life
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Picture Post
This week has been pretty eh but I have spent a good deal of time reading, rereading and playing with my new camera. I feel the pics already look much better. {Hey, for the price they should right?} I went through Ken Rockwell’s site and set my camera according to his recommendations. So are so many options, there’s not way I would even know where to start. Anyway, so far so good.
Monday and Tuesday I pretty much sat on the couch and took picture after picture of the fireplace or bookshelf. I would read, adjust settings, take pics and repeat. Wednesday afternoon was nice so I went outside and took pics of flowers. Played and tweaked settings and took more pics. I am by no means feeling super comfortable with this camera yet but I’m getting there.
So far my only problem is the auto focus. There are like 30 different focus points the camera can focus on and for the life of me, I can’t figure out how to choose the location I want to focus on. This is the one thing I am used to from my old camera. It picks a focal spot and I can manually change this should it not be correct. I guess I’m going to have to do some more reading.
Playing with the white balance.
Just playing.
Playing with exposure.
More randoms.
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So you’re going to the beach?
Hmm, well Tropical Depression Andrea welcomes you!
Seriously?!!? The girls and I have had a trip to Myrtle Beach planned for a few months now and the day before we leave a stupid Tropical Depression hits Florida and is headed straight up the East Coast! Wonderful! We are going anyway, come hell or highwater. 😉 Regardless it should be a fun trip. It’s just a small group and the 5 of us all have fun. We will have even more fun when
sunshopping, sand and booze are involved. 🙂Since neither of us have to travel for work, it’s very rare that one of us is actually home alone. I hope Matt can survive without me. 😀 I’ll have to give him a list of things to do, like water my plants unless we get like 5 inches of rain, which is what has been predicted. He’ll also have to feed the kiddos, which he knows how to do. I’m really not worried about him, I mean he did live on his own before he met me.
~k
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Pizza and Fire
Our weekend was pretty quiet except for Saturday night. Matt and I ran errands in the morning and while we were out we stopped at Trader Joe’s. We ended up grabbing some pizza dough, fresh mozzarella, and a basil plant (I am determined to grow basil dammit!).
Saturday night Matt grabbed the pizza stone and fired up the grill. We had decided to try making pizza on the gill with the stone. We go inside and start making our pizzas while the grill and pizza stone heat up. I had just finished topping mine when we headed out. Matt opened the grill and the whole thing flamed up. We laughed and he cut the gas off. Next thing we know the deck railing is on fire. Matt grabs the oven mitt and starts trying to put it out while I run inside and grab some water. A nice splash of water and the rail fire is out. Then I notice that inside the grill, where the propane tanks are are on fire. Crap! We grab more water and put that fire out too.
Once all the fires were out we surveyed the damage. Rail behind the grill charred. Christmas lights (from 2009 ish) melted to the rail. Keg trash can that had been against the grill, melted. Hose connecting the grill to the propane tank also melted.
That’s not even as bad as it first was but I didn’t get a pic. 
You can see the char on the rail and the grill and the melted lights. 
Finally, my yummy pizza. We cleaned up what we could and then moved the pizza stone to the oven. A few minutes later I had pizza and it was Matt’s turn to put his in the oven. Needless to say dinner was quiet interesting. We always have fun on pizza night, whether it’s smoking the house up and the fire alarm going off or apparently actually having a real fire on the deck.
Thankfully the whole thing wasn’t that bad, but we both know it could have been worse. The deck is in terrible shape and we are planning a redo in the next few weeks so that was fine. The grill ended up being saved when Matt found a replacement hose at Lowes. Needless to say the grill got a good cleaning on Sunday. From what we can figure, the stuff in the bottom of the grill caught fire. Then when Matt opened it up, I think that’s when it caught the rail on fire.
With that, make sure you watch your grill! Shit can happen and it can happen quiet fast!
~k
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Weekend Recap
I don’t think we did anything on Friday night except watch a movie. Saturday my dad and I had a photo shoot with a few of my friends. We met them at the Duke Gardens at 10:30 and couldn’t have asked for a more perfect day. Sunny and blue skies. None of us had been so we just wandered around taking pics in various locations. We even stumbled on to a wedding rehearsal. 🙂 The grounds were beautiful and still had plenty of flowers blooming despite the lateness of the season.
Matt washed the cars while I was gone and then later in the afternoon we went to see Fast and Furious 6. The movie was AWESOME! I am super excited there will be a 7! (This is a total guilty pleasure but I love me some Vin Disel and the Rock!)
Sunday Matt played golf so I went shopping. I ran to Lowe’s hoping I might find a clearance peony. Still no luck so I ended up with a gardenia. I LOVE the smell of gardenias and I used to have a few bushes outside my townhouse. I bought one with the plant to put it under the deck, however once I got home I realized I would really need 2. Next I headed to Briar Creek. I ran to Home Goods and TJ Maxx. I found an adorable ballerina pic. I thought it would go nicely with my old ballerina pics but at 59.00 I decided to pass. 🙁 (Kelly wants a new camera so….yeah.)
Monday we got up and ran to Lowe’s to purchase another gardenia. Then we went to the grocery to pick up a few items for our cook out with mom and dad. They invited us over to their pool to sun and grill. The weather was amazing and we laid out for a while before dad cooked burgers. We ate and headed home.
Overall we had a really nice weekend though I wish I was currently home in bed!
~k
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Garden update
Here are some pics of things that are currently doing amazing in the front yard.
The top photo is the before and the bottom is after. I am soooo happy with how well everything is doing!Happy Memorial Day weekend!
~k
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Weekend roundup
Matt’s parents were up for the weekend. After my hair appt Friday, I came home, met them and the 4 of us headed to meet my parents for dinner at Porters on campus. Matt and I have been several times and we really enjoy it.
Saturday Jill and Steve had plans with friends so Matt and I ran a few errands. We stopped by Lowe’s so I could buy more flowers. Lowe’s had a pretty poor selection so I ended up with a few geraniums. I really wanted more begonias but they didn’t have any 🙁 I did manage to find a hibiscus on clearance. I have no idea if it will make it, the poor thing was soaked through but for $4.00 I thought it was worth tying to save.
We got home and pulled up my pansies and then planted the geraniums. I got about half the pot filled with soil for the hibiscus when I ran out of soil. By this point I was super sweaty and dirty so I didn’t feel like running back to Lowe’s for more soil. I figured we could run by on Sunday.
Sunday the guys were supposed to play golf but the forecast was rainy so we all ended up going to Southpoint in Durham. After like 6 hours of walking around and shopping we headed back to Raleigh to find dinner. We settled on one of our fave Mexican restaurants Dos Taquitos. As always the food was delicious.
Today I ran to Lowe’s and picked up more soil and finally got my hibiscus in a pot. The roots were soaked through. I hope it will dry out soon and be okay. I’ll post some pics if it doesn’t die. 😉
~k
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Marriage is hard
You see this phrase often. Just yesterday I saw this in some article I was reading and I thought to myself, “I don’t feel like being married to Matt is hard.” I wondered what Matt thought about this so I asked him last night and he said the same thing I did, “being married isn’t hard.”
I feel like I need to say that everyday you have to work at being married but overall I don’t feel like it’s hard. (We still have our disagreements and the first 2 years hasn’t always been a picnic but overall it’s good.) I’ve been in relationships that were hard or difficult but for some reason our relationship just seems to fit. I think a lot of this comes from Matt not being the type to try and piss me off and me understanding and realizing this, therefore I don’t “sweat the small stuff” nearly as much as I used to. I feel I’m very conscience in my thinking of “is this really worth it”. Most of the time it’s not worth the extra energy to make something a bigger deal than it really is.
I have a lot of friends that got married around the same time as us and it seems like there are a lot of complaints, from small stuff to large stuff. I’m honestly so glad that’s not me, not anymore. We have our routines and things just seem to work. Sure Matt annoys me from time to time and I know I annoy him and that’s okay.
This morning I saw an article about contracting marriages for 10 years. This would be to cut down on the divorce rate I guess. You give it 10 years and at the end decide if you want to renew your contract or leave. I’m not really sure how I feel about this concept. On one hand, I would absolutely sign a 10 year agreement with Matt. But not because I thought it wouldn’t last past that or that one of us would want out but because to me that’s like saying I KNOW we can last 10 years, and 20 and so on. So if that’s my thought, then would I really need a contract? I guess not.
Honestly I feel like it’s a pretty silly “solution” if you were. I feel the biggest problem with the divorce rate is people aren’t willing to fight for their marriages anymore. I’ve been divorced and 1 person can’t make a marriage. Both people have to be willing to fight for it. I think we are a very throw away society now and that is reflected in the divorce rate. I also feel a lot of this comes from having 2 income households. Back in the day it was much harder to leave because women weren’t able to provide the way they can now. I’m not saying I think we need to go back to this it’s merely a thought.
Clearly I have no solution for this problem and I’m going to start rambling soon.
Happy Friday!
~k
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Whatever Wednesday
This week has been dragging. Maybe it’s because vacation is next week or maybe it’s because it’s just been slow. It doesn’t help that the weather has royally sucked this week! It’s down right cold outside today, the FIRST of MAY! Are you kidding?!?!! It’s been cloudy, rainy and cold and it sucks! I’m ready for spring! But I know what’s going to happen, the weather is going to finally warm up to summer like temps. Then everyone will be complaining that it’s too hot, me included.
One thing I’m looking forward to this weekend is my mani-pedi scheduled for Saturday. Mom and I are going to a place downtown. Unfortunately it seems to be just one lady so we will have to wait on each other, which means we are going to be there for a while. Oh well. I don’t have anything else planned for Saturday.
One week till vacation! Woo hooo!
~k
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Currently
I’ve seen a few other blogs that do a Currently post. In reality, I hope that this might help give the blog some structure and help me update it more. I think I’ve tried stuff like this before with no success so we’ll see how this goes.
Currently: Waiting to go home. Work has been weird lately. Some times we are really slow and others we are super busy. This can literally change within the span of a few minutes. But for now things are quiet. I’ve been looking at the Nik Collection of photo actions Matt just sent me. I am also still currently working on baby Owen’s pics so I am going to home tonight to download my free trial and edit some pics and see what I think. The whole collection is now 149.00 so I guess we’ll see if I like it and if I think it’s worth the money. Ideally I would prefer to start editing pics on Matt’s Mac (if he will let me touch it!) but all my editing programs are on my Dell. It’s not that is sucks, but the battery is about dead so I have to keep it plugged in and well I’ve gotten spoiled with my iPad.
Loving: My yard! The warmer weather and my husband. I hear lots of girls with lots of complaints about their hubbies and I am super thankful I got a good one!
Reading: Summer Secrets by Barbara Freethy. This is a random book I picked up off Amazon a few months ago. Every now and then I’ll go through and buy a few cheap/free books from the Kindle store. This way when I get the urge to read I don’t have to browse through Amazon. Anyway, this book is about 3 sisters who sail around the world as teens. Like 10 years later, a reporter decides to start digging to get to the real “truth” behind the trip. I haven’t gotten very far yet so this may by on my list for a while. 😉
Thinking about: Other people’s problems and how thankful they aren’t mine.
Looking forward to: Our trip to Jamaica! Holy cow, it’s NEXT week! It didn’t really hit me till the other day that we were a little over a week away! I am excited for some much needed sun, beach and booze! 😉 Oddly enough a coworker who got married over the weekend is currently in Jamaica at the same resort. We are getting together for lunch next week to discuss. I’m pretty excited to see how she liked it.
Making me happy: All my flowers. My front yard looks AMAZING! I am so pleased at how well all of my bushes are doing. I even had a neighbor stop by last week to say how nice it looked. I know the flowers will only last a few more weeks but I plan to enjoy them while I can.
So that is my attempt at a currently post. Hopefully it will get better as time goes on. 🙂
~k
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Weekend recap
Friday was pretty crazy. I spent most of my day watching the news as the Boston PD searched for the Boston Marathon bomber. For some reason, I was weirdly fascinated by the whole thing. The search part I should say. After waking up and hearing the news that one was dead, I figured the police would find the second one pretty quickly but that didn’t happen.
That afternoon around 6 while I was lying on the couch, I heard a loud gust of wind. With that, the bottom fell out. I quickly scrambled to close the windows and then the power went out. Thankfully it was only out for a few minutes but then I noticed a puddle of water in dining room by the door. Our back door is a huge piece of crap and needs to be replaced. It doesn’t fit very well in the frame so when the wind blows right rain can comes through. I finally got the mess cleaned up when Matt announced shots were fired via twitter. I quickly turned the news back on and became glued to the TV. Finally we were both starving so we grabbed some fast food and returned home. Just in time to see reports that the bomber had been caught.
Around mid-night the power went off again and woke us up. Unfortunately it stayed off for the better part of an hour. I tossed and turned waiting for it to cut back on. I was hot and it was waaaaaayyy too quiet. It finally cut back on and I was able to sleep. I remember it cutting off again at some point but I guess I slept through that.
Saturday Matt met one of Patrick’s friends for a round of golf. I headed back to Old Navy to exchange a few more items and then ran to Target to get food for dinner. Around 6:30 Matt texted to say they were only on #13 and it would be a while. He also asked if I would be up for meeting them out for dinner. I got dressed and met everyone at Maru. MMMMM sushi! 🙂
Sunday we slept in and went to Costco. Then I came home and re-potted my hostas and planted the hyacinth mom gave me for Easter. The temperature also dropped this weekend. Matt finally got cold and turned the heat back on. It’s almost May, seriously, could it just warm up already!
~k