white christmas

christmas eve

i left everything to the last minute, which left me snowed in for the past week without a tree, and, as i discovered this afternoon, without a lot of food in the house. so for christmas eve dinner, i used a tray full of almost too-ripe vine ripe tomatoes for a curried peanut and tomato soup along with roasted potatoes and roast beef with dijon sauce. very unchristmas-y of us, but perhaps reflective of our unfestive mood. the snow and, in andrew's case, work, kept us from being home with our families this year, so it's just the two of us this. and of course the cat.

wishlist

apparently i left the web browser window open to my beloved "chirp" china collection for andrew to find, but i'm disappointed that it is no longer on sale (although the platter is, and wasn't before). why oh why did i wait so many months? so in a way, this is my want, but don't-want, wishlist. don't want because everything is too damn expensive to justify spending any money on. except for maybe pointe shoes. aaaaaaand the flour sifter.

i thought after reading and reading and reading about getting the widest lens, that canon made a 7mm one, but i think i'm mistaken. at any rate, the new full frame 5D mark II is $5300 cheaper than the nikon equivalent (because i think the D700, although full-frame, isn't worth comparing considering how similar it is to my D300), and with the 45mm tiltshift being $730 less, and even the availabilty of two more tiltshifts...i may end up shooting with two different brands. which in the photo world seems almost sacrilegious ....but i feel like my nikkor 18-200mm lens is so versatile i'd never give up on nikon as my everyday "point-and-click" (albeit large, and, at times, heavy).

snow, snow, go away, come again some other day

i managed to break my snow chains within the last four days, and after many phone calls to different schuck's around town, i realized that a good old tire shop had an ample supply. needless to say, the weather and worry of family members has marooned me here for christmas.

gifts

you know that you have a rare friend when she goes out, braves the mall with a bored husband at her side, and actually does your christmas shopping for you. this such friend is jenna, and i am very indebted to her for rounding up three perfect gifts i had in mind.

we had a gift exchange at work today, and after much thought and exacto-knife cut outs of everything from the latin text "i p.v." to the yellow and black halves of a macrobid capsule and a failed attempt to reproduce any auxiliary label in vinyl form, i finally came up with the perfect design for my pharmacy intern: the chemical structure of vicodin, lest she be relegated to the mundane life of retail pharmacy and lose all her book knowledge.

cassie imparted some wisdom upon jenna and me some months ago, giving us a warning about life after fifty that she had wished someone would have had the foresight to give to her. that the hair down there goes away. so i brought to life a new design that i'd had at the back of my head for over a year, so that she could always lay claim to ownership of some patch:

jenna got me a fantastic pair of mucklucks so now i have my coveted calf-high house booties to protect me from the cold hardwoods. i ordered her some cute digs from zappos, but despite the one day shipping, my saturday order got held up on the 21st and the tracking shows this message: "7:00 P.M. ADVERSE WEATHER CONDITIONS."

in the words of lisa loeb, it's a snow day...

outside my dance studio grow ookonoomus

the morning of...

here are the few short-lived moments i enjoyed with my d-slr the day of the wedding. i do somewhat regret not making use of it when i had it in tow and had a bit of down-time throughout the day, though it was perhaps a little more silly of me to forget about our credit-card sized point-and-click the whole day.

i made everyone's jewelry (which literally took place within 14 hours of these these photos being taken), and aimed to create chunky, opaque necklaces, which proved to be just as stunning and bold as i thought they would be. none of that dainty swarovski business for me....just look how these necklaces stand out in the photographs! i spent an exhorbitant amount of money on gemstones, despite my fifty percent wholesale discount, with the intent of using just a few stones from each strand for each necklace. however, each one of my girls, completely independent of each other, picked up one particular strand, and immediately wrapped it around their neck. while certainly not expensive, it was the only one i had, and tiara ended up getting it in the end:

special thanks to my mom's hairdresser friend who singlehandedly did the hair for five women before the clock struck one. she was originally supposed to have two assistants, but she managed to pull it off even after they bailed. while i was busy putting on makeup, she was working her fingers off getting everyone else's hair done, and even burned herself with the curling iron a few times.


also, a very special thanks to darlene, the best man's mother, who not only opened up her gorgeous house for us ladies to get ready in, but prepared a fabulous breakfast, and then went out to buy fabulous lunch foods...she even made a special trip for me to get bagels since i'm one of the rare vancouver natives that doesn't eat sushi.

this is why a hair trial run is of utmost importance:

my hair actually turned out very lovely the first time around...my mom's and vanessa's, though, not so much. and the word that came to mind was, texas....big, southern, hair.










i let vanessa chop, chop, chop her hair down within a couple weeks of the wedding with no qualms whatsoever. this, however, proved to be quite the unwelcome challenge for my mother's hairdresser friend.











uh oh...what's going on atop her head...











vanessa had been beyond patient with me with many things, but i think this was the only legitimate "i'm not impressed" look i received from her through the whole wedding ordeal.








a little more fussing, and voila!

not quite as elvis-like, although not quite the idea we had been going for. actually, now that i look at the file names, this hairstyle actually came before the huge evlis heights were reached, and in all the images i have of the end result, i managed to chop out the volumous mass of hair in my trademark "why-do-you-always-cut-off-everyone's-foreheads" style. in the end, we concluded her hair was way too short to attempt anything but free-flowing curls, which she thoroughly enjoyed on the big day.

eastlake

our church held a worship night this evening that included baptisms and baby dedications, and it also marked the launch of their new cd, two. i took a walk around the church for the first time since they moved to the new building, and i realized that the kids' rooms have ski ball, guitar hero, arcade games, and chuck-e-cheese style basketball hoops! wow, who ever said sunday school was boring?