the pure interest

I finally got out to do a bit of photography yesterday at the ever-changing, ever-blooming, ever-colorful little Erie, PA sphere of a world I live in. It is just incredible how QUICKLY things are moving through their blooming/growing cycles. It was like, 2 weeks ago, nothing except a few crocus, then all of a sudden, leaves, trees, flowers, tulips, azaleas, cherry trees, pear trees…. one day I will own at least 2-3 flowering trees. I have my baby Kwanzan cherry tree replacement that came from Burgess yesterday, and I Plan to pot it again. This will be the third attempt and replacement from them. As a side-note, as tempting as their catalog is, I don’t recommend Burgess seed company. 75% of what they’ve sent me has died, and it’s not the case with plants I’ve bought from other sources.  Anyway without further ado…

Things making me happy around Erie

Things making me happy around my house

and things making me happy inside my house (and I think the cats too)…. sunlight.

Have a great weekend everyone.

Thank you so much for all your compliments yesterday everyone. They really mean a lot - when I post these things it’s not necessarily to get a bunch of praise, but feedback either way, and of course the positive stuff is always appreciated!

So I’ve decided to start a .mac trial (60 days - I like that they give you a full two months) mainly for the “Back to My Mac” feature, where you can connect and control two (or more) of your mac computers remotely. I’ve had this need for the last few months especially when sometimes I’ll end up needing to work on agency work from home, and I don’t have all the files, so I end up emailing them to myself, etc. It’s just not efficient. In theory, .mac allows me to have not only storage space online (which I can’t say I’ve been too thrilled with - a friend of mine and I use it to transfer sermon mp3s and it often crashes my computer if I try to copy too much at once), but remote management of both macs depending on where are at. You can do screen sharing, but I’d probably avoid this since on Mondays and Tuesday there is another designer sitting at this computer and I don’t think she’s appreciate her mouse and folders being taken over by me Anyway, for $100 a year, if this works, I think it will be super helpful and very worth it!

Anyone else have experience with .mac that they could weigh in on?

Thanks - and have a wonderful Wednesday! GE Shareowners meeting is today, (big deal in our town) so I hope to go down to the convention center later and get a look at all my agency and some other vendor’s in towns hard work in helping GE put it together!!

One of my first big freelance projects finally wrapped up last month, and I was so excited to have the real CD in my hands. I think the look of it really goes with David’s style. You can listen to him here, and pick up a copy of the cd.

I also completed some web order buttons and banners to go with the style.

Anyway - it’s been a really fun project, and I’m actually quite sad that it’s over. The good news is my husband and I are still working on our worship CD, and I’m pretty much ensured to be the chosen graphic designer on that job ;-), so I know there is another one on the horizon.

I’m sorry to my normal commenting-bloggy-friends that I haven’t been commenting lately, I’ve been really just scattered and haven’t gotten to many blogs. Also, it is so warm and sunny out I’m trying to be outside more than in!

Why do I insist on taking pictures of every haircut I get? I really don’t have a reason for it except I’m usually SO thrilled with my hair color and cut right after I get it done, I want to remember how I was happy with it at that time, especially since my tragic December hair butchering. It’s finally getting to a point where my stylist and I can put a new spin on it, and have a cute shorter style without being “chopped.” Anyway, I went brighter blonde for warmer weather. I didn’t sleep well last night so excuse any dark circles. I love having a web cam on my work computer!

Brian was out last night so I was feeling kind of down and lonely, he hasn’t been home much since beginning of last week and our horrible stomach episodes. But it inspired me to work on a fun project that I’d been talking to one of my best friends about - designing a sort of self-promotional website for her future ministry endeavors. She wanted it pink, which made me super happy, because I rarely get to design in pink! Obviously, I won’t be revealing the design yet, but be sure you’ll see it eventually

THIS IS SO EXCITING - I am always looking for advice on Vectors, I think it is a lot harder to find that Photoshop tips. Check out Vectips!

Have great Thursdays. Yay, the Office is new and on tonight!!!

Please prepare for a very linky post.

Thanks to KT for this font game reference. I was proud of myself for scoring 30 out of 34!! It’s interesting to see what you recognize. Some were easy, some trickier and had to be done through process of elimination.

Last night was spent watching some tv, American idol (I thought Mariah Carey was a great mentor), while online with my bloggy friend Tina who was helping me make the dynamic lightbox script work. I couldn’t figure out what i was doing wrong, and after about 5 tries of completely redoing the script, I finally just used Tina’s version, and it started working There are a few kinks in it, but I’m almost there, and Tina stuck with me for 2.5 hours online!! I seriously don’t know what I would do without my web designing and techy friends to ask for advice sometimes… thanks for being there for me. I’ve learned so much from you and you help me get out of sticky situations a lot, I owe you.

Yesterday was a little hard… my husband was discouraged about his job, and then I had sort of a depressing day for my business; I was scared because I was on hold on so many projects, I literally had nothing to work on. I have invoices out, and about 5 projects in the works… but I don’t know that any of them will be able to be paid in the next month, which means forgoing the small additional salary I give myself monthly out of my business account (I just paid estimated taxes so there isn’t much cushion). But then around 6:00 pm, I got a cold call from a referred client who wants me to help them do a small website in the next 2 weeks. This is such a blessing, and to top it off, it’s a Christian client who wants to promote his evangelism missions! It won’t be much, but it helped boost my confidence that God is providing work for me and to just keep calm, keep working on administrative things and promotion when I am slow, and trust that things will pick up. And the small cash flow will help. I also have two small wedding photography projects coming up that I know of this year, and that is also really fun stuff!!

It’s so funny because at my agency job, things are so crazy, I feel like I could work for weeks and not finish everything. And yet, here I am, blogging.

To work with me!!

I had an interesting interaction with two of my best friends (Christy & Kristin) this weekend We had our annual “birthdays at the Outback” get together, and it was awesome as always - i really treasure that time with them. They both walked in and presented me with a flower and a card each - it was so beautiful (pictures below). We then headed in to church together which was really great, and as we were going in I said, I forgot to tell you guys I got pulled over on my way to church last week. And they were both like - oh yeah, we know, we read it on your blog. This statement gave me mixed feelings - 1) disappointment that I wasn’t revealing new information to them in person, 2)  flattery that they care enough about my life to try to stay caught up when they can by reading the blog.

What about other bloggers out there - how does this affect you? Do close family and/or friends read your blog? There are certain people I know read whenever I post, so I assume that they have certain knowledge if I’ve posted when I talk to them, and if they are confused while I’m talking, I’m all - “oh, well i posted about it today” … It’s an odd conundrum. Not good or bad either way, I guess, just interesting how communication and the retelling of events sort of changes with this medium.

As Brian was out of town at the church winter retreat for the youth, the rest of the weekend gave me time to just sort of chill at the house, finish the cleaning, do a massive overhaul of our bedroom clothing/cleaning, and get caught up on some movies I’ve wanted to see. “Waitress,” so cute I watched it twice, and “Elizabeth: The Golden Age.” I didn’t get to finish Elizabeth yet but what I saw I loved. Sunday was a beautiful day of church, eating, and chilling out with my other best friends D&D and their little niece Candace who was in rare form. I wish I knew how to get the videos onto the computer, as I have some of her interacting with the cats; well, mainly with the cat toys.

Everyone have a blessed Monday!

the Cala Lily is my first, so I’m so excited to see it open up.

The flowers were from KaBloom - I’ve never been there but I was so impressed with the quality and presentation. One individual flower had the impact of a dozen because it was so perfect.

I had a big long post on the Shout to the Lord song done on idol, not once, but twice… lol… but I just realized it doesn’t matter and I didn’t want to even share it because my thoughts are too confusing and bumping around in my head and I might risk making you guys never want to read again, cuz you’ll think I’ve gone crazy.

Just read Danielle’s post - I guess really, deep down, that summarizes some of the feelings that I was thinking, along with just one that I wanted to share - that Shout to the Lord is meant to be a worship song sung in a worshipful spirit, and it was written for that purpose, so used as a performance piece for the Idols to showcase their voice was what deep down bothered me about it.

But then again, if it was done excellently, was it worshipful to God anyway? Probably not, because God knows your heart and without love and a true spirit toward Him, it is a clanging gong. (scripture reference)… but:

Philippians 1:18 says, “But what does it matter? The important thing is that in every way, whether from false motives or true, Christ is preached. And because of this I rejoice.” So I guess scripture shot me down there

Regardless, Idol Gives Back was an amazing cause, and for sure, Jesus would be 100,000,000,000,000,000 % behind it. So, I hope if you were able, you did give.

See? Scatterbrained. This is why I deleted the other post.

A few other thoughts…

• Hmm.. why am I still awake at 12:15 am on a worknight? Because I had a Diet Pepsi with Lime after 5:00pm.
• I got pulled over on Grubb Road on my way to church tonight for going 51 in a 35. Oops - I seriously thought I was in a 45. Luckily my cop was nice. But not nice enough to not give me the ticket. $150 fine baby. But it’s pretty typical that something else crap-for-crap would happen to me in April. For some reason, April tends to be my worst month in the last two years.
• My full appetite is back and I’m hungry basically always. Hubby and I are back to ourselves now, and our house is in the process of been stripped, washed in hot water, and disinfected, so you can come back over soon
• The cat just jumped up and hit the mirror above our bed, it is swinging.
• Work is ridiculous right now, and I think I need to go in at 5am and stay until 10pm.

Anyway, HAPPY FRIDAY from kitties!

ah… to be that carefree

I’ve avoided any comments or thoughts that spring might be here, but I think I can safely say that it is on its way. It was beautiful and relatively warm the last few days. It is supposed to get cool again, but things are definitely growing. I have two cute little purple crocus’ and my tulips are coming up. I was able to muster up the energy to clean up all the old leaves and dirt and sticks that this rough winter has deposited all over my garden. It was nice to be outside, but hard because I am still a bit weak And update, its 5:50 am and my hubby woke up really ill too, so whatever I had, I think he might have caught I’m sorry baby!

Anyway here are some spring moments for you…

daylilies beginning

my first year for tulips

buds on my lilac tree

when these little guys come up its fun, but they don’t bloom until fall which sort of stinks

yellow crocus. I didn’t even know I had these but they came up in the backyard!

my parents gave me a peony last year. It didn’t bloom last year, but should now (i hope). I didn’t know they came up red!

purple crocus

enjoy it, and if you garden, get out there! and if you don’t, you should.