Distractible Huddle

First task each am on our Philly trip: gathering together and deciding what we want to do, eat, do and eat some more. Especially eat.

But look how well we stay focused!

And notice Lee playing a game of checkers. With himself. With scraps of paper.



And look how happy he is that he won!

Philly Fun

Should you have children, (which happen to be quite a bit of work, but very worth it), make sure that you require them, if they get married, to do so in a cool city. Because it's the least they can do to entertain us (which they must), given how much work they are.

So, Scott got married in Philadelphia (good choice, Scott; so far, you're doing it all just right!) And what a cool city it is! (Except for their parking issues!)



And when/if your kids get married, it will give you a golden opportunity to hang out with your relatives!!!!

This is Betsy Ross--NOT one of my relatives. She was excellent and stayed in character in such a wonderful way that I'll always picture her any time I ever hear of any reference to Betsy Ross again.



These ARE two of my relatives, one older brother, one younger. It's the funniest thing, getting two brothers together; it seems to bring out the Uber Imp in them. Who knew that Lee would be so fiendishly attracted to. . . . vegetation?

November Days: Best Spent Being Industrious

It's time to get busy!



. . . . each in her own way.

Wedding Photographers are Awesome!

Seriously, you are! I don't know how you do it, day after day, getting all those perfect shots! Just the handful I got at my son's wedding were laborious . . . . and imperfect. And it was terribly agonizing to sit in the front row, tears in my eyes, seeing Scott and Elizabeth so lovingly wed. . . and not have my Nikon D300s in hand!

But my sweet sister, Mary Ann, graciously saw to it that my camera made it to the reception for me to get a "fix." Isn't her son (above) just cuddly adorable?

And my daughter Dianna, who is truly always right, says that wedding photographers have the most thankless job on the planet, because everyone looks at their own photos, and don't like them. Especially us women. (Relatives! You know who you are!) Ahhhh, but the rest of us! I love this photo of Maria and Lee, joyfully dancing at the reception. When I walked down the aisle, and caught Maria's beaming smile, I felt so embraced by a circle of love, and knew that this was the kind of family embrace that would extend to Scott and Elizabeth, and on through our circles of connection.

Thanksgiving week is such a wonderful week to count our blessings! I count this photo of Brian, above, one of my blessings! To catch his under-stated smile, without any hands warding off the Mom-Camera, was such a gift!





Mmmmmmm, cake! The fall theme was so perfect for the wedding! But WHY did I miss a shot of the pumpkins that they carved the night before, lining the path to the wedding venue?

No one would let me put these desserts in my purse to take home to enjoy the extras! I want to swirl white chocolate like that!





If only I could live close to these wonderful women!

Group Shot

Wow! Two days in a row (although, technically, one was this morning and this one is the evening of the same day.)

(You'd be posting twice in one day too if your husband was doing what mine is right now. He's watching Lawrence Welk! I kid you not! It's just sad.)

OK, so about my post. This is a group shot of my family at Scott and Elizabeth's wedding. It's a shot at the very end, after much dancing, (at least on Scott and Elizabeth's part), so everyone is beginning to look a little bit bedraggled.

But, I have to say, I really love all these people! This photo has me and Doug, our three children, the wonderful woman my son has married, two of my brothers and their phenomenal wives, my wonderful sister, her husband and her two little kids. You have no clue who is who, right? But you know what I mean, I hope, when I talk like this about family. . . .

Me and Three Sibs

Life's been such a whirlwind! A vacation, a puppy, an anniversary, a wedding, and now, preparing for a large Christmas party and a grand-puppy!

But I miss posting on my blog!

Barcelo Maya Palace, the Yucatan Peninsula

In my fantasies, this is where I'll go, come Winter, North Dakota.

Just for Fun. . . From Mexico Xel Ha

This bad boy is fun to mess with with different editing techniques:

The Birthday Tour: Part 4 Our So-Called Scenic Backway

And practically a stone's throw from Canada, traveling west, we proceeded along the so-called Rendezvous Region Backway through the "Spectacular Pembina Gorge." I suppose I should be more ecstatic about it, but somehow I was not. Maybe it was the construction we ran into on a 2 lane gravel road, which literally made us have to stop in our tracks for 20 minutes, waiting for the pilot car to lead our little caravan of about 10 cars, across a stretch. Apparently, some kind of construction was occurring (invisible construction escaping the naked eye.) And do you know how long it takes to accumulate 10 cars on a North Dakota backroad?

Well, to prevent totally caving to the phenomena of the "grass being greener on the other side," I just boosted the saturation and contrast in this photo:

This is as hilly as you could ever get in North Dakota. I kid you not; this is our ski slope! (My son once broke his collar bone skiing there. The parent accompanying him on this middle school trip really annoyed me when she called me from the hospital, s*l*o*w*l*y dragging it out that she was in the hospital with my son, then digressing into something about the weather, before she told me he was fine! ALWAYS begin these conversation with a parent with the bottom line: "He/she is fine." That's the rule. Don't break it! It's evil to handle it any other way.)

We did have a hitchhiker on our trip to see the scenery. Before we got totally lost, out of range of our Garmin and cell phone coverage. How do you get lost when there are only a handful of roads? And we kept asking, is THIS the spectacular scenic byway?


And we saw wildlife, so all was good.

The Birthday Tour: Part 3 Icelandic State Park

And this is a rare bit of wonderfulness in North Dakota: an honest to God, actual, real, beach. They're rare, and miles and miles apart (unless you think of Devil's Lake, which is a lake that seems to be slowly consuming the state, like something out of a grade B horror flick named something like "The Glob"). But this is in Icelandic State Park, and it's beautiful.

And there are walking trails! Just wandering through the woods, along some fields. Doug is stalking a monarch. The monarch population has been declining because of the use of herbicides to control milkweed. Apparently, the monarch really depends on the milkweed plant. So I guess Doug should grab this photo while he can.





And you know that little obsession I have about sRGB? And making sure that the photos I post are in this color space rather than RGB? Forget all that stuff I said about "convert" vs. assign. It turned out that the new "save for web" action I created did not have the "embed color space" box checked off, after my computer crash in March. That's all it was! I created a new action, and now, finally, I should have dependable sRGB posts.

Why is this important, you ask? Because web browser need the information to figure out how to interpet the colors in your photo. This means that after you carefully edit your photos, the browser will willy nilly interpret the color any old way it feels like. Unless you embed the color profile in sRGB, and then there's more of a chance that the right color information will be communicated to the browser. (But then there's still that problem of not all browsers being color managed. Will you ever listen Google Chrome?)