Odds and Ends

Slow Start to 2014 Photo Scavenger Hunt

 

1. A sign welcoming people to your home town (or a nearby town)
2. A garden gnome
3. Birds on a wire
4. A group of tourists
5. A rack of post cards
6. An urban street scene
7. A rural landscape
8. A tattoo on a person
9. A bakery
10. A photo bomb (someone found lurking in the background of photo; the lurker may have intended to disrupt the picture or may be doing it unintentionally, but the background lurker is a surprise to the photographer)
11. A horn
12. A mascot
13. A sunrise
14. A parade
15. A juggler
16. A sign in a language other than English
17. A lamp post
18. A water fall
19. A public garden
20. A bus (not a car, truck, lorry, camper or RV) with a picture painted on its sides.
21. A photograph of you with something representing the season. Note: you may not use a substitute for this item.
If you find something on the list too difficult, you may substitute one of the following items for anything on the list, except for Item #21:
Alternative A: A kite, hot air balloon or blimp
Alternative B: A bird house

Rinda had the scavenger hunt list up for June 1st and it's taken me till today to get just 1 of the 21 items crossed off the list.  In fact I got 2 versions of it.  If you'd like to find out more about the scavenger hunt please check out Rinda's blog on it here.

Number 17 - a lamp post

Taken on a very dull day through the windshield.

These were actually right across the street from each other.  I saw some other really neat looking ones but I would have had to stop in traffic to get those pictures. 

Zoom In Zoom Out - Week 25

I'm participating Helena's photographic weekly meme.  See more on her blog at Helena's Creative Maven.

While sitting out on our front porch last night I couldn't help but notice the delicate flowers and veining on the leaves on the hosta nearest the house.  I love taking pictures of it, especially after a rain but last night was dry (precipitation wise).  This time my ZIZO is a series of 3 pictures.  I couldn't quite get zoomed in as far as I wanted to so I went and got the DSLR with the 300mm zoom on it.

 

Me On Monday

My blogging friend Sian (From High in the Sky) has been sharing about her weekend's the past few weeks under the title of Me on Monday.  I thought it was a neat idea and decided to follow along.

It's been a very relaxing birthday weekend.  We did have plans to go out for dinner for it on Friday but John is having trouble with his right foot and is having a lot of pain walking so I took a raincheck on that dinner out and we spent a relaxing weekend at home.

 Birthday card from my arty friend

It was a weekend of trying a new recipe (a keeper), barbequing all the suppers so we wouldn't heat the house up, relaxing, skyping with his sister who's in Turkey right now, making decisions with our travel agent, sitting out on the deck (in the shade), doing laundry, talking long distance with my sister,  his brother and my cousin, reading blogs, doing sudoku - see I told you it was a relaxing weekend.  And today I've been experimenting with using his old 70-300mm film lens on the DSLR - I'm trying to suggest a new digital one might be a good retirement gift for him but he seems to think the old film one is good enough.  While they're on sale (discovered that by actually reading the paper this weekend) we should go down and check one out against the film one and just see what kind of a difference it makes.

Taken at 75mm

Taken at 300mm

Hmmm, maybe I should have saved those 2 for ZIZO later this week.

 

 

 

ZIZO Catchup of Weeks 17 to 23

I thought I was doing pretty good taking pictures for Helena's Zoom In Zoom Out meme but on going back over the weeks I hadn't posted yet I see I am missing some weeks.

Week 17 was one of those weeks with no ZIZO pictures taken.

However Week 18 while checking up on the nest we'd noticed in the very early spring I got these two of our apple trees.

Do you see the nest just right of centre?  It is still unoccupied.

Zooming in on the detail of the leaves starting.

Week 19 brought some unexpected tulips.  When did we plant that one?

That must have been planted over 12 years ago judging by where it came up.

Week 20 brought me back to the apple trees again.  With a view off of our deck.

You really have to squint to see the spot of yellow under the apple trees.

The single clump of daffodils that has survived amongst the Snow on the Mountain under our apple trees.  Now if only we could get rid of that Snow on the Mountain - it has become a pest.

Week 21 had me zeroing in on the ferns by the gate - nothing was growing there in the practically total shade but these sure have taken off.

 

Week 22 had me taking pictures of our neighbour's magnolia tree when I noticed something new had been added to the front of their house.

A cable had been attached to the bottom of the magnolia tree and tied around their evergreen that fell over onto our garage roof during the ice storm on December 21st.  It has since been moved further up the magnolia tree.  I guess they are trying to save it but I don't think it's going to work.  It will be interesting to see if it does work.  I didn't want to zoom in any closer because of privacy issues. 

Week 23 unfortunately didn't see any ZIZO pictures taken but hopefully this week I'll find some interesting ZIZO pictures to share.

If you'd like to check out what others are sharing for their ZIZO pairings check out Helena's blog here.

 

Zoom In Zoom Out - Week 24

I've missed a few weeks of participating Helena's weekly meme but I thought I'd try and work backwards and join in this week before I attempt to go back.   If you'd like to see more of what others and Helena came up with please check out Helena's blog here.

Our tree out front of the house.

On looking closer I saw this.

What looks like tiny pea pods hanging from it.

Zooming in even further I discovered this.

In all the years we've had that tree (a Linden) I have never noticed before that it has tiny fruit on it.

 

One Photo, Twenty Words - June

Taking part in Abi's One Photo and Twenty Words meme.   If you'd like to check it out go to Abi's Blog Creating Paper Dreams.

Hmmm, bird seed.  Do you think this was meant for us?   You stand guard while I check it out!

My Weekend

My blog friend Sian has been sharing about her weekends the past few weeks in her "Me on Monday" posts and I thought I'd join her this week.

It was an enforced "relaxing" weekend after waking up on Saturday with a back that somehow or other got thrown out.  As DH John says "getting old's the pits".

There was a lot of babying the back, some back exercises (ouch), and when that was done some reading, some blog reading catching up, some scrapping, some sitting out on the deck enjoying the sunshine, some new recipe trying (2 definite keepers), some online ordering, a lot of using my ergonomic computer chair, some Barcelona research for the fall, some planning for the week ahead, some deciding on the next knitting project,

from Debbie Bliss Spring Summer 2014 magazine

and a lot of regretting that I couldn't go to the gathering yesterday in memory of my cousin.

Thankfully all that babying and those exercises seem to have done the trick and I'm looking forward to getting to doing stuff like go to the garden centre this morning and doing some grocery shopping - John was a big help there but there are things I forgot to tell him of course.

Open Windows

Open windows sometimes do not make for a good start to the day.  I know sleeping with open windows is supposed to be good for you but honestly it sure isn't in this house.  I woke up this morning in full allergy mode.  One of us (I'm not saying who, ok me) forgot to make sure the bedroom windows were closed.  I love how everything looks in spring but my head sure doesn't.  :)

Thanks to my antihistamines I was feeling much better and able to work away at my Project Life pages after a wee bit.  Funnily enough with the window in here open - it doesn't seem to bother me in the daytime unless it's a really horrible pollen day and windy - neither one of which it is today.

I've puzzled over week 19 for weeks as it was originally only going to be a single page while I knew week 20 was going to be a double page spread.  Lately though I've noticed on pages shared on the internet that some people (including Ali Edwards) have been using the odd full page picture on some of their pages.  Aha - problem solved with that picture from our garden.   It's still a week with hardly any photos (I even used one from 1981 that I had shared in One Photo and Twenty Words that week) taken but it is done (though I'm not all that keen on the colour choices).   The "Time well spent" card is from the Becky Higgins Cinnnamon digital filler card set and I just changed the colours on it to fit in with my colour scheme of gray, turquoise, gold, orange and black.  I have to come up with a colour scheme I like better for next year.

Layout has been changed to this - I just did not like that gray in the centre of the left page, I think the beige goes better with it instead.

I decided to make some changes and will be going back to make a minor change on all the previous weeks where I had neglected to put in the dates for that week.  Duh!  Good thing they are all digital and I can easily do that.

 

Revised June 11, 2014 (revised layout).

The Massive Backup Project & Scavenger Hunt

After finishing up the photo backup project in duplicate (it ended up being 51 DVD's - how can that be?) I'm ready to catch up on all that's been going on with my favourite blogs.

I took a quick peek at Rinda's blog a few minutes ago (her annual Photographic Scavenger Hunt has started again) to see what we'll be looking for this summer.  A great list as usual and quite a few toughies this year (where am I going to find a juggler?).  To see what we'll be looking for and perhaps participate check out Rinda's blog here.

 

Now, with a cup of tea by my side, I'm off to check out all the other blogs I've gotten behind on.

My Month in Numbers - May 2014

It's the first of the month and that can only mean one thing (blog-wise that is).  It's time for sharing "My Month in Numbers" a meme created by Julie at "Notes on Paper". 

May for me was a cleaning up month.  It wasn't planned that way aside from some shredding after cleaning out the archival file bin (to make room for last year's stuff paperwork).

I shredded enough paperwork to get rid of 8 bags of shred.

As for the rest of the cleaning up month, I discovered one of my 500 GB external hard drives had failed - one with all the photos & movies on it.  Ugh!  Thankfully they are also on another external hard drive but who knows when that one is going to fail.   I had been in the habit of also backing them up onto DVDs (2 copies of each year - 1 copy being stored elsewhere) but had really slacked off on that so I spent days updating my backups of the pictures onto DVD's.  I ended up created and labelling 23 new DVDs and creating but not labelling (I ran out of month) 20 more.  There are still more to go as I have to go out and buy more DVD's.

After more than 60 days of the ship's cough as I called it or the cough from h..l it is finally (knock on wood) gone.  However between the 2 of us we still had 5 Doctor appointments during the month - one of which entailed John getting 1 skin cancer biopsy taken.  So far no news is good news.

The weather has vastly improved over April and we seem to have jumped straight from winter to summer and have had the AC on for 4 days.

We finally chose and booked 1 hotel in Barcelona for 5 nights this fall before our Med cruise.  Speaking of the trip we had 2 long skype conversations with John's sister (who we've never met) and her husband who we'll meet up with in London while we're away.

As for scrapbooking, I took advantage of some sales and went on a little digital supply buying ending up with 3 new kits. 

 

We started counting down to John's retirement this month and at the end of the month he had 22 more working days to go or 32 days.

Sadly the month ended up with going through 1000's of our old pictures looking for ones of one of my cousins for his wake this week.