Random Photo For A Blah Wednesday

I was typing up a complain-y post about my post-holiday doldrums, but that just made me feel more blah.

So instead, here is a random photo from our Christmas trip, me with our friend's adorable kitty:

Happy Wednesday to everyone! Hope you're feeling more motivated and less blah than I am this first week of 2012!

OMFG!!!

I got a camera, I got a camera, I got a camera, hey hey hey HEY!

Last night after work, I innocently changed out of my work clothes, and was carrying a sweatshirt out to go sit on the couch. I wasn't really paying attention, and so when I went to sit down, I almost squished a box that was hiding under our throw blanket.

And inside the box was this beauty, along with some other goodies, like an extra battery, carrying case, etc!


My husband = awesome!

As soon as I got the battery charged enough to use, I had to try it out on the cats. And the results were SO much better than my last attempt at cat photography (although getting them to sit still, or not be in awkward mid-yawn or licking poses is still a challenge).

Here's the best of my 15 minute session with the cats, on the automatic, no flash setting.


I would love to continue learning how to use the manual settings (I'm finding the camera basics tutorials that Mrs. Bee has been posting to be really useful!), but instead I'm headed out to have a productive day, to have lunch with my parents and help them move some things.

But I can't wait to play around some more. This is going to make our upcoming vacations even more fun, now that I have a good camera to play with!

Does anyone have any good online resources for someone who is new to DSLRs?

P.S. If you're only reading this in Google Reader, be sure to check out my new blog design, done by How Joyful Design Studio (aka Mrs. Poodle on Weddingbee). She did an awesome job!

Busy, Busy, Busy!

You know when you have a whole bunch of ideas for blog posts, but you're too busy to actually get around to writing them and uploading photos for them?

Yeah, that's me right now!

I've got a ton of posts in draft form right now, but they're all incomplete at the moment. I thought I'd have a chance to get caught up with yesterday off of work, but instead I spent the day running a ton of errands and cleaning and organizing our kitchen cabinets. My husband never seems to put things back in the right place, so I had a lot of crawling back and forth between our under-the-counter cabinets to do!

We've been super busy continuing on with our mission to de-clutter our house, and we've set a goal for ourselves. By the second week of March, our house needs to be clutter-free. We're scheduling another special garbage pick up for then, so we need to be ready. We've already done one pick up, for a pile of junk that was 8ft wide x 4ft deep x 4ft high (the max they'll pick up), and I think in the next few weeks we'll have that much stuff to get rid of again. And that's on top of all the clothes and shoes we already gave away!

But it feels good. And I think I want to make this a habit. Every year I want us to go through our house and get rid of things we're not using, or are only saving out of guilt (sorry, Christmas gifts from 5 years ago that are still in their package).

In other news, I've been hard at work planning lots of upcoming travel. You know by now how much I love travel planning, but because I'm so thorough (and love researching every possible option and making detailed itineraries that include fun photos to look at), it's pretty time consuming. Coming up, we have a trip to Florida in March with my in-laws (which we're cutting short to spend a few days on a detour further north up the east coast). Then we'll be headed back to our detour spot sometime either in early or late April. And oh yeah, I've also spent a huge amount of time planning and organizing a trip for about 30 people to New Orleans in mid-April. Not to mention that our 1st wedding anniversary is coming up in early June, so I need to figure out where we're going for that. And finally, I need to start researching and booking our summer and early fall camping trips, and put together our summer calendar of all the stuff we'll be doing every weekend.

Boy, that sounds exhausting! But I do like doing things and going places, and I love well planned out trips, so I know it's worth all of the work.

And finally, my husband and I are working on a huge home project, but I probably won't be ready to share it for another month, once it's closer to being ready. We went to Home Depot this last weekend for a bunch of supplies, and are already making good headway. But wish us luck, because I anticipate lots of wanting-to-pull-out-our-hair before it's done!

All of this is to say, posting is probably going to be a little lighter than usual for the next few busy weeks. But I do have plans for another giveaway in March, my blog design is getting an overhaul soon, and I hope to carve out some time to finish up my draft blog posts in the not-t00-distant future. I definitely need to find time to do my Vlog of The Month in the next week too. And I promise, I'm still reading everyone's blogs, even if I'm not commenting as much as usual. When time is tight, Google Reader is my friend for getting my blog fixes, but not for easily commenting. Love you all though, and when I get a little caught up, I promise to be back and spreading my comment love to you--I know just how much getting comments means to all of us bloggers! :)

And since I can't end a post without a photo, here is my youngest cat, Rascal, when he was about 10 weeks old. I don't think I've ever shared this picture before, but can't you see why I just had to keep him?

(He's sitting on a ~6ft high x 7ft wide kitty jungle gym that we built about 6 years ago. It's seen better days though, and soon we'll be scrapping the old jungle gym and building them a better one. Yet another project!)

And for good measure here's a pic my other two, all crazy-eyed from the flash.

Does life ever get in the way of your blogging?