Hello!
Harry hiding at the slight mention of a haircut. Seriously?
Sword fights with friends.
My boys singing to Johnny Cash’s ” Ring of Fire” at a karaoke party.
Making “Magic Mud” for a science experiment at school. Extracting the starch from the potatoes.
The leftover starch which creates the mud.
The mud.
Adding the quinine so it can glow in the dark.
Bending glow-in-the-dark magic mud. 
Harry’s own Rainbow Loom design of Rath from Ben 10.
Jump.
Harry took this one.
An incredible sunset (unfortunately, much of its beauty came from the skies of the nearby fires).
To really get the feel of the car, it is important to get in the trunk when car shopping.
First karate tournament.
He sure looks big compared to Harry.
Lots of kicking. 
He placed silver in Kata and sparring. 
Swords.
A typical day rainbow looming a dragon with Raja looking on.
Rainbow Loom Toothless and Hiccup from How to Train Your Dragon (via Courtney Nicole).
Harry with his plethora of dragons. Oh my!
Try to be a rainbow in someone’s cloud. – Maya Angelou
Being someone who loves to takes photos and document everything, I have to stay organized or I will go insane. After various attempts with numerous programs, I think I am finally at the right place – Adobe Lightroom. It does everything I need it do (and a little more).
Now everyone has a different system to organize their photos and I have certainly spent hours upon hours researching the best solution. Wedding photographers organize by weddings, baby and family photographers tend to organize by client, but how do ordinary people organize? After many attempts at consolidation by event, date, people, place I finally resolved that organzing by date is the only way to go for me.
First I organize by year. I have scans back from my birth and beyond.
Within each year I organize by month.
And within each month is the date followed by a title (or brief description) of the day.
I “keyword” everything so I can search my photos by specific people, events, places and/or details and then create a “collection” of these photos for photo books, projects, etc.
Now I have been documenting our lives every day for the past 5 years and that is A LOT of photos. I am currently at around 200,000. There is no way I could keep all those on my computer or even half without my computer crashing, so I use external hard drives. And not only are they all stored on the external hard drives, I am also currently using CrashPlan for my external back up of my hardrives. You can never have enough back up!!
Whatever you do, stay sane and find a path towards the zen of photograph organization.
Welcome to another week!
A Picasso inspired piece for Mother’s Day.
And a lovely poem. My heart melts.
My Mother’s Day present to myself – a trip to Safari Park. A selfie
Almost as big as the gorillas.
Acting like a gorilla.
Hanging with the lemurs.
Lemurs are cool.
Me as a lemur.
Harry was the lorikeet whisperer.
They really liked him.
Love the colors.
A 5-month-old lion cub.
Isn’t he cute playing with a big box just like a kitten? ( but much, much bigger)
Loved watching all their antics.
Just incredible.
Brother and sister.
Brother and sister playing.
They really liked to play.
Just couldn’t get enough of the cubs.
I swear he is smiling.
Mommy and baby elephant. What could be more appropriate on Mother’s Day.
Couldn’t take the drive to Michaels every couple of days so I decided to open my own Rainbow Loom store. Harry has to buy them from me. Saves a lot on gas money.
Lunch date with my best friend.
Harry showing off his new shoes to the cats. They look fascinated.
On a journey with a bucket full of Rainbow Loom dragons.
Life is beautiful, as long as it consumes you. When it is rushing through you, destroying you, life is gorgeous, glorious. It’s when you burn a slow fire and save fuel, that life’s not worth having.
D. H. Lawrence
Tara Moore / Getty Images
Do you think our great grandparents, our grandparents or even our parents had any idea what we (as women) would look like today? What do you imagine they would think?
Getty Images in conjunction with Leanin.org assembled thousands of photos of women with the idea of documenting powerful women in our contemporary world. These images hope to change the way we look at women.
The images made me swell up with pride. Look at who we are and what we can become. We are not limited. We are a force. We are to be celebrated for our uniqueness and our accomplishments. What a powerful project!
And another week goes by….
We celebrated Arbor Day by planting a tree in our town.
At our designated area we started the digging.
And kept digging. 
A giant rootball thwarted our efforts, leaving us with a twisted shovel (which I forgot to take a photo of.) After walking back, trading out shovels and moving our spot a bit, we started again.
Sucess (finally). Here is the newly planted Hong Kong Orchid tree.
The Hong Kong Orchid has these gorgeous flowers.
Found this funny sign on our walk around town.
Dragon origami.
Chess club.
Raja lovin’.
A surprise early Mother’s Day celebration. (Patrick forgot the last 3 years so he had a little making up to do.)
Hope you are having fabulous week!
We love book fairs – lots and lots of books !!! This was one of several piles! Yikes!
These ridiculously fun creatures are part of our annual Flower Show.
One of our scores at the book fair was 139 episodes of MacGyver for $8. We spent the weekend binge watching MacGyver!
Their is a certain fascination with our cart escalator at Target. 
“Holy Unanticipated Occurances.”
The boys wrestling.
And Raja.
Happy Mother’s Day!!!
Losing a pet can be overwhelming. After our cat died recently, I felt so lost and alone yet the memories were so vibrant in my mind. I knew I had to find a way to channel the energy into something that would help me overcome the sadness. A photo book allowed me to tell her story in photos and words and start my healing.
I searched my photos on Lightroom using keywords pertaining to my cat and put them all in a “Collection”. I used the Lightroom “Book” mode and created a quick and easy book linked directly to Blurb. The simplicity was just right for this project where I wanted to quickly get my words down. I made a 7″x 7″ soft cover book.
The following are some excerpts of the book:
How she came to be with us.
What she was like as a kitten.
Her relationship with the other animals.
Her relationship with people.
How she played and her favorite toys.
Fun photos and a story about a specific day.
Favorite details – her sounds.
Her personality.
Her physical characteristics.
Her favorite treats.
Her favorite places.
Her impact and what she taught us.
And a good-bye.
We all miss you soo much. We now have this wonderful book to look through and remember all the things we love about you.
Hellllllloooo!
Waiting for a friend at the train station. (Love how little he looks among the larger architecture.)
A Scavenger (Silly Faced) Egg Hunt
Inside each egg was a picture and the picture led to the next egg and so on and so on…
There was an egg in the sock drawer among some many other crazy places.
A picture of a dishwasher?
What kind of crazy Easter Bunny leaves the Easter basket ( full of pool and beach toys) in the dishwasher?
Patrick was out of town, so Harry and I splurged on a special Easter Brunch (complete with a yummy pomegranate mimosa.)
An Easter Selfie.
Ready, set……
Go!
The aftermath.
Trying a new type of Easter Egg art with crayons called Volcanic Explosion. It sounded great in theory but it was an epic fail. We will always remember the disaster we created!
Easter Bunny Harry Rainbow Looming Wild Man.
This may seem like abuse but our cat really likes it. No really! He is actually trying to catch the water stream with his outstretched paw.
A soaking wet Moomba!
Hope your weekend is filled with silliness!
While I love taking photos, sometimes I get in a rut and need inspiration or I think everything feels the same so I want to try new things and learn new techniques. But where to go? Often it is Pinterest, or a new online article, or perusing the book store but there is something about magazines that call to me. I don’t know if it is the pictures or the articles or even the advertisements or the combination of all those elements together. Photography magazines have beautiful photos of landscapes, interesting people and exotic animals but they don’t necessarily talk about capturing the story of the everyday. I finally found a magazine that was meant for me – Click Magazine. Click is the perfect combination of narrative, photography techniques, use of light, inspiration and so much more. There are six issues a year and I anxiously await each one. Click Magazine is a great place to start for people looking to tell stories through photos and improve their photography skills.
surf and sea design 