ZOE IN THE CAR

Zoe LOVES to ride! Can you tell I hate to wash my car? Yup, before we even pull out of the driveway, she's on the watch for the obnoxious neighborhood cat.

And she knows that as soon as I get ready to back up, she should stand directly in front of the rear-view mirror.

The only thing that bothers her in the car are motorcyclists. For some reason, they always trip her out and she barks like a maniac. (Cause maniacs bark, ya know?)

Don't try this at home kids! Me, my camera and my hubby behind me! All without flash..sorry for the blur!

Zoe out the other window. I wonder why this one is cleaner.
And just for laughs, Zoe as a puppy (3 months old) on our drive back to Austin.

GOOD NEWS OF THE DAY: HIP HIP HOOORAY for the long weekend! ENJOY

DUPLEX DUTIES

We own some rental properties and the tenant had been asking me to do something about the side yard flooding when it rains. We decided to expand the walkway and hopefully remove areas that could gather water. Last Sunday, we headed to Home Depot to work!

30 measly pavers doesn't sound so bad when you start out. It's after you have to pull 30 down off the Home Depot shelf and stack them on your pallet that you realize how many that really is!

And once you load them all in your car, it really starts to sink in. Glad we didn't go for 40. Really glad I've got such a fabulous hubby that did most of the lifting!

This is the side yard on the duplex, and due to the shade from the tree, no grass can grow.

The unloading went quickly, and I think there was about 2 mosquito bites for every 3 pavers put down. We expanded her walk area and created a little path around the back.

That doesn't really look like enough though. Soooooooo- back to Home Depot we headed to load up on another 20 pavers. Check out this sexy side yard now! Big enough for a dance floor!

My dear husband rocks! He did all the hard work. I helped him unload them from the car, but he did the major lifting and loading at the Depot.

Yea, so my hands were rough and cut up for a few days. I really hope my tenant appreciates this!

GOOD NEWS OF THE DAY: I've been blessed with great tenants so far.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY HOUSTON

If you don't know anything about my home town, let me take a few minutes to share with you about the fabulous city of Houston. The Bayou City is the 4th largest city (behind NY, LA & Chicago) and the largest city in the great state of Texas. I didn't take the photo above, but I took the ones below!

The city was founded on this day in 1836 on one of the prominent Bayou's in the city. It was named after Sam Houston- a great leader in the Texas Revolution. Around the turn of the 20th century oil was discovered near here and after Galveston was wiped off the map by a hurricane, Houston gained prominence as a major port in the south.

If you ever come to visit, we've got some nice parks, world-class museums and the Johnson Space Center (NASA). Hopefully you won't have to visit the very renowned Medical Center here, but if you want a job- there are tons in the energy and financial sector here. The cost-of-living is CHEAP, I mean really cheap. My friends turn green with envy when I show them how cheap housing is here.

All this info thanks to Wikipedia, and no thanks to the year of Texas History I was required to take in 7th grade. I have vague recollections of Indians and cowboys from that class- that's about it. Oh, and I was required to take a Texas course in college to graduate, and I remember zippo from that one.

When Stephanie was here, I had a mini-field day with my camera when we went downtown. So enjoy a few of my first architectural photos & HAPPY BIRTHDAY HOUSTON!

GOOD NEWS OF THE DAY: It's rain a LOT, a LOT LOT, here in Houston this summer. No floods and no watering the lawn.

SNACKS, SWIMMING & SUSHI

WOW! What an awesome day! Saturday morning we crammed in a bunch of chores and then early afternoon we went to go hang out with some friends of ours. It's actually H's mom's friend, but we've been blessed to call them our friends too. Ever meet those people who are magnetic? Just something about them that is so fun and interesting. How you want to hear every word they say. How you want to listen to all their stories and pick their brains about their opinion on everything. Well, that's Dennis & Nikki.

When we arrived at their house, Nikki had an unbelievable spread on her table. Missing from the fabulous food above are the shrimp and a few other delectable that wouldn't fit on the table! Yummy smoked salmon!

Tasty tasty margaritas!

After wiping out the feast, we all hit the pool for a few hours of fun. Like boys- they were all having a "hold your breath the longest" contest. Love the photo below!

When we started to turn into pool prunes and the sun was quickly disappearing on the horizon, we cleaned up enough to hit an awesome sushi restaurant in the Woodlands.

I'm very much a sushi-novice, and just tell people to order for me and I'll probably eat it. I have not idea what all the stuff above is, but below is a Caterpillar roll.

The only one I know below is called Spider- which looks like it has legs, but they are just crab legs coming out :)

GOOD NEWS OF THE DAY: There are still those people out there that inspire you with their life and love.

LIGHTROOM: Keywords

So my favorite thing about LR this week, after going through a few hundred of H's photos from NY & DC is the keyword feature. The "modules" I'm mostly operating in right now are Library (find, organize, tag photos) and Develop (make all your adjustments to settings.). Below is what the Library Module looks like. Down the left side is the Navigator Panel which gives you different ways to "find" your photos.

The Navigator drops down and shows you a larger preview of any photo you "mouse over" in the filmstrip at bottom. The buttons also give you the option to zoom full/partial (in the main viewing area in the center) on the image you have selected.

Navigating in the Library under the Find menu lets you search for any number of things including keywords, file names, dates, metadata, captions, titles, etc. You can also filter by a date or date range. Very powerful and very awesome.

The next way to find photos you are looking for is simply the folder method in how they are stored on the hard drive.

Finally- here's my favorite and the topic of this blog KEYWORDS! They are like tags, but even more powerful. You can create folders of keywords. For example in the Nature Keyword Folder, you can have Plants, Animals & Landscape. Underneath plants, you could have flowers, trees, bushes, etc. You could get even more specific and names the flower like tulip, rose, or daisy. If you apply the keyword Daisy to a photo and then one day decided to search for all your flower photos, it's smart enough to know the daisy is a flower and that's what you are looking to find. BRILLIANT! I've created Parent-Child Relationships with keywords that make my life so much easier. Simply by keywording a photo of my sister with "Haley", I've additionally assigned her to the following keywords- Kids, Dad's Family, Family, People.

There are many ways to apply keywords, but I utilized one today that was incredibly powerful. On the right side of the library module is a keyword box, which you can manually type in keywords and it also shows any currently assigned keywords. Even though it will auto-complete for you, it's still a PITA. Just under that box is the keyword set that saved my life. You assign the number 1-9 a keyword. You can create your own set 'on the fly' or save a custom set as a Pre-set for repeated use.

I created a custom keyword set for processing their baseball photos- each of their names, the cities, and a few others. Simply select the photo (or as many as you want at a time), then hit ALT+# to assign it the corresponding keyword. I ripped through keywording all the photos in a matter of minutes! This makes being organized SO easy! Wheee! I'm a total photography nerd now :)

You can also "batch apply" keywords when importing (uploading) them or you can apply a keyword to multiple photos in the Library by selecting them all. Also you can assign a keyword to a "stamp" like icon. This icon is always available on right click in the develop module. I keep the keyword "blog" on my stamp and always label any photos I export of blog purposes.

Check out previous Lightroom Reviews on the blog

Lightroom: Before & After

Lightroom: Presets & Developing

GOOD NEWS OF THE DAY: I'm so organized with my photos I could squeal for joy!

JUNIOR HIGH

My brother and sister had their first day of school Monday morning, and I was there to capture all the excitement-....er, apathy. I guess they both had such a wonderful summer, they didn't want to go back. I'd hop on the chance to go back to school now!

He's at that age where he HATES having his photo taken. He avoids all eye-contact & buries his face. My brother had the summer of his life so far. No working (at least not too much!). Trip with my Dad to see Yankee stadium. Mission trip with the church youth group to Monterrey, Mexico. Trip to visit his cousin in Atlanta. Week in Galveston with friends and family. New cell phone. Life is as good as it gets for him. His last year of innocence before the big, bad world of High School.

My sister didn't have it too rough either. She's excited and nervous about her first year of Junior High school. With the school year, she will start back to Girl Scouts and her weekly dance classes.

They were too adorable this morning as they kept comparing shoes/clothes/backpacks/anything that mom could have spent more money on the other one. At 12 and in the 6th grade, my sister practically wear the same shoe size as I do! My brother is dropping his clean-cut look and searching for his style more along the punk lines.

My school, waaaaaay back when, was a bit different. I attended 5th & 6th grade at Dean Intermediate school, then went onto 7th & 8th grade at Cook Junior High. This was the only photo I had easily available. Yup- check out that dorky Junior High kid! Swatch watch and all!Oh! Those were the days! What I wouldn't give to be carefree in school, where my only job was to learn.

GOOD NEWS OF THE DAY: Life is great when your biggest worry is about getting a bottom locker.

CABO FUN AND FROLICKING

After all that tasty food in Cabo, we had to work off those calories with some fun stuff. We decided to dress up like gangsters one day and ride through the desert on a 4-wheeler. We did a morning tour with a group that took us along a beautiful dry-river bed to a very authentic town. It was really neat to look around at the homes of real Mexican people, their church and school. We were able to hike a short way up a small waterfall, then ended the trip out by the Pacific Ocean with all the pelicans and whales off in the distance. Great fun and I'd highly recommend it to everybody.

One day, we hopped in our rent car and headed north up the Peninsula to the capital of Baja Sur, La Paz. We drove through the famous town of Todos Santos- a great artisan community with a rich history. Often a destination in itself, the sleep town looked like a fun place to stop. But we were on a mission to see Isla Espiritu Santo, in the Sea of Cortez, about an hour's boat ride away from La Paz.

Our concierge at the hotel helped us arrange a small boat to take us snorkeling on the island, near the world-famous kayaking areas. After a short, frigid swim- our 15 year old captain took us to some other gorgeous areas, including a beach where we ate lunch.

On the way back, we stopped by this lighthouse on an out-cropping, full encamped by sea lions. The young captain and my dear husband entertained me by making sea lion sounds.


One afternoon, we went on a guided Kayak tour of the Arcos. Baja Wild picked us up at the hotel and provided all equipment, along with a very knowledgeable guide. They do several different actives in the Cabo area, so check them out. H and I shared a kayak and I do NOT recommend this to anybody- they don't call them divorce kayaks for nothing!

We kayaked right up near these sea lions- they smelled really bad! The rocks are also home to thousands of birds- I guess seagulls. Yup, their poop makes some really interesting "art" on the rocks and adds to the sea lion smell!

It got rough as we went through the Arcos into the Pacific side, and then back to Lover's Beach. We walked around and explored the area a bit, had a snack and H went snorkeling until he froze.

On the last night of our Honeymoon, we decided to take a sunset sail on the intimate boat Yael operated by Cabo Sail. What a great time! The crew was amazing and we had a blast! All the wine you can drink, chips & salsa, meat & chess plate, and desert plate, all while sailing around the Arcos, watching other tourists, catching the breathtaking sunset and looking for whales. TOTALLY AWESOME!

GOOD NEWS OF THE DAY: Life is too short, sweet, beautiful and amazing to just lay on a beach!