At I ♥ Faces this week, the theme is

~ Reflection ~

And not the thoughtful kind, but the I-see-another-me kind!

As a contributor, I’m not eligible to win, just to play! 

This shot was taken a couple years ago.  It was a cold, spring day in need of hot cocoa with marshmallows…do you see Ethan and me in the tea kettle? 

And another reflection shot of just me, taken last year, also as part of my dailies.  The caption I wrote with it follows…

Thinking…inside the box.

I look through my camera with my left eye, with my right eye squeezed shut and the right side of my face contorted in a grimacing wink.  I never knew how much until I took a series of shots to get this shot.  A little later, as I stood in front of my bathroom mirror to brush my teeth, I noticed lines on my face (the temporary sort you get when you fall asleep on a wrinkled-up pillow case) extending from the corner of my eye like stretched crow’s feet.  Gasp!  All that squinting to look through my viewfinder is causing the right side of my face to age faster than the left side!  Do I need to train myself to look with my right eye in order to balance this out?  I don’t think I’m coordinated enough to do that!  I can’t even put my coat on using my left arm first…my right arm ends up flailing around looking for my right sleeve and I have to give up, take it off and start again with the right.  Maybe I need to invent a photographer’s face cream, just to be used on the squinty side of the face, to keep it looking as fresh and fair as the opposite side.  Hah!  I believe this falls under the category of suffering for your art, right?

Last weekend, I did a super fast shoot with the children of a good friend.  These kids are so beautiful, which is not surprising because mom and dad are, too!  Little Miss was “into” it; Little Mister… not so much…not surprising for a nine year old boy!

All shots taken between 6:45-7:10 pm with the Canon 40D,  Canon 85mm f/1.8 lens at f/2, and a little fill flash from a Canon 580 EX II set at -1.

I have some things to say and some photos to share, but I’m caught up in too-much-to- do-land at the moment, so I’m going to make this brief.

• Ethan lost tooth number seven, as of this morning.  Number six was extracted a couple weeks ago, using the nerf dart gun method again.  This time, by me.  This morning, it mostly worked again, but I had to give a final tug to the dental floss.  Ethan wasn’t a huge fan, but he got over it quickly, and then acted as if he’d done the whole thing himself.
• My own dental procedure, a small little filling, went quickly and smoothly last week.
• We’ve been working on a patio improvement project at our house.  Hours of primering and painting by me.  Hours of new roof installation by Seth.  Before and after pics to be shared soon.
• I had a 24-hour escape this weekend, with some girlfriends, to a Beth Moore conference.  It was awesome and I highly recommend the experience!  Beth wrote a bit about her time in Portland on her blog.  I plan to write up my notes into a more cohesive and coherent format and share them here…whenever that gets done!
• We’ve been having glorious weather.  70-80 degree weather.  Live outside weather.  Summer-like weather.  Glorious, I tell you!

It’s self-portrait week at I ♥ Faces and the rules require you to be holding the camera (no tripods allowed).  So, I dug up this goof-ball shot!

As a contributor, I’m not eligible to win, but sometimes it’s fun to play along!

Since baseball practice has come into our life, the busyness factor seems to have increased by…well, a lot.  I’m a homebody and don’t usually have my days filled with leaving the house.  There are probably a number of crazy reasons for that, but for whatever reason, I just don’t do a bunch of running around.  We usually have Awana on Monday nights, and Ethan has swimming on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons.  Now, we have baseball on Monday and Wednesday nights, (still trying to figure out how Ethan can get back to one more Awana so he can finish his book!), swimming on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, and some Fridays we get to do a kid swap with another family so Seth and I can have a date night.  (Yay!)  Last week, we threw in a trip to the dentist for Ethan (which was super easy and soooo much better than last time), and a regular check-up at the dermatologist for me (no worries there).  This week, it was my turn at the dentist.  Yesterday, in fact.

I really don’t mind going to the dentist.  To my numerous skills (such as staying up late and sleeping in, avoiding laundry, and passing off cooking duties) I’ve added flossing.  I’ve become quite good at it over the last year, and so I go into the dentist with some strong gums and a sense of accomplishment.  A year ago, the dentist decided I should have a minor issue on one tooth addressed, but I just wasn’t in the frame of mind to be able to handle that.  And I didn’t want to disrupt my nice, easy-going trips to the dentist where I lay back, listen to the easy listening tunes on the radio, wish I could actually watch my teeth getting cleaned, and remind my hygienist that I’m inept and can’t close my lips around the little water-sucker-outer-thingie.  So, I pretended I didn’t hear his advice, or something.  Anyway, a year has gone by, and all my flossing has not improved this particular little spot on one particular tooth, and so I decided to go ahead and get it fixed this time.  They didn’t have time next week, but they had time…today!

And so, I will go back to the dentist today.  And I’m a bit nervous.  I’ve only had good experiences with this dentist, whom we’ve been seeing for about 10 years.  But I haven’t had any sort of procedure done since my wisdom teeth were pulled when I was in college, and I don’t have the most fond memories of that.  It was fast, and the teeth weren’t difficult to get out and I healed fine, but I did not appreciate having needles jammed into my mouth, and I really did not enjoy the gas in my mask and spent the time breathing as shallowly and as little as possible so I wouldn’t feel like I was floating and spinning around the room.  Hmm…maybe that had something to do with why I didn’t enjoy myself.

Seth had his very first filling taken care of last year and said that this dentist did a terrific job and it was painless and easy.  I hope I can have the same experience today.  Wish me luck!

Tomorrow, I get to go listen to Beth Moore speak, spend the night in Portland with some girlfriends, and then hear Beth again on Saturday morning.  That will be a fantastic way to end my week!  Have a wonderful weekend, friends!

I’m still here!  Thanks for the inquiries and encouragement to update the ol’ blog.  I can’t believe it’s been 10 days since I’ve posted.  Time has sped up this month, and it was already going fast.  I think I’m regaining my bearings.

Monday marked the two year anniversary of when I began my photo-a-day project called Pieces of Me.  It started out as a self-portrait-a-day project (some part of me had to be in each photo).  That was tough and lasted for six months.  The last year-and-a-half has been filled up with a picture of something, each day.  (By the way, a “day” in my photo-project world refers to the hours that I’m awake, even if they technically spill over into the wee hours of the next actual day.)  It’s been a fascinating process.  I’ve learned a ton in the last two years, about photography and post processing and what makes a photo interesting to me.   I’ve learned that I can never come to the end of my learning about photography, which is actually very cool and daunting and exciting.  Recently, I’ve learned that even though my camera is basically another appendage, I would like to take a break from filling up my daily photo galleries and concentrate on filling up my family galleries.  The last two years have given me the habit of shooting, a lot.  That was one of the goals at the outset…to get in the habit of seeing things through a camera’s lens.  I haven’t arrived at a place where I’m satisfied with my vision (will I ever?), but I’ve made progress.  And I’ve shot, a lot.  And my family galleries are filling up.  But I’ve come to a place where I would rather not have photo time being spent on a pure daily gallery.  I’ll probably still take photos nearly every day, but instead of populating a separate daily gallery, I’ll be concentrating on building a visual history of our family and the beauty we see and what fills our days.  It’s really just a simplifying process.  I like simple.

So, it’s time for a new chapter.  I’ll be making photo books out of my daily galleries, and I’ll keep shooting in order to make photo books out of my family galleries.  And I’ll keep sharing photos here.

Like this one…

We had artichokes for dinner tonight, and as I was placing them into the pot of boiling water, I thought that I should take a picture of them, and then run out and take a picture of the indestructible one we have growing in our herb garden.  (The thing survived being unplanted and ignored for weeks last summer, and then a snowy winter, and now it’s growing well!)  And then I had to finish it up with a shot of one on my plate, with a little dipping bowl of garlic butter.  Yum-O!

And to spread the hope that Spring is on its way to those who feel a bit behind in that area, here are a few recent flowery shots…

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Mooching more spring off a neighbor’s tree…

Predicted high temps for the next four days…61, 70, 75, 69.

WooHoo!!!