has anyone else unwittingly picked a hobby of your fiance's that you never thought you were capable of doing? i used to like hanging out in the room, doing something else while the boy played games whose names i could never recall. soon, many games had nicknames, so i retained a strong hold of my girlyness. when i was younger, super nintendo was the coolest thing, and i'm sure we all had gameboys (heck most people our age, guys and girls alike, have the nintendo DS), and donkey kong country and all the sequels rocked my world. but then the videogame industry introduced the concept of 3D, which soon dominated, and i couldn't maneuver my little mario guy in a straight line, quickly became dizzy, and gave up. gone were the days of running across the screen, from left to right, jumping on bad guys. after dating my fiance, i came to learn these were called "platform games." when we first started dating he trained me to play a soccer game, Winning Eleven, and he was surprised at how good at it i became. somehow he managed to suck me into playing Resistance with him last year and with the recent releases of Call of Duty 4 and Halo 3, I can officially play "first person shooters." not well enough to play against any hard core guys online, but well enough to get a few kills in when him and i play together....although i can totally beat a pack of 16 guys online in Motorstorm.

when Rock Band first came out, my fiance and I happened to stumble upon it by fluke at costco and snatched it up. an old boss of mine had pre-ordered it on amazon, but then he was told it wasn't going to arrive in time for christmas! so i called around to try and find it as a surprise, then went to circuit city. as i was paying for it, the sales-guy was telling me how lucky i was to get it, to which i said, i already have it - this is for a friend. then he proceeded ask if i had guitar hero, yes. a ps3? yes. a wii? yes. an xbox 360? yes. and then he said "wow! so you're a gamer!" that left me totally speechless. somehow in the course of the last three years, my fiance had transformed me into a gamer?! but it's okay. my DS is light pink and i like chopping things in zelda. and it's also okay, because it's cute to see him happily pick up my new honking-big camera and take snapshots of me. and of course i always get to rub it in his face and say "how many guys have girlfriends that will help them shoot down people in world war 3?"

me and him

here's my newest post for weddingbee, because i realize that i'm going to have so many photos of my bridesmaids and so few photos of me since i'm always behind the camera, that most people are going to think i'm jenn. so i'll do some sort of pictoral-introductory post, because it's always nice to get to know the identity behind all the writing. i think i look goofy in this picture, but at least i look nice and approachable. *side note - i had gorgeously long hair for many many years...and last summer i decided to cut it pretty short so that's what i'm dealing with now...



so the mister and i went to pharmacy school together. here's a photo of us at our grad a couple years ago, which is almost like a high school prom, except everyone is in their twenties or thirties and there are no poofy dresses. he bought me a gorgeous little black dress, a la Diane vonFurstenberg, from a local consignment shop. i love all the consignment shops around vancouver - there's a handful in kits, and some really great ones on main street.

there's not a whole lot to say about pharmacy school. other than him and i lived about 2 blocks away from each other for 3 years and didn't know it! he stopped me on the bus one day, and was like - hey you live around here?

after we graduated, we took a trip with a couple friend from our class on a hawaiian cruise. ooh the sun did some nice natural light effects in this photo.

i'm involved in the indie craft scene, which seattle is great for! here, we're having lunch at The Croc in Seattle before hitting up i heart rummage - an edgy craft-fair type ordeal.




somehow i look super chinese in that photo on the right, but i'm not. i've had friends i've known for over 5 years that come up to me and ask me to translate something from chinese to english, and i'm like.....i'm not chinese! i can maybe do a bit of french, but that's it.


and these are what photos look like without the aid of natural light (ie sunlight):




i'd like to say that i've actually used my lomo supersampler, but i haven't and this is just cutting and pasting in photoshop. so that's me and him in a nutshell. he likes soccer and video games. i like sewing and making jewelry. and art.

Hatley Castle

Hatley Castle

Wedding photo courtesy of blue olive photography, based out of Vancouver, BC. I found this castle long after I had already booked my venue. Hatley Castle is about 25 minutes from Victoria, BC (which is on Vancouver Island). Apparently it was Lex Luthor's home on Smallville, and Jean Luc Bacard's school in one of the Xmen movies (I realize that's not his name in real life or in the movie, but I'm just glad I didn't call him Spock.) The ivy looks gloriously green and lush, and I even saw a photo where all the foliage was a rich red color, but I can imagine that this place would look pretty cold and unwelcoming in the winter months (unless of course it was snowing, which, as most people in the northwest will know is pretty rare...people in Seattle seem to think that Vancouver gets a lot of snow, but it's entirely untrue! And, people in Canada don't live in igloos. I was asked that once as a child.).



photos via flickr.

tim willoughby

tim willoughby is a handsome photographer hailing from south carolina. i used to say that i really didn't care for photoshop, and with the exception of a few inappropriate light flares and other random effects, i think tim's post-processing is the best i've seen, especially when applied to unexpected images like prep shots. i say a warm hello to "noise" and to the speckling of images to make them look like they're out of a 1970's self-adhesive/magnetic(?)/cellophane-paged photo albums. his use of wide angles and fish eyes is sometimes awkward in the people shots from entire galleries i've seen, but his blog is droolworthy, and he shoots some really great landscapes. i would actually recommend him as the best guy i've seen for a day after shoot. because he is so skilled at editing, he can deliver any sort of images you like - i've selected a handful of photos that show his versatility in the photoshop department, including several with a really vintage feel, as tiara had said of another photographer.

here's mini montage of our spying adventures this summer at brock house that is prefacing my newest post at weddingbee! yay, i'm a bee! so, jenn, i guess this is the closest thing you get to a "preview."

save my date!!

i spent the weekend at a craft fair next to a lovely gal selling beautiful letterpressed calendars. i came home with two and andrew was so impressed with them that the two thousand some odd dollars i had estimated for letterpressed invitations was totally okay with him.
so back to planning for a wedding. i couldn't believe it was the end of november a few days ago....it literally felt like august was last month! so save the dates are going to get combined with christmas cards if i can finally get my act together. if i had more time, i'd go ahead and design an entire calendar set with beautiful images for each month, but here we are in december already and i'd still have to spend money on weddings favors for the day of. after finding nothing by way of blackberry illustrations, i drew made my own. pick your favorites, or mix and match.


so here's a look at what flickr has for save the date ideas. see also some beautiful letter press images. so what ideas for save the dates? there's always simple cards, or a simple piece of paper. a sh*tty fridge magnet that doesn't hold up anything but itself, random moo cards that'll probably get tossed, post cards, a card with a photobooth strip, a faux polaroid magnet with the date scribbled on the bottom white part......there must be more options than this?