Manual Labor Day Weekend

The above shot is how my "new" desk looked before I got to work on it this weekend. I say "new" because it's new to me but this wood appears to have been on this earth a long time before I got to it! It's actually reclaimed wood that my dad rescued from an old barn. I love that this desk is going to have such a better story than "yeah I went down to Pottery Barn, dropped a couple grand, now I have me a nice workspace." This desk is going to be almost free and my dad and I made it together and it's custom!

This shot is what it looks like now. It's still not quite done. There are a few more steps before it gets to meet its new home in my fuschia office!

WTF?!

So let's just file this under "things you don't see every day" and move on. And thank God for camera phones!

Seriously?

Canon announced today that they are releasing their new Canon 5D Mark II. This is horrible news for me. Why you ask? Because I’ve been waiting months to buy a 5D and have waited and waited, saying they must come out with a new one considering the 1st version is THREE YEARS OLD! That’s like 86 in electronic years. Last week I couldn’t take it anymore. I broke down and finally purchased a 5D. I checked the status from UPS and it’s this close to being delivered TODAY on the day Canon laughs at me saying “haha you fool! You couldn’t wait one more week!” I have never been known as a patient person. I think this situation just proves that. Oh well, I’m going to play with my 5D tonight like it’s the apple of my eye and will resist the urge to treat it like the red-headed step child that it is.

Image from: Photography Bay

WOW!!!

I haven’t posted in over a month! I probably lost my entire readership of three due to my absence :(. If I promise to post more will you come back to me? So this must mean that nothing has been going on in my life and I’ve had nothing to write about, right? No way Jose! I’ve been a busy little bee!

It all started at the beginning of August when I attended the Free to Succeed Tour with DJ and Jasmine Star…and it was AMAZING!!! I met my American Idol J* and I love her more now than ever. She is utterly fabulous! And DJs pretty cool too. JK…I LOVE him a lot too! He’s really business minded and I love that coming from a business background myself. He’s all about streamlining your business, outsourcing what needs to be outsourced and doing only what you are great at and love to do! Hallelujah! And he has some fabulous programs for photographers that I can’t wait to get.

After The Tour, we went up to the Freedom House, which is his house up in the mountains of Santa Barbara. It’s a seriously SICK house. But my favorite part about his house party was meeting my new friend and neighbor, Jen Harris! We were just chit-chatting in a group and she was like oh yeah I just moved to Camarillo. And my shy self was screaming in my head “OMG I live in Camarillo too!!!” then I proceeded to actually say it out loud and started talking about Cam-town and it turns out we are neighbors! So cool! So we went to lunch a couple weeks later and she’s so nice, and giving, and helpful! It’s so fabulous to have someone in your same town that can be your friend and fellow photographer so you can talk shop too! (I’m just realizing there are way too many “!!!” in this post. I’ll try to pare it down in the future but I’m just too excited in this post!)

Then after that something else REALLY exciting happened but I’ll have to wait to post on that till I have the physical evidence to show you. Hehehe.

Then my new friend, Jen, and I went down to the Truth or Dare Tour with Dane Sanders, Robert Evans, Sara France, and Carlos Baez. It was fabulous! Robert shot Brad and Jen’s wedding and Tom and Katie’s wedding and he showed us some pics of TomKat’s wedding that were published in Europe but not here so that was cool to see! Sara was the cutest thing ever and she’s works a lot with Apple which would be so cool! I’m an Apple geek. I can’t wait to use some of the tricks she showed us when I have clients! Carlos was hilarious! OMG! The big joke was that he has a gay stylist and trust me you can tell! Too cute. I would love to just sit and have a meal with that guy one day. And then Dane finished up the evening and he was great! I had already read his book Fast Track Photographer which is an amazing book for photographers. My only comment to Dane is STOP GIVING IT AWAY FOR FREE!!! Everywhere I go I’m being offered a free PDF of his book. It’s too good to be given away! He deserves some scrilla for the work he did on that baby! And as a presenter he was awesome! Such a good guy with a big heart.

That evening Jen and I went to dinner with Jen’s friend, Scarlett Lillian. Dinner was fabulous and at a very fabulous restaurant at the LAX Sheraton. (More to come on Scarlett, keep reading…this technique is called a “teaser”)

THEN I went to PartnerCon. I guess you are technically supposed to be a member to go but I kind of snuck in. I mean I paid and all. But I didn’t have a “studio ID” so I just went the morning of the conference and had a girl put in a fake studio ID so I could register. Hey they still got the money! And I will probably be a member in the very near future, especially considering that their sales reps keep calling.

I was pretty intimidated to be at PartnerCon. I think there were like 300 photographers and here I am without even a business card or a website or anything! Even though I was pretty shy everyone was so nice and welcoming. Especially Scarlett!!! I tagged along with her as much as I could because she was the only person I sort of knew, but she was so great to me. She introduced to me to many people (including THE Jessica Claire!) and let me eat lunch with her and sit with her at a couple of the meetings. I met many photographers that were so nice and jumped to give advice to a newbie. I think I’m going to really like being in a community like this! I see nothing but good times ahead…

But wait! There’s more! This is getting to be a LONG post, but I’m making up for 1.5 months!

Nate Kaiser of The Image is Found glory announced his next Shootshops and I got in! He sold out in 24 hours, but because I am a loyal stalker I got in just in the nick of time. More on Nate in another post…again a teaser to try and get my readers to come back to me. October 29th I will be in Oceanside, CA to get learned good.

And to finish this post off…another workshop that I will be attending… The Love Affair Workshop. It will be in November at the W Hotel in San Diego. It will be a whole week with Lauren Clark (we have the same color dining room), Millie Holloman, Kelly Moore, and Davina Fear. There will be a lot of estrogen and I was a little worried but in talking to my new friend, Scarlett, I discovered that she has gone to one of their past workshops and said it will be great for me! Stoked!

Ok, I’m done now. Oh and I almost forgot…Scarlett put pics of me on her blog! Coolest thing ever? I think so!!!

Lazy Weekend

I had a normal weekend. For once. As most of you know, my darling husband works every weekend, I work every weekday. So we rarely see each other for extended periods of time. He had this weekend off, and typically when we have mutual time off we plan something. But this weekend we had no real plans. A couple of ideas. But no real plans or agenda. It was nice to sleep in late, wake up and not shower, hang out around the house. On Saturday we went to Ventura to go to the fair but once we got there and ate lunch at my favorite restaurant, we decided that neither of us really had any desire to deal with crowds of people and spend money. We ran some errands and went and saw Step Brothers instead. It wasn’t awful, it wasn’t great. What could you really expect? Then on Sunday, we really did nothing. We lounged around for hours, then went and played in the pool. I’m not a huge pool person, but no one was there (where was everyone on a Sunday during the summer?!) so I got in and we had lots of fun splashing around. Then in the evening we went and saw The Mummy 3. I knew from the commercials that Rachel Weisz was missing, but I was still very disappointed by her absence the entire movie and I just couldn’t get over it. Rachel, where did you go?

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You are probably wondering why I started this post with a picture of sunglasses. Well in my San Fran post I mentioned the glasses that Mike bought that he LOVES and wishes he had gotten more of. We looked on eBay for some more, and found some that looked exactly like them in some very fun colors. These were “Turbo” not “Sport” but they looked great so we hit “Buy Now” and waited patiently for our package of SIX to arrive! They came. Not so stoked. Bummer. But they make for a cool picture! I really wanted this package because I thought the green ones would be my new best friend. Maybe they will make a debut on my face in a future post, but not for everyday wear.

Stuff

"The Story of Stuff is a 20-minute, fast-paced, fact-filled look at the underside of our production and consumption patterns." Click the link above to see this pretty cool video. I love the graphics, and Annie Leonard captures your attention. It's pretty much "another way" to look at environmental concerns and goes beyond recycling because as this video shows recycling is just not enough! I've been trying to cut down on my own personal consumerism because there is more to life than just accumulating stuff and you can't take stuff with you when you die and stuff won't make you happy and now I know I am being environmentally conscious too!

Movie Weekend

I haven’t posted a pic of my baby nephew in a while. Here he is in his Bumbo. Just before this pic he was positioned to look outside the open sliding glass door that’s behind him and he couldn’t have been happier. He’s such a cool baby. I hope he’s always this relaxed and chill. Mike hasn’t had a chance to see him very often because he works so much but he saw him this weekend and was holding him and playing with him, it was the cutest thing ever! When we got home, I was like you liked him, and he was all, he’s cool!

So, I’m sure everyone and their mother saw Batman this weekend. I’m sure because I saw them all when I was there. After we went to my parent’s house for July birthdays (yes plural, three to be exact) my sister and niece along with my husband wanted to go see it. I didn’t want to go try to see it late at night because I’m lying that I’m 25, I’m really 65 and I have a bed time. We went home before meeting them at the movie theater and I looked at Fandango.com just to see if the movie was sold out or not and it was. At this point I’m thinking alright I get to stay home now and go to bed! Not so much. They all wanted to go to a theater on the other side of town that Fandango couldn’t give me info on. So I went along. We were trying to see the 10:15 show, but it was sold out until 11:15. Again, immediately I think yeah we get to go home! Again, not so much. When I’m tired I’m cranky so I was like “I don’t wanna, I don’t wanna!” I still lost. We waited around for an hour for the movie to start. Now, you may be asking me “hey Amanda, what did you think of the movie that you drove around town and went to so much effort to see?” Well, the answer, my friend, is I don’t know. Because I fell asleep. That’s how old I am. It seemed like a really GREAT movie for the first hour and forty-five minutes of the two and half-hour running time. I’m totally bummed that I don’t know what happened. But Heath Ledger did do an awesome job. I’ve already seen the quote “I can make this pencil disappear” on someone’s Twitter. If you didn’t wait in line for an hour to see this movie this weekend then you may not know what I’m talking about. If you did then you can go ahead and quote something from the last half of the movie and I’ll be the one left out with no clue what you’re talking about.

Finally San Fran

AHHH!!! It’s been almost a month and I haven’t written about my recent trip to SF with the hub. Despite my prediction that we would bicker over silly things and spend most of our short time together trying to make up, I was surprisingly wrong! We got along beautifully the whole time. I’m pretty sure I know the reason why…I think Mikey has discovered that he just needs to do and say what I want and I’m perfectly happy and if I’m happy then he’s happy. Oh how my little bear has grown, I’m such a proud mama.

On to little tid bits of our time in the cold, overcast, city.

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We get there and drive around our hotel and notice three Indian (my FAV) restaurants right away. So we throw our stuff in our hotel room (after a lengthy check in process see previous post) and run to go eat. As we are leaving the hotel there are several sedan drivers waiting around and Mike asks their opinion of the best one in the area. The guy says we HAVE to go to this one that’s further away than all the ones I can see from where we are standing and gives us directions. Well, gives Mike directions. Never trust Mike with directions. NEVER. So we are going along and suddenly find ourselves in the scariest part of any city I’ve ever been in. We are now surrounded by obvious prostitutes and people that heavily support the underground drug industry and fear that I will feel the sharp pain of a knife in my kidney any second. Mike is trying to look at a map and I scold him “look like you know what you’re doing and walk fast!!!”

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Walking around the city we pass by some of the happiest and friendliest bums we’ve seen and the man shouts out to me “ooh lady, you got good taste. He’s WOOONDAFUL” we’ve been laughing ever since.

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Scene: Mike and I in the elevator with a hotel employee. Mike: “Your name is Hakeem?” to the gentleman wearing a nametag engraved with “Hakeem.” Me: (in my head) OH MY GOSH, he did NOT just say that! You may wonder what is wrong with this. Anyone seen the movie “Coming to America”? The second the man exited the elevator I KNEW I was going to get Mike’s LOUD impression of the father in that movie going “HAKEEM!!!” you have to hear Mike do it to really get this story…

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And some more pics...

Us in the car at the beginning of our road trip.


Our new car knows my name!!



The view from our hotel room.

Nordstrom, Forever 21, Anthropologie are just a few of the stores visible from our room!

We went to the aquarium out on Pier 39. This is me in a tunnel with millions of school fish all around. I love how they look like little lights behind me in the dark!

Mike in the tunnel. More schools. And a Starfish.

Mike getting interactive with the fish.

Me and the famous seals of Pier 39. This is the only thing I remember from my San Fran trip when I was a kid. It wasn't the season for them this time so there weren't very many.

Mike and I on the double decker bus tour. It was one of those things that you can hop on and off as much as you wanted for two days. That is, if the bus actually shows up. We waited around for 45 minutes for the first bus. And then at the end of the day I lost my ticket! Two pieces of advice: if you take a double decker bus in SF DON'T take the older run-down looking bus (we purchased our tickets without seeing the equipment) there are other newer, nicer looking buses if you wait outside Macy's in Union Square. Two: Don't keep your absolutely-necessary- to-ride-the-bus ticket in your back pocket when you are walking around all day. It will shimmy it's way out with every step you take. Fortunately for me, I was able to wave the bus map to the ticket checker as the long pushy line behind me distracted the ticket checker. Also note Mike's new shades. I've been hearing about these amazing $7 shades since we got home and how he should have bought more!

Me on a lion in China Town. To most people this is abnormal behavior. Whenever we are away from home and we see big lion sculptures, it reminds us of our big kitty, Murray.

Me on an anchor. Also possibly classified as abnormal behavior. I have no explanation for this one. I just thought it was cool. I asked Mike to pose with it and he stood next to it like a boring person, so I had to show him how it's done.

Dude, Where's Mike's Car?

This is Mike's new car! This is a stock photo from Toyota's website, but it's the same thing. I bought it for him last Friday night before we headed off to San Fran for the weekend. We looked everywhere for this exact model, in this color, with the specs that we wanted and we finally got a call Friday night that it was coming in from another dealership for us. I rushed over there while Mike was working and snagged this baby up just in time for 394 miles on Saturday morning! We didn't end up getting home until about 11pm on Friday night because after I bought it I was about a half an hour from my home with two cars so I had to drive to Mike's dealership, wait till he got off, then we had to drive back to where my car was and then home! All before we had to get up super early on Saturday. I wasn't very happy because when Mike was a salesmen he would follow people to help them get their cars home and have someone pick him up and my salesmen was NOT willing to do this even though I asked him several times...and he wants me to put "Excellent" on his evaluation of him...yeah, we'll see about that buddy!

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Quick SF story. So, going to SF was a last minute decision. We figured it was close, we've never been, we could do it cheap. I told Mike to find a hotel. So he calls me a few nights before we are set to leave and says "So, the 19th and the 20th right?" Me: "No, the 21st and the 22nd. Saturday and Sunday night." Mike: "Saturday and Sunday are the 19th and the 20th." Me: "No, not really." We eventually figured out that he was looking at JULY!!! End of story, right? Not so much when you're dealing with Mike B. We get to the hotel on SATURDAY, THE 21st and she says (surprise of all surprises): "I have you checking in on July 19th." Yes, he really did still go ahead and make our reservations for July. Oh, Mikey, how I love thee? Let me count the days...

Point A to Point B

Tomorrow Mike and I are embarking on our longest car trip ever for our 6-year wedding anniversary. I know we said no vacations this year, so we are taking a 3-day weekend road trip to San Francisco. That’s not vacation! Vacation is Cancun, Maui, Paris…somewhere that you have to fly and you stay longer than 3 days! My personal bet is that I will be pulling out my hair before we even hit the road…Mike will say something that he thinks is funny but will hurt my feelings and we’ll make up somewhere near San Luis Obispo. Mike can hardly handle the car ride to San Diego or Vegas, so this will be interesting! I haven’t been to the Frisco since I was a kid and Mike has never been and we have absolutely no plans. We barely secured a hotel a couple of days ago, we bought a GPS unit to reduce wasted hours on being lost, and we don’t have a clue what we will actually do there. We’ll probably just ask the concierge at the hotel which direction we should head and explore the city. We will really only be there one full day and two half days so there’s not a lot we can do in such a short amount on time.