Time to move on

Christmas is over and now it is time to move on to the new year. I can't believe it is almost 2009. Where did the time go? My kids are grown with kids of their own (well half of them have kids of their own) My grandkids are getting to be mini-adults and still time rushes on. How fast and fleeting are the days...grownups wanting to be children again and children wanting to rush into adulthood. Ah..the precious present to appreciate....living in the here and now and not wanting things to be different than what they are. Ha...easy to say very hard to live that way. Soon it will be time to change my word of the year. It was relax and I think the new year needs something different....I still have a few days to think of what that might be.

Till then here are a couple of picture from Christmas...


Stan and Noel made this picture for me...now I have to find a cool place to hang it in the house...I have a chocolate wall that it would look great on but that means moving the pastel pictures of my kids when they were young...hum....


And this greeted me when I walked into Noel's house on Christmas. There is a story behind this...this is not the original but a newly made copy. When Danica was in 5th grade she made a corn husk doll. One day she got very mad at me and hung it from the balconey of the house we lived in. That one only said "MOM" on it....I so wish I had saved that little corn husk doll with it's nametag...I would have liked to give it to Madison, Danica's daughter, who is just like her. Maybe someday this one will show up at Danica's house hanging from something...as they don't have a balconey to hang it appropriately from :)
Merry Christmas all...Happy new year

More snow and a new puppy :)

We are getting snow once again here...whoopee.....of course I don't have to drive in it so it isn't bad for me :) And I picked up another male pup today...he is cute but will have him checked out by my vet come Tuesday when he is in before the holidays

Still snowing :)

It is day 5 and it is still snowing...we have lived in the Northwest for over 16 years now and have never had so much snow last so long in all that time. We have about 10-12"...the top layer being powder and the bottom layer pure ice. Needless to say I am staying put getting things done at the house that need to get done here. One of those things was to post more pics of snow dogs....



Bailey

Annie

Most of the gang...

Keeping watch over their flocks???

So many times you see these really cute pictures of people taking pictures of peoples backs..well I thot this was a cute one of my "furkids" sitting on the deck watching the others play

Ok...had to add these too

Ok...had to put these up too.




Bailey picking off snowballs on her fur

Now for the funny ones :) I am old enough to know better :) But it was a fun trip down the mountain until I saw I was going to run into Emma who decided she needed to go down with me. The need to protect her from me made me try and get out of her way...well the blue saucer is what she was riding on and the boogie board type of thing in the air is...or should I say was mine....the shadow of the body is me rolling down the hill the rest of the way :)







Notice the impacted snow-brows :) Frosty had some competition there for a bit :)

Wow it has been too long....

For those of you who get snow often this isn't a treat for you....but for those of us in the Western Northwest it is a treat to get the rare snowfalls and to have the pleasure of watching the dogs play in it....they were like little kids running non-stop through the freshly fallen snow. So being the thotful person that I am before I even got them out of bed I got my camera out and started snapping almost the minute their feet hit the snow. Wish you could see some of the action that they were doing but it was hard to catch it all...got a couple of good action shots of them running through the snow...but most of all I was just enjoying them playing in it.

Annie's first snow. Although she loved it she kept sitting in it to bite off the snowballs that would get on her feet.


Lexie's ears are flying as she runs in the snow around Hattie


Here is a snow picture and the "kids" running around the yard


Bailey was just too cute in this picture not to put it up


No..those aren't cotton balls on Riley's feet but tiny snowballs attached to his fur....actually had to rinse them off as the hairdryer wasn't melting them...even the heavy duty one I have to dry the dogs when I give them a bath...........

Well that is all the pictures that this will let me post so maybe will put more up later :) Or the one of me biffing it on the sled........... :)

Who training who?? or is it whom

I took three of my dogs to the beach and worked with them on training....here they are put in a "place" and I was so surprised that they did it and stayed..........I had put them there and then decided how much fun it would be for me to get a picture...so I got them to come to the car with me and then put them back on the rock and snapped with my little digital I keep in the car just for such handy dandy moments like this...they were all looking at me and that in itself is amazing....a new friend took this picture and made a physical copy of it for me so I have a picture of them doing what they are supposed to...can't wait till I can do this with all 6 of my dogs......right now 4 are on my lap while I am trying to type this out....ya think they love me???

Choco-latte

Haven't posted for a bit...so thot I would give an introduction to the newest of my pack...or at least I hope to add her to my pack. She isn't really chocolate...she is a sable and will change colors drastically as she grows. Now she needs a cool name :)

Life

Life has been a bit busy this week...My sister from Michigan came to Washington and we spent three days together. She had a hotel about 45 minutes away so everyday I would go and we would go do something fun and had lots of fun together.....we went to Leavenworth and to the beach and to a lake and various places to eat which each time never worked out like we were thinking they were supposed to. Tonight I took her to the train station and we said our goodbyes. She is hoping to return next year and maybe we can hit the restaurants that we didn't get to this time as each time we tried the restaurant of choice was closed :) But we laughed a lot together about it.
.
My sister Chris

And of course there was camera practice time. I met my friend in Leavenworth and she had lunch with us. She was saying something about joining facebook and her daughter hating the picture that she put on it...so I told her I would take a picture of her....so I used some of my new found skills and got this lovely picture of Melinda. It was bright bright sun...but this came out great........


My friend Melinda

Hattie

I was getting pictures of the puppies and Hattie got up where I was putting them and laid down...of course I snapped a picture of her......this is so cute.... :) But then I am prejudiced about my dogs.

Don'tcha just wish.......

Don't ya just wish that you could sometimes live the life of a puppy? You could lay around
and sun yourself with all your buddies laying around you waiting for the next meal? And you don't even have to do anything to get it except let out a little cry and someone comes in and lays beside you and lunch is served? Hum...maybe in my next life :) I will come back as a puppy and live the life of leisure...at least for a few weeks...until I have to spend more time playing and learning to go potty in appropriate places.

Can you say Remote??

Ok...what happens when two friends and one stranger meet to play with their cameras one day? Lots of pictures taken and lots of laughs shared. As promised here are the pictures I promised a few days ago of Jamie, Wendi and I meeting at a park near us to take pictures. Jamie thot it would be a good idea to have a picture taken of all three of us and even picked out the tree we would be under. So after we shot a bunch of other pictures we took our newly practiced skills and set up the tripod to take a group shot. Jamie thot we could use the self-timer but aha....I had my remote with me....so Jamie set up her camera to take the picture....and the remote wouldn't work unless it was too much in the picture.....or if we used her camera...so we switched to Wendi's camera....


So we tried again....but the remote didn't like being that far from the sensor...so the giggles started as we tried to get a picture of the three of us......


Well as you can see that meant more giggles and out right guffaws as we tried to snap one picture that looked semi-normal of all of us......



Finally we got one picture of all of us that wasn't bad...geez...now that I think about it we only got one halfway decent one. period....no extra in case shots....good thing we all turned out somewhat ok.......



oh a ps....I did crop the picture so that my arm that was up in the air isn't noticeable in this picture...
Thanks girls for a fun Sunday afternoon.

Photo Shoot Times

I started a photography class about a month ago and in the introductions I saw that there was someone from Stanwood...I was quite amazed as Stanwood is not exactly the heart of anywhere but a small town in Western Washington. We used to call it a two blink town as if you blinked twice you would miss it...however in the last 16 years that we have been in Washington Stanwood has grown...well to get to Camano Island you have to go through Stanwood so I was quite surprised that there were people in the same on-line class that I was in that lived very close to me. We decided to get together and practice our new found skills and to help each other out :) We met at Church Creek Park and had a ball shooting different apertures, shutter speeds, manual, different ISO's and any other camera talk that I am forgetting. So here are a couple of the hundreds of pictures that I shot yesterday.


Jamie and Wendi on the tetter tatter. I am standing on a picnic table :)


Here is Wendi taking a picture of Jamie


Jamie playing with her camera settings


We were tossing rocks into the stream and seeing if would could catch the splash....here is just one of the dozens I got :)

Thanks Jamie and Wendi for a great time........

ps..there should be a picture coming of the three of us......and there is a whole story that goes with that picture

Naughty Lucy and others

We have these really cool plants with yellow flowers that bloom awesomely in the summer...they are getting gangley right now and the dogs are loving getting into them. This picture of Lucy in the plant doesn't show how high off the ground it is but it is a very large bush and she is sitting on the top of the plant. The three "red" puppies I have, Lucy, Abby and Riley are getting in the plant and chewing on the stalks of it. They are totally trashing the plant but it is fun to watch them...and to get my camera out while they are still in the plant.


This picture actually shows how big that bush is...and yep...there are three dogs in that bush.

Pink Frog???

I have heard of seeing Pink Elephants altho I have never seen on myself..but Pink Frogs??? I was outside and looked in my dying Daisy bush to see if there was a frog on the flowers like there has been recently...I think I have a family of them living under my deck......well........this time the "female" of the batch must have been sunning herself as she had pink legs and an iridescent pink stripe down her back.....ah ha...where is the camera when you need it.....but I got my trusty little Nikon out and snapped a few pictures of this pink frog.....just so people wouldn't think me crazy...well at least not for seeing Pink Frogs............the picture looks more salmon colored but it really was a Hot pink color on those legs...maybe she had leg warmers in anticipation of the drop in temperatures to come :)

Too Cute

Sometimes a picture comes across your computer that you just have to share. I sold two puppies to a lady named Tiana on Friday....she sent me an update and some pictures...one of the pictures was this one...the puppies asleep together...but more than that...they formed a shape of a heart...now ya gotta admit..that is pretty cute.

Equal time

Just didn't want to make poor Abby feel left out so I thot I would post this picture of her that I took yesterday. Sharpened it up a bit...was playing with apertures and my new 18-200mm lens. I love that thing...you can go from quite far away to very close as you can see in this picture she was right in front of me.



Oh the top picture was done with the tutorial on Noel's blog :)

Smart curve tutorial trial

Noel posted a tutorial for Smart Curve on her blog so I decided to try it with this cute picture of Lucy...one of my new puppies..............hum...will need to give equal time to Abby to I think...maybe tomorrow

Before Smart curve

After Smart curve

Waiting

I have been waiting to post this picture of a snail that followed me home from Noel's house way back in the beginning of August....she never noticed it was gone till she saw it at my house on the back porch one day......well she thot she would get even and stole my chicken....and then I didn't even notice it was gone as I was always busy watching the puppies to see if they were pottying or getting into any trouble...the entire family was in on it and thot it funny that I never noticed it gone....oh well...so much for my powers of observation...guess they have gone down the tube....or should I say...to the dogs??



don't you think that he looks very happy at my house??? what I think is funnier is that I didn't notice that the snail was gone :(

Dust Bunnies

Lucy got under one of my pieces of furniture and found this dust bunny...it made such a cute beard for her that I had to get my camera and snap a few shots. Now...if I could just teach her how to collect all the dust bunnies and put them in the trash for me.......hum...she does have a tail...maybe I could put a dust mop on the end of her tail and she could become my cleaning lady :) Whatever she is cute collector of dust bunnies for me

Big Boy Haircut

Here is a pre-haircut picture of my little boy :)

My baby got his first haircut today...he was getting so shabby. He looks like a big boy now. He wasn't crazy about standing there while I clippered him but he endured it most of the time. It helped that he was tethered so that he couldn't go very far. Didn't do his face much as he was tired of me primping him....poor baby :)

Three Queens

This is the last layout for the Type-Writer class. We were to write in the third person a fairy tale type of entry of someone and an object that was important to us. Well I didn't quite do that but I did use these photos and tell a story of three queens.
WOW it was amazing! I learned some things about journaling and lots of new things about Typography. It was a four month course packed into two weeks. To make things a little simpler in the course we had templates and just added papers, pictures and words to make them uniquely ours. We got these amazing tips on how to write our feelings out on paper....well we got them but not sure I can remember or even used them but I loved the class........so if you have nothing else to do...hop on over to Jessica Sprague's website and see when the next class is going to start :)

Layout about Young Jackie

I have wanted to do these pictures into a layout for a while. When this lesson came up it was fun to be able to use all four of the pictures in one layout. We were to journal about ourself...not sure if I did the lesson like I was supposed to but this is what I came up with....

Shutter Speeds

I am taking a photography class from Candice Stringham and our first lesson was on shutter speeds....it has taken forever for me to get this posted cuz I couldn't find the shutter speeds and guess from some information from PSE5...hope they are close :)
We were sitting at a restaurant where I had brought my camera to ask Noel about shutter speed readings on my Nikon. So I practiced by having Torrey shake her head back and forth....and got these really cool pictures.