Tuesday, July 22, 2014

A Little Video - Dallas Tango


Just for fun, I'm not going to post a picture today.  Nick is finishing up my June recital DVDs for the kiddos.  I won't post all of them, but here's one of a dear friend and myself playing one of my favourite pieces:

The Dallas Tango by David Karp  (Password, if required, = "Laura"):

Friday, July 18, 2014

Photography 356 Project: (Days 191 - 198)

Thursday night, Nick had a meeting, so I had the place to myself and not much to do.  It was really nice!

Friday was the beginning of a heat wave in these parts:

Saturday I spent the entire day home alternating between editing photos and napping while Nick was off on a wedding:

Sunday, after church, we headed out to the beach with Nick's cousins, brother, and some of their friends.  The boys played and wrestled in the warm (yes, warm), salty waves and I was more than happy to just go up to my knees and call it a day.  I'm a fresh-water lake girl.  None of this Pacific Ocean stuff.

Monday, Nick and I spent the evening at home working on our respective craft/photo projects and trying to survive the heat.  He came into the kitchen to see me lighting all these candles in a row to shoot them and exclaimed, "You're lighting candles in this heat?!"  To which I replied, "And you're only in here because you're turning on the oven to bake some clay models!"

Tuesday, I was home alone after teaching as Nick was with his cousins and brother for a guys' night.  I found this little friend to keep me company in my dining room, though :)

Wednesday was date night since our dinner with friends was postponed.  We actually made a real dinner together, and it was lovely (even if it was just really good hamburgers).  We tidied up the kitchen and enjoyed a movie together.  Okay, enjoyed is a loose term.  We watched the movie, "Noah", and it's really weird.

Thursday, we biked to the grocery store after my last piano student left and picked up some treats.  We kind of enjoyed actually having a healthy meal the night before so thought we would go for two nights in a row ;).  We also picked up some not-so-healthy treats:

And that's the end of this short little blog post.  It's really short because I'm really tired as I've been staying up way too late and it's been too hot to sleep most nights.  It's the end of the week and the lack of energy is catching up to me.  I have a 15-hour wedding tomorrow that's in a completely different town, so sleep will have to wait until Sunday this week.  Maybe by then I will be more verbose :)

Thursday, July 10, 2014

Photography 365 Project: (Days 183 - 190)

Wednesday, July 2nd, was a pretty ordinary day.  A little bit of piano teaching (to make up for not teaching on the Statutory Holiday the day prior), and still enjoying finishing my day in the daylight!  I so love Summer with my whole heart.

Thursday, I had every intention of going to bed early.  Bringing my laptop with me kind of defeated the purpose, but I tried!

Friday, Nick picked me up after work because we had a 4th of July party to go to that night.  However, we had a few hours before the party started, so we had an impromptu date!  We googled coffee shops that were stocked with board games, and found 6 places.  The one that looked like it had the best games was actually a pub and I enjoyed some great poutine while we played (dairy allergies ignored in the necessity of the moment to eat fries!).  We tried a couple new games and had a lot of fun!  Then we headed over to our friends' place for even more amazing food and good times :)


Saturday, I was interning with a wedding company and spent the day shooting.  I couldn't keep any of the shots as they belonged to the company, but while we were photographing the bride getting into her dress, I snapped a quick photo of these window flowers to save for my "daily":

And this picture is for my mother-in-law!  We were just talking about how Vancouver is filled with random outdoor pianos that are for public use.  As I walked from my wedding over to Nick's (as his finished later), I heard music to my right and sure enough - there was another one!

Sunday, I was so tired from shooting the wedding that I slept in until after lunch.  I kept hoping it would just keep raining so I didn't have to get out of bed at all that day, but the sun broke through.  This meant my maternity shoot downtown was still on.  I'm so glad the rain did actually stop, and I'm so glad we did the shoot that day because it was perfect.  Perfect location, perfect couple, perfect weather, perfect light.  Here's one of my favourites, though if you want to see more, you can go to our Facebook Page:

Monday, was an exhausting day.  I was up late editing the maternity photos and waiting for Nick to get home from work.  This resulted in about 3 hours of sleep before a fully-packed day.  My coworker wasn't feeling 100%, so I taught a 7-hour class at work that day.  I also edited photos while the students worked on exercises and during lunch.  Then I had a meeting with the wedding company I'm interning with and two piano lessons that evening.  Also, all the berries in our fridge needed to be frozen, like, days prior.  Very productive.  Very tired.  Very uncreative in my shot for the day:

Tuesday, again I had every intention of going to bed early.  Right as I was trying to fall asleep, I shouted, "Oh no!" and ran into the living room.  Nick also came into the living room from the office to see what the heck was the matter!  I exclaimed that I had almost forgotten my daily, and I hadn't missed a day yet, and couldn't start now.  I quickly used the light from the office to take the photo and went back to bed.

Wednesday, we had an evening out with some friends.  I had to stay late at work which was annoying, but as soon as I got home, we headed over to their place for some delicious burgers, salads, and dessert.  We are all gamers, so playing a "quick" 3-hour board game is considered perfectly acceptable after dinner.  They taught us to play Game of Thrones and I came in second :)

Wednesday, July 2, 2014

Photography 365 Project (Days 174 - 182: HALF WAY!)


I can't believe that by the time I hit "Publish" on this blog post I will be officially half done my 365 project.  Craziness!  The people that I've met and the friendships that have formed through this are just a bonus to having half of 2014 documented in a photo book I've been creating as I go along here.  So excited to see what the second half of the year brings!

Monday:  Starting to feel like Summer around here finally!

Tuesday:  Tired and uninspired.

Wednesday:  Just the norm :)  No piano students tonight as my Wednesday kids take the Summer off.

Thursday:  A nice evening relaxing and watching shows in bed.  Also another night off piano teaching as my load lightens in July and August.

Friday:  A nice dinner with friends after work, cut short by a team meeting to gear up for shooting weekend weddings.  I made Nick pull over on the way home from the meeting and ran back across the bridge to catch this sunset.

Saturday:  My wedding wrapped at 5:30pm, so I skytrained over to Nick's wedding and hung out for the evening.  Pretty good deal.  Sitting on a sunny deck with this view all evening and scoring some delicious wedding food.  (Actually, I left my bus pass at home, snuck on the skytrain for two stops, and was too cheap to cough up the actual fair so I just waited for Nick for 6 hours to drive me home instead!).  He's the veteran, and I'm still working on an internship with the company.  Thus, he gets all the fancy, high-stress weddings and I get all the shorter, less stressful ones.  This is working well for me ;)

Sunday:  Sleep ALL day.  I'm not kidding.  I got out of bed to go get these smoothies with Nick in the evening.  And I slept all the next night through as well.  Deficit much?

Monday:  I took today off work since Tuesday was a holiday.  We ran some errands, picked some berries, and made some pies.  I had a couple students to teach in the evening, but other than that it was a very fun, pensive and relaxing day.  You can read more about it HERE.

Tuesday:  A sleep-in, a bike ride around the seawall at Stanley Park, a picnic, the Aquarium, and fireworks!  Very hard to choose a daily from the almost 100 photos I kept from this day!  If you want to see more, you can check out this post HERE.

Aquarium, Sea Wall, and Fireworks (Canada Day)


Yesterday, Nick and I decided to play tourist in our own city.  He has lived here for 7 years and I have lived here for 5, and yet we have never done much that is truly “Vancouver”.  We were either always too broke or too busy.  This year has been a year of finding a balance, though.  It’s been a year of saying no to good things to say yes to better things.  Some of those better things are planned Summer dates with each other.  (Planned because life is still crazy busy, and also planned because we want to be deliberate about going out and DOING things rather than just collapsing in front of our screens during our downtime).

Yesterday it was a glorious 25-30 degrees Celsius out.  For this interior-raised girl, it never truly feels like Summer until you hit at least 30.  We packed up a picnic and grabbed the camera bag, heading down into the city around 2pm.  We realized about half way there that I had to look at some locations for a shoot next week, and all our gas and parking instantly became a business write-off.  We used my hospital employee pass to secure $8 parking for the day, and pulled our bikes out of the car where we had systematically squeezed them in.  (And yes, I immensely enjoyed using a discount from one job as a write-off for a second job).  

We biked through the city streets and over to Stanley Park where our first stop was the aquarium.  We’ve never been as the $34 per head puts it way out of our usual price range for activities.  But we were told it was awesome by numerous people, and when I found out there were dolphins, it sealed the deal.  And it was worth it.  Every cent.  We spent a good 3 hours there and still didn’t see everything!  I think I chewed through 1/3rd of my camera battery in that time.  It was really hard to narrow it down to some of my favourites, but here's my attempt at giving you a glimpse of all the cool sights there:

Next up on our agenda was an evening bike around the seawall.  We’re not sure how many hours it takes to go all the way around as we were took our time, scouted for photography locations, and stopped to enjoy a picnic half way:

As the sun started to set, we decided to head over to the far side of the park and complete our circuit.  Stopping for smoothies along the way, we eventually plunked ourselves down on a grassy hill and settled in to wait the couple hours until dark.  We didn’t bring a tripod, but we stacked the bikes on top of each other and wrapped the gorilla pod around the handle bars and that sufficed just fine.  The last time I attempted to photograph fireworks (two years ago - wow time flies), I think I made Nick a little crazy spending more time fiddling with my settings than enjoying the show with him.  This time I was smart.  I researched my settings ahead of time, got it right on the first try, and operated the camera on Bulb mode with my remote so I could fire the shots without even looking and thus also be in the moment with Husband :)

The show finished up just before 11pm, and we got on our bikes for the 20-minute ride back to our car - uphill.  I think we got more exercise yesterday than we have all year combined!  We found our bed shortly before 1am, and were rudely awakened by the 6:20 alarm a few short hours later, but it was all worth it :)