Day 51 - 5/31/07

For today's "action" shot: SLIDING.

This is a photo of my niece at the park. She just loved the slides. It was tricky to time it so I'd get her and not an empty slide because the slide was enclosed and she shot down it so fast that she nearly came right off the end every time.

Day 45 - 5/25/07

In Michigan, Spring means that the birds come back!

I took this one of a bird (maybe a female Blue Jay?) that was sitting on our cable wire when I came home from work. As I got out of the car I heard some cheeping chatter, and I looked up to see her sitting there. I went into the house and got my camera, and was pleasantly surprised to see her still there when I came back to the door. Not willing to push my luck, I took this through the door. As I was trying to set up for a second shot, she flew away - it's almost as if she was saying, "One's enough!"

Day 41- 5/21/07

Spring means flowers! These grow in our lawn if we let it go more than a week without cutting it. Whether we can do that without the grass getting too tall and our landlord complaining about it depends a lot on the weather.

Day 40 - 5/20/07

This is a project that I am making for a friend's new baby. I let myself get a little behind though - the baby was born at the end of March. And, since she lives in Australia, it's going to take a little while to get to her anyway.

The sad thing is, I had it completely finished except for the feet and the personalization before the baby was born - it's taken me this long to get the feet on it because I suddenly got very busy in April & May!

Day 37 - 5/17/07

Today my photo is fairly boring. It is within the liquid theme though.

Today it's just my bottle of water. The big deal about it is that I am proud of myself for drinking this instead of soda - a big downfall of mine.

I played around with it a little bit just to make it seem a little more interesting (to myself, anyway).

Day 36 - 5/16/07

I didn't quite get the shot I wanted for this picture, but I did get one that was still good. To get what I wanted, I would have needed to be working without a flash, but when I turned the flash off the entire thing was too dark. What I really liked about it was when I saw the light from the window coming through the drink, the color was really neat. As it is, my picture is more of condensation than anything else.


It still came out okay, it just wasn't 100% what I wanted it to be. It was hard to focus as well, because I was zooming in so much. I had to focus on the edge of the glass to get the entire thing to sharpen up.

Day 35 - 5/15/07

Bubbles!!

I was actually trying to get a picture of the water as it flowed in to the washing machine (it's laundry day), but none of those turned out. The washer filled up faster than I thought it would! But, there are still a lot of pretty bubbles, and bubbles are at least part liquid.

Day 34 - 5/14/07

Well, I did it. I managed to incorporate this week's theme (liquid) into what I had already planned for today (baseball).

There is a new minor league team in the next town over. This is their first season in town, and today we went to our first game there. We had a really good time. We commented that it's possible that the minor league games are more fun to attend than the major league games, because there is a lot more action and a lot more to notice and pay attention to. Plus, it gives us a chance to speculate on who will move on and who will probably stay at this level.

Sadly, our team lost 4-5.

Today's photos were taken before the game, while they were watering the dirt to keep the dust down. Aside from cropping, these are all SOOC.

I love this one - it looks as if the guy with the hose is aiming for the player squatting in shallow right field.

Another shot of the watering near second base.

Day 33 - 5/13/07

My favorite toy (and hopefully it will soon become a partial breadwinner) - my sewing machine. I love to sew. I want to create a business sewing clothes for kids, but I can't seem to find a way to get it to start. I am hoping to hit on some sort of a breakthrough soon though.

Day 32 - 5/12/07

Teddy Bear Day

These are my Build-A-Bear bears. Both of them are charity bears, which means that a portion of their purchase price went to charity. The purple one is for children's cancer, and the brown one is for children's health & wellness. There is another one I want that supports children's literacy. Can you tell I have a soft spot for children's causes?


The first photo was taken without flash with the A setting - I had lights turned on all around to get as much light as possible, and set up a stand
with a couple of boxes (one from our griddle, the other our Scattergories game) plus used the timer, since this setting caused the camera to go through a capturing process that I just could not hold still long enough for.
The below photo I used the flash for. Still on the stand (for comparison purposes I wanted the same angle on both shots). I really can't decide which I like better. Both have their merits. I think the flash photo shows truer colors, but I really prefer the lighting in the non-flash photo.

Day 31 - 5/11/07

My new favorite toy.

I just downloaded the free trial version a few days ago because I seriously missed having the photo editing software on our computer. Now I'm so hooked that I have already warned DH that he has until the end of my free trial to find a way to get me the real thing!! :)

Hopefully we'll be able to find it cheaper than $80 though - that is definitely out of our price range.

Day 30 - 5/10/07

I created this photo for two reasons. One of them is as a motivator. I like this shirt a lot and would like to look better in it. The second reason is that I want to be able to compare how I look as I go along with WW.

In a few months I will take another pair of photos with the same poses. I hope there will be a noticeable difference!

I also made a scrapbook page with these two photos on it.

Day 29 - 5/9/07

A couple of DH's toys. He doesn't have them properly displayed by any stretch of the imagination - these are sitting atop each other on top of a tall bookshelf. I wish we had more display room for things like this. When we finally get to own a home, I will install shelves around the perimeter of one room just for collectibles things like this. :)

Day 28 - 5/8/07

My Ribbon Salad

This is the Jell-O salad I was making the other day. The top two layers didn't come out quite the way I would have hoped, because the topmost white layer was thicker than it ought to be and didn't spread out as nicely.

All in all, it came out very well. DH is looking forward to having it for dessert tonight, and it makes so much that I will have plenty to take and share around some at work, too.

I don't know why it looks like there is an extra white layer on top in the first photo - the top layer is red Jell-O, as you can see by the other photo below. Maybe it's just a reflection - I set it near a window, hoping for the light to go through the Jell-O and show off the colors in the layers. I also notice in the below picture that the window is very well reflected, and I can see the shadows of the things sitting on the sill - never thought of that while I was picking a location to shoot the photo!


This is a very summery salad, but does not hold up well in the heat. My sister made it for our family reunion last year and hers kinda fell apart in the heat, despite being nestled into a tub of ice. I told her I had made it, and she is now thinking of making a special trip over here to visit, just so she can have some.

Day 27 - 5/7/07

This week's theme is Toys.

This is my Cabbage Patch Kid. Not very exciting, but in a way it is. When I was a kid and CPKs were all the rage, I had one that looked almost exactly like this one. The only difference was the eyes - my childhood doll had green eyes. Her name was Emmalynn Christy. During a family move while in high school, all of my childhood toys were lost - including my CPK (which by that time was no longer played with but still displayed). While I was in college, CPK made a comeback. My roommates and I were in a store shortly before Christmas when I spotted this doll. Not only does she look almost identical to my childhood doll, but her name is Emma Lyn. I couldn't afford to buy her myself, but my roommates bought her for me for Christmas.

Right now I keep her sitting on a shelf. I feel a little selfish sometimes, but I don't let anyone play with her. Even after almost 9 years, she still has that "new CPK" smell, because she has never been played with. I have so few things that I have saved for my future children, and I decided long ago that this doll would be one of them. Fairly soon I will have to hide her away, because my niece is getting older and often asks to play with her now. I feel badly having to tell her that she can't play with this doll, but there are so many other toys in our house that she IS allowed to play with that she doesn't need this one, too.

Day 26 - 5/6/07

I finally came up with another Food entry for this week!

I'm making a jell0 salad today. I don't really consider it a salad, but that's the name of it. It's called "Ribbon Salad" and it's one of my grandma's recipes that all of her grandkids love. I don't know if DH likes it or not - he doesn't remember ever having tried it. I've been wanting to make it for a while now, so if he doesn't like it, I'll just take some in to work to share. I don't mind.

This is the cookbook that the recipe is in. Several years ago the Ladies Society at my Grandma's church put together a cookbook. All of the ladies submitted recipes and they got them organized and bound into a cookbook, which they then sold as a fundraiser. Grandma got all of her grandchildren one of these cookbooks as part of our Christmas gifts that year. The cover actually shows a drawing of the church as it is now, and the smaller drawing is the church the way it looked when it was founded. That original building still exists; it is across the street from the current building.

Day 25 - 5/5/07

DH and a friend of his. I discovered that I have a B&W setting on my camera and decided to play around with it a little. I just love black & white photos.






There is also a sepia setting that I will have to play around with sometime - probably next time I have my niece as a subject since she generally doesn't make faces at me when I take her picture!

Day 24 - 5/4/07

Today's breakfast: Wheaties.

I had an issue with the spoon being a little too reflective, so I tried it a few different ways. I would have removed the spoon but I liked the look of the bowl with the spoon in it (and I didn't want to get milk on the counter).

This first one is the one that I think came out the best - I was using a bounce card.

This one is with no flash:

And this one is direct flash:

Day 23 - 5/3/07

An Oldie but a Goodie: the Moon.

This is one of the first photos I took with my camera when it was brand new. I loved it then and I still love it now.

I think I got a little spoiled with it though, because somehow I managed to fiddle around with the manual settings and the zoom and got this shot really easily, but then when I tried to take other shots that would look half as good, they simply stunk. For the longest time I was so frustrated with the camera that I would only shoot in automatic mode. It's only been since starting on this and the ABC project that I have begun to delve back into my manual functions.

The other shots from that night:

Day 22 - 5/2/07

Last summer, this field was full of corn. I have no idea what they're going to put in it this year, probably corn again. These are the stalks - what is left behind after the corn is harvested. The fact that there is this much stalk left behind tells some of the prosperity of the farmer (not that any farmers are truly "prosperous" any more). A farmer who has a lot of animals to support and not a lot of money to feed them would not have left such tall stalks; they would have been cut closer to the ground or possibly even dug up to make food for the animals. Cattle especially do well on corn stalks.

Day 21 - 5/1/07

This weeks theme is Food. So, in the interests of that, I present: my freezer.

Sadly, this is what it looks like about 95% of the time. We don't have nearly enough in it. But hey, we've got the staples! Bread, hotdog buns, fishsticks, and if you look in the back on the bottom left, you'll see ice cream! Yum-O!

Note the red box next to the ice cube tray - that's plastic wrap. I heard once that if you keep your plastic wrap in the freezer, it won't stick to itself. It really works!!