Little Man's 11th birthday extravaganza

This is how we celebrated Little Man’s birthday this year. (on June 30th, not his actual birthday, which he spent with his grandparents).

We woke up late (for us) at around 8. We’ve been hearing about Nick’s Diner from our friends Antoine and Heidi for months, so this seemed the perfect time to try it out. Nick’s is a 50’s style diner with pretty cool decor and a jukebox playing fun 50’s and 60’s music. They serve breakfast all day, so we went with that. It was really tasty, especially the hash browns! And oh my lord, the biscuits…

(I’d show the food, but the lighting and all the red made our pics look super unappetizing).

We had to make a couple of stops to get a few necessities/ cupcake liners before we could go home. We tried to be sneaky, but our lack of planning made things a bit stressful.  We finally made it back home and LM was still not suspecting anything.

Jason told him they  were going to go outside and “check the mail”. Instead, they went to the movies! They saw Superman in 3D and really loved it.

Meanwhile back at the ranch, I was busy making Zombie Farm cupcakes! Also wrapping birthday presents in baby shower and Santa wrapping paper. And trying to keep the cat from eating the balloons. But mostly making cupcakes.

It started storming pretty hard when they got out of the theater, so I had to hustle to get things done so they could come home. My zombies look a little janky, but zombies aren’t supposed to be pretty anyway 😛

I ran around like a crazy person trying to finish up, and they went to Starbucks to kill a little time.

At this point, LM still didn’t know what we were planning, so it was a big surprise when they  came home to cupcakes and presents!

Opening presents. He got a book, some HexBug stuff, an RC helicopter, a new mouse, and a case for his iPod touch. And a skateboard.

Of course the Birds had to get in on the action too.

We went outside for Jason to show him his awesome skateboard moves.

Somehow I only got video of LM on the skateboard and no pictures, so here’s one I took the next day. This dude is too cool for school!

We went to hybachi for dinner. LM has requested Saito’s every year for awhile now, and we were happy to oblige! Love it there.

Sometimes it’s physically impossible for me to take a picture with my eyes open…

They always put on a good show.

The guys got chicken, and I got chicken + shrimp. We all ate WAY too much.

When we got home, we played Rock, Paper, Scissors, Lizard, Spock.

Before bed, we had cupcakes and ice cream.

This was a really great birthday. It was probably the most stressful party I’ve ever put on, with all the plan changes, but SO worth it! I’m glad we did it earlier in the summer so we could watch him enjoying his presents. The best part was that he was totally surprised! He’s used to us having the party on the last weekend he’s here. I think we all like it better this way 🙂

You can read about last year’s party here.

The stories we tell- Non-driving edition

Everyone has those stories. You know the ones I mean, the ones where we were young/stupid/drunk/etc. The ones where we look back as grownups and cringe. The stories that we should really keep to ourselves, but for some reason we’re compelled to tell. Here are a couple of mine. And I’m dragging my friend Melissa into them, because you can’t be friends with someone for almost thirty years without sharing many of “those” stories.

My best friend Melissa and I are not bad drivers, I promise. But when we were learning to drive, there were a lot of “non-driving” moments.

Like the time she got her car stuck on one of the raised lane dividers in the Kroger parking lot. My dad was with us and he hilariously tried to lift the car up off the divider. Our hero 🙂

Or the time we came out out of Walgreens and got into the wrong car. I noticed my seat covers were gone and got mad because I thought someone had stolen them. I won’t even tell you how long it took us to figure out we were in someone else’s black Camero.

Her car was acting funny one time and she got out to check under the hood. She was giving me instructions, and said “Don’t hit the gas”. But all I heard was “Hit the gas”, and almost ran her over.

Then there was that one time when I made a very bad left turn and ended up driving partway up someone’s front steps. I freaked out so bad that I made her switch seats with me and drive us off the steps and back home. Sadly, that was not the only time we had to do the switcheroo because one of us got into something we couldn’t get out of…

I swear we were never under the influence when any of these things happened. I think we just brought out the bad driver in each other!

I’m linking up with the Document Life Workshop.

Making your photos more awesome with apps and actions

I will freely admit that I’m not the best photographer in the world. In a perfect world, all of our pics would be taken in great lighting with DSLR cameras in Manual setting to get beautiful images every time. I don’t know about you, but that pretty much never happens for me. So I depend heavily on photo actions, either on my phone or in PSE. Here are a few of my favorites right now.

For the phone- Pic Tap Go, A Beautiful Mess, and Instagram

Pic Tap Go is my go-to for basic editing. I’ve tried many others apps, but this is the one that’s stuck. I love the cropping options that let you save a rectangular photo to Instagram. The sliders make it so easy to make more subtle adjustments and you can pile filters on top of each other. If you find a combination you like, save it to Recipes and use that combo on other photos. One caveat is that the app is pretty buggy right now. It crashes on me every two days or so.

My newest obsession is the A Beautiful Mess App. You can use filters to make your photos prettier, but my favorite parts are the doodles and text options. You can buy add on packs with more doodles and fonts, but the ones that come with the app are pretty great to play around with.

And of course there’s Instagram. Every photo that I edit with the first two apps eventually gets shared through Instagram. The filters are great, but don’t add as much versatility as many other apps since you can’t adjust their strength or use more than one at a time. For me, the best part of Instagram is the social media aspect. I think I have more conversations on Instagram than I do on Facebook or Twitter. I’m also excited to start playing around with the video feature on Instagram.

For the computer- CoffeeShop, Pioneer Woman, and RadLab

Some of the first photoshop actions I’ve ever used were from the Coffee Shop Blog. Rita offers a ton of PS and PSE actions- all for free! (You can also save time and support her blog by buying them all in a bundle. Just make sure you download the correct actions for the program you’re using, either PS or PSE, or they won’t work.

I’m also a big fan of the Pioneer Woman’s photoshop actions, which are also free. I almost always use her Boost and Flatten actions on my photos for the blog. If you haven’t visited her blog before, you definitely should. She has lots of photography tips, plus tasty recipes.

If you’re looking to spend a few dollars, I recommend RadLab. I got the free trial a few days ago, and I’m Loving it! You can get actions for PS and PSE, or presets for Lightroom. The RadLab people are the same ones behind Pic Tap Go, and just like the app, you can pile filters on top of each other and save your favorites to recipes.

So now that you’ve seen some of my vacation photos, (like how I snuck those in?). let’s see how these apps can take an older photo from eh to awesome!

Here is the original. Pretty bad photo taken with Jason’s old Palm Pilot from 2006. But it’s just so sweet!

Now here’s the same photo, edited with some of my favorite apps and actions. Please note that these pictures are teeny and low res. I had to blow them up a bit just to get them big enough to post. Also, I’m not doing anything to try and correct the graininess or anything like that in PSE. This is just showing the apps and actions alone, with a little cropping.

Pic Tap Go

A Beautiful Mess

Instagram

CoffeeShop

Pioneer Woman

RadLab. This is the one I ultimately decided to go with in Jason’s Father’s Day book.

There are a lot of options for even the worst photo, depending on what kind of layout you’re going for. Have fun and play around, you might find your new favorite photo effect with one of these apps or actions.

Memory Monday- Hurricane Wilma (October 25, 2005)

This post marks my 101st blog post! Pretty excited about that!

I’m taking a page out of Katie the Scrapbook Lady’s book and starting a new series of posts called Memory Monday. I won’t do them every week, but at least once a month I want to write about something that happened before I started blogging. Just a fun trip down memory lane. And I love taking blog posts and turning them into journaling for layouts.

Yesterday we felt the effects of Tropical Storm Isaac, so I have storms on the brain. Luckily we’re all safe and have power back on now. I’ll write up our experiences with that tomorrow probably.

To help me remember some of the details about Hurricane Wilma, I turned to Wikipedia. Of course that’s not the most trusted source around, but I just needed a memory jog.

Wilma hit our area as a Category 3 hurricane on October 25, 2005. This was two months before we got married, so I was still living in Nashville but I’d come down to visit Jason and stay for a week or so. This was only my second visit to WP, and my very first hurricane. Jason had gone through two hurricanes the previous year, so he was more used to it all. He has always had a very laid back attitude towards storms. “A little wind, a little rain”. I don’t remember being very scared, but I must have been pretty nervous, because I plowed through almost an entire bag of Doritos the night before while watching the news coverage. Ever since then, I always need something salty and crunchy to get me through storm nerves.

We could have used either of the bathrooms in our old place as a safe room, but for some reason we decided to pile up in the upstairs hallway. We had blankets to hide under if necessary. We talked and napped a little. At some point my mom called on the home phone. This was before I had a cell. I went downstairs to answer it because I thought it Must be important if someone was calling us in the middle of a hurricane.

The conversation went like this-

Mom- Watcha doin’?
Me- ummmm… kind of busy being in a hurricane right now…

She hadn’t been watching the news and had no idea we were even in the pathway of the storm. It was pretty funny.

So we made it through. I don’t have a lot of memories of the actual storm, except that it was loud. Not tornado loud, just really strong windy storm loud. At some point we lost electricity. And water. I’m mostly ok with no electricity, but for some reason I freak the eff out without water. I can’t stand not being able to wash my hands. It took us a day or two to get water, but it was still under a boil order. Which would have been okay but we didn’t have electricity for almost a week.

We ventured out to check out the damage and forage for food. Our neighborhood had some damage and several trees that had fallen or lost limbs.

One interesting sight was at the Texaco.

But despite everything, the sun was shining and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky.

The next few days were kind of a blur. We went downtown and got to experience Price Gouging at Cheeburger Cheeburger. $30 for two hot dogs and two cans of soda. Unbelievable!

Another night we walked around the neighborhood and came across a taco truck. This was before food trucks were cool. We ate the most delicious pork tacos ever. Also super cheap. I think that was my only other hot meal all week.

Jason went back to work and I was at home for a couple of days by myself. Luckily it was nice and cool, so I was ok without having AC. I hung out, cleaned, read a Steven Womack book, and ate a lot of Halloween candy. I had to throw out all the food in the fridge and freezer because we were out of power for so long. Jason’s company gave away free supplies and he brought home ice one day. It was one of those really really grateful for the little things moments. Ice is a wonderful thing when you don’t have a working freezer. I remember being cranky because the only sound I could hear was the roars of other peoples’ generators. You really start hating your neighbors with generators when you don’t have one.

The morning I was supposed to leave to go back home, I woke up at about 3 or 4 to discover we had power! It would have been nice to have it back sooner, but at least I got to have a hot shower before I got on a plane.

So that was my first hurricane experience. 🙂