Flash-back to a month ago

My mom came home a few days before Passover. She used a bunch of sick leave to have a whole week state-side, every day she had a doctor’s appointment (dentist, eye doc, etc.) she was able to use a sick day. Anyway, my dad has a friend who works in the Smithsonian Natural History Museum’s PR department and he was able to sneak us in on a tour of the new/temporary orchid exhibit with a bunch of local garden club members!

The exhibit closed recently, but here are a few of my photos that actually came out. I was trying to catch how glittery and lush the orchids looked, but I only had my tiny point-and-shoot with me. Oh well.

dendrobum orchids (white and yellow centers with pink edges)

the elephant in the rotunda

CYMBIDIUM orchids, green tea colored petals and white and pink centers

white orchids with magenta splotches, my favorite!

frilly pink orchid with a deep magenta beard

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Eclipse Party!

Eclipse viewing glasses. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Yesterday, CU’s Fiske Planetarium hosted a big eclipse watching party at Folsom Field to watch the partial solar eclipse. Admission was by proving that you had solar viewing paper safety glasses (like old-school 3-D movie glasses) that were given away for free at local schools and at the university OR if you bought a pair for $2 at the concession stand before entering the stadium.

Those paper glasses work! You can’t see anything but the sun, and then it’s a weird orange color. I tried taking a photo through them and failed, here’s Becca’s photo instead, taken right before the sun sunk behind the mountains.

the orange double is just a reflection between the camera lens and the solar viewing glasses

Ben also brought his binoculars, which we used every few minutes (clouds permitting), to project the sun onto the risers of the bleachers between our legs. Not the most comfortable, but definitely an awesome view! You can just make out the outline of the mountains as the sun is setting in this projection. Amazing!

projecting the eclipse with binoculars

I’m looking forward to using my solar viewing glasses again in a week to see the transit of Venus in front of the sun!

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10 months and counting (putting together our wedding album)

We’ve had our wedding photos since last December and we’re just now really putting in an effort to put together our wedding album. On our anniversary, I started putting together an album made up of favorite photos from our guests and our pro photos. 216 of our favorite photos (plus the extra 50 or so that I printed out and had to decide for/against). Now, we’re trying to put together our album from JUST the professional photos and it’s HARD! There are so many great photos of us that we’d like to include in our album, but then there aren’t that many pages available and we can’t decide if we want to be more story-telling or more feature-photo-y. As in do we try and jam as much as possible into the album or just take the cream of the crop and feature it? Do we have huge narcissistic spreads of us, or pages and pages of our friends dancing and having a good time?

I feel like I’m asking our photographers to be our therapists in sorting this out!

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we didn’t plan a Halloween wedding, did we?

     

On our way over to The Attic for our after party, we passed by a costume shop that happened to have a vampy bride in their display window. how perfect! So we stopped and took a few photos in the misty drizzle. I sure look like I was having fun, but I barely remember this 10 minutes of my life– I was so high on love and family and friends!

 

 

 

 

OK, in the photo above I was going in to bite his neck, like a vampire but wimped  out and nibbled his ear instead. It’s hard to pretend to want to kill your brand new husband!

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posing for the cameras for Wordless Wednesday

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yeah, I laugh like a hyena

(c) Kokoro Photography

Amanda (one of our photographers), Ben, and I have been working on finalizing our wedding album. It is too many pages. Way too many pages. The standard 30 pages is fine for a Christian wedding, but not a Jewish wedding with multiple parts to it!

Anyway, while looking through our photographs again I’ve found more evidence that I laugh like a hyena and need to cover up my bubbies some more. The seamstress added 1.5″ of extra fabric to the top of my dress to cover them up better, but they apparently still tried to make an attempted escape! Next time, I’ll wear a turtle neck.

PS- I love that even in a b/w photo, you can see the deepness of the purple in my sapphire. Who needs diamonds when you can have purple!

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I like shoes too

Hehe. My shoes made it onto our photographers blog. That post also explains why there were quite so many pictures of my shoes (though I’m a big believer in not wearing ugly/boring shoes unless they’re exceptionally comfortable and you truly don’t mind looking frumpy -i.e. on Mondays and some Fridays).

The funny thing about this photo is that I bought a nice hanger, like this one only sturdier, for photos like this to be taken with. It wasn’t something I remember discussing with anyone, just something I saw on the blog-o-sphere and decided to copy. The nice Container Store hanger stayed in its plastic sleeve all weekend. I ended up leaving it at the hotel because I just didn’t care about it that much. I wish I’d remembered to say something to someone though, I think the little lingerie from the hotel was shot after this (all warped and floppy).

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side notes

I like wearing a hat to synagogue. Actually, I like wearing hats in general, but wearing a hat to services helps me feel like a married lady. I know that’s silly, but it’s kind of like how being able to pay my own bills makes me feel like a grownup. Pus, it makes me accidently frum sometimes, and sometimes I like that. Skirts, heels, tights, makeup, earrings, and a hat. All things I don’t always wear the rest of the week, I always wear a shirt though, so I didn’t list that, but I do have some nicer tops that I don’t wear to work (I’m pretty sure I could get away with jeans and a sweater if I wanted to push my personal limits there, but I’m happy with slacks and a non-t shirt top).

Yes, I cut my hair, no I’m not pregnant (even though I dropped out of the drug trial, we’re not ready for babies yet). I go through cycles of chopping off my hair, getting lazy and letting it grow, and then getting mad at it and donating +12″ inches at a time. FYI, it 14″ when I chopped it off in February. Sadly, I haven’t gotten around to donating it yet, my ponytail is still in the bag I brought it home from the salon in.

Speaking of being lazy, our wedding clothes are still dirty and hanging in the closet in the second bedroom/study. That room is turning into a garbage pit. Ick. It needs to go through a purge. Not all books are worth holding onto, right?

Tomorrow’s goals:

• get some serious cleaning done in prep for passover
• finish the last 12-15 or so wedding thank you notes that didn’t get done with the rest. Oops!
• comb through the wedding album draft and email changes to the photographers

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shiny!!!

Wow. Not only are our rings beautiful, but the photo was taken on our chuppah (see above) that is also beautiful, but the photography is beautiful too!

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local camera shops are the best!

Sadly, Mike’s Camera is low on everything  in preparation for their annual inventory. Thankfully, they were willing to charge the camera’s battery for me, on the charger for their floor model! They couldn’t sell me the charger, but will call me when they get more in.

Here are the photos from our Wyoming road trip. We drove from Thornton (where I work) on Friday, to Rawlins (via a pit stop at the Sierra Trading Post, in Cheyenne), and then on to Jackson on Saturday. Visited with Ben’s younger sister, Emma, on Saturday afternoon through Sunday morning, and then stopped at “points of interest” along the highway en route to dinner in Fort Collins, CO and then home to Boulder.

In Rawlins, we stayed in a cute little B&B in a big old house (Ferris Mansion) and had AMAZING carmel apple french toast for breakfast. I ate like a starved woman, tea, 2 glasses of milk, 3 eggs, and 3 or 4 pieces of french toast. Then I had 1/2 a salad for lunch at the Bitter Creek Brewing, in Rock Springs. I wish we could have sampled some beers, but we still had 3 more hours of driving after that (it was supposed to be 2, but we got stuck behind an aggressively slow truck). We tried to stop at Bitter Creek again on the way home, but they’re apparently closed on Sundays. :( We ended up at a taco place by the interstate after driving all over tow looking for something non-icky to eat at 2 PM on a Sunday.

It was a LOT of driving, but less than 3 tanks of gas round trip (about 1000 miles, or 2.5 tanks of gas)! No one ever had a driving shift of more than 2.5 hours. There were lots of potty breaks, ice cream breaks, sun chip breaks, and more potty breaks (we bought 3 lbs of wildflower honey at one pit stop, postcards at another, and some local honey caramels at yet another pit stop). FYI, Wyoming’s roadside merchants are much more “general store” than the ones in Kansas, those were 7-11 meets tacky-tourist gift shop.

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