March 9 – 16, 2010

I like this photo of nothingness. It’s pretty…and will make a good photo overlay for taking an ordinary photo and over processing it (which seems to be a current trend that I’m not exactly all that hip with…as in, I don’t really prefer the over processed look). Maybe it will come in handy on Kortni’s wedding photos.

March 10th.

Camden. At his very best. Groaning…Moooooom! Stop, don’t take my picture. Stop taking video…and since 1 minute 29 seconds of video is almost 500mb, sure. I’ll stop.

March 11th. Camden turned 14. We had a surprise party for him at Gino’s – he thought he was going to El Sombrero for shrimp soup with his grandpa…Awesome party, great turnout. We found a new fun party game for teen boys - “Tattoo the birthday guest of honor,” – not as bad as it sounds folks, we simply put a plain white t-shirt on him and gave the guests a pile of colored permanent markers – there were prizes for the best tattoo :) Abby and Ruby decked him out in Irish/Green garb since St. Patrick’s Day is approaching and the leprechaun beard was pretty funny!!

Friday, March 12th – I didn’t take this photo, I was driving. Camden took the photo while I was driving us all to Lincoln City where we were staying with the Wrights for the weekend so he could swim the Newport meet on Saturday & Sunday.

Saturday, after the really LOOOONNNNG day in Newport at the meet (Camden had to be there at 9 but didn’t swim until after 1 and they were WAY behind schedule and didn’t seem to care…) we went back to Lincoln City and hit the beach hoping a float fairy would leave us a beautiful glass ball on the beach…but no. We just froze. It was super cold! Pretty though, different waves on their beach than we get on ours, they get lots of big rolling waves, we have a lot of rocks just off shore that tame ours down a bit most of the time as they are coming in.

March 14th – waiting around for the next heat. Camden and Noah, everyone else is cropped out :D Cam was easy to spot, being the only bright yellow shirt hanging out – most of the collegiate fans at this meet were BEAVERS not Ducks.

 

 

 

Fashionista. AKA Abby. March 15th.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Scans of directions that came with plastic toy (real) camera we bought today – it’s pretty close to a *pinhole* camera in that it’s lens is plastic & super tiny. It claims to be f/11 with a shutter speed of 1/125. This should be interesting since I just loaded it with a roll of 100 ISO slide film to cross process. Enlarge those directions and read them for a good laugh. Today is March 16th. Camera was purchased inside of a $4.99 cheesy easter basket at Grocery Outlet…it also had stickers, a really lame dry erase board that is useless because the tape that holds it down in the basket removes the dry erase surface with it upon removal, a box of mini stickers, a little tied together photo album that’s really just a few sheets of white paper between to cardboard covers in an obscure size…but all we wanted was the *toy camera* so we didn’t have to buy one on ebay for $6 and then pay another $6 to have it shipped to us…make sense?

March 7 & 8, 2010

You know, I know some people who have to even wait until APRIL 3RD for this…so they can have 3G coverage.
I will wait until 2012 and buy a used one lol :)
Photo taken of column in Register Guard paper.


And here it is folks, 03.08.2010 – my view from the waiting room at Bay Clinic. Since I have been coughing and hacking and coughing and wheezing since last Tuesday, I promised family members I would have it checked out…and the nice nurse decided not to look too much into why my lungs are burning, hurting, rattling and wheezy, BECAUSE, apparently I also have a sinus infection – and it is her belief that treating the sinusitis will take care of the lung issue. In 3 weeks if it hasn’t (or if I get worse in the next few days) then they’ll try a chest x-ray or something to take a closer look. That way, we can bill the insurance TWO office visits for the same sickness instead of just one, right? I believe the pharmaceutical companies are in league with wall street. Now, this could all be REALLY AWFUL – but it is absolutely beautiful to LOOK outside – pretty sun, pretty flowers – and I get to be inside where it’s warm to enjoy it. It’s not warm out there.
In other news, I accidentally shot what I thought was an entire roll of film, however, there wasn’t any film in the camera. Oops. So I loaded a roll and started over. :D Now I am sitting in a sea of 35mm SLR cameras from the 80s.

March 6th. For real…

That’s it. The ONLY digital photo I took today. I have searched all over for those lollipops and finally found them in Charleston – and paid a ridiculous $4.29 or something like that for it…BUT picture it in photos (in Camden’s mental photo, he saw sticky colored faces and SAND all over the lollipop and the sticky face and wasn’t thinking this was such a good plan).
We shot 3 rolls of 35mm film today. Well, three rolls worth of shots across 4 cameras. We only got to change out one roll that was at the end and one is almost at the end. The changed out roll was 200 ISO recently purchased the almost done one happens to be 400 ISO that expired in 2003 – I am really excited about THAT film…but that story and sickness is for Drink More Tea :D

February 23 – March 5th…time flies when you’re having cough…

I only took the photo of these cookies to tease Mr. Hinkel with. For real. I actually had intended to take one to our meeting, but you know me, a little blond, a little sketchy, and yeah…sorry. forgot. 02.23

Meeting day, February 24, Abby just made herself right at home on the sofa in the classroom. Isn’t it cute how she…slipped in some webkinz…or something.


02.25
This dude. He kills me. I have been searching for RAINBOW colored large swirl lollipops (at least 3” but I would prefer 5” or so). I didn’t find rainbow, but on the commercial easter aisle at Wal-Mart, I did find duo colored swirl lollipops in white, with blue, yellow, green or pink – and they were cute and came in two packs with other decorated lollies so I bought one set of each color and two sets of pink (because I have two girls and they will wear white flower girl dresses in a couple of weeks and white dresses with pink lollies is just too cute…) Anyhow, no, I didn’t make an error on the capitalization of easter – to me, that’s the holiday with the bunny and the froo froo and the candy and it’s more like a commercial party of mahem and madness (don’t get me wrong, I like candy) – we celebrate Resurrection Sunday and commercial easter the Saturday before (Sause puts on a whing ding egg hunt).

On the 26th, Friday to be precise, we went to the Sixteen Cities concert at The Green Spot. Entry fee was non perishable foods for local food banks. A local worship band opened for them and it was super cool to see an old co-worker’s son on the drums – he seems to be about 9 or 10 ish. Anyhow, I took lots of photos with grainy ISO and it’s OKAY, I’m down with that. I would rather have a little grain than use a flash and this was good practice and a good test to see what the 7D would do in the dark. Manual focus worked out better most of the time. Meet Joel, the bass player. He and the drummer in the back were difficult to get photos of – and Josiah did keep stepping in front of whomever else I was focusing on :D Awesome concert, super nice bunch of guys – and we had a pretty good youth group turn out from church as well.

Saturday was official DAY OFF day for me (right up until I got called in to work) so we were heading to the park…and while we were there we saw this guy who had total iPhone-itis. Now, we were waiting for the big tsunami from the Chilean earthquake to hit us, and hit the Hawaiian Islands – but we never did see it. All we saw were state troopers clearing the beaches, kids playing in the puddle under the swings (after promising not to get wet) and throngs of people who had gathered round to watch for the tsunami. To be honest, I didn’t even notice them until we headed back to the car to go home since we couldn’t play frisbee on the closed beach.

we won’t talk about work.

Sunday. I missed church do to poor communication with Kurt about timing and dough rolling, I needed to leave the house at 9:30 without kids to get the dough at Gino’s rolled so they could open and I could get to church. While this was a solid plan, it failed. He started to leave BEFORE me, WITHOUT children. SO I rolled dough through church, and hooked up with kids after church and we went to the park to play for a bit. Kayla made me sick on the merry-go-round. Folks, this is not a good spot to sit and try to take photos, even if it seems unused and lonely, the minute you sit…they spin you. Rotten little things…02.28
SIGH in relief. There is no photo from March 1st because it’s FILM and still in the camera. There is 200 ISO color film in my 35mm Canon t50 and in my Minolta MG-X. I am dead set on shooting 3 to 10 shots a day with film to increase my abilities – and I plan to shoot at least a couple of rolls of film at Kortni’s wedding (one of those will be black and white, and one will be going into a cheesy 3 lens *toy* camera – and it will be FUN).

Just a funny. I was shooting through a cut off play dough container. I think with my cell phone camera. Shhhh. Don’t tell Kurt. March 2, 2010 (almost his 44th birthday folks).


Happy Birthday to Dad – our Fix it up Chappy repaired the cabinet in the bathroom – he removed the plywood he’d screwed on to cover the hole where the entire front face had been destroyed when a supply line blew off and flooded the entire bathroom, built a new frame around it and put doors on. Awesome. His assistant had a few suggestions apparently and was freely giving her advice and opinions. She was very dramatic about the whole thing, including the part where she was shouting,

“MOM! He’s got Dad’s TOOOOOOOOLS!! WIthout PERMISSION!!”

Zipporah was just bent on getting as many workbook pages as she could do – without doing any math because borrowing makes her brain hurt and then she has to cry.
03.03.2010

March 4, 2010. A bed bug has been spotted. See her?
It’s the curly haired version. They take up the entire bed and prefer to sleep perpendicular to the other occupants of the bed.

Narcissism. That’s my boy. Took a series of portraits of himself today because the ones I took and sent him via email for his FB profile were not up to snuff. And this? Maybe he’s smelling…his pits and needs to shower? I dunno. March 5, 2010

February 1st through 6th, 2010

Alrighty folks, this weekly updating is MOSTLY awesome, except that  I have been using Abigail’s camera and it resets the time/date that tags the image data…so keeping days straight is wretched :D I will do the best I can to keep it straight.
February 1st was my mother’s birthday, folks, she is officially 36 this year…(just kidding, it’s a joke, she skipped her 36th birthday and decided to be 37 twice).
OY! It is also maddening that due to operator error, my phone was saving my images to the phone and not the mini sd card, and those stinking images have to be moved one by one to the card! GRRRR!
So, February 1, I find myself at Wal Mart after work, in thick fog…because we were out of milk at home AGAIN. Camden always gets the blame for drinking the entire gallon in one day, but he was innocent this time, he wasn’t home :)

February 2, after picking Cam up from the pool, I made him show me all of his ribbons. He got three 1sts, three 2nds and two 3rd place ribbons! Amazing boy! His fly is AMAZING now and we were all very impressed with his 200 IM and hope to see him swim that again! No ‘A’ times, but we weren’t exactly prepared to go to state yet anyhow. He did an awesome job at this meet and we are proud of him!

Wednesday, this photo is basically how I felt. Fighting off some kind of icky tummy bug for a couple of days left me wiped out. We met with Mr. Hinkel, left Camden’s computer there in the process of being formatted to Linux and updating drivers so he could get himself *back online*, however it stays in Mr. Hinkel’s room until Camden begins to show some effort in producing some kind of work. Camden still claims he doesn’t remember that part of the deal.  Remembered or not, that’s the deal (and all of the unreasonable, mean, brutal parents of teens say AMEN).

Alright folks, the dude in the sailboat is CRAZY! It’s cold, it’s raining…and that’s Kurt. We caught him taking half a day off on Wednesday (we were on our way home from Resource Link) to sail the boat to the California Street public boat ramp to pull the Zipporah out of the water for a while. Seriously, blowing rain, we had to run down to the casino parking lot so we could find a place to stop the car and take some photos – his location when we first spotted him was in the area where all of the commercial boats, barges and tugs were, and on the 101 side, there was no place to pull over and flag him down.
Thursday, that would have been the 4th, and I remember having gone in to Gino’s at 3:00AM to roll dough, suspecting that it wouldn’t be there, and guess what…it wasn’t. So instead of rolling dough, I made dough – scared the daylights out of one of the Register Guard newspaper guys on my way out – went home and went back to sleep. Dropped Cam at swimming around 3 PM and waited around for him at Gino’s until Dad called and said he’d pick him up and keep him for the weekend, he had some chores to do. SO, back home and back to bed (to the best of my knowledge).

Friday, PAYDAY. Okay, well, I nearly forgot to pick up my check. I rolled three tubs of dough and piled the car to leave for Lincoln City for the weekend. Hard to tell if we took photos on Friday because Abby’s camera time/date RESETS every time you shut the stupid thing off (yes, need to replace an internal battery because that totally BUGS me).  This suspiciously looks like me, on a last minute check of the *do I have everything we need* visual scan, before we head off toward town/gino’s/grandpa’s and then LINCOLN CITY…3 hours later than I had wanted to be leaving. Whatever. We got out of there and Angie knows about me and my straggling.
AND, I read several chapters in a really cool book, Rowing to Latitude, by Jill Freston that Mr. Hinkel suggested (and loaned me). It’s awesome so far…resulting in my not going to sleep last night until early Saturday morning.
Then for Saturday, February 6th…we have this STELLAR photo of Angie’s arm/hand, some blurry rocks covered with mussels and a wave that you can’t see that caused the chaos. Okay, so I knew lying on rocks only exposed at low tide to get a photo of incoming waves was a little risky, but Angie was already soaked anyhow after trying out a teeter totter rock unknowingly, so what did we have to lose except for a handful and pocket full of electronic equipment. UM…wish I had a nice wide angle, that would have been MUCH more fun than cell phone camera. At any rate, nothing broken. Just a little spray on us. SO, we tried some more :D 




(those are sandwiches they be eatin’)

January 26 - 31, 2010 - I think I like clumping my days together ;)

So I played around a bit with some of the frames on my cell phone camera...it would be a lot more fun if it would let you use them at a printable resolution, but no, they are micro. like...176x144. not even postage stamp printable. Sigh. It still works great to send photos of silly things to Mindy for color inspiration :) And the Bossa Nova mangosteen blend was YUMMY!! That was Tuesday, January 26th of 2010.

Wednesday evening at church we had a mock Bible Quiz so the quizzers could show the rest of the church what they are doing in "Bible Quizzing." These kids are AMAZING!! Niki & Alaina both "quizzed out," during their teams' turns, quizzing out means they answered their limit of questions correctly and didn't get to answer anymore to make it fair so the other kids would get a chance to answer.

Thursday, I worked a little at Gino's & Sandy took the girls with her to the beach. They were taking Uncle Alan who came down from the big city to visit. It was COLD when I got there, and the girls were all soaked...and Kayla still didn't want to leave :( Abby and Ruby couldn't wait to leave and I had a laugh about how we always get tsunami warnings and when we get the *tsunami* it's like 1 to 3 feet high, however when we get a *high surf* advisory, we get giant (10, 20, even higher) foot waves - one right after another, not one big wave, hundreds of BIG waves - and they usually destroy parts of Sunset Beach as shown here. Apparently, some people chose not to heed the warning and went to beaches and lookouts anyhow, and some of those were actually knocked down by the giant waves, from the observatory at Shore Acres where you would normally think you were relatively safe from the high surf, and had injuries substantial enough to seek medical treatment. CRAZY!! Ten years ago, I might have ignored the warnings too, but one day, driving out to Shore Acres, I realized just how easily the entire road could be washed out in the low spots...leaving one who happened to be beyond that point STUCK until someone figured out how to get them back.

I finally got around to scanning all of my goodies from my trip to Oahu. This was one of my favorite postcards and I wanted to put it into my scrapbook...so it had to be scanned :D I like the old style and the soft colors and the rounded colors :)

Saturday, I saw this cool sign at Ross...not cool necessarily because it's a nice sign...but the idea is cool. Photo of something average like grass with a keyword. I like it :)

I also found this photo of our poor cat on Abby's memory card from Saturday. Poor Cat. I'm telling you, the faster she runs, the better off she ends up being. She really enjoys being outside most of the time...no one can get to her and mess with her program out there. She can run about, wander, hunt, come and go at will and not be bothered with constant mauling.



We had 2 baptisms this morning at church, Zion being one of them - new and exciting things are going to happen in Zion's life - and I am SOOOO happy and excited for him!! What an awesome family God has blessed him with :D What an awesome way to end January :)

7JAN10 - another longish day

Today...I was totally NOT ORGANIZED! I mean, I had my list of things to do, starting with going to the clinic to get Camden and Ruby caught up on their necessary shots. Oy.

Then we went to...US Cellular to pick up Kurt's repaired phone, swap the phone he was using to Camden's line and I bought a used phone because mine was limping and I didn't want to limp through Hawaii and have a dead and broken phone where I couldn't get a loaner or repair...so I bought a used phone for $49 - a Samsung and it's cool enough, plays mp3 files, has a slot for a micro sd card...and apparently has a software glitch that causes it to crash and reboot if you get a call waiting interruption while you are on the phone...so if I am ever on the phone with you and suddenly you find t line is dead/call dropped - yeah, I didn't hang up on you, someone else called and the phone rebooted itself. I will be searching Samsung's site on this topic - it has to be a glitch in the phone software...nevermind that this particular model was the add a line now and get this phone free, as well as the buy one get one free model (why do they always assume you need another line, or two phones? yes, my 9-year-old wants one, NO she's not getting one, she's not old enough to be left alone - and she's always with someone who has a phone either on them or in their home).

USCC shop to Dollar Tree to buy promised ice creams for the shot victims. And prizes. And toys. and several other dollar's worth of things we didn't exactly need. I did  need a few toiletries for the trip.

From there to Gino's where I fixed starving children lunch and they looked at it and said, "um, we're not eating pizza."

From there to Coos Bay to Oregon Inspiration - I used the rest of my Christmas gift certificate and bought a Coos Bay t-shirt (red) and some snacks for the trip.

From there to Wells Fargo to make the car payment.

From there to Wal-Mart to use my gift card to buy a micro sd card for the new phone and a prepaid Visa card for my trip.

War Mart (that's what Ruby called it until she could say it right) back to the pool to drop Cam off, then back HOME because I STILL HADN'T PACKED...and Kortni was already in town looking around for wedding location and reception hall stuff...so when she called, I was sitting in the middle of my bed, showered and half dressed, sorting through piles of clothes and junk, trying to pack my suitcase. I said Kurt would run me over when he got home.

FINALLY, Kurt got home, I got packed, and I made it to Dad & Kelli's by about 6, thinking I'd held up our departure, only to find Kortni still going over wedding details with Kelli, looking at invites, and not yet printing her boarding pass for our flights in the morning.

Fast forward (that's how she drives) to Philomath, where I am now, packed, tired, thirsty (I should get up and get some water) and having to be up by 5 so we can pull out by 5:30, because I am supposed to start boarding at 8AM - and I realize that you are supposed to be at the airport like an hour or 2 early, but golly, the fast food joints aren't even open at 6 - and I don't want to mill around the airport for 2 hours...and Rob really doesn't want to get up 2 hours earlier than he already has to because Kortni doesn't have to board until 9:45 - so I'm already throwing a hitch in this kind man's giddy-up :o)

Wonder if you can take sliced carrots on the plane in your backpack...dried, salty foods make me feel YUCK after 5 hours of SITTING :D

OH YES, and the photo - the new phone does this multi shot thing, in especially low resolution of course, and that's the auto mode, while at Gino's this afternoon. I do like that it names the image files by date and TIME. cool.

4.Jan.2010 - Malfunction Results in Special Effects

So, my phone is basically TOAST. I sent it in for *repairs* once and they said it was a factory defect, sent it off to the manufacturer (which I could have done without having to use my paid warranty service) and returned it...UNCHANGED!! That's right, it still malfunctioned, still crashed. And I say, whatever, I will get a new one when I get back from Hawaii, for now, we will have ALIEN PHOTOS...and when it crashes, I will simply reboot. It's just a phone, you CALL people with it. It doesn't have to be all smart and fancy - and Ruby does look rather lovely in grainy green...okay, fine. She looks dazed and confused :D But it's still funny that it does this all by itself, only when it feels like it :D

October 24, 2009 - Living For Jesus is Fun

Have I mentioned the netbook crashed? 48 hours of data recovery on every memory card I had...kiss what whas on the hard drive good-bye (does it really matter in the grand scheme of things? Is the information on the crashed hard drive necessary for my eternal salvation? NO. it crashed. bummer. moving on...)

I recovered enough photos that I'm happy, some that weren't recovered are posted on the blog and my memory isn't really all that bad...besides, my kids are cute every day - and don't really change a whole lot in 1 month :D

So what I'm really saying is I HAVE NO CLUE what photo I took on this day (haven't sorted that out yet). We'll come back to October 24th when I find that photo :D

AHHHH - due to the data recovery, I was NOT USING A CAMERA to take photos because you are supposed to immediately stop using the data storage you want to try and recover, as soon as you realize you are going to need to recover...so cell phone photo. At 11:25 PM I realized I was left with cell phone photos as a last resort :D

October 2, 2009 - Living For Jesus is Fun!

I got MY phone back today and got to give the less than stellar loaner phone back to the phone store! And there you have it, the first photo I took after getting it back! Ruby on the porch with her *fort.*

AND all of my data is STILL on it. My ringtones. My photos. My speed dials are all gone...my contacts had to be updated again, there were no texts left, but whatever. Photos and ringtones still there - way cool :D