my would be portfolio: the cloud and sky edition, part 2.

I've had a very weird weekend with my camera. For a couple of days it just would not take any pictures. It would focus, but not release the shutter. Really put a damper on my weekend photography plans. I just ended up using my iphone though. The second picture from the top was taken with my iphone months ago. The bottom picture was done with a disposable camera years ago.

I had planned on embarking upon a special photography project this past weekend that would require my accountability for 30 days. I have decided to start this coming weekend, probably Friday. I will share it with you then.

my would be portfolio: the cloud and sky edition, part 1.

I am still learning my way around my camera, even though I've had it since last December! I've just now started playing around with other settings, other than just "Auto" and "No auto" and the one with the mountain on it. I even discovered some things that allow me to modify my photos in my camera! Yep, just discovered that, THIS WEEK. I'm really truckin' now. Look out folks.

on the eve of september.

It seems like a week ago that the year was starting. It's been a whirlwind! Gah! The year is three months away from being over! Really?

September begins my absolute favorite time of year: Autumn. Don't get me wrong; I love Summer. I love having a break from things, I love having vacation opportunities, I love the fourth of July, and I love swimming pools, cookouts, long days and late sunsets. But. There's something about Autumn. 

Actually, there are several things about Autumn:

1. It's awesome.

2. The weather gets cooler, but not cold.

3. The leaves. They change color. Even though they're dying, they look so full of vibrant life.

4. It's football season in the high schools and colleges.

5. It's awesome.

6. The air. It smells different. There's something in the air. It's crisp and refreshing.

7. A string of holidays is right around the corner, culminating in my favorite--Christmas.

8. The days are still long enough to enjoy.

9. It's awesome.

And ten, it's awesome.

I know Summer's not officially over yet, but in my mind Autumn begins in September. Just the word "September" evokes all of these Fall-ish feelings. Good feelings. Expectant feelings.

And just what am I expecting?

I am expecting to take a few long drives through the north Georgia mountains, going nowhere in particular, and snap some photos along the way.

I am expecting to take my children to an apple orchard and to one or two pumpkin patches. And while I'm thinking about pumpkins...

I am expecting to go to Starbucks and Bruster's and purchase a few pumpkin-flavored delights.

Those are just a few things that I am expecting. There are plenty of other fond memories waiting to be made during this time of year.

For a lot of people, Springtime signifies the start of something new. Autumn has always done that for me. I'm not sure why, but it has. Here I am, wanting to jump into all these new endeavors, just as the year is starting to make its final turn toward the finish line. Odd.

five questions.

I've been finding a slew of online creativity classes lately, all of which I would like to take!

They all cost money though, and funding my newfound (or rather no-longer-dormant) creative juicing and exploits is not in my budget. August is always the leanest month of the year around here.

I did find one free online creativity class. There is one lesson per month. I didn't find it until last week, so this month's assignment is a bit short for me. The assignment was to ask myself five questions a day for the whole month. They could be any question I could think of. Here is a sample of one of my days:

Five Questions.

1. What was the first random thing that made you happy today?

my big, tasty bowl of instant oatmeal with raisins, dates, and walnuts

2. What was the first non-random thing that made you happy today?

thoughts of my husband and our first date and the goodness of the Lord who crossed our paths

3. What color combination are you liking right now?

pink and turquoise

4. What small thing do you wish you still had that you used to own?

my Polaroid camera

5. If you gave a recital tomorrow, what are five pieces that you would sing?

Ach Ich Fuhl's, Donde Lieta Usci, Caro Nome, Depuis le Jour, Chi bel sogno di Doretta

This has been a fun assignment.

gifts and surprises.

So, in the last month I've won five giveaways. I'm pretty psyched. I've won some skincare which I've been using every day. Even though it is a drugstore brand, it feels really luxurious. It came with a serum and cream, and while it's not philosophy or anything (my favorite brand), it certainly does an excellent job for what it is!

I've also won a couple of other small gifts, including this delightful custom memento set that I can't wait to get in the mail. Last but certainly not least, I won a $100 Visa gift card!

And now I've entered a $500 Wal-mart gift card giveaway. Pretty sweet prize...that's a lot of diapers! Here is a link for entering the contest, which ends September 9: http://bit.ly/1Y3LfR

I love this winning trend.

tgif.

We've had a very good week, but I am still glad the weekend is here so that we can just chill for a day or two. I have had so many creative ideas swirling through my head this week it is quite overwhelming. I started doing a couple of small mind maps a couple of days ago, but of course got sidetracked with other things. Maybe I can finish them up this evening. Or maybe I can get the rest of the photos off of my camera and into iphoto. I don't know. I'll do one or the other.

Or maybe I'll sit and make yet another list of the projects I want to tackle in this sublime craft book that I've had for several months and have flipped through countless times already. There's just so much to do! So much to learn! So much NEW!

Since it has been so long since I've been posting lately, which means it has been even longer since I posted a nice little photo, I made sure to post one this time. Yep, it's my shoe. It was taken in the springtime. It's random, I know. But it's a cute shoe!

woo!

Well, after much time away, I am posting here again. Since my last post in January, my family and I have had the opportunity to fall in love with two more cities through my husband's work: Charlotte and Chicago. We spent four months in Charlotte, finishing up in March. Then about a month ago we were in Chicago for a week and a half. That was by no means enough time. I hadn't been to Chicago since I was maybe twelve years old, and even then it was to the South Side to visit relatives. Beloved memories, those are. But I had never seen the CITY. Never saw Lake Michigan. Or the skyscrapers. Or the Chicago river. Nothing like that. 

So we spent our amazing ten days in the HEART of the city. It was too awesome for words. I still have loads of pictures on my D40 that I have yet to download. Although my husband was working, it was still like a vacation for all of us. I am so glad we had the chance to go. About a month prior to our trip, my husband had to travel out to San Jose, California for a week and we could not go with him. I was so bummed. This trip totally made up for it.

So now, here we are, chilling at home, waiting for his next assignment. I'm in my third week of preschooling my three year-old (with my eighteen month-old joining in!), and it's the second week of school for my seventh-grader. We're one week away from being completely back in the swing of things schedule-wise, and the dog days of Summer are winding down. It's almost time for my favorite time of year: Autumn!

I've become quite the shutterbug since I got my D40 in December. That was one of the best birthday presents I've ever had! I'm still trying to organize my photos from the summer, but I plan to post here a lot more often about the things that have been inspiring me lately. That means I'll have photos to share as well!

Now it's time to fire up the grill and get dinner started.

i was in a time warp, i guess.

Well, it's been forever since I have blogged here. Don't know what happened.

...Well, actually, I do know what happened.

Life happened.

Things got pretty trying for a while. I got pregnant with my third child, and while that was a truly happy and awesome thing, it left me in bed the first three months, sick as a dog. That wasn't fun. I had no energy to do anything really, least of all blog. I didn't even get on my computer most days. That's when I knew I was in trouble, because I'm on my computer every day. But the Spring/Summer of '07 pretty much put me back in the dark ages technology-wise.

Once the summer was over, we found ourselves trying to prepare for a baby and starting a new school year and my husband found himself laid off. For the second time that year. So we went two months I think it was with no job for him. Not fun. We ended up having to move out of our apartment and in with some friends temporarily in the midst of some serious uncertainty of what we were going to do. Things were already tight since the first layoff, but with the second layoff and going to one income indefinitely, things were nearly impossible. Living on one income was not as difficult during the summer, because the kids and I could just stay at home most of the time. And with me feeling uber-sickly with the pregnancy that whole time, that's just what we did. But the fall brings Master's Academy and I was teaching there. I needed to keep teaching so that we would at least have that income coming in. But with that income comes other expenses, and so on...

Sigh. Soooo, at the end of October we caught a break. A pretty big break, it turns out. My husband landed a job, but it was in Houston. He would be there for a week and a half. Then he would be flying home and heading to Nashville a couple of days later for another job. We did not go with him to Houston, because of school. But man was it hard. That was only the third time my husband and I had been apart. The other two times were two days each (too long). Needless to say, we had a tough time getting through those ten days. Me being six or seven months pregnant and going through a serious nesting phase but not having found a new place to live yet left me pretty emotional anyway, so being without my husband while trying to take care of my two boys left me a wreck most of those days. When my husband landed at the airport and we picked him up, we all cried.

Then after two days, he was off to Nashville. The bad thing about it was that we were having to be apart again, as this new project would go until just before Christmas. So I would have to hunt for a place to live by myself. The good thing about it was it was only a three hour drive, so I went up there every week and stayed from Wednesday to Sunday. It was awesome. We ended up falling in love with Nashville, and we had a pretty nice set up up there while he was working. We actually had some pretty neat times up there, and I came away from it with precious memories.

We moved into our new apartment the day before Christmas Eve, so we didn't do a tree and all of that. But at least we had our own place again. Then a month later baby girl came, and it was all joy. But between the new baby and work and attempting (and I emphasize the word ATTEMPTING) to get the house together, among other unexpected circumstances (don't those always come up?), blogging took a back seat. Quite a few times I figured I would just post a blog here and there on MySpace or Facebook and be done. And yet, here I am. So maybe I will get to a semblance of a blogging schedule again.

Even if I don't, I do like having this online journal. I think it's cool. And maybe every now and then, if not more often, I will remember to post some cool thing that happened or something random that one of my kids said or some deep thought I had all of a sudden. We'll see.

hope in a jar.

I try to take good care of my skin. The line of skincare that I am using right now is called philosophy. I first tried their kiss me lip balm back in 1997, because I thought their packaging was cool and I liked the name of it. Now, years later, I still like their stuff and I still think the packaging is cool.

One of the cool things about the packaging is that each product has this neat name with a little blurb underneath that relates to the name of the product. Now, there are many products in the philosophy line that I love, but my favorite is my face cream. It feels great. It's got a bunch of good stuff in it. And the neat name? Hope in a jar. Isn't that cute?

It gets better. The little blurb on the jar says:

"Where there is hope, there can be faith. Where there is faith, miracles can occur."

Now, I realize that it's supposed to be a blurb that purports the miracle-working properties of the cream for one's skin (and I apologize NOW for using the word 'NOW' so much in this post...I must be tired) but it can really be the blurb for my life. Or the life of any believer for that matter. I don't know if the founder of the company is a believer or not, but she hit the nail right on the head. And how apropos that she fits such a power-packed statement on a little jar.

How much hope does one need really? If one can do fairly well (to say the least) with faith the size of a mustard seed, then a jar-full of hope would do more than enough to see one through a life of miracles, wouldn't it?

Sorry to lead you down a rabbit trail. And no, I'm not randomly musing. I really do have a point to all of this.

I was asked to lead the worship for the spanish church service that we have on Sunday afternoons. I've done it before, so it was no big deal.

What was a big deal was being asked to do the teaching for the service. Hmm. It's been years since I've done any teaching like this, and never in Spanish. And it was short notice. So I was like, what should I say?

"I know," I thought. I'll tell them about hope and encourage them to never lose it. I'll tell them that as new Christians (which they all are) the enemy will go after them with guns blazing to try to get them to feel hope-less. He'll throw all sorts of impossible circumstances their way, to get them to feel there is no hope. Because without hope, there can be no faith, and without faith, it's pretty hard to see any miracles. (Hebrews 11:1)

So, that's pretty much what I told them.

I told them about a church full of hope, wanting to see the Kingdom of Heaven manifested here on earth in people's lives, versus a church full of religion, devoid of hope, faith, or power. The latter may look good on the outside and even seem right, but in the end it leads to death. It leads to the death of destiny and purpose.

I spoke to them about their destiny and purpose, and prayed for each one of them. It was cool.

That was after a Friday afternoon that was spent carrying some hope to a couple of girls in a predominantly Spanish neighborhood and leading them to the Lord. That was cool.

THAT was after spending about an hour on the phone with my cousin the day before, pouring hope into her, encouraging her to hold onto it and keep her eyes on the Lord and not on circumstances, as she was worrying about how she would pay her rent which was due on May 5 (her husband just left her). I knew it might be a hard sell, but since she already knows the Lord, I believed that if I could just get her thinking about Jesus and all the GOOD he has for her (Jeremiah 29:11) and get her mind off of what has just transpired in her life, she would begin to see some miracles herself. And she did.

I told her her rent would be paid, and it was. Her boss ended up paying it for her, and told her she was family! How many bosses do THAT? That was cool.

That was hope. And my skin looks pretty good with no makeup. That's cool.

nostalgia tuesday.

Today it's the year 1975. Here are the hits.

• "One of These Nights," The Eagles
• "Jive Talkin'," Bee Gees
• "Black Water," Doobie Brothers
  

must...go...to...sleep.

Oh my gosh! I am SO glad Heroes is back on. And it was SO good last night!

...Well...two nights ago. I guess.

Grrrr Sylar! I hate that guy!

HOW will it all END??

nostalgia tuesday.

I know it was only a few years ago (okay, three), but what the heck? It was still in the past, if not exactly vintage. So here you are. Songs from yesteryear, or more like almost yesterday: 2004.

• "This Love," Maroon 5
• "Yeah," Usher
• "Meant to Live," Switchfoot

nostalgia tuesday.

Today it's songs from 1994. SOME GOOD ONES! :)

• "The Sign," Ace of Base
• "All That She Wants," Ace of Base
• "Don't Turn Around," Ace of Base

nostalgia tuesday.

Well, actually, it's Nostalgia Wednesday this week.

Yesterday was a long day and time just totally got away from me. Here are three great songs from 1984. You may already have them on your Ipod, especially all of my peeps out there who love 80s music! Reminisce away!

• "When Doves Cry," Prince
• "Owner of a Lonely Heart," Yes
• "The Reflex," Duran Duran

Oh my gosh...I SOOO LOVED all three of those songs!

congo video.

Here is a video highlighting the trip to the Congo that four men from our church took:



Also, there is an update to the story on Ryan's blog, for those who have been reading it.

nostalgia tuesday.

Today it's songs from 1974. Were any of these your (or your parents') favorites?

• "The Way We Were," Barbra Streisand
• "Hooked on a Feeling," Blue Swede
• "Time in a Bottle," Jim Croce

bobbyisms.

It's been a while since he's slipped up, due to his increase in maturity I guess. But, in the last week, he has let slip some hum-dingers!...

Me: "What kind of tennis shoes did your dad buy you?"

Him: "Nothing special. Just some organic ones."

Me: "...You mean, generic?"

Him: "...Oh. Yeah."


And several days before that...

"The Nicholsons use Purell a lot; that's how I was introduced to it. I like using it because of all the anti-doxins it has."

There you have it, folks.

nostalgia tuesday.

This set is not nearly as old as the others, but it was four years ago so I added it instead of going back to the 70s this week. For those of you who are wondering why I'm not doing anything from before the 70s, I decided to start with the year I was born (refer to this post) and go up by decades until the 2000s, then start back with the following year in the 70s. So next week the year will be 1974. But for tonight, here are your three songs of yesteryear (2003):

• "Crazy in Love," Beyonce
  
• "Hey Ya!" Outkast
• "Miss Independent," Kelly Clarkson
  

celebrity.

I'm about to blow up!

more from congo.

One of the other men from our church who went to the Congo has put together a website with pictures and his testimony of the trip, as well as video! It looks superb. I encourage you to check it out and be blessed:

Congo trip 2007