NaBloPoMo: Day 24 "Festive Sweaters"

Today, Adam and I had our already healthy egos generously stroked by our photog friend, Relja as he shot us for a "Couples' Holiday Portrait" photo session.

The most epic part of the session was when we momentarily ran out of pose ideas, and Relja handed Adam a pencil and notebook paper and said "draw anything you have in mind, and we'll make it happen!"

After a few minutes, this was what Adam had drawn:

Relja literally did not miss a beat: "A humanoid pteradactyl shooting a gun? I can make that happen."

2 minutes later? This masterpiece:

Yes, I'm wearing a kite on my back as wings. Yes, my ammo belt says "limbo." Yes, that is the scariest face I've got. 

My attempt to elongate my face as much as possible to imitate Adam's drawing. Success? ....Yyyeeeeessss?

I can't share my favorite photo with you for Top Secret reasons, but here's the best of the "Happy Couple Says Happy Holidays" set:

Posed? yes. Cheesy? yes. SOLID GOLD? yes.

That took up a large chunk of our afternoon and evening, so there's not much else to tell about the day.
So, the end.

Carpe November!

P.s. Squats, CHECK. (Rest day!)
Abs, CHECK. (caught up on crunches from yesterday, and enjoyed the rest day)
Minimalism, CHECK. Take time for yourself? This photo shoot was a super fun and indulgent (and cheap) activity that we'd kinda wanted to do for a while. Well, a photo shoot of us as a couple, anyways. What can we say? We're both lens-lovers at heart.

Thankvember 11/27

Today, I am thankful for photographs!

And I'm thankful for my poor point-and-click camera, which is dying a surprisingly slow and painful-looking death. I have no idea what magic Fujifilm glue is keeping its pieces together, but it is quite literally hanging together at this point. (Time for a christmas present for myself, non? ^_^) It's too bad I can't take a photo of my camera to show you the damage. Just use your imagination.

This particular camera only dates back to the first several months of my job at Little Linguists Int'l Preschool. It got a crazy-intense workout that year! We took photos of our kids almost daily, and posted them on a share site for the parents to melt over (well, and us, too). It was also toddler-handled by the occasional classroom thief-cum-photographer. So, really it's impressive that this relatively cheap machine managed to live through that year AND a brief but turbulent visit to Asia AND a year and 1/2 in the muggy swamplands that are New Orleans.

I had a point-and-click camera before this one that was even more stalwart - it made it through 3 years of college, a semester abroad, AND a year in Europe.

I'm pretty rough on my digital cameras, so if you happen to know of a hardy, travel-friendly brand please let me know. I'm in the market.

I am crazy about photographs. I dig MY photographs - ones that dredge up memories, smells, nostalgia, feelings. I get a kick out of photos of people I love. I also enjoy looking at photos taken by true artists, professionals, and lucky amateurs.

It's brilliant. Capturing a moment, not even that, a fraction of a moment. Or an expression. Or a phenomenon.

I don't have a really great memory for the past. Never have had. I can tell you exactly who is sleeping in each bed in this hostel at this moment, first and last names, but not for last month. (Or last week, erm)

So, photos are a beautiful thing to me - one of the most visceral ways of reminding myself of my LIFE. Of things forgotten. Of what's important... or not so important, but hilarious, perhaps. Or just an event. Or person. Or flower or food or animal or sunrise/set/view.... Everything!

Tonight, Adam and I took a lot of photos so we could flirt with the idea of sending out Christmas cards (don't get your hopes up.). I looked back through them, and just have the biggest smile plastered on my face right now. I grinned the entire time it took to tweak and edit them a twitch. I'm smiling now, just thinking about them.

I think I owe this blog an apology. Frankly, I believe that my fellow bloggess, the Ginger Penny Pincher, put it correctly when she stated that every post should really have at least one picture for everyone to look at, even if it's a completely off-topic photo of her dogs.

So! I'm going to do my utmost to uphold this utterly astute objective. (Nod to your penchant for alliteration, GPP ^_^) Apologies for all the boring, picture-deprived posts you've had recently, which I am sure you read through in entirety despite the lack of visual stimuli. Riiiight?

Anyways, fear not! Here are some very on-topic pics from our twinkly photo shoot in the hostel office tonight:

Mad hatters

"Office Workers"

Handsome

A Project.

New hat

Herons & egrets galore

Audubon Park bird sanctuary

I want one.

For Grace (she just had a BD, folks!)

Royal st. street performers in the French Quarter

Crawfish picnic with an Aussie, a  Brit, a NOLA girl and my new boyfriend, Sam (age 3)

Sucking the juice from 'dem crawfish

NOM NOM - corn, 'taters, berries, crawfish 'n' Root Beer

My chocolate pie topped with wHipped cream, raspberries and presented by Caz

Happy food coma in the park

Wish these girls didn't have to leave the country!

Photo booth crazy

IS THIS NOT the most comically happy face you have ever seen in your life?

As evidenced by these pics above, it's been a good week. I had to say goodbye to one of my new-found hostel friends, Susan, and next week I'm losing Caz. It's been a joy to have some girls to hang out with, eat ice cream sundaes with, dance like mad at zumba with, and generally just be girly.

The photos I really wanted to post (but didn't) contained hard evidence that not only is there a van in NOLA that sells Weed Pops (assumedly with some legal amount of weed in them, but they didn't come with nutritional info, so we'll never know...), but that Adam, myself and his mother all bought some and ate those suckers. I kid you not. We all agreed they tasted very medicinal, and could have used a little more sugar to cover the grassy flavor.  :)  We also got a lot of good laughs out of that experience. If you want to see pics of the hard evidence, email me.

But here's the big news of the day.

I just made a decision. I decided that I want a project. I follow a couple of blogs that are "project" blogs, in that the blog was created to reach a goal or fulfill a specific purpose. Then there are the movies I've recently watched like "Julie & Julia" where individuals decide to ruin/revamp their lives by embarking on a quest, usually time-specific. (I also read and watched "Eat, pray, love", another time-specific, goal-oriented quest story.)

I'm feeling a little left out.

• But... I don't like to cook. 

• 100 portraits in 100 days of people I appreciate is definitely out, because I would need to have some shred of talent for drawing. 

• I don't want to spend 3 months in 3 different countries trying to "find myself and become myself"  - though the travel part sounds wonderful...

• My camera skillz aren't crazy enough to attempt taking one gorgeous photograph a day for a year. 

• Writing a poem a day for 111 days to express my creativity would take up so much of my time every day it would keep me from going to zumba, practicing violin, chatting with friends, and eating. So that's out. 

• And while I would LOVE to hike through a different mountain range every week for 2 years straight (*shiver of delight at the thought*), my current situation doesn't exactly allow for that, nor am I willing to give up this current situation for such a project.

While I was soberly considering the possibilities, the very simplest of answers came to me: I have a lot of letters to write to people I love. In fact, I spend who-knows-how-many minutes every day mentally composing letters that never make it to paper.

BRILLIANT "PROJECT" PLAN: One letter a day, for the 30 days of April, to 30 people I want to thank for one thing or another.

It's so perfect. I can't wipe this happy smirk of self-satisfaction off my face. Attack a new project AND get some of my long-put-off letter-writing done?

THIS IS EFFICIENCY, PEOPLE!

I'll keep you posted.

(pun intended.)

Lousy but loved.

At this point, it's definitely official: Mrs. S has correctly labeled me as a lousy blogger. I have been about as lousy a blogger as one can be without actually having a single louse on my head. (Ew.)

This makes me feel very happy and very guilty. Kinda like how I felt after reading the melodramatic email I got from the ever-encouraging Sarah a while back :

"21 days of looking for an update on your blog.

21 days of sorrow.

21 days of pouting.

21 days of thinking of you."

HA!
She checks my blog every day!
She wants more!
She loves me!
I'm practically famous!

This is a lovely feeling for a bloggess. Even being called lousy is a semi-compliment, because it means someone is paying enough attention to your blog to notice how lousy you're being.

Hand-in-hand with this smug happiness though, is the guilt and sense of neglected responsibility. I mean, these people are counting on me - I can't just keep letting them down, day after day. I feel guilt. Remorse. Anxiety. Sadness.  Also, Sarah demands photos.

Obviously, I gotta get posting.

So! Here's what's been happening in Nawlins recently:
...
...
...
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No. There is too much - lemme sum up:

JULY-PRESENT = busy.



Here are some photos of the hostel:

Front door at night

The messy office

Kitchen

Outdoor patio with pool table

Bourbon House!

Our little loft

We've been super happy to have lots of friends and family come and visit us in the 3.5 months since we arrived (only 3?), but it also took us at least the first 2 months before we felt comfortable in our job. Things are running smoothly now, and a happy little rhythm has settled in, it seems.

Recently, I've been spending my time volunteering for the New Orleans Film Festival and also wracking my brain to try to imagine what surprise Adam has planned for my birthday.  He's been super tight-lipped about it, while being careful to mention it frequently and tease me to insanity over it.

Anna loves surprises. But Anna is also very very curious/nosy.  These two characteristics don't always mix well. So far, I have succeeded in resisting the temptation to hack into his gmail account and read through his messages looking for clues (I won't do it, baby, promise).

In the past, Adam has usually let more clues and hints drop than he has this time, which makes me REALLY CURIOUS. He even paid for "it" by CHECK, with our OLD bank account which we aren't currently using, so there would be no way for me to accidentally stumble across revelatory information. This is really sneaky of him, although he still had to ask me where those checks were.

A check, though? What on earth could this surprise be?
Lessons of some sort?
A (short) trip?
Scavenger hunt? - we haven't indulged in one of those in a while, but it doesn't exactly explain the check...
A pony?


I'll report back after the 25th. After which I will be 25, by the way - my "magical" BD, as my 2 red-headed cousins once explained to me.

Life is very exciting these days.

Almost as exciting as three alligators going for the same chunk of chicken.

Get dat meat!

P.s. Frankly, most of the fun of any of his surprises is the anticipation for me, so I'm already in love with my BD gift. Shoot, he could take me salsa dancing at the club down the road, and I'd have already gotten the main part of my gift. :)