car thing probably wouldn't have turned out very good. I had several to choose from and it came down to two. Then I figured....I just post them both. So it's a twofer! They are both best viewed large (click on them).

Self-portrait ***** What I wore today
Something green ***** Someone I love
Something new ***** Technology
Something I made ***** Something fun
Fruit ***** From a distance
Flowers ***** My shoes
What I ate ***** In my bag
Pretty pattern ***** Trees
Breakfast ***** Clouds
Sunflare ***** Bokeh
Something orange ***** In motion
Long exposure ***** Purchased
Animal ***** Black and white
From a low angle ***** From a high angle
After dark ***** Close-up

30 Day Photography Challenge - Day 3

This started out being the cloud photo day but then quickly turned into sunflare photo day. I walked down my street to get a better shot of the puffy clouds and suddenly the sun popped through the clouds for a few minutes behind me. I quickly turned around and only got about 5 shots before the sun was eclipsed again. Right place at the right time :)

Self-portrait ***** What I wore today
Something green ***** Someone I love
Something new ***** Technology
Something I made ***** Something fun
Fruit ***** From a distance
Flowers ***** My shoes
What I ate ***** In my bag
Pretty pattern ***** Trees
Breakfast ***** Clouds
Sunflare ***** Bokeh
Something orange ***** In motion
Long exposure ***** Purchased
Animal ***** Black and white
From a low angle ***** From a high angle
After dark ***** Close-up

30 Day Photography Challenge - Day 2

Ok, this is proving to be harder than I thought it would be. It's only day 2 and I already forgot to take a picture! I got to work and all I had is the camera on my phone. To make things harder, I'm at work! Not too much inspiration around here. I went outside at 7:20am and started looking around. This was the most interesting thing I could find. So day 2 is something green. This is the ornamental grass they have outside my office. It had just been watered so it has some water droplets. Best I could do with a camera phone and being stuck at work.

Self-portrait ***** What I wore today
Something green ***** Someone I love
Something new ***** Technology
Something I made ***** Something fun
Fruit ***** From a distance
Flowers ***** My shoes
What I ate ***** In my bag
Pretty pattern ***** Trees
Breakfast ***** Clouds
Sunflare ***** Bokeh
Something orange ***** In motion
Long exposure ***** Purchased
Animal ***** Black and white
From a low angle ***** From a high angle
After dark ***** Close-up

30 Day Photography Challenge

I saw 2 different 30 day challenges on Pinterest last month and thought it would be good for me to do since I haven't picked up my camera in ages. Problem was, some of the things on the lists didn't appeal to me. For example, one had "a bad habit". How do you take a picture of a bad habit? A bag of chips or something? I don't know, just seemed like an odd thing to dedicate a picture to. So I decided to take things from each them and make my 30 day list.

Here's the list in random order:

Self-portrait ***** What I wore today
Something green ***** Someone I love
Something new ***** Technology
Something I made ***** Something fun
Fruit ***** From a distance
Flowers ***** My shoes
What I ate ***** In my bag
Pretty pattern ***** Trees
Breakfast ***** Clouds
Sunflare ***** Bokeh
Something orange ***** In motion
Long exposure ***** Purchased
Animal ***** Black and white
From a low angle ***** From a high angle
After dark ***** Close-up

Day one is: What I wore



Today we went to my nephew's wedding today. The location was really beautiful. I really should have taken advantage of it and gone out and about looking for photo opportunities...but I wasn't thinking I guess. I should have taken a picture of the bride and groom, but there never seemed to be a good moment for it. So I took a photo of the necklace I wore. Love this necklace. Greg got it for new about 5 years ago :) We'll see what I come up with for day 2!

Calvin

Calvin passed away last Monday (8/22).

I've been thinking of posting something here but it's been too hard to "talk" about. It's still hard and will always be hard to talk about. I'm sure you understand. He was a special little thing. We miss him a lot. I'm having a hard time just typing this.

He'd been having trouble with hairballs over the last month and we had taken him to the vet in July for it. On Sunday (8/21) it seemed like he had another one so we took him in again. We got a liquid medication that would help greatly and were feeling very confident that this would take care of the problem. Sunday night he wasn't social and just wanted to sleep in the corner of my craft room. He'd done this the previous time, too. We thought he'd perk up by the next day. Monday morning Greg woke up around 5am and went to check on him. He wasn't doing well at all. I got up and we put him on the bed and he took a step and collapsed. We rushed him to the vet hospital. We usually put them in the pet carrier but he always seems so terrified in it so we wrapped him in a blanket and Greg cradled him in his arms like a baby. He barely made a peep the whole way. I know he felt safe in Greg's arms. While driving to the pet hospital I looked over at him a few times. It's really hard to explain, but his pretty green eyes were very expressive and were telling me something that I kept to myself. When we got there they whisked him away and we waited. It's hard to wait for bad news. After some blood tests, they determined he was in renal failure. He'd probably been in renal failure for a month and the hairball issues were actually masking the real problem. Chances are he probably didn't even have hairballs but it presented like that because he has a history of problems with them. His little body just wasn't working well enough to keep things moving in his digestive system. They told us that morning his condition was terminal and he would not recover.

For us, our pets are our children. Loosing them is a pain like no other we have experienced. We find little comfort these days...it's heartbreaking to know we will never see him again.

I took this of him and it captured his personality pretty well. He was so curious. Can you see it?



He was into everything all the time. And always wanted to be with people. Such a charmer. I can honestly say that everyone loved Calvin. But no one more than Greg. They had an extraordinary bond. Cat's tend to be aloof but Calvin was more like a dog in that he always wanted to be with people. But no one more than Greg. They were like two peas in a pod. This will sound exaggerated, but it's not. When I was home and Greg would come home, Calvin would run circles around the coffee table until he came in the house. Calvin was so excited to see him. Not a few times ~ every time. Wouldn't it be cool to know someone or something was that excited to see you every single time you came home? I love to see Greg, but I'm not running around the coffee table when he comes home. This is how much Calvin loved Greg. And Greg loved him, too. So much.



Every story has an ending....for us, this one came too soon.



“Those who bring sunshine into the lives of others, cannot keep it from themselves"
~ James Matthew Barrie

Is all true. If only I had the nerve to follow every one of them.

At work we interact via email with systems administrators daily and get to know them that way. Often we don't know anything about them. Very little personal information is exchanged since they are emailing us to take care of departmental business. Unless we've met them at a campus event, we don't know their age, what they look like....nothing.

Today, just a while ago, we got email from a systems administrator who says he's sorry to have to deliver this news, but one of the other systems administrators we also deal with in his department is in the hospital and isn't expected to live through the weekend. He said her husband will meet people in the lobby of the hospital today if they want to come by and be taken to her room to say goodbye to her.

Man.....this was like a ton of bricks falling on me. I don't know her personally but I know her from her emails to us. I just thought about it for a minute and wondered what happened to her. I checked and we got email from her about a month ago but nothing since. I wondered if she was an older woman so I Googled her and found her Facebook page and her Flickr account. She's young. Maybe 30's. As I looked at her Flickr account, it was hard to comprehend that this young woman is in a hospital dying. I got very sad. I looked at one photo of her taken in 2008. She looks really happy. She's pretty. Big smile. I thought to myself as I looked at her, did she have any idea she would die in 2011?

This just made me start thinking how no one knows what will happen tomorrow, next moth, 3 years from now...

Get busy having a good time TODAY because you're here today and you can. Life is short....we just don't know how short.

How can you not love this song? Seriously.

(I like the directors cut the best)