Lisa and Mike's Wedding: the beauty's in the details

This weekend, Hubby and I were honored to attend the wedding of a good friend of mine, Lisa, to her sweetheart, Mike.

Lisa was the incredibly talented graphic designer I hired in my last job, right out of college and we have remained friends even after my leaving. I'm so thankful that, even though I may not have been the easiest person to work for at times (and yes, girls, spare me the examples - I've enough distance to probably fall on my own sword these days) I have been able to maintain many friendships with the people I worked with and for over the past few years.

Ms. Lisa is a beautiful, sweet, tender-hearted, and yet intelligent and grounded woman - I know, right, who gets all those qualities? So unfair! She is also extremely crafty and by that I don't mean sly, I mean she couples her design-eye with crafty hands to match. To top it all off, her now-husband, Mike, is also the creative sort, a successful graphic designer in his own right and, as it turns out, rather thrifty. So, put together creative, crafty Lisa with creative-frugal Mike, and you've got a special sort of do-it-yourself wedding that just couldn't be beat for personal touches.

Like this, the writing on the fans handed out to attendees for the ceremony...



Or this, the whimsical display of photos from Lisa and Mike's time together. By the way, the photos were hung right above a huge canvas of a tree where friends and family could pop their thumb print and name on a branch, instead of a guest book. (I didn't get a photo for this, sorry, the bright sunlight was problematic.) Cool or wot?



And there were the little anecdotes on the back of the table number cards







Or the unique board to help you find your table number





Even the flowers that adorned the aisle were hand-made (yes, meaning, literally that) by Lisa and Mike with fabric they hand-picked to match their color theme





And, of course, they designed the layout (and hand-made some of the elements) of their own little sweetheart table, which was just heart-breakingly adorable, just like the couple themselves.



Of course, Lisa and Mike couldn't be content with writing their own vows, they went 10 steps further and wrote the whole ceremony from start to finish. Which, by the way, was lovely - the perfect length and the appropriate amount of mushiness, gravitass, and personalization. I had tears in my eyes, especially when they used the verse from "These are the hands..." for the hand blessing, someting which Hubby and I also wrote into our wedding and which is still one of my favorite and most touching parts of our whole ceremony.



In fact, everything was perfect, not an element was out of place or out of theme - or if it was, it was so insignificant that it did not notice.

Funnily enough, the one element Lisa and Mike didn't plan down to the last detail, was The First Dance. Yet, by winging it, they managed to hit just the right note yet again: their natural shyness came across as tenderness and the lack of fanfare added to the whimsical note of the whole afternoon.







Plus, there was this thing where one of the waiters looked kind of like a Greek God, but that's another story for another time....

Here, in all her beautious splendor, is the lady of the day herself



I mean, how can you NOT love her??

Oh, and then there was this...



Flippin' A, they pulled out ALL the stops, didn't they?

And yes, Hubby and I were there too, and here's the proof...





And lest we not forget our mutual and good friend, Joe, a God in his own right when it comes to managing an event. I remember the relief when Joe showed up to take the day's events off my hands almost four years ago and I'm sure he did the same for Lisa. In fact, I have a sneaking suspicion that the lack of anything appearing to go wrong was also somewhat of his doing.



If you want to see more photos from the day, just click here

LEAP and the net will appear {Zen Saying}

I hope. And very soon.

One step at a time. And here is step one...

More later.

When black or white is gray

At the gym in the morning, I have taken to listening to NPR instead of music on my iPod. I like the intellectual stimulation and find it makes my workouts go a lot faster. With music, my mind wanders. With NPR, it's engaged.

Often times, I will hear something on NPR that really makes me think, or just a story that is so interesting that I say to myself "I have to go home and blog about this..." but then life takes over and I rarely remember to.

This morning, however, a particular story that is part of a series called "American Lives", was so incredibly fascinating to me that I had to share.

Here is a teaser...

   " Ada Copeland, an African-American woman born in Georgia just months before that state seceded from the Union, moved to New York City in the mid-1880s. There, she met a man named James Todd. He was light-skinned, handsome, had a good job for an African-American man in that time — a Pullman porter. They hit it off, and eventually married. They had five children and a house in Brooklyn. Their story would be unremarkable if not for one detail: Nothing James had told his future wife was true. James Todd was really not black ..."    Read more here


If you're anything like me, right about now you're saying to yourself "How the bejeezus can a woman marry a man and then not know the color of his skin? Surely she would notice THAT!?" And indeed, it's a reasonable question. And even more reasonable given that THIS is a photo of said James Todd:

Photo Courtesy of the U.S. Geological Survey Photographic Library

However, author of the book "Passing Strange", Martha Sandweiss, goes on to explain that, after the Civil War, many Southerners got worried that they would no longer be able to identify a "slave" just by the color of his or her skin any more. So, one of the solutions they came up with to help them categorize folks was to say that, if one of your eight great-parents was black, you were black, no matter what color your skin. (I wonder how many of us would be "black" these days, based on THAT categorization?)

This made it possible (although extremely rare, for obvious reasons) for a white person to claim they were African American.  Later, Ada and James' daughters, although brought up as African American, both married white men, made possible by each sister "swearing" for the other, that they were, in fact, white. Yet their brothers, when registering for the draft in World War I, were placed in all-black regiments.

I've always been the kind of person who is unobservant to race and this just makes me smile. At the end of the day, race itself is just about a society's label for someone based upon a number of cultural, economic, or societal factors, not really about anything genetically significant.

Wear wristwatch? Use e-mail? Not for Class of '14 - Yahoo! News

Wear wristwatch? Use e-mail? Not for Class of '14 - Yahoo! News

A little perspective, this Thursday afternoon.

Not sure I agree about cultural influences fading over time (ref: Beavis & Butthead). Maybe in memory but not in the subtle ways they all collectively shape who we are. I think about my teenage years and the things I watched, listened-to, said etc.. as very formative. Your thoughts?

What, if any, influences did you bring with you from childhood/adolescenthood, through to adulthood?

(And, for the record, since being glued to my cell phone, I no longer wear a wristwatch. However, I still love email like my life depends on it.)

Drinking lots of alcohol is good for your diet

Ok, well, only insomuch as I spent my lunch hour sorting through yesterday's sordid photos instead of eating lunch today.

Out of 647 pics, there were about 200 usable ones. After further pairing down, I made it to 150-ish. Not all of them (ok, maybe very few at all) are exemplary examples of my photography skills but most of them were so freakin' hilarious, I couldn't delete them. In my defense: there was wine, and vodka, and champagne, and tequilla in my system, and the roads were bumpy. When you're that tipsy, you're all like: "ISO? Aperture? What?"

I'm honestly a LOT better on solid ground and fully sober. Promise!

Full slide-show at the bottom. Here are a few of my personal favorites...

THE BIRTHDAY GIRL HERSELF - Thanks for being a year older, Renee!


NATALIE CRACKING UP. She does that a lot. That's why I love her.


ME, RENEE, AND NATALIE - still sober... ish.


RENEE'S HUSBAND, DAVID, SHARING A JOKE WITH THE BOYS


BRANDIE AND DAVE HAMMING IT UP


NICK SHOWING OFF


ME AND JENNIFER BEING ALL "POSEY"


NAT AND NICK - these two are a constant source of entertainment.



JENNIFER ROCKING OUT ON THE BUS



AND THE PICTURE OF THE DAY... Dave, surrounded by his posse.




HERE'S THE SLIDESHOW WITH ALL THE "BEST OF" PICS

Parents indulge in drunken debauchery - a sneak peek

Hello all. Well, what a FUN weekend I had. Totally the kind of fun weekend I used to have all the time about 10 years ago but one day was enough to make me realize that one day was all I could take for a while. Ahem.

Yesterday I went wine-tasting in Amador County on a limo-bus, for a good friends' birthday. It was a day with nine fun-starved parents on a black leather-seated bus with champagne, vodka, and wine, heading from one winery to the other, and with 90s pop and hip-hop music vibrating the roof. The good news is that nobody puked (especially since there was a $750 incidental charge for vomit on the carpet) the bad news is that we all had to somehow return to our lives as parents at the end of the festivities.

In all, I took 657 photos on my camera. However, a good 50% of those were taken on a moving, bouncy bus, after several drinks, so my guess is that only 100 will make it out of the review phase alive. Then there are the ones where I was a little too tipsy to remember to change my camera settings as I went from different lighting situations, so I'm not guaranteeing much in the way of artistic prowess on this round. In fact, if I have 100 that were in focus, I might just consider this little photo expedition a success. Ahem.

Anyways, it's going to take quite some time to go through all the photos, immediately discard the bad ones and then sort through the rest for the true keepers. In the meantime, I thought it might be fun to offer ya'll a sneak peak at the craziness with some completely un-edited shots I grabbed purely based upon a thumbnail preview that made me laugh out loud...



More soon!

Kylieeeeeeeeeeeee

I love happy, poppy music. Sometimes I forget this because American radio stations seem to play the same songs over and over again every 30 minutes and so I sometimes tune-out of the pop scene over here.

Ever since the late 80s, when I was but a green-teen, one of the pop-chicks guaranteed to get me out of my seat dancing, and put a smile on my face, is the Australian Princess of Pop, Kylie Minogue.

Before she even released a single, she was an actress on an Australian soap opera called Neighbours, that was HUGELY popular in the UK during the late 80s. (And no comments about the spelling, Yanks, that's really how it's spelled.) Kylie and hottie, Jason Donovan, were the teen sensations of their day and yours-truly was equally as smitten as the next person.

What I love about Kylie is that, more than 20 years later, she is still as fun and relevant and she was back then. (Even after fighting breast cancer several years ago.) She never sold out. She never got weird or affected by her fame. She is who she is and she does what she does well. She doesn't pretend to be anything more or less. You can always rely on Kylie for some dancerific pop beats and a happy tune to pump you up.

It's easy to forget about her here in the States where she had only brief success with "Can't Get You Out of My Head", but every now and again, something pops up to make me rediscover her.

Here she is... putting some energy back in my lacklustre Friday morning. Thanks, Kylie! 20 years on and you're still my favorite pick-me-up.

The new camera bag

Aint it purdy?





If you like this bag and want to see others available from the same merchant, click here.

On pause

You may have noticed that my feverishly-frequent updates have been on pause lately. Or, maybe you have not noticed at all, in which case I thumb my nose at you, you traitor!

Anyway, I wanted to post something brief, in case you're not connected to me on Facebook or twitter and wondered if I was still alive.

This last week we have been focusing on family. My mother in law has been extremely ill, critically so, and has been in the hospital for 10 days now. Things were not going so well for a while but now I'm pleased to report that it's all looking up again.

In the face of something so emotionally all-encompassing, I have not been in a space to do things like go on jaunts to Sacramento "hot spots" or play with my camera settings. In fact, there has been little room in our heads and hearts for much else. Hence, the lack of posts.

As a quick update for ya'll, however...

• I have signed-up for more photography classes at the same studio where I took the recent workshops. The next round, Class 3 (I skipped class one because I am ohhhh so advanced already) is on composition, I believe. This is where I consider my "skills", such that they are, to be the strongest and so I'm expecting the biggest blow to my ego here. Next two classes are at the end of August. Will blog more on that when the time comes.

• My fancy new, custom camera bag has shipped! I'm soooo excited, I can barely contain myself. I've been looking for something fun, stylish, and functional for a while, that would hold not only the camera itself but also my lenses and a couple of filters and stuff, and coming up against a whole slew of websites with either cute-and-impractical bags or boring-and-functional ones. Then I found this site. My bag is the custom type. I picked the fabrics but, otherwise, what will arrive will be somewhat of a surprise. Kewl. I'll take a photo and post it here, of course. I know, you're just DYING of excitement, right? You can admit it.

• In the absence of a vampire TV show or movie that I have not seen, to satiate my bloodlust I have begun reading The Vampire Diaries books. This is probably not incredibly surprising to you, of course, if you know anything at all about me. The reason I'm mentioning it here is because I think the books are terrible. If it's even possible, they're more corny than the Twilight saga. (I know, gag!) What's worse is that the main protagonist, Elena, is not even likable in the books. In the TV show, she's nothing special, admittedly (the attraction is, literally, all with the two hot vamp brothers) but at least she's not dislikable. Elena of the books is vain and self-centered and somewhat lacking a redeeming quality, except for the fact that she seems to like tall, dark strangers with fangs as much as I do. I started reading the first volume and cringed most of the way through it. The sad thing is, though - and here's an insight into how incredibly sad my vampire obsession is - I'm completely hooked anyway. I raced through books one and two and then sought out book three online because I didn't have the patience to wait until I could get to the book store to buy it. I know they're bad but I can't help it. Oh God help me!

Progress

Oooooo, don't you just love the sound of that? Progress! It's a fantastic word, isn't it?

Well, I'm happy to report further progress with my back/hip issues. Ok, well, happy may be a severe understatement. If you've been following this issue for a while now, you'll know the depths of despair dealing with this injury has dragged me to. So 'progress' is pretty much like saying "multiple orgasms" to me right now.

Today was my last physical therapy session. I've basically moved beyond "treatment", doing so well with all the exercises they have given me and being all-but pain free now for quite some time. Sure, there has been the odd mini flare-up, where I haven't paid attention or have overdone it on something I wasn't supposed to be doing (like housework, conveniently enough) but they are short-lived and I am bouncing back much faster.

This was not my last time going to the physical therapist, however. The facility also does sports specific and personal training and we agreed that it would make sense for me to continue on a program of personal training for a while. You see, my previous issues all flared back up again as soon as I was discharged from physical therapy and tried to return to a more full-body fitness routine. It was like, by trying to take one more step forward towards being strong and fit once more, I would wind up 10 steps back.

Since I don't want that to happen again, I really want to take the next few steps under supervision of an expert. Dustin, my PT, is an athletic trainer and the types of exercises and instruction I have received from him and Kyle, the owner of the facility, include a lot of routines and approaches that are different from anything I have ever done before. So, despite my prior status as a personal trainer, their experience is far greater than mine and their approach rooted in athletic training, which means a focus on preventing injury as well as increasing balance, strength, and endurance.

So, from hereon out, the focus is all on progress. We're going to build upon the foundation we have created, without flaring up my symptoms and with the goal of making me strong and more injury resilient than I have been for quite some time. Which is everything I have been hoping for and everything I have wanted from a treatment program.

I am sooooo incredibly happy that I did not give up and that I kept switching and changing professionals and strategies until I found one that worked for me. I could never quite accept that I was out for the count at age 35 and I'm pleased to say that, although there may be some things that I may never do again, and others that I have to do much less than I did before, I have every hope that I will return to little miss buff Rantypants in the near future.

Now, for my part, all I need to do is start eating more healthfully again. That has definitely been a lagging factor. Although I haven't been eating POORLY (its not like I'm a drive-thru-junkie or anything) I definitely have not been making proper nutrition the top of my list of priorities. That needs to change now, especially if I am going to be upping the ante on the workout side. I'll need a quality diet to fuel my routines.

All in all, this sounds suspiciously like the old me is returning. It's been a long time coming, let me tell you, but I'm glad to meet the old Ms. Rantypants again. I liked her much better and have missed her a lot.

Daisy's Sacramento: Coloma

This weekend Daisy, Mum, Dad, and I went on a little excursion to a small town in the foothills that has a large claim to fame: Coloma. You see, this one stop-light city was the place where, back in 1848, gold was first discovered, and the infamous California Gold Rush began.


Sutter's Mill, the exact spot where the shiny stuff was found. 

Despite its rather important place in California's history, the town and State Historic Park is somewhat low-key and lacking the dynamism of the event itself (probably due to chronic underfunding.) The three times I have been there, once in Spring, once in Fall, and now in the Summer, there have not been more than a handful of people milling around the dusty exhibits.


The sleepy atmosphere suited us, however, as it was scorching hot out and it meant that Daisy had the opportunity to dash around, unhindered.


Daisy, enjoying the miniature scenes in the museum.






Marshall Gold Discovery State Historic Park. Impressive, huh?



"Oh, look, Daisy! It's an... um... wooden shack."



"So, let's see....What's this thing supposed to be?"



The view up the barrel of a gun.



Daisy, Mummy, and Nanny, gold-panning. Cheaper than a lottery ticket but a tad more hard work.


Despite being generally underwhelmed by the park itself, we had a great time milling around. The drive to Coloma, up historic California Highway 49, is lovely - all hills, trees, twists, and turns - and emerging from around the side of a cliff and under the Foresthill Bridge, and right at the confluence of the north and south forks of the American River, never fails to take my breath away.


We stopped for frozen yogurt in Auburn, where Hubby pretty much grew up, and then drove back home down Auburn-Folsom Road, enjoying the blazing sunshine from inside our air conditioned car.


You can see all the photos here.

Aperture homework samples

I have almost completed my homework assignment for my photography class, part two of which is tomorrow.

Here are some samples I have for the various assignments, including my aperture for each:


#6 - shot in the darkest place I can safely take a photo

Exposure	0.006 sec (1/160)
Aperture	f/2.5
Focal Length	50 mm
ISO Speed	1600

#5 Two shots of the same subject in the highest and lowest possible ISO mode 

Exposure	0.006 sec (1/160)
Aperture	f/9.0
Focal Length	55 mm
ISO Speed	1600

Exposure	0.033 sec (1/30)
Aperture	f/5.6
Focal Length	55 mm
ISO Speed	100

#1 A photo with a blurry background (shallow depth of field)
(I have a few for this - any votes for which one I should pick?)

Exposure	0.001 sec (1/2000)
Aperture	f/2.5
Focal Length	50 mm
ISO Speed	100

Exposure	0.008 sec (1/125)
Aperture	f/2.5
Focal Length	50 mm
ISO Speed	200

Exposure	0.004 sec (1/250)
Aperture	f/2.5
Focal Length	50 mm
ISO Speed	100

#2 A landscape photo (deep depth of field)
Again, looking for nominations. Not crazy about my submissions here.

Exposure	0.017 sec (1/60)
Aperture	f/22.0
Focal Length	21 mm
ISO Speed	400

Exposure	0.02 sec (1/50)
Aperture	f/22.0
Focal Length	18 mm
ISO Speed	400

Exposure	0.033 sec (1/30)
Aperture	f/22.0
Focal Length	18 mm
ISO Speed	200

I still have to get shots for assignments #3, #4, and #7. The first two are practice with shutter speed - fast and slow - and the last is the bonus shot for a silhouette, where I get to play with some manual settings. I'm going to have to work on those tonight, methinks. I did try to get off some shots for the shutter speed - one of Daisy in the kitchen (slow SS) and one of a truck going by (fast SS) but I'm not happy with them. For a start, the slow SS one is supposed to be a clear photo with ONE element that is blurred due to motion, not the whole photo blurry. I really need to get out the tripod and park it in the back yard while Daisy and the dogs play this evening.

You can click here to see all the photos I took for this assignment.