Month: July 2012

Look at those cacti!

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Holy crap… One week from now (almost) everyone will be here and we’ll be gearing up for setup and the rehearsal! How time flies! We were at the venue yesterday (LOVE IT still… haven’t seen it since January and it’s so good to see everything in bloom and all the nice changes they’ve made…) and we walked through everything to make a huge map of events for all our vendors (caterer, photographer, etc). I talked to our photographer on the phone on Tuesday and she and I came up with an itinerary too! It’s allllll coming together quite nicely. It’s amazing how much more stuff gets done when I only have to focus on the wedding (and not on grad school too.) Thanks boss for giving me that time off!

Short post today. Cobalt and I are about to go pick up our marriage license (we had to order it online last night? We are confused about how this process works but we’re going over there anyway). Then it’s more errands, etc. I leave you today with these cacti! They are going to be the center of our centerpieces and also how we “number” the tables. Yesterday, Cobalt and I named each cactus and then spent hours working on a seating chart so that each person will have a place to sit at one of the cactus’ tables. Seating chart is complete (and I also took the map from the venue and figured out where each table was going with respect to the head table and the buffet) so now we just need to make name tags for the cacti so that people will know where to sit. Yay!

The cacti are just chilling in their funny little Home Depot pots in my parents’ backyard right now! If you can read any of their names, you probably won’t be surprised that they are completely ridiculous. We literally just picked one up, brainstormed a good name for it, put it back, picked up another one…

Update on life…

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Whew… The T and I made it safely home on Sunday. It is so nice to be home. Driving 21 hours is epic… now all I want to do is sleep.

But… there is so much to do right now! And so much fun to be had! The California bridal shower was yesterday and it was a huge success. So much fun. :) I will hopefully do a post about it soon. I also got to try on my dress for the very first time (!!!!!!) yesterday and all went well with that. Today we are going to work on hemming it and I need to call our wedding photographer to finalize the photography schedule for the wedding day. Then Wednesday Cobalt comes into town and we can start to finalize everything else. CRAZY.

I am getting so excited about our wedding. It really just seems like such a blessing that our close friends and family will be here (even though some of them can’t come and I am sad about that). At the shower last night, I was reminded how all of these people are like my family and I can’t wait to spend Cobalt’s and my special day with them! I feel very lucky right now. I also feel very conflicted because I am so excited for everyone to get here but I kind of want time to get the rest of the details planned out and done…

Picture: Alfred the shark is trying to get me to wake up so I can get stuff done!

And it begins…

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Oooo Sunday post! Well… this Wedding Wednesday post is so late it is almost on time for next Wednesday’s post… Anyway… with less than two weeks before the wedding things are really starting to shape up!

The grant is written and turned in. Sounds like it will be submitted on Monday as long as everything goes well with the school. I feel like a whole new person with that weight off my shoulders. I yawned for a half hour straight while driving through Utah today either due to my extreme exhaustion or the fact that I am finally maybe actually relaxing a little? Probably both. Only time will tell…
The T (MOH) successfully arrived in CO last week and we started our epic road trip home yesterday. Some pictures…

(up there) The T and I (and Gustav) at the salt flats in Utah. It was quite windy…

Wind Turbines in WY. Pretty much the only interesting thing about WY in our opinion. No offense to anyone who likes it… :-/

Salt Flats go on forever…

Gustav and me at the salt flats

Sunset!

It’s crazy how real everything is getting…. Not that it hasn’t been real this whole time or anything but now everything is coming together. These next few weeks are going to fly by and I have so much left to do (Though Cobalt and the T did an awwwwesome job getting a bunch of things ready while I was freaking out about the grant all week… happiness. Thanks guys!)

How’s everyone else? Is there anything special you want me to post about or do you like these impromtu little gems?

Butterflies at the Insectival!

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This butterfly’s wings are wrinkled because of a birth defect. It can’t fly very well… :(

So… this weekend, the Butterfly Pavilion hosted an Insectival (or Insect Carnival)! The best part about it was that the local camera store in the Boulder/Denver area was there loaning out macro lenses for free! For those of you who don’t know what a macro lens is, check out your point and shoot cameras. Macro mode is always identified by a little flower shape. When you turn on macro mode, you can take pictures of super tiny things and the camera will do its best to bring those little things into perfect focus. It’s kind of similar for big DSLRS too except you can actually use a totally different lens that specializes on focusing on the tiny. Macro lenses are pretty expensive (the one I played with is around $1000) and I don’t do enough photography of tiny things to justify buying one but if someone wants to loan me an expensive macro lens in an area full of tiny things (like butterflies) and let me play, I am okay with that!
So we went! I was so stressed out and nervous the whole drive there, worrying that they would be out of loaner lenses or something. >_< Poor Cobalt…

It all worked out though. I got to borrow a 105 mm macro lens which turned out to be HUGE. My friend J also brought her DSLR and she got to borrow this epic telephoto macro lens which was even bigger. The difference between our two lenses is that with her telephoto lens, J could look at tiny things farther away and have them appear as if they are right next to you. With our borrowed lenses in hand, J and I (and the rest of our group) headed into the world of butterflies!


It was interesting trying out a new lens with my camera. Usually if you go to a camera store and ask to try a lens, they bring you a random camera with the lens of interest attached and you play with it in the store. This time, I had my own camera (that I am completely comfortable using) and my own memory card and I could just mess around (i.e. take a million pictures and look at them all later in the comfort of my home). I usually shoot all my DSLR pictures in manual mode – meaning that I often take several pictures of the same thing to try to get the settings the way I want them. I found that with demoing a new lens, I would rather just mess around with the lens settings and let the camera take control of the light settings. I couldn’t let myself go all the way to automatic mode so I settled on Aperture Priority (Av mode on most cameras), which lets you set the depth of field and it adjusts the shutter speed to whatever it thinks will work best. It was hard trusting my camera when I am so used to doing everything myself (I found myself constantly judging the lighting of certain situations and wondering if I should change something before I realized the camera would take care of it) but it did a good job. Once we got inside to look at some of the other bugs, I had to put it back on manual because I was disappointed in its choice of shutter speed but otherwise, good job camera! Thank you for letting me only focus on the lens.


Long story short… it was a blast. I have so many butterfly pictures on my computer right now… AND the camera store is holding a photo contest! I am currently trying to figure out which of ALLLLLL my pictures is my favorite (these three are in the running with about 8 other ones…) so I can enter it in the contest. Winner wins a fancy Nikon J1 camera. Maybe I will post the picture I submit when I submit it…

Finally some non butterfly/camera geekiness:
Cobalt LOVES tarantulas. You can tell from just his mouth in this picture… He actually got to hold one named Rosie (and he got a sticker saying that he held her). Rosie also must have really liked Cobalt. When the handler tried to take her back, she wouldn’t leave his hands…

And a picture of J, me, and A (taken with my normal 50 mm lens). I am sad because we just had to give our fancy lenses back to the camera people…

Crazy week ahead! MOH comes tomorrow and we leave on Saturday for CA!!!! Gotta finish that crazy grant too. Plus, I should probably clean the house before T shows up tomorrow….

Your assignment for today: What do you look for in a good photograph? Do you look at photo composition, colors, focus, etc? Are you a huuuge nerd about something the way I am about cameras/photography?

Grad school and why it’s freaking me out

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So… as some of you know, right now I am in the middle of applying for this HUGE government grant for my research in grad school. This grant would be awesome to receive. Not only would it make me look prestigious, but would pay my stipend/health care/tuition/fees/etc (things my boss and/or I currently pay), give me money to get a new computer (which I desperately need….), and give me money to accompany my boss on her trip to the Pasteur institute (huuuuge bacteria research facility!!!) in Paris, France. She’s going on sabbatical but I could go for a little bit… Not only have I been dreaming of going to Paris my whole life but how cool would it be to have done some of my PhD in France?! Anyway, there are probably other reasons why this grant is good but the big point of this post is that it is also eating my soul alive and I don’t want to get married without a soul… That sounds bad.

Anyway, so this is a government grant – meaning there is a LOT of paperwork to fill out and a lot of things for me to write. I have so much writing to do on top of wedding planning that it is totally stressing me out. Plus my boss is on vacation so she is limited with the amount of feedback she can give me. The grant itself is due on August 8th, which is 4 days after our wedding… The grants office at the school requires you submit the grant at least 4 days before the deadline so they can make sure you filled it out correctly. Since I will be getting married 4 days before the deadline, my boss has vetoed me taking the grant to CA to finish it. She said that you (hopefully) only get married once so she wants me to enjoy it. It’s really nice of her to give me 2 weeks off… but also really scary because of everything I have left to do before next week! I want to submit it a full 4 days before I leave so that I will at least be in the same state if there are any problems but we’ll see if that actually happens…… :(

It’s just such bad timing… but I don’t want to wait for the next round of grants because I would really like a new computer and because I want to go to France… Ugh… back to the grindstone for me! How about you? Was there ever a time when stuff just got piled on top of you during an already stressful time?!

Picture: The poor dining room table has been converted to a desk because our upstairs is too hot during the day. Anyway, here is a picture of Potassium working on her grant surrounded by grant stuff and wedding stuff. At least she has some sharks (Gustav and Alfred) and Cobalt’s record collection to keep her company…

On an unrelated note, it’s Friday the 13th! Woooooooo…. any scary ghost stories?

ONE MONTH UPDATE!!!

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Wooo! We’re getting down on the number of Wedding Wednesday posts I have left! Last week marked our 1 month mark and now we are into DAYS on that little calendar over there (—–>;)!!! So I thought I’d catch everyone up on what’s going on. First – Second Wedding shower First, some background into how […]

Epic Weekend!

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Wow… Cobalt and I had a great weekend! We drove to see his family for the fourth of July and decided to spend the rest of the weekend frolicking with his family, catching up with some of our friends we haven’t seen in a while (we hadn’t seen some of them in almost 4 years!), […]

Prom recap!!!

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First things first. ONE MONTH UNTIL OUR WEDDING!!!!!

Whew! Short post today… You’re all probably grateful for that since my last posts have been pretty epic. Anyway. Prom shower! It was a lot of fun. Everyone got dressed up super fancy (except L’s husband T who decided that he stayed home from the prom to play video games… hahaha). My other friend T lamented that the rest of us girls were wearing sundresses and she was the only one in a full out prom dress… IT WAS HOT! We spent the majority of our time in this little shelter at the park which was in the shade. Anyway, we got pizza and cake and then Cobalt and I were crowned prom King and Queen (our surprise). Do you like our crowns/candy scepters? Maybe more pictures later… Thanks to a different friend L (I gotta come up with a better system for names…) for taking these awesome pictures!

Just in case you are wondering what happened about 2 seconds after this picture was taken, I’ll show you Cobalt’s crazy face in the next picture.

In other wedding news, SEND US YOUR RSVP POSTCARDS! Seriously… :-/

In OTHER wedding news, second shower this weekend! Exciting!!!! :)

Pre-evacuation and what followed

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Picture: Flagstaff fire on Thursday. If you look closely you can see the spot fires which are what remained of that giant smoke plume I posted on Wednesday…

I thought I would write a post about the pre evacuation we had last week now that everything has calmed down (a little… wedding in a month! Tons to do for lab and wedding and etc!! Also, remind me to post about what I have been up to in lab lately… I think it gives good insight into why I have been so insane lately…). Anyway… yes. We got pre evacuated last week. This means that we had to have everything ready to go in case the Flagstaff Fire decided to head down the mountain and into the town. At any point, we could get the reverse 911 call and be asked to leave our house.

I have never had this experience before though Cobalt unfortunately has… in fact, his house or a house he has lived at (i.e. his mom’s house) has been in a pre evacuation zone three times and has actually had to evacuate twice due to forest fires. We have already decided that while living in the mountains is pretty, we are done.

So, anyway, when we got the pre evacuation notice on Tuesday afternoon last week, we went upstairs to start packing and I found I had a bit of a dilemma. I’ve lived in four different states and have moved almost every year since I was 18, so I am really good at packing everything to move to a new house. I am also pretty good at packing things for trips. However, packing to evacuate is a different thing all together. It’s kind of like packing for a trip except that you also have to pack everything that is emotionally important to you (like a keepsake or something) and everything that is necessary for life (like your renter’s insurance policy which will pay for you to get new stuff if your apartment burns down). So in that way, it is sort of like packing to move your house… except you can’t pack EVERYTHING. The other awkward thing was that we have started to get some really nice gifts for our wedding and we have been collecting things we want to bring to CA for the wedding too. So allllll of that had to get packed too. We could barely navigate through the living room to get to the kitchen when it was all over…

Unfortunately for Cobalt and me, we actually ended up having to pack both for evacuation as well as for a trip because his grandpa died on Tuesday (in addition to the fire starting on Tuesday… Tuesday was not a good day…) so we had to pack to go to the funeral on Friday. There was a lot of just throwing random things in suitcases for the pre evacuation and throwing random outfits into a suit bag for the trip. That was all in the living room too.

Let’s fastforward to Wednesday, when we were still under pre evacuation notice and we had to get ready to fly out for the funeral on Thursday. This is when we decided we should probably move the pre evacuation stuff somewhere safe just in case we got evacuated while we were gone. We loaded up my car with all of the stuff deemed important for evacuation and drove to a friend’s house just east of the pre evacuation line. They put it all in their garage and we headed home to discover that the pre evacuation notice had just gotten lifted! We headed back to their garage and grabbed our stuff, which remained in the living room until we got back from the funeral on Saturday… the upstairs is still a mess though because both of us have been too tired/busy to unpack anything…

The Flagstaff fire is now almost 90% contained (as of Sunday afternoon, when I wrote this) but Colorado is still pretty much on fire. We have had our fireworks canceled this year and anyone found in possession of fireworks could get charged with arson… :-/ The worst of the fires is in Colorado springs; the Waldo Canyon fire has been by far the most devastating fire I have seen in a long time… :( So sad… Keep praying/hoping/etc for rain!


Picture: Cobalt’s grandpa teaching him about picture frames in his frame shop.

A word about the funeral… It was really sad (obviously) but also awesome to hear all these people honoring Cobalt’s grandpa’s life. He was such a good man… We will all really miss him. :( It was really nice to be surrounded by Cobalt’s extended family, even though it was for a sad occasion. I just loved how good it felt to be there surrounded by such a loving group of people…


I am so excited to be officially a part of this family in almost a month!

Have you ever had a week where you were just deluged by craziness? What happened? How did you deal with it?

Next up… more craziness! Our prom wedding shower! I need to acquire the pictures between now and Wednesday…