Seeing Red

For some reason i have been intrigued by all things red, yesterday i was sewing some new Damask material in Red & White and my current favorite pair of Converse are red and today i bought a box and these red golf tee's were in it.

Sassy Hits 150 Grand

Sassy, my little Sport Trac, hit a milestone today, 150,000 miles! I love my truck and personally put on over 100,000 miles myself. She gets me where i am going and is always willing to stop on the side of the road to pick up a treasure that someone may have put out to the curb. She has taken me to N.Y.C and up to the U.P. and over to Kzoo. I usually become attached to my vehicles and i have a feeling someone will have to pry my hands off of her cold dead lifeless body at some point. Hopefully we have a few more years together!

A Little Piece of History

This funky Kennedy head has been in my memories for as long as i can remember. I first remember it on the mantle at my grandma's house where it appeared in countless photos over the years. When my grandma passed it moved to my aunt's house who put it on her mantle where again it became part of the fabric of my life. Recently when my aunt passed it was passed onto me to become part of my families history. It's the metaphoric "fly on the wall", can you imagine the stories he would tell if he could.

Do you have any quirky items that have been around for years?

On a completely unrelated note i received news today that an old friend had passed away, he was involved in an accident and had contracted an infection, but it occurred to me that when i get news like that i always feel a tinge of regret. Not the kind of regret you have for the things you had done but more so the regret for the things you haven't done. In this case a request was made by a relative of his that he wanted some old photos that i had and while i did in fact gather some up i never got around to giving them to her to give to him. Such a small request in the scheme of things but yet i never did it.

This is the type of thing i am hoping to change this year to live in a way that i will have fewer moments of this regret for the things i have NOT done.

Which brings me to yet another one of my favorite quotes:

"I'd rather regret the things I have done than the things that I haven't ." Lucille Ball

Spring vs. Winter

Spring wants in as seen here in what i hope are some crocus i planted last fall, but the ice is hanging tough still! Something gotta give!

Hangin' with Family

My cousin Lauren is getting married next year and asked me to help out with some crafty projects, one of which we tested out today! We got our prototype done.

Anthony Turns 7

My nephew Anthony celebrated his 7th birthday yesterday and today we joined him at the bowling alley for a party.

However my day started off on more of a somber note as i finished up reading a book i started a couple days ago. The book "Before I Say Goodbye" by Ruth Picardie is the story of a woman's final year before she loses her battle with cancer. The book while very sad at times is also insightful and funny. If you can take the roller coaster ride and have been touched by cancer i highly recommend reading it.

Worth 7 Points

If i were playing Scrabble this word would be worth 7 points!

I am trying to follow the Live, Laugh, Love philosophy this year so the words keep running through my mind and therefore seemed like a natural choice when i had to come up with a photo today!

Art or Function?

Not much going on today, just cleaning and another day of my "crack down on clutter campaign"!

I did take a minute out to shoot a few photos and really liked this one of some colored pencils - i have always liked the beauty you can find in the most simple items.

Do you always see the function in an item or the beauty?

Spring?

Slept like a baby last night and i was up before the crack of dawn again - still no sunrise photo (don't know how many mornings i can do this :) . Woke up to a snowy, icy mess instead.

I spent my morning at the High School talking to the kids about photography, what a great morning!

Ramblings of an Insomniac

Post composed at 6:32 a.m.

Before you get excited and think, good lord she has changed her ways - up at the crack of dawn ready to tackle her day --- think again - i never went to sleep, i know! Perhaps it was the two skinny lattes at Starbucks when i met my cousins or the gallon sized ice tea i drank from McDonald's - i don't know but if this wasn't a receipe for disaster or at least a blinking neon sign saying take a sleep aid i dont know what it is...... since i had a free minute i decided to see if having a cortisone injection could cause insomnia and viola, many people report having insomnia and restless energy. If i would have bought that paint yesterday i could have had the room painted by now!

I see a nap in my future, greeeeeeeeenieeeee!

(My first attempt at taking a photo was at 7:32 a.m. when the sun was due to rise, a sight rarely seen by me unless of course i am up all night, however the cloud cover was too dense to see the sunrise. Making it necessary to capture crash and burn which occurred in the late afternoon as anticipated.)

Color Management

Started out my day pretty much the way it ended - working with color! (Of course I am blanking out the very first thing i did this morning which was to get a cortisone shot in my elbow - yikes.) Lucky for me my next stop was Sherwin Williams where i browsed the color samples and picked out a few to add to the ones i found the other day for a possible color for our Boudoir!

I love color, and Andi, you got me thinking when you asked the question where do we find our inspiration. I had told you food which i frequently draw from, yes the paint in my Boudoir right now is a deeelicious chocolatey brown almost edible - one more loose screw and i could have licked the stir stick the day i painted. But i do find inspiration in everything i look at whether it is a combination of colors or how a color might makes me feel. I typically repaint my rooms every two to three years because there are so many great colors out there and so few walls to paint. Sometimes i grab color swatches first on visual appeal, but then sometimes you get lucky and get a great name too. The choices i most like for the Boudoir are of course "Boudoir Blue", "Innuendo" and "Dazzle" - i just love those names. When i painted the living room last week Autumn asked me why i chose the color i did with a stifled giggle to which i answered " Autumn i picked this color so that when your friends come over i could say, girls do you like the new color in the living room, it's "Pussywillow". She was not thrilled!

Ended the day much on the same note, i took a color management webinar for calibrating your color spaces on your monitor and printing sources.

Couch Potato's

I know today marks the first day of Spring but i can't wait for the weather to be consistently warm so that i can get off the couch, get outside and stop eating!

"Drops of Jupiter"

Get it, it's a TRAIN song! Well any hooo I needed a photo of cliff and i for the wall so i talked him into going to the train tracks for a quick shot, unfortunately i forgot the mount for my tripod so i didn't get the shot i was looking for but cliff played along and we took this one. Oh yeah we had to wait for a train to pass that came as soon as we parked.

Walking for the HEALTH of it!

Papa and I took a walk today to enjoy the nice weather and to get some much needed exercise! Spending time with the ones you love is much more important than having a clean house or making your way through your TO-DO list.

When you look back I hope you can talk about the good times we had and not how clean my house was.

Girls Gone Green!

Ahh, St. Patty's day, when everyone is Irish for the day. Met some friends up at the Hamlin Pub to partake in the festivities.

(photo credit to bottom photo goes to Jack Plescow - thanks Jack)

Three prego's and a baby!

Sounds like this could be the name of a new sitcom, but in reality it is just what consumed the majority of my day. My first session this morning included 3 lovely ladies, sisters to be exact who were all pregnant, and visibly so. My second session was with a now one month old Riley Catherine, a chubby, beautiful little girl who came into this world on Valentines day weighing a whopping 9 pounds 14 ounces, Ay, caramba!

(side note - i wanted to make sure i was spelling this correctly so i looked it up and check out the description: comes from the Spanish interjection ¡ay! (denoting surprise or pain) and caramba (a minced oath, a euphemism for carajo, an interjection expressing pain or surprise similar to "ouch" or "gee") nuff said!

Confucius say -

"A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step" and I am taking my first step today by starting this blog. I have a million, make that a million and one things on my mind and I am finding it harder and harder to take action. So today I am taking action!

Where will your journey lead you in 2011?