Photo Overload


My grandma's memorial service is today. In preparation for it, I have been dealing with all of the photos that she collected over her lifetime. Thanks to the effords of my parents and myself, we now have a repository of family photos from approx 1940 on … about 300 images. Of course there were many more, but we picked the really good ones to archive.

Seems like every spare moment has been consumed touching-up, cropping, rotating, categorizing, and labeling photos. I'm still not done, but it's much closer than it was. It's been loads of hard work, but it's really worthwhile to have all of these images captured digitally and available for our whole family. And that's worth a ton.

Now I need a 5-day nap.

Things

Annoying Things
– Tivo deleted last week's ep of Veronica Mars before I got to watch it
– Ditto Grey's Anatomy
– Matt's been sick and I've been tired so the house is a mess and laundry is piling up
– Our beautiful weather (in the 60s) has turned bitter cold and snowy
– Discover Card (and all the other credit card companies) charge fees for their gift cards and assess penalties if the recipient doesn't use them within a year

Good Things
– Kind pirates have posted last week's Veronica Mars on Go Fish and I can see grey's on ABC's website.
– I did manage to at least get the dishes done last night and cart a whole bunch of boxes from the basement to the curb so the trash collectors could get them out of our house
– I found a top to wear to the company Christmas party that doesn't make me look like a whale
– I am just about ready to place an order for a whole lotta Christmas gifts on Amazon
– I cooked a very nice dinner last night and there are leftovers!
– there's a chance that this snow might give us a bit of humidity and I won't turn into one big scab Continue reading “Things”

What We've Been Up To


Matt made the mistake of getting a new video game a couple weeks back and we've been playing it incessantly. It's the latest title in the Final Fantasy series and like all titles from this series it features scantily clad extremely feminie heroines and even more scantily clad feminine-looking heroes, a mish-mash of technology (teleportation, but no email) and of course fights with creatures who resemble anything from tomatoes to the Hindu god vishnu in wall form (don't ask). It's only a 1-player game, but someone has to read the map, damnit, which makes it a great game to play together. Yea, we're nerds. Continue reading “What We've Been Up To”

Thanksgiving

I really really really cannot believe that the 4-day weekend is over with.

Thursday was basically an all-day Turkey fest. That photo is from Thanksgiving. Loki came with us to my grandma's house and spent most of his day in the side-yard which connects to the porch by a staircase and separates with a gate. Loki was so desparate to get thru he very nearly got his little doggie self stuck. He got lots of treats though.

The rest of the weekend flew by in a haze of projects errands and down time. We got little done, but we're pretty relaxed if not well rested.

Update

Hi all! Well, we went to the doctor and had another ultrasound and found that things look fine. AFI looks fine, baby girl looks fine. They didn't measure the AFI but indicated that it is still possibly on the low-side of normal. Apparently it's not a real scientific thing anyhow so “a qualitative analysis is as good as a quantitative analysis.” And she seems to be growing just fine. And that is something we're very thankful for.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

Happy Thanksgiving Eve

Ahhh… the day before Thanksgiving. It's just after 7:30, but not so much life is stirring around my office. Mostly no one is going to be here today. I have a half-day myself, but not really because of tomorrow's holiday. We have an appointment with the perinatologist today so he can check and make sure little one is still on track. And we need to get our flu shots while we're at the clinic as well.

After that, who knows? I need to make some mashed potatoes at some point and there had been talk of some shopping or dinner or a movie. I don't know about you, but I'm really really really looking forward to having some time off.

If I don't get around to posting again, have a happy Thanksgiving!

What to Do With All Those Photos

I'm sure you all have seen the cool things that you can do with Snapfish and Kodak Gallery, but you may not yet have seen Qoop. Qoop integrates with your Flickr account and features some photo swag that you may not have seen before. I especially like their mini photo books, keychains, and luggage tags. They also have a very cool “life poster” style print that you can get for just $10. I have only used the service to get the mini photo books, but they turned out so very cool I have pretty good confidence in the other things they're offering.

Happy Monday

The weekend was nice. Dinner with my parents on Friday. They cooked AND cleaned at our house. So very nice. Video games, shopping with friends, family party, dinner out, errand running, laundry-doing, TV-watching, more video-game playing, dinner making. That was the rest of the weekend.

Weather was gorgeous. Clear skies, temps in the 50s, no wind. Lovely. We took Loki to the dog park and very nearly wore him out.

Can't believe it's Monday again. At least it's a short weeek!

Exhausted

I took a look over our calendar for the next 6 weeks or so and I'm exhausted just from looking at it. We are jam packed with events so much that we don't have a free weekend until mid December and as you can imagine, “free” will be a relative term as we wrap up Christmas shopping, finish wrapping, and trim the tree.

Of course even with all the business, I really look forward to our Christmas traditions. A couple of my faves:
* buying goofy stocking stuffers for everyone (one year we bought my dad travel-sized Charmin for camping)
* having tamales and guacamole and margaritas on Christmas Eve – we pick them up earlier in the day from an awesome place around here since no one wants to cook and nothing is open on Christmas Eve
* this year we're starting what we hope will become a new tradition – we're going up into the mountains with some of our nearest and dearest and spending the weekend baking cookies and watching DVDs and such

What are your holiday traditions?