No More Whining....

For the past few months I have been whining about not getting a real summer vacation. Actually, we really had no family summer vacation. The kids were busy with school trips and sports and summer art school, etc.. But, alas, I am persistent and I was bound and determined to get my family on a vacation--together--this year! For Michael's sake, I wanted something tropical: Hawaii or Mexico. But Joey was having none of it. He wants history and a place where he can immerse himself in culture. I know he is spoiled, but we have less than two years left with the kid.... so bring on Europe!

I have done it! The four of us will be spending Thanksgiving break in London and Scotland. I know I am crazy. I know the dollar is so so weak, especially in Europe. Although things will be expensive once we get there, I was able to use points and miles and everything I could come up with to make this trip happen. For most of our stay in London we will be renting a vacation apartment: 3 bedrooms, 2 baths and a 3 minute walk from Kings Cross Station (maybe we will catch the Hogwart's Express... ) and half the price of a hotel.

Ahhh, something to look forward to. And even though the weather hasn't completely changed to cloudy, rainy and generally dismal yet, Michael and I will spend the week of his birthday (next week as a matter of fact) in Southern California--sunny and warm enough for us and a lot less expensive than Hawaii!

Things are looking up....

Lessons Learned

20 Days to Halloween...

My photography class has ended. Here's a few class photos. Now its time to find my software and really get to work.

Tomatoes from the garden.

In this photo I was working with getting enough light

to take the photo inside without using a flash. This

was taken at dusk in the kitchen.

The rest of these are some practice photos.

We were asked to take pictures of familiar things in

an unfamiliar way. This beautiful old Mercedes was parked

outside the school.

I have a whole series of these photos inside

the ladies bathroom at the school. I used every angle,

shutter speed, f-stop I could... this is my favorite of the bunch

although they all look really different.

This is my favorite overall.

It is a metal statue on one of the streets of the

Pearl District. It is a statue of people and it is about

7 feet tall. All my photos are in the

Pearl District (neighborhood where the school is)

or in the school as I never did get

much homework done.

Another Lesson...

I had another photography class today. Our assignment from last week was, basically, to take unusual photos of ordinary things. I took a lot of these types of photos, but now that we are shooting in RAW, not JPEG, my iphoto does not really want to load the photos, so I have to go searching for some other software (that I own, but just cannot find) so that I can get all the pictures loaded on my home computer. Today in class we had a photoshop lesson, a very long photoshop lesson... my mind wandered, a lot. So, I just decided to have fun with this picture of Bridget I took when she visited with me on Thursday. I learned enough to manipulate the photo and then convert to a JPEG and send to myself from school, but that is about all I learned.

I would have liked to have taken some pictures of her

picking baby pumpkins for her Mommy and Daddy,

but since I was holding her the whole time,

it was just physically impossible.