Happy Friday!

Happy Friday everyone!  I enjoyed a nice, relaxing day today, considering it is my Friday off from work. It's been a week of few blog posts because I've been busy at work (shocker, I know!).  I've found that I love being busy, but by the time I come home, I'm utterly exhausted, hence no blog posts since Monday.  My hope is to not let my exhaustion get in the way of blogging.  Even though the audience is few, I enjoy sharing what's going on in our lives, and it's definitely liberating to write down feelings and thoughts whether anyone is reading or not (although it's nicer to believe that people are reading--don't be shy, let us know you're here by commenting on a post or two).

Anyway, as I was saying, I had a good Friday.  I slept in until 10am.  Oh, how I LOVE sleeping in.  Workdays I am up well before the sun rises and am sitting at my desk by 7am. Today I caught up on email, watched yesterday's episode of Real Housewives of Orange County (man, Lynne is a MESS), WORKED OUT (more to come in a future blog post on my quest to get back on the health track), straightened up the apartment, took Marty to our little neighborhood dog park, took pictures of him playing, came back, thawed since it was a mere 10 degrees outside, and played around with the photos on Photoshop Elements.

(I added some color pop and fun textures to this one)

(Marty playing with his Wubba)

While he was sniffing around the park, I took a couple pictures of our surroundings.  We live very close to downtown, as evidenced by this picture of the Willis Tower (aka Sears Tower aka BIG WILLY) from the dog park:

And just on the other side of the dog park are the Metra/Amtrak rails.

As you can tell by these photos, I'm experimenting a bit with different styles, editing, etc. until I find my style.  I feel a little silly with so many different feels of photos, but it's all in the learning process.  Which brings me to my next topic...

Tomorrow, I am heading to my first ever in-person, live photography class.  It is on lighting, which I know very little about.  It's a seven hour long class, so I'm sure to learn a LOT!  Raul is looking forward to catching up on his DVR'd NFL ProBowl practices, Scrubs, and other shows that I don't watch with him.  Hope that everyone has a wonderful weekend!

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A Little Family Time

Today we met up with family to celebrate my cousin Hannah's 8th birthday.  Following her birthday party at Make-A-Messterpiece, we went out to lunch with her family, my grandma, and my brother and sister-in-law.  It truly is hard to believe how fast my little cousins are growing up.  Hannah was born my senior year of high school, and I'm happy that I've had the chance to spend many, many holidays with her and her family.  I feel like she is growing like a weed.  I look back at our wedding pictures and think she looks totally different in just a few months. Such a pretty girl!

I've become the annoying one with the camera and gladly captured some of the moments from our lunch.  Since I bought my new MacBook earlier this month, I have been playing with Photoshop Elements to take my pictures up a notch.  All of the pictures below have been edited, some more than others.  I've been doing a lot of reading and playing around with the program to learn what its potential is.  While my goal is to get great pictures SOOC (straight out of the camera), I thought it wouldn't heart to learn how to edit. If any of you out there are interested in learning more about photography or Photoshop/Photoshop Elements, please leave me a comment, and I'll gladly write a post about some of my favorite blogs and websites that I use as resources.

Now, onto the pictures...

The Birthday Girl

Hannah and her mom (my Aunt Laurel)

Cousin Emma and Sister-in-Law Jess

Hannah and Laurel

Cousin Emma and her static-y hair.  She insisted I take several pictures!

Emma peeking thru Raul's arms

My beautiful Grandma JoAnn

Cousin Christian

It was a great lunch filled with lots of conversation and beer.  They had 130 beers on draft which made the selection all that much more difficult, but we managed to try a few good ones!

Raul and I are spending the evening cheering on the COLTS!  We're looking forward to a relaxing Sunday, and I'm especially looking forward to my day off of work on Monday.  Hope that you all are having a great weekend!

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Marty the Model

To his liking, or probably not, Marty has become my model for practicing my photography skills around our itty bitty apartment.  He makes an adorable subject and can be calm or crazy or entertaining, whatever my lens desires.  

If you don't like pictures of adorable dogs such as Marty, I suggest you don't visit this blog again, because there are many more to come. Ha! Especially with my new hobby and desire to learn just about anything and everything about photography.  I hope to share a bit of what I learn thru this blog, but I figure I better practice a bit more before I go sharing any knowledge and pretending like I know what I'm doing.  I also don't want to put myself out there too much in case I suck at it.  But, I have to say, I'm pretty proud of this picture.  I might just have to frame it!

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