There are a few good points to working lots and lots and lots of hours for work:

• I get paid for the extra hours, so I've picked up a few new camera lenses
• Sometimes management takes pity on us and buys us really nice lunches
  
• I work in gorgeous Research Park and can walk two minutes down the hill from my office's parking lot and find a bunch of blooming cherry trees when I need a break

That last bit is exactly what I did on Tuesday afternoon, and I toted the D300 and my 105mm micro lens with me. The first shot is going in as my Project 365 photo for that day.

Next weekend I get to go to DC for two days for the big Cherry Blossom Festival! I can't wait!

Why I haven't been scrapbooking lately...

I know I haven't written any scrapbooking posts in ages (or at least a couple of months- thank you hyperbole). The reason is that I've been spending a lot of time at work with these fine, fun people.

We're practically living in the software lab right now, coding and testing and integrating our little hearts out. One more month and things should get back to normal...sort of. For now, I really only have time to snap a few photos on pretty days and post them, so I'll be focusing (oh, bad pun!) on the photography for a while.

This has been the extent of my scrapbooking lately. These are photos that I recently had printed and shipped in, all laid out in stacks by layout and ready to be packed into page kits. I crop, edit, and size all of my photos before having them printed and then arrange them on 4x6 (or whatever) size canvases before uploading them to the developer. I've come across a couple of 100+ free print coupons lately, so any scrapping time I do have is spent editing photos on the MacBook and getting them ready to print. Since I choose sketches before my photos are ever printed, I know what my layouts will look like in advance and I should be able to get a lot of actual scrapping done once I can get back to it.

Christmas in March

My family has decided that we should probably do Christmas in March every year- it's so much less stressful than trying to do it in December, sandwiched between Thanksgiving and New Year's with a thousand other things going on at the same time.

The reason we were celebrating so late this year is because my brother was in Baghdad over Christmas and got two weeks leave to come home in March. He has to go back until sometime in early July, and then he'll be back home for good.

My family always has some creative and wacky gift-wrapping going on. This tube has been used for a couple of Christmases now, and this year it held a painting from Iraq for my Dad.

Beth got some yummy John Sheppard goodness.

J does love his power tools!

Mom and Beth looking at some photos on my MacBook.

And Darren had fun torturing the cat with clothespins. I hope PETA doesn't read this blog!!

More Spring-iferous Photos

I seriously ::heart:: my macro lenses. I have two that I've bought used on eBay (AF-S, but non-VR because who needs VR on a macro, anyway?) really cheap, and they're my favorite lenses- especially the 60mm f/2.8- it's the lens that's on my camera most often (at least, until the 35mm f/2 that I ordered over the weekend gets here).

Wow, that was an extraordinarily long sentence!

Anyway, these are some shots that I got in the backyard yesterday when I took a break from painting the dining room. I just love the little bug face. :)

Birthday Sushi

For my birthday today, I got to have lunch at Edo, this awesome Japanese restaurant in Madison. I love the chance to totally nom (how did that word become part of my regular vocabulary?) on some good sushi.

I think half the fun is in the presentation- it's all just so perfectly laid out in neat little OCD-friendly rows of California roll, Ebi-tem (shrimp tempura roll), smoked salmon and crab nigiri.

And my birthday present from Darren? This awesome new toy- a 120GB iPod Classic (so I can have all my Star Wars audio books on the drive at the same time). I was sort of thinking I might want one when they were released last summer, and I finally got one!

I'm sitting on the couch typing this out while plugged into it, listening to my latest musical obsession- "Gotta Be Somebody" by Nickelback. I'm as stuck on this song as I was on Lifehouse's "First Time" last year.

I arrived home to find a box from Amazon on the porch- not an uncommon ocurrence here, except that I wasn't expecting anything today. Turns out that Mom and Dad had my gifts shipped straight to the house!!

I can't wait to dig into these books and learn all kinds of new photographic goodness. And they gave me an extra battery for the D300- should come in handy since I'm always running mine down!

Happiness is...

Discovering that I have one tub of Tutti Dolci Cinnamon Frosting body scrub left in my Bath and Body Works stash. I thought I was out of it completely until I went digging for something else. I love this stuff, and they don't carry it any more. I will enjoy this while it lasts. :)

That picture ended up being my Project 365 photo for today...here are a few others I've taken recently...

A pile of yogurt containers from a weekly grocery shopping trip. I think I'll title this one "Michael Westen's Refrigerator." That guy does love his yogurt!

A surprise shipment from Amazon- Mom and Dad gave me this cookbook out of the blue. I can't wait to try out some of the stuff in it!

Enjoying Season 3 of Lost on Blu-Ray.

And finally, the plants in the Aerogarden are blooming!!

I want Fruit Wheats!

Does anyone else remember a cereal that Nabisco made in the 80's and 90's called Fruit Wheats? I remember eating the strawberry variety by the bowl for breakfast and after school snacks, and now I've found out that it's no longer being made. :(

I'm apparently not the only person who misses it. There is an online petition to bring it back, along with a page about it on In the 80's. There's even a YouTube video of one of the original commercials for it here.

I realize that this has nothing to do with Scrapbooking, Star Wars, or Photography...I just felt like getting this out there. :)