Category Archives: photo challenge

Weekly Photo Challenge: Close

Weekly Photo Challenge: Close

The clematis plant close to the camera is growing up my front porch.

In the background you can see the road and get any idea how close it is to our house.

In fact the house is close enough to the highway that a split second after the photo was taken the wind from that big blue semi blew the flowers around.

But, we have planted many trees and a willow fence across part of the yard and the road is close to tolerable.

Unfortunately they are very close to redoing the entire road that we live on.

We are waiting, and waiting, and waiting to see how this will affect our property and if the road will come any closer than it is.

And all this waiting is pushing me much closer to crazy than I’d like!

Weekly Photo Challenge: Friendship

Weekly Photo Challenge: Friendship

My friend Sarah (of thinkbigmuch) and I have been friends since second grade.

When you’ve been friends that long you tend to fall into a few patterns, for instance:

Sarah says, “You should have a blog.”…I say, “OK”

Sarah  says, “You should move your blog to WordPress.”…  I say, “OK”

Sarah says, “We should do the photo challenge on friendship together.”  I say, “OK” (I’m always this easy going, just ask John…)

A large flurry of e-mails and phone calls later we have our friendship photo. Two friends on the same afternoon, four hours away from each other:

To go along with our photo Sarah has shared the top ten reasons why I am her friend. I thought it would be sort of boring if I did the same since you’d be reading basically the same list with our names in different places. Instead, sometimes against my better judgment, I decided to share my top ten memorable moments in our friendship.

In no particular order we have….

  1. One night in grade school we were at my house and had been sledding but were now just laying on our backs under a tree. Sarah asked me why I never talked this much in school. While I was extremely shy during my grade school years (and beyond) talking to Sarah was never a problem. Getting Sarah and I to stop talking… that’s a different story.
  2. When thanks to the gift of a case of beer from my older (read legal drinking age) boyfriend we were obligated to acquire a taste for beer together – on our roof. Thank you John!
  3. Between our sophomore and junior years of high school Sarah’s family moved to Canada. The memory of watching Sarah and her Mom walk away from my Mom and I the last night before they moved can still bring tears to my eyes.
  4. Stealing a candy bar from our friend in grade school and eating it in the bathroom. We were such rebels… except that we weren’t, I have no idea why we did this!
  5. The first time we saw each other when we both had babies.
  6. In high school Sarah was back visiting in Pewaukee during the time she lived in Canada. We had spent all the days (and nights) she was there sleeping minimal amounts and drinking far too much Diet Coke so as not to waste any of our short time together doing something so foolish as sleeping. The last day we were at the kitchen table and started laughing, which turned into crying, we were just one big sleep deprived mess, so happy to be together but knowing that our time was almost over. I can still picture Sarah laughing/crying and my Mom looking at the two of us like we were nuts – which we were.
  7. Weddings. My wedding, her wedding… happy times!
  8. Once we stole a bottle of Tequila Rose from a friends party. We literally ran it home to our own apartment, laughing like maniacs the entire time and then ran back. Apparently you should watch your food and drink around us.
  9. Discovering during a late night of beer appreciation with a tape measure that while I am taller than Sarah, her legs are significantly longer than mine. Our husbands were not astounded by our discovery, a flaw I forgive them for.
  10. Talking on the phone. Talking in the car. Talking late at night. Mumbling early in the morning. Talking. Talking. Talking!

All in all I think it’s been a good start to a life long friendship!

Weekly Photo Challenge: Today

Weekly Photo Challenge: Today

This weeks photo challenge was to use a picture taken on the day you read about the challenge. For accuracy’s sake I feel I must admit that both those things happened on Friday and then it sat unfinished here until now – such is life.

In any case, Friday John replaced our water softener. The water softener lives in the much avoided basement. Much avoided because it is really more of a cellar – as in a Wizard of Oz, hide from the twister, door in the ground, cellar. It comes complete with flagstone walls, lots of spiders, dampness and more rodents than I’m willing to admit to – in general I try to forget that it exist. The problem is, in addition to its not so inviting ambiance, every time we go down to the basement something is wrong.  Frozen pipes, broken water heaters, furnace problems, floods, tornadoes – nothing good happens in the basement. (It is of course possible that my attempting to forget it exists when nothing is wrong contributes to the things that go wrong but that’s not a theory I’m willing to entertain right now.)  It seems that the combination of nasty problems in a nasty environment have even inspired my husband to come up with a new life goal- a life goal of filling the basement with rocks.  Not just fill it with dirt.  No, he wants to move the house out of the way and then to throw large rocks into the basement one by one while laughing maniacally.  The basement has not been kind to him over the last few years. (Again this may be because we chose to forget it exists for much of the time, and again, we aren’t going there today.)

Friday when I took my picture the basement was still free of rocks and John was working in a dark, damp, cobwebby corner once again fixing things and mumbling about filling the basement with rocks. I had gone down to lend a bit of moral support… alright, fine, honestly, I had gone down to escape Ivy who was cheerfully following me around demanding all my attention and driving me mad, but I was also lending John moral support and giving him important things like twist ties.  I’m sure I was crucial to the job, just ask me. Jane was riding on my back in my new mei tai (Thank you Jenny!) and I blindly snapped this photo of her behind my back as she looked behind us both, up the stairs into the light.

Today is Monday, we have soft water, there isn’t a tornado in sight and the other appliances seem to be functioning normally. I shall now publish this post and go back to pretending the basement doesn’t exist.

Weekly Photo Challenge: Unfocused

Weekly Photo Challenge: Unfocused

Ugh!

This weeks photo challenge was not my favorite. Ideas I had either turned out smudgy and stupid, or had me cursing my camera. Since other than it’s flash my camera and I normally get along swimmingly it was frustrating experience.

Things I have learned this week:

-While having an auto focus is usual handy/excellent/nice/wonderful/easy sometimes a manual option would be really nice!

-My camera won’t do they very cool zoom while capturing technique I read about here.

-In effort to replicate Anne’s very cool effect in her cheetah pictures I discovered that I can’t get far enough away from the neighbors cows.

-I’m never getting rid of my creeping charlie.

-Tripods are essential for taking super zoomed in pictures even when they are of moving things like butterflies.

Today making a last ditch effort for something reasonable I was trying to zoom way in on something hoping to get a similar watercolor effect as the cheetahs had. I was hoping for a “watercolor” pastoral scene, chickens, ducks, cows, sheep… no such luck. Then I realized that the creeping charlie was in full bloom and the yard was swarming with bees and butterflies. Ivy and saw seven different kinds of butterflies and four different kinds of bees, all looking for those tiny purple flowers in the lawn! Unfortunately, even though they aren’t super crisp pictures, the butterflies weren’t what I would call “unfocused.”  So I aimed my camera at the only other spot of color in the yard, which happened to be a bunch of chives, zoomed as far in as I could and finally came up with something that I think fits the unfocused bill. Completely unedited it has a bit of that painting sort of feel, just by going to the extreme of the digital zoom.  I never would have thought to try anything like that before seeing the cheetah pictures, thank you Anne for the idea!

Here is one of my fairly focused butterfly photos… …now let’s get on to the next challenge!!!

Weekly Photo Challenge: Sun

Weekly Photo Challenge: Sun

I love looking around at life through the “lens” of the week’s theme.

I love that I’m taking more pictures, playing with my camera settings and challenging myself to do it all without Photoshop (at least for that one picture!). Life is always full of obligatory challenges and  it’s been nice to be able to choose a challenge for a change! But, life being what it is there are also nights, like tonight, where there are unexpected challenges with the photos.

When you try to take a picture while simultaneously attempting to calm down the baby you’ve upset by the sudden change of position and arguing with the two year old over who gets the one particular dandelion amongst the hundred or so available, the challenge part of the photo challenge takes on a whole new meaning.

But, after I snapped my picture and Clara picked the contested flower for her bouquet I watched her blow her dandelion seed heads and remembered another challenge of mine.

To slow down.

To remember that even though the kids might make things take a little bit longer, make life a little bit messier and a bit more frustrating, that I need to take a deep breath, slow down and let them in.

Because when I do, it’s always just a little bit better.

And if it takes looking at life through a camera lens to remember that, I guess I’ll just have to keep snapping photos!