Moving day

Right now, my cute son is taking his nap. My husband is at our house finishing up some concrete work and I am sitting here writing this blog. We have our new carpet in and the touching up has been completed on the paint. Now, it's packing time. I spent most of this morning packing up my kitchen. I still have a little more packing to do, but it seems like this move day has been a long time coming.

Seems as though God's timing was perfect for us on this house. We just pray we can continue to be good steward's of the money God has been providing us to make the improvements that we needed. Tomorrow will be a very different day, especially since tomorrow will be the first night we spend in our new house. No Doubt the day will be long but we look forward to being able to actually BE in our house and not have to listen to our neighbors having sex and running upstairs from us. I have no doubt that our new place will have new sets of noises, but the sex thing... that is one of the many downsides of living in a downstairs apartment and one I am happily saying good bye to.

Also, I have been planning a baby shower for my best friend Becca. She is due in September, and she has so graciously offered to watching Hezekiah during the morning until his nap time so we can get all the furniture out without worrying about him getting in the way. This baby shower, I am hoping will be a lot of fun and I look forward to seeing all the pieces of this shower coming together... including an extra special fondant cake I am hopefully having specially made for the shower by a friend of a friend of a friend... cakesbyjeanine.com. This will be one of the first events I will be able to have at our house so I am extremely excited to be able to do that FINALLY!

Anyway, onto moving day tomorrow!

It's been a little while

It's been really hard to blog these last couple of weeks between trying to pack, paint and to get our house ready, work, church, and now this week is VBS. Well, we pretty much have all our rooms painted now. We ran into a small hiccup with the addition to our house, and we're not even sure how the city allowed that room to be permitted because the roof and side of the addition is not up to code. We are taking it to the city to see if they would be willing to put up some money to help us fix the mistakes the city let pass. Anyway, it doesn't effect us moving in. With most of the house almost finished we can schedule the carpet installation and hopefully be soon moving in. We are so ready to be out of the apartments. That's pretty much it for now. More to come later.

Elena & Brian- Preview

I had a wedding at Laguna Beach this last Sunday, I have been doing some post production on these photos with lots more to do still. I am working on texture layering to give some of them some more artistic feeling to the photos. This was a very informal wedding, and I was happy to be able to be a part of this gorgeous couples wedding. It was one of the shortest weddings I have ever shot, and the sunset was quite a challenge, I was switching quite frequently to flash and no flash to get a variety of looks for the photos. Also, mastering my manual settings was quite a doozy since depending on which way my camera was faced changed my settings, either way I had a great time with this couple.

Fire

We weren't officially in the news, but yes we did make headlines because last night lighting struck our apartment complex catching on fire. It was the building directly next to us, were sitting around getting ready for dinner, we had the windows open and we heard what sounded like a bomb going off outside our door. My heart was pumping and hands were shaking, never have hard anything like it. We ran outside to make sure it wasn't our building, and sure enough the fire dept happened to be across the street at Andulka park putting out a fire from lighting striking there, and saw the smoke from the complex. We had 6 fire trucks here, and it was chaos for a little bit, but either way everyone got out safe...and the fire was out within 30 minutes causing over $100,000 worth of damage. Here's the link to the new article:
PE.com

And a picture of the fire dept putting out the fire:

Can you say renovation?

We have been very busy working on the house, we've had to arrange someone to watch Hezekiah almost all of the days since it's just not safe nor would we be able to get anything done on the house with him being there. It's been long weekends, and Andrew and Eric have been spending most nights after work on the house as well. We have had to do a lot of prep work on the walls since a lot of the walls had wallpaper. We thought only 2 rooms had wallpaper but it seems there was quite a bit more in the other rooms. We have 4 bedrooms and 1 bathroom now textured with what is called Knock Down, makes the walls looks more professionally done than the normal flat walls which shows every little hole and gash. Now, it's onto 1 bathroom, living room, laundry room, office, and kitchen to be done and then we will be ready to paint the walls within the next week or so. We have some more minor things to do, but all in all we seems to be progressing quite a bit and CANNOT wait to actually be living in the house and out of the apartment. Here are some pictures of the work being done within the last couple of days.

More photos...

Had some fun this afternoon with my camera some more... Hezekiah and Andrew were my models today. Photography is so much fun, and I just love natural lighting and how it shades the face and lights others. I think I am really going to have fun doing this sunset wedding in Laguna Beach next month. Anyway, these were m favorites from today:

Manual

Having some fun with manual settings, I love being able to just adjust the aperture or ISO and get a cool photos. Hezekiah was napping so I couldn't use him as my subject so I quickly grabbed one of my willow tree figurines and put it in front of my window. I am also testing some different methods for creating a sepia toned photos, I am very picky about sepia- I do not like ones that look too yellow. So this is one method for doing sepia with my manual settings: