Today was filled with a lot of sweet things.

Not the least of which was my boyfriend and dogs, who rang my birthday in early by giving me two awesome birthday gifts of a super screamin' fast 4 gb memory card and a ring flash for my macro lens! Woooooo-hoo!

And THEN ... not only did I get the ring flash, but Jeremy said that if I wanted to play with the ring flash, HE would make the curry for tonight's small dinner "party."

Absolutely awesome! So I played indeed. It's going to take me a while to get good at using it, but this was the first subject matter ... dessert from LAST night's dinner party. :) I'll post a recipe tomorrow .. it's kind of a neat thing.

Anyway, as if all of that wasn't enough, then Christi and Nathan came over and brought a friend for Dante.


Brit was a little wary. Um, ok. She was pretty well terrified. haha. She kept trying really hard to be close to Evan, but he shrieked a lot and moved very quickly and it kind of freaked her out. Dante, however? He didn't care! That tail never stopped wagging. Whether Evan was beating on him or pulling his ears or lips or just handfulls of fur ... it didn't matter. Dante was in love and kept giving Evan plenty of kisses. And Evan seemed pretty darned happy, too. :)

And later on in the evening, when Evan woke up from sleeping in the back room and started crying, Dante beat Christi into the room and plopped his sweet face right in Evan's lap. He was very concerned and wanted to make it all better. Christi said he actually did help, too.

So, like I said, it was an evening of sweet things ... including all those sweet birthday wishes on the guestbook .. thank you, everyone! :)

Brit's resting, finally – now that we got Dante to leave her alone, that is. I had to finally yell at him and grab him by the scruff of the neck to get through to him that I needed him to STOP licking her. She would whine but then just kind of give up and let him lick. But I think she's on so many pain meds, she just doesn't have the energy to get away from him and when she tries, he's on her in an instant, because he's at his regular strength level.

So finally I grabbed him and looked him in the eye and held onto his face and let him know he needed to STOP and let her rest. So that's what she's doing now. He finally got it, so he's sleeping/pouting on the couch and she's laying on the cool tiles in the dining room. She gives a low groan now and then, and we'll give her some painkillers if she seems to be uncomfortable.

In the meantime, we had dinner. Incredible morels, onion and garlic, fried in olive oil, over grilled steak, baked potato and asparagus. Incredible, Vikky. Jeremy tasted the morels and LOVED them. He said they tasted like steak, without even having been cooked with it.

They were almost exactly as I remembered ... awesome!

And as you can see, we did partake in the "relaxation" drinks, too. :) Thank you again, Vikky! We'll pay you back with great food in about a month.

I'm wiped, it'll be an early night tonight. The doc says Brit should be fairly well back to normal tomorrow. Thank you again for all your wishes and thoughts. Sad to see our little girl in pain, but hoping this is the last time she has to go through this!

Not in any way that should make Jeremy nervous or anything ... but I LOVE you! What an immense surprise ... I was flabbergasted! And tomorrow, my friend, we are having steak with sautéed morels, onions and garlic. And we will think of you with every tasty bite!

Thank you, thank you, thank you!

For all the rest of you who don't know what this is ... it's a quart of fresh morels - mushrooms. When I was a kid we would go out and pick them in the woods. We'd come home with grocery bags full of them. Nowadays you can buy them all dried out and shriveled up, about 6 mushrooms for $8 at the grocery store. It's probably one of the things I miss MOST about Michigan. Seriously.

And Vikky knows how very much I've wanted some. So she sent me a whole bag full!! Vikky, this is incredible. THANK you!!

Jeremy's going to love them. :) I'm so glad he gets to try them! Thank you. :)

Ok, so maybe short hair isn't really the "dark side", but it fit the photo. :)

It seems there are some benefits to short hair that I didn't anticipate, but before I get into those, I wanted to tell a quick story.

It's 11:18 p.m. on a Monday night (when I started this blog, anyway). I'm helping a friend with a project and it was stupid of me to take it on while I was on deadline. A series of unfortunate events pushed it to this time frame, and I'm not the type to offer my help and then yank it because the timing becomes inconvenient. And "friend", when you read this (which I know you will eventually), this is not me complaining about helping you, not at all. Read on ...

So anyway, I finished up the design for her tonight, and am now in the process of printing up some flyers that need to be sent to California tomorrow. I'm using Jeremy's printer (and I specify "Jeremy's" because he knows the ins and outs of it much better than me), and have been printing while working on magazine stuff (the aforementioned deadline). Jeremy has jumped to help with paper jams and making sure the paper is oriented properly, etc.

At about 11:00 p.m., the printer ran out of yellow ink. We don't have a spare yellow. So I said "Well, she'll just get as many as she gets, I guess." Jeremy just looked at me and I could hear his gears grinding. So I asked, "There's no place open at this time of night that might have a replacement, is there?" And he answered, "WalMart." So I thought for a moment, then said, resigned, "Feel like heading to WalMart?" (Jeremy knows I hate WalMart) So he responded, "Why don't I go to WalMart and you stay here and finish your magazine work?"

So here I am, writing a blog about how absolutely fantastic my boyfriend is. I take on too much sometimes (that should answer the question for all of you who ask how I do so much in a day), and Jeremy always comes to my rescue. Always. So here's the real deal - I am who I am, I do what I do ... I am capable of what I'm capable of because I have Jeremy in my life. It took me a long time to accept his help. I was single and self-sufficient for a long, long time before he came along. But now that I see what my .. what our .. life can be with him in it, I realize we're unstoppable. :)

All that said, it's now quarter to midnight and he's in the kitchen, working over the black ink tank because WalMart didn't have black, and it's refusing to print any more because the black is empty. And here I sit, ever more in love with him. :)

Oh yeah .. so now .. the benefits of short hair.

• I no longer have to hold my hair out of the way when brushing my teeth and spitting into the sink (and other various activities during which I find myself, uh, "on top").

• I can keep the windows open on my car while driving 75 mph and not blind myself by stinging whips of hair in the eyes.

• No more knots and snarls!!

• I'm freezing all the time. This may not seem like a benefit, but with warm summer weather coming, I think it definitely is. It's amazing how adjusted my body has gotten used to having a perpetual thermal heater on my head and neck and shoulders. Without it I am perpetually chilled in the evenings.

• No more hair sticking to my face due to static cling.

• Less product, more experimentation.

• Being thrust out of my comfort zone has been a great learning (and humbling) experience.

Ok, that's it for now. "Friend", you get all but 5 copies of your brochure. Five of them are just the outside of the tri-fold, but that's ok because it has your company name and contact info and some samples of your work. They'll be in the mail tomorrow. Time to shut down for the night and snuggle on in with the better half of this relationship. Hope you all have an awesome Tuesday.

Tonight our friends Christi & Nathan came over for a little bit and brought the dogs an amazing treat .. their 3 boys! I don't often see Dante grin that much ... it was awesome. And even moreso was seeing Evan grinning and laughing so much whenever Dante would come to him! Awesome ... really just .. awesome. :)

Of course Britley got herself in on some of that lovin', too. But Dante is the one who truly seeks kids out. He LOVES kids. Evan would reach down and grab handfulls of Dante and giggle and Dante would wag his whole body and grin wider.


Notice the blur of the wagging tail in this photo? Ha. She was loving being the little princess on the couch.

It was a fantastic way to start our weekend. I hope yours goes just as well!

This was the relaxing end to a busy weekend. :) I think the lesson here is, so long as you've got a duck, a tennis ball and a yard to play in (and people to love you), life is good.

Hope yours was great and that the upcoming week's a good one.

I just came upon a set of 20 photos ... they are of some of the pit bulls rescued from Michael Vick's "kennel".
(photo by Eric Risberg for The AP)

With wet eyes and a lump in my throat I have absolutely nothing to say but .. awesome.

... when the parents are gone!

Seriously, I watched this about 10x in a row and laughed every time! If you've ever had or known a dog that loved water, this one's gonna get you. haha.

I stayed home today because of this stupid ear infection. I'd gotten about 4 hours' sleep Sunday and Monday night combined, and the days were just plain painful. So I'm now on antibiotics and things are getting better quickly.

As I was sitting here, Dante came in and jumped up next to me.

Haha. It really makes me laugh.

He jumped in the pool and then rolled around in the dirt. Then came in to share it with me. It's true love, I tell ya.

Maybe now you'll be able to see why I'm going to be SO glad to have a landscaped back yard that has grass! And why there's no way in heck we're opening up that dirt lot to the dogs. I can't wait to be able to sit on the couch without worrying about whether it's muddy or not.

I know this might gross some people out, but hey, it's just a couch. And so long as he's happy, that's what matters to me. Once the mud dries, it brushes right off – we have a very resilient couch.

Once Dante jumped down, Brit jumped up.

She is a super-snuggly dog, almost all the time. This was the view I had, while trying to type. :) Every time I put my right hand down, she'd start to lick it, which also makes it impossible to type.

The way I look at it, she's probably just so happy to live here, in the house, with people who love her, that she wants to be close to us whenever she can.

I don't mind ... again, it just makes me happy to see her happy. Especially knowing how timid and shy she was when she first got here. She would run any time Jeremy came in the room, and if we would bend down to pet her, she'd often duck or wince, especially if we had something in our hands. She is a different dog now, and the love around here flows freely!

I say it a lot, but here it is again ... life is good!

For those of you celebrating Thanksgiving at this time, I wish you a holiday full of love. My new temporary header photo is a picture of the apple pie Jeremy made for us during our very first Thanksgiving together (our "1 year anniversary of the day we met"). I would wish for all my friends' lives to be as full of love as ours.

For those not exactly celebrating the holiday, it can still be a good time to contemplate the things in life you're thankful for. Sometimes you can surprise yourself and come up with more than you ever realized. And, celebrate or not, I still wish you much happiness and love.

(P.S. - Sharon, I saw ya peeking! ;) )

November 25, 2004.

I logged in to #TheDarkroom (Yahoo chat room), greeted and was greeted by the usual bevy of photography regulars who had nothing better to do on a Thanksgiving afternoon. A few minutes after I joined the room, a stranger said hello to me and followed it up with, “I hope someday I can take images like you do.” (I’m paraphrasing ... but it was close to that).

I was flattered – someone who actually took the time to look at not only my profile but also my photography. I slowed my pace along the path of single living.

I stumbled.

We chatted in private for a while. I don’t remember whether it was that night or a couple nights later, but he sent me a link to some images he had online. Amongst them I saw a photo of a guy sitting on a couch with a dog and thought, “I hope that’s him.”

It was.

We have talked, every day, in one manner or another (IM, e-mail, phone, in person), since that day.

January 2005.

He was supposed to fly across the country to meet me for the first time, but a family emergency postponed those plans for us. We met in February instead.

I tripped.

From that point on, once a month, either he flew out here or I flew out there, and we spent time together. We laughed, met each others’ friends, shared in each others’ favorite activities. He sent me a camera for my birthday. I sent him a bellows for his fireplace. I made him a pillow with my own two hands (which is pretty impressive if you know how un-domestic I am) – hand-painted and hand-sewn. In October, he told me he was going to look for work out here during his visit at Thanksgiving and, find something or not, he was going to give notice to MCI in December. I remember my heart skipping a beat – I could hardly believe it and told him, if you’re planning to quit right after you visit, why don’t you just move up the plans and relocate here by Thanksgiving?

November 22, 2005.

Jeremy rolled into my driveway with his truck loaded down with whatever he could fit from his life in Virginia. Dante got a new person, I got a new best friend and partner, and we all got a better life than I think any of us ever expected.

I fell.

And this time, when I got up, I was on a whole new path. Glad you’re all here to share the scenery along the way.

- - - - -

The image above is a sneak peek into my new web site. It’s one of the main images from the home page. The photos were taken by my friend, Christi. Thanks, Christi ... didn’t think you’d mind.


This post is in response to the Picture Perfect challenge, whose subject is posted every Wednesday and whose responding images are to be posted the following Friday. The subject this week is "Fall", and I got too excited to wait, as I knew immediately just what spin I wanted to give it.

(the picture above is from Wikipedia - it's an 8 mm kidney stone)

I thought I felt the twinge at Jeremy's parents' house this weekend. I also had an upset stomach on and off for the last few days. However, it didn't actually hit until last night, after pilates. It kept me awake last night - every time I moved the wrong way, took too deep of a breath, put pressure on the wrong area, I was woken up with the pain that takes my breath away. The best way I can explain it is like when you're running or hiking really hard and you get a sharp stitch in your side, but then add a little hot poker type feeling that flares up with each breath. It passes after a minute or two, usually. But when I got up to go to the bathroom this morning I thought I was going to pass out, it hurt so badly. Apparently what causes the pain is that the stone pokes its way into the soft tissue of the urinary tract and blocks the flow of urine. Usually I will be able to pass a stone within a day or two, now that I know how to handle them. The first one I got threw me for a total loop and had me laid up for days with the stone and then days afterwards with a raging infection where the stone had left a torn-up trail on its way out.

My doctor gave me a prescription for Vicodin about a year ago, and that helps a ton with the pain. My doc said that if I get them a lot, we can do some ultrasounds to try to see if there's just one stone breaking off in pieces and then they can go in and bust that one up. I think I've had about 4 in the past year .. maybe 5. At this point I'm not chomping at the bit to get that kind of stuff done, so I'll wait 'til they get worse. I'm hoping an imminent medication change next year might help them not be as frequent.

But my real reason for posting this blog is to share with you how lucky I am. :)

Jeremy came home with flowers and a cucumber (he'd messaged me during the day and I had a craving for cucumber). He cut the flowers and put them in water for me here in the living room (I was laying, stoned, on the couch) and then went and cut up the cucumber for me. Then he cooked dinner for us, and all this after working a very full work day. He is the absolute best, and I am the luckiest woman in the world. No one's ever done so much for me without asking for anything in return. So, pain or no pain, I am feeling on top of the world.

The house we rent was built in 1902. It's old, quaint and fairly tiny. Well, by American standards, anyway. It's about 650 square feet, which is small for two people and two English Labs. Our living room has 3 very large picture windows, each about 6' tall. The center panel is about 4' wide and the side windows are about 2' wide. They show a beautiful view of the eastern Sierra Nevada mountain range and are just about my favorite part of the house during a snowstorm (the old antique-ish gas-burning stove that looks like real fire sits a few feet to the left of these windows).

Tonight, as Jeremy was fixing dinner, I was in the living room, looking out these great windows and saw what every person in the high desert dreads: Smoke. Like, wildfire smoke. And close .. uncomfortably close. I called Jeremy in and, being the photographers we are, we threw dinner half-prepped in the fridge and ran out the door with the cameras. It was a brush fire next to a home about a mile away (maybe a little less). Tons of fire trucks and police cars and other emergency response vehicles. I fully intended to post the photos here ...

until we got home. We'd been having problems with Britley jumping up with muddy paws on our electronics cabinet in the living room and just recently discovered why she was doing it. She was trying to see out the front windows! So now we leave the blinds on the left-hand panel up about a foot. Problem solved! As I got out of the car, I luckily had the forethought to prep the camera and catch this shot. The only way it could have been better would have been if Dante pushed his way in behind her to peek through the window. This is my family, my world, my reasons for smiling and feeling loved every single day. I am so lucky. :)

Some of you know, some may not, that I have been working super hard to really build my freelance company up to where I can quit my day job and go full-time as a freelance photographer/graphic designer. Well, I knew that it would get a lot harder before it got easier, and I am finding myself struggling sometimes when trying to manage a full-time 40+ hour per week job and a growing freelance company. Not that I'm complaining .. I love that I'm gaining new clients, and that the work is coming in more and more regularly! It just gets overwhelming sometimes, and although Jeremy will continue to argue against it, I really do become kind of a raving bitch. :) I am difficult and argumentative and lose my patience quickly, and he is just even more incredible for putting up with me as well as he does. Last week was one of my busiest weeks yet, and the volume of work was .. well, overwhelming wasn't even the right word for it. Anyway, Sunday I had a little more straggler work to deal with, but I was edgy and just .. dunno. All I really wanted to do was sleep, but my mind and body wouldn't let me, and yet I didn't know WHAT I wanted to do. Poor Jeremy. I know for a fact that if I were him I would not deal with me NEAR as well as he does. So what did he do? Sent me off to a long, luxurious bubble bath with a good book, went to the grocery store and brought home everything for a really nice baked chicken dinner. Then he cooked it and, while I was finishing up my straggler work, he set this beautiful table for us. I should mention here that we are NOT "eat at the table" people. 99% of the time we eat in the living room, reading or watching tv while we eat. So this was quite an occasion. :) I've never known anyone quite like Jeremy .. and can't even begin to tell you how grateful I am to have him in my life.

I really have nothing poetic or witty to say about this photo. It just represents my family, and I couldn't possibly imagine myself happier than I am right now in my life. :)

Moments like these are the best at our house. Jumping on the bed with the dogs and playing. That's Jeremy (the one with 2 legs), Dante (black English Lab) and Britley (chocolate English Lab). This photo really makes me smile ... life is good.