Our Adventures

Two new parents and a toddler

Happy 10/10/10, fantasy football and mustaches



Just wanted to wish everyone a happy 10/10/10, especially my newly-married friends Molly and Chris Zolman! They were married today at 3 p.m. in St. Lucia. Congratulations you two. Here's to a long, happy and healthy life together.

While we're on the subject of weddings.......Congratulations to Emily Whittamore (Scott's sister) on her engagement to her boyfriend Eric. They are getting married in March 2011. Eric is in the coast guard, so they have to tie the knot before he is transfered somewhere far from here. They may be moving to Alaska or Hawaii in June. Can you say awesome vacation destination?

Today Scott and I ate breakfast at Crave with mom and Billy. mmmmm.....shrimp and grits. Then Scott and I watched football. I thought I'd actually get a win for my 0-4 fantasy team this week after Hakeem Nicks and Brandon Lloyd scored 27 points each, but I don't think it's meant to be. I'm down 118-91 with Randy Moss left and he has his kicker and Percy Harvin left to go. So Randy Moss pretty much needs the game of his life for me to win. Every single team in the league has scored their highest against me. I've got by far the most points scored against me. And I'm in last place, obviously. So frustrating!

Anywho, I've also been working on a little DIY for the wedding. Mustaches and red lips for the photo booth I'm going to attempt at the wedding. I found templates for the mustaches here and here. And I bought some adhesive-backed felt from A.C. Moore, some bamboo skewers and some Martha Stewart craft paper for the back. What do you think?


My first big catch





Today was the first day Scott and I have had off together since September 7th, so we decided to go out on the boat with his parents to go fishing. I wasn't really expecting to catch anything, but I pulled in a catfish early. Not too exciting, I know. But at our second fishing spot we were seeing more interesting fish swimming around. After 30 minutes or so, I started feeling a tug on the line. Then all of a sudden the line went out of control. This was my first big fish, so Scott and his dad came over to help me out. This thing was running like a shark was chasing it and swimming all around the boat. I had to circle it twice before I got it in the net. It ended up being a 10-15 pound jack.

Your Prayers Please



My grandmother (Mema) has been sick in the hospital with pneumonia and congestive heart failure. Dad seemed to think she was doing better yesterday afternoon, but last night my dad called and said that he thought I needed to come home after all. She told my aunt Julie yesterday that she knew she didn't have much time left and she wanted to see her grandbabies.
So I am off to North Carolina on Saturday morning and coming back home on Sunday night. It's a quick trip, but I definitely want to see her while I can still talk to her. Please pray for her.

Green Eggs and Ham

I've been getting organic, free-range eggs recently from a woman that used to work at the News-Press. The flavor is unbelievable -- way better that salmonella grocery store eggs. I also like the size and color variation in the fresh eggs. So imagine my surprise when I pulled my eggs she delivered out of the refrigerator at work and saw these -- GREEN EGGS!
We ate some this morning, and they were so good. The yolks were still yellow and the same color as the brown eggs. I was prepared to take a photo if they were green. I guess the green shells are because the chickens were eating grass or something. cool, huh? I really do want some chickens.

I'm a winner!!!!!

So my obsession with wedding blogs has finally paid off! I just won a $250 gift certificate to Williams Sonoma from Ruffled! I'm so excited I can hardly stand it. I can't wait to have a mini shopping spree!

Here is an excerpt from their post........

"And the winner of the fabulous $250 giftcard to Williams-Sonoma is….

Amanda I!, comment #31, who said: “I knew he was the one when I told him I had a couple of days off right after we started dating, and he suggested we take a trip to Key West. A trip was exactly what I had in mind, and we’ve been traveling together as often as possible since.”

Congratulations! We will be in touch with you shortly."

Baby photography

I just saw this blog post by MCP Actions. They have some good information for photographers,and so I thought I'd share their tips for successful baby photography. Mostly I just wanted to save this post for my own reference, but I thought my 3-4 readers would all find it handy also.

I also wanted to showcase two of my favorite babies: Emme and Evan. Sadly they are really no longer babies, they are toddlers. But it's fun to go back and see how small they really were. Ok, so Evan wasn't really that small....
I'm excited to use the new tips to photograph baby MJ, who should be making her world debut in the next few weeks..Yay!

Fun with magnetic photo paper

A few weeks ago, I bought some magnetic photo inkjet paper to go with our snazzy new printer. I wasn't sure what I wanted to do with it, but I thought it was cool.

At the same time, I've been seeing all these design blogs with framed posters saying "Keep Calm and Carry On." They're literally everywhere (just see the comments on this apartment therapy post), but I dig it. I framed a similar saying from The Bright Side Project, and it now sits on my desk at work. It reminds me to breathe in difficult situations when Scott is not around to remind me.

According to wikipedia, the "Keep Calm" poster was "a poster produced by theBritish government in 1939during the beginning of World War II, to raise the morale of the British public in the case of invasion. It was little known and never used. The poster was rediscovered in 2000 and has been re-issued by a number of private sector companies, and used as the decorative theme for a range of other products."

I read the comments from the Apartment Therapy article after googling the saying to find an image I could print. Someone linked to this gem on etsy, an antidote to "Keep Calm and Carry On."
I think the second poster is a good commentary on the way some politicians would have us feel. But I'm not trying to go all political. I just wanted to make some cool refrigerator magnets out of the sayings. So that's what I did.....what do you think?



Here's the magnetic paper I used....I think I got it from A.C. Moore/Michaels/Jo-Anns.



Ring photos


Lately I've been looking at a lot of wedding blogs and "real wedding" photos just trying to get ideas for the wedding. It seems everybody is photographing the details of their wedding now. The rings, the centerpieces, the cake, the invitations, the programs, etc. So since I'm not going to be behind the camera at my own wedding, I decided to photograph some of the details along the way.
As you know I just finished the Save the Dates. I haven't sent my dad's yet because he was moving, so I decided to photograph the ones I'm sending to Dad and Judy and to my grandmother. I was also inspired by some awesome ring photos I've seen on the blogs. These are from Tag7 photography via Merci. I love this shoe photo. I just wish I could afford some shoes like that. I'm not sure that Nine West shoes are quite as photographable if you know what I mean.


And here's my own version with our Save the Dates! I'm going to do more photos later to try to get the ring to really sparkle, but for a first run, I don't think this is too bad.

My first videos for the News-Press


S o, today I googled myself and stumbled upon some old videos from when I went to Andros Island in the Bahamas in May 2008 with reporter Kevin Lollar. The rotary club of Cape Coral was building a playground for the children of Red Bays, a very poor community on the north end of the island. We tagged along to document the weekend. It was a beautiful place, and I met some amazing people including a little boy who I will never forget.....



Here are some videos that were edited by Jackie Winchester of our online department, because I did not know how to edit then. I know that probably nobody will watch these. I just wanted to have them here so they wouldn't get lost in cyberspace. It is such a magical place. I hope to return someday. The children are all polite and well dressed even though they may live in a house with no running water or electricity.



This is a demo of how to make their famous baskets. And, yes, I bought one.



This guy is great!


and here's Hank of Hank's place.


Home again



The trip to the Keys for Molly's bachelorette party was a success! We all stayed together at the bars in Key West and all got in the cab to go back to Big Pine Key on time. This is an amazing feat considering there were 16 of us. Only one west home early with a headache.

We had a great time celebrating Molly's upcoming wedding on 10/10/10 in St. Lucia. The weekend confirmed what a great friend Molly is to everyone. Each girl said that Molly had gone out of her way to make her feel welcome when they met, and she did the same for me when I got to the News-Press seven years ago. I don't know what I would do without her. Anytime I need anything Molly is there. And her motto throughout the trip was "I love you all equally."

So, thank you Molly, for including me in the weekend and for being a great friend. I had an amazing time! I love you and congratulations. I know you and Chris will have a wonderful life together.

Here are a few pics. I didn't take many because I only took the point and shoot camera and the video camera. I shot more than an hour of video of our night in Key West. And while we were out in Key West, I left the camera at the house. The less to keep up with, the better.


This was the crazy upside down rainbow over Key West when I arrived on the boat on Saturday.



And here's two pics of the view from the house where we stayed on Big Pine Key.




This is looking back toward our house from the boat. Every time I go to the Keys I marvel at how blue it really is. Just beautiful!



These are the crafty vests the girls made with vintage stencils and paint for Chris's huntin' bachelor party next weekend. I think most of their significant others were going. So cute.

Key West bound!

I set sail for Key West on the Key West Express boat early this morning, and now we're almost there. I'm going for Molly's bachelorette party. The rest of the group left yesterday, but I had to stay to shoot high school football last night. So here I am on the boat by myself. I must say, it's pretty nice and comfortable. Although there is a gaggle of children all screaming and video-gaming around me.

I also decided to include some photos of Matanzas Pass just after sunrise, since I'm rarely up that early.

Fantasy football and fun with videos

F our-day weekends are one of my favorite things. Every month I switch schedules at work, so every other month I get a long weekend.

On Saturday, we had our fantasy football draft at our house. It was fun to have the team over for a little fun. I think I got a pretty good team, but I ended up with Brett Favre as my quarterback. Not happy about that, but I have Maurice Jones-Drew and Randy Moss, so I hope they make up for the old man. Not that Randy Moss is all that young either. We'll see how it goes. If you're curious (and probably only Amanda will be), the rest of my team is Rashard Mendenhall, Steve Smith (Panthers), Ricky Williams, Tony Gonzalez, Hakeem Nicks (go heels!), Jerome Harrison, Mike Wallace, Kevin Kolb, Darren Sproles, Kenny Britt, Bengals Def., and Matt Prater for my kicker.

On Sunday, Jack flew in to pick up Mary and to get some of his things from the condo. He'll be returning to Chicago soon, and we were glad to see him. After hanging out with Jack and Mary for a while, I decided that I needed to catch up on video editing from our trips this year or I may never do it. And here are the results.....

The first is Evan playing in the hotel when we met Amanda and Robert in Orlando in August.



The second is from my trip to Maine for work in July.



And the third is from our trip to the NC mountains in April, where Scott proposed!

More new tricks

After our short trip to the NC mountains this summer to find a place to get hitched, we stayed in Raleigh a few days with dad and Judy. I don't even want to get into the extensive car trouble that caused our Raleigh visit to be extended.

One night Dad pulled out the old photo albums after I showed him our family tree on ancestry.com. I decided to take photos of some of them so I could have them and to post on ancestry.com.

Skip to last night. {JACK-- take notice, you should check this out!} I'm just catching up on reading my blogs and emails, and I run into this website. It is a great place to find all of these links to free photoshop actions! She also has tutorials and other goodies. That site led me to the CoffeeShop, which has tons of free photoshop actions here. This one is also a treasure chest of goodies and tutorials.

I normally don't get to do this stuff with my photos because I work for the newspaper and straightforward is what they want. So it's fun to play with some of our vacation photos and the old family photos I copied this summer.

Here's a sampling of the new stuff I learned.......



This is a photo of my dad in high school I think or early college. I downloaded an action to make it look like an old polaroid print on watercolor paper. Awesome! There are several different options with this.



This is a photo of my great grandfather Hallie Glover and his brother Thadieus. It must have been taken in the 30s or 40s. The photo was already colorized like this, but I downloaded an action to make the corners rounded and add a drop shadow.


clockwise from top left: My grandmother, Kay, as a child with Grandma Glover (great grandma), Mama Ethel (great great gma), and Wilma Glover (great great aunt); My grandparents with my dad as a child; My grandma, Kay, with dad; and dad at the beach when he was little.
For this one I learned how to use clipping masks to create this storyboard. She also has storyboards that make themselves using actions, like this one. So cool! And a huge timesaver or time waster depending on how you look at it. I've already spent hours playing with this stuff.

River cruise

This week has been a GREAT weather week by my standards. We've barely seen the sun because of the rain and clouds. We have had a little too much rain, but it hasn't been over 90 degrees all week, and that has to be some kind of record for Florida.

swing on the river......oh how dreamy!



Yesterday I was chosen to cruise the Caloosahatchee river with reporter Amy Williams and our new videographer Brian. I was a little scared my new camera would get wet in the predicted rain, but pumped that the sun wouldn't make this an unbearable experience. I still got sunburned through all the clouds, but with a little breeze it was a great trip. No rain at all. It was my first trip through the Franklin Lock-- pretty cool. Then we spotted some beautiful horses on the bank after the Caloosahatchee Regional Park.

Then we saw this guy smiling at us! haaaaaay!


And then this guy! A two-humped camel.

New toys

I n my many hours of scouring wedding and graphic design blogs, I came across some photoshop actions on a photography blog. They basically automatically tone photos for you in different ways. Here are the results:


Original



Wood Frame



Sunshine


Heartland



Edge Burn



Colorized

and 70's....


Pretty cool with just one click of a button considering it took me a lot of experimentation and still could not get photos to look like this.

Perseid Meteor Shower

S cott and I decided to make an effort to see this year's Perseid meteor shower. So when I got off work, we headed out to the beach on Sanibel Island with our chairs, the camera and tripod to see some meteors. We usually just try to see some from our backyard, but our proximity to downtown and the streetlights kindof put a damper on stargazing.

We got lucky and saw quite a show. This photo has three meteors in it!

O-Town

T heme parks? Who needs them when you have a two-year-old to entertain you?
We're having lots of fun with Evan, Amanda and Robert in Orlando. Today we went swimming in the hotel pool. Evan LOVES to swim. And my underwater video camera came in quite handy........