Look at it this way, we now get 2.5 years of *peace* before we have to start hearing about elections again.

I'm so glad this election is finally over.

Am I happy with the results, no, of course not. Am I going to slit my wrists? No. Personally I think both candidates sucked. Mccain was barely a republican to start with, Palin carried him in that department IMO.

Now is just the time to pray for the best. You have no other choice.

It's been so busy here the past few weeks with the fair and the garage sale, and then on top of that some shoots, editing photos, working on the website. I've been working 10-12 hour days (which I LOVE btw). I was editing pics until midnight last night, and wanted to keep going but was so tired I was forced to go to bed.

In return, I've been given a present of a nice cold sore. yay me {sarcasm} I did a little research and found that L- Lysine and Vit C will help reduce the life of a cold sore so I bought a pile of it last night. It seems to be working, it's very small and not very painful. The last one I had several years ago was big, annoying and embarassing.

Today, I met with another bride, Brigett. She is so sweet and her fiance is in Iraq right now. He'll be home in March. I will be doing their wedding photos in September and I'm *so excited*. She sounds like she really wants to do something "different", which is what I'm hearing from brides. The photographers in the area are great, and take nice portraits - for sure, but I think brides with sites like theknot, bridal magazines and TV shows like Platinum Weddings are looking for something out there - something special. *that* is what I'm striving for.

Got some errands done now that I have a car, but forgot to pick up the stupid deposit check, and I DROVE RIGHT BY. *grr* I also stopped by the storage unit and have all the halloween decor down to a large tub and a med sized tub. That's more than enough. Anything new coming in, something old has to go out. Period.

I'm going to work on getting my christmas decor culled down too. I have until the end of the month to get rid of my storage unit so I'm going to work on it a bit every few days. I'd like to get that down to like 4 boxes. *for real* I have probably double that if not more. I have 3 christmas trees! (ok I like them all). But I really don't get to put all that stuff out anymore, so it's time to face reality. I don't need a ceramic bear dressed like santa. And I need to get it done soon so the local thrift store can sell it before the holidays.

I also need to work on my stock photos today (I have a BILLION to add) OK, maybe 1/2 billion.

Then edit edit edit.

I'll probably share more photos later if I have time!

More Amy and Zac

These 2 were fun! Always smiling and making funny faces. You really can tell that they love each other.

My overly used, classic fav - legs only. I promise you, I will continue to overuse this shot because it's my camera and I'll do what I want :p

This is something I normally do not do. I usually do a little vignetting, color pop/saturation or desaturation... etc. But not the "weird" filters. I got to playing with this filter and made a "sketch" of one of the photos. I really liked it, and Amy is the artsy fartsy type, so I think she'll like it too.

Love this shot... sexy and fun both.

I'm about 1/3 done editing their photos, have the rest of Eric's to edit yet too. When I get done, I will probably add a couple outtakes from Amy and Zac's shoot. I have some really hilarious shots. Not engagement worthy I suppose, but really captured their personalities.

I voted!

I made it!

I got there and there was no line. Only took about 10 min, there were a couple things thrown on the ballot I had to stop and really think about so it took me a bit longer than I expected.

Gene got the car running. It's temp fixed, it was not the battery like I first thought. It is the battery cables, which I kind of suspected - and he finally did too. Everyone else kept saying it was the starter. Didn't sound like it to me - it didn't act like it either IMO.

Anyway, they need replaced, but he got it temp fixed so I hope to nag him enough to get it fixed fixed this weekend :p

The more things change.....

Cattle in the mist
November 2, 7:30 a.m.

Plans change.

Made an appt for my nails today and had several errands to run in town. I needed to do the nails, stop and pick up a check that was a deposit, but most importantly, I needed to vote, which was stop #1. I got all ready, make up and all and head out the door. I stopped momentarily to pack up a few halloween decorations to take to storage as I was going to work on that for 10-15 min.

Put the keys in the ignition and it started, then died.. then *nothing*.

GRRR.

I knew immediately it was the battery. That car is a bitch on batteries - always has been. One second you're fine, the next the car won't start. So I put on my big girl panties, got out some tools, and tried to rough up the battery posts and inside cables. I also checked to make sure it hadn't dried out, which that was fine. Put everything back on, turned it on and *clickclickclickclick*. Yep. Battery.

We just bought one not too long ago, but I think the alternator going out zapped this one. FINE. I want a freaking 4 year battery next time.

So, I called Gene, he's going to try to get off early so I can make it to the polls. I *will* go if I have to go on a bicycle. LOL. Oh wait I don't have a bicycle. Probably should start walking NOW cuz that's how long it would take me to get to town!

Since Gene's boss said that he could be late if he had to be to vote, I'm hoping he'll be ok with him getting off a wee bit early to take me! lol.

In other news, I got my external drive finally hooked up. It kicked my butt. weird. I installed the software, did what it said, and it wouldn't let me set it up so I gave up. Then I got up yesterday and it just magically was working. weirdx2. So I moved a bunch of pics from my hard drive, to the external and now I have a faster moving computer. heh. I doubled my harddrive space for like $30. Don't be too impressed, I have a small harddrive.

Michael chastised me for not buying an internal drive, but at that point it was too late.

And just for fun, today is mine and Gene's 4 month anniversary. Last night we were talking about it and wanted to say Neener neener to all those that said it wouldn't last.

LOL

Happy November!

Happy November!!

I feel like the last week of October was just as busy as the weeks leading up to the bridal show. I wish that today I could have just sat on the couch watching TV, but I had a BUNCH of errands to run today - more on that later.

Happy belated Halloween. My 31 day project ended up going to the wayside because of how busy October ended up being. Really makes me sad because I was getting some awesome shots. Maybe I'll finish it out anyway and do them all in a few days. *for fun*

We had our garage sale "estate" sale. We held it on Saturday at the Senior Center in Maryville. There were 18 tables of stuff. That doesn't include things that we sat on chairs, on top of tubs and a couple things on the floor. *seriously*


This is about 5% of what we had. (Yes I sold halloween crap in November)

Let me tell you, we're so sick of garage sales. I told Gene I was NOT having another one for a LONG TIME. People were lined up at the door at 7:30. Really. And we were still dragging stuff in and pricing. It was actually a dream garage sale. ppl around here rarely know how to have a good one, and I think we set the bar really high.

Anyway, we made quite a bit, got rid of quite a bit and then donated almost every single thing left over. I kept out a few things that I didn't want to get rid of if they didn't sell, or things that I thought were worthy of listing on craigslist or ebay.

You should see our storage unit now. I should have taken before/after pics. We had 2 units and one is about 3/4 empty now. I'm going to finish sorting through the holiday stuff. Donate a bunch and sell some shelving units that are in storage and then combine them all into one. Yay for reducing my storage bill by half!

I even sold most of my wedding stuff. The July 4 bride came and she loved all my things which really made me very happy! Hope I didn't take all the fun out of wedding planning for her. The funnest part for me, was making all the projects - she even took some of my floral arrangements so I got to help pick her flowers!

Here's how we all felt by the end of the day:

We celebrated by going to Applebee's for dinner.

Oh, and Kudos to Tanner for skipping Halloween with his friends because he wanted to stay and help. That was a huge help as we didn't get to bed until late and then was up at 6 a.m. on Saturday.

You know what sucks? I woke up at (officially) 6 a.m. on Sunday. UGH.

I did sneak out of the house tho, because there was tons of fog out. Which I didn't get great pics of the fog because it wasn't heavy fog, just misty fog... I did stop and get some pics of the cows up the road I've been wanting to photograph.

They were terribly interested in what I was doing and came right up to the fence. I wanted to get closer, but they were bulls and well, it was just 3 little pieces of wire separating us.

Friday I got my new 30d!

Whoooop!

I. Love. It.

It rocks the awesome sauce.

I've been lens shopping, flash shopping and tons of other goodies. All I've bought tho, was a cf card. I have a hard time committing to spending so much $$ sometimes.

I did NOT use it to take this pic:

I actually took this last week and keep forgetting to share. I took it with my XT. It's a puddle in our driveway that made this awesome pattern w/ leaves. I punched the saturation and lightness .... very abstract.

On the foundation front, it's pretty much done...

The contractor I think forgot to put our vents in, so we need to speak about that. We also are putting new trim boards all the way around the house to cover the seam. The old stuff was bad. We'd never noticed it until this other stuff came along, but there is a couple spots of rot that has to be taken care of. Nothing major, just something that we missed and it could have gotten bad, so it was good it got caught when it did. The caulking around the trim had not been looked after for *years* so that's where the problem came in.

The foundation will have to be painted at some point (or stained). Right now it's just concrete colored. At first it was dark dark grey and I HATED IT. Now it's turning light like real concrete so I'm happier. Anyway, but I don't want a cabin on concrete so we'll probably either paint it a solid color or put some stone treatment on it at some point.

Today was crazy. I had this weird thing happen. I literally had about 1/2 dozen errands to run and I added one onto my list. I ended up taking the test to become a census worker... which I didn't even know about until like 45 min before I did it.

Apparently they need help badly here, and they need a recruiter and clerical for the area. Both I can do. It also pays about double what the factories do. I aced the test. Which I wasn't shocked, it wasn't super hard but there were a couple questions I wasn't 100% positive about. Anyway, the regional lady seemed excited by that and said to expect a phone call with an offer. It's temporary work, but she said that the census is not until 4-2010 and if they have good workers they keep them on.

I'm considering it. We'll see what happens. I wouldn't mind stockpiling more cash. I've become quite the money hoarder lately. This Saturday I got my stimulus check (filed an extension so it came late), had the garage sale, got an insurance check and even found some cash I forgot I stuck in a drawer. LOL. woooo... hope god isn't telling me something bad is coming.

I sat up an account last night to start selling stock photos. It's something I've been thinking about for a long time. I take so many shots of random other things, that I will probably never print or use, so I thought it would maybe generate some extra cash to have a few stock photo accounts out there. I am going to try to add just a few photos every day to build up my stockpile. Even $20 a month would be better than nothing... BUT, you can make up to $60 per image that you sell. Minimum of .50 - better than a sharp stick in the eye.

And lastly, do not forget that tomorrow is election day! I truly believe that as a citizen of this country it's your civic duty to vote. You have no right to complain about the administration, if did not take part in the process to elect officials.

Now, my own personal statement about our upcoming election? As you can tell by my "old school conservative" banner on the right, I'm a republican. I personally thing that Obama is *not ready* for this position. He speaks about flowery "hope" for our future. Here's my opinion on the word "Hope"....

It's a reactive word. It's not proactive.

I "hope" things get better

I "hope" I can make a change.

I "hope" I do a good job.

Proactive word: *will*.

I got this piece of literature in the mail and I think it speaks volumes so I kept it.

"Casting a vote in the US Senate only 291 days, the equivalent of working 9.5 months, Obama is still new to the job.

If he was in the Army.... you'd call him a PRIVATE

If he was an athlete ... you'd call him a ROOKIE

If he was a plumber... you'd call him an APPRENTICE.

If he was a student... you'd call him a FRESHMAN

If he was your doctor... you'd call ANOTHER DOCTOR.

Can you trust Obama to make the right decision? Dangerously Inexperienced."

Political statement - off

OK. I have laundry on the line, I have to get it off!!

It was beautiful today, too bad I didn't have time to enjoy it!