You gotta be kidding me. Seriously?

Okay, I have a story about this photo.

Are you ready?

I pass by this tree when I'm walking to my car from my office. It is a beautiful, old tree. Usually I see an average of 6 squirrels and countless little birds climbing up and down and playing in the branches, at any given time. It is a popular tree among the local wildlife. I will often stop for a moment and watch the little animals scurrying around.

Yesterday, as I was walking past the tree, I looked up and saw a HUGE hawk perched on one of the low  branches. It was an absolutely beautiful creature, and so close! Since I have been participating in a 365 photos project I have been carrying my camera with me much more frequently. I felt super awesome as a whipped out my camera and started snapping away. He sat still for a while and let me indulge in photographing such a rare and beautiful sight, but then after a few minutes he flaunted his great wingspan and took flight, flying right over my head. It was breathtaking.

Once the hawk was gone I of course was anxious to look at the treasures on my camera. I hit the review button and what was displayed? Not the beautiful photos I had just taken, but a little error message reading "No Memory Card". NOOOoooooo!

Yes.... I had taken the memory card out to upload some photos, and had forgotten to put it back in. So now all I have to share with you is an empty tree.

Da Bomb Dot Com.

I'm sure I am more than partial when it comes to my super-cool husband, but can I just say that I think he is da bomb dot com? For real. He's rad.

I could list a bazillion reasons why I think he's the greatest thing since sliced toast, but for now I'll just share two.

Reason One:

He's an awesome sport when it comes to my photography endeavors. There are many times when we are out at an event, park, whatever, and he would really just like to enjoy an nice afternoon with his wife. But what am I often doing? I'm on my hands and knees trying to get just the right shot. I'll say something along the lines of, "Hey, go stand over there by that pillar in front of the lighthouse." "What do you want me to do when I get there?" He'll ask. "Look suave." I'll respond. Not that its hard for him to look suave anyway. I know that posing for my camera is probably not his favorite, but he does it anyway to make me happy. And then I put my camera back in the bag, hold his hand, and enjoy the rest of the afternoon with the man I love.

Reason Two:

He's so stinkin' smart! I've been messing with Photoshop and with Blogger all day long trying to get the silly white corners on my rounded corner header image to be transparent. I tried different ways to crop the rounded corners, and I tried saving it in every file format I knew. I tried every thing I could think of and searched everywhere for information and found nothing that worked.

He fixed it in about 2 minutes. Smarty pants. :-)

Disconnect to Connect.

We've all seen it. Maybe we've even done it.

Two friends out to lunch, and one of them spends half the time on the phone, "catching up with a friend" while the other one quietly eats their salad wishing their friend would talk with them and not to the person on the phone.

A father has the special opportunity to take his daughter to preschool every morning, but misses out on this quality time he could be sharing with her, because he's on the phone getting a jump on work for the day.

A family out is out to dinner, but the kids are all glued to their phones, texting to their friends about the boring dinner they're having, when they could be enjoying fun conversation with their parents and siblings.

I have to give major props to DTac, a Thai Cell Phone Company who created the ad below. They have realized what many have not. That even though we may feel "Connected" to the world through our super-phones, often it is at the price of being Disconnected from those who are with us right now.





Ps. Please don't leave me disgruntled comments. I use a cell phone. I use Facebook. And hey, I even write a blog! They are all good in their proper place, and yes they do connect us with the people who are far away that we can't physically be with. But my point is that we don't want to become so focused on connecting with the rest of the world that we forget about the world that is sitting next to us, longing for our attention.

Vanilla.

What do you do when your rough month at work suddenly turned from rough to horrible?

What do you do when Technology goes haywire?

What do you do when you your deadlines are approaching just as quickly as before, but now you have to re-do work several days worth of work that got eaten by haywire technology, and you're even more behind than you were before because you spent all day trying to fix what broke?

What do you do when you work at a church where everyone around you wants to look at the bright side of the situation, rather than just agreeing with you that the situation sucks?

I got in my car and drove to the closest place I could find that sold milkshakes.