Author: iampotassium

Adventures and Elsa hair

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The bride of Frankenstein is wondering where her wedding pictures are…

Remember last week when I said I would post my wedding pictures this week because I would have them by now? Welllllll… as of 9:30 pm on Halloween, we are still without them. It’s been an awkward process between our photographer and her third party host for the past two weeks. Apparently our pictures uploaded last week but the third party host said that half of them were corrupted. She got them reuploaded over the weekend – not corrupted this time – and we still can’t see them. It’s so bad right now… we can see the link to our gallery but when we enter the password, it says the gallery is not ready for viewing. Third party host, what are you doing?!?! We are also going to get all our pictures on a jump drive in the mail so we’re also checking the mail crazily every day…

Needless to say, it’s been a bit frustrating. So that’s why this post is late – I thought for sure we would get our pictures some time on Halloween so I waited and waited and waited but Halloween is over. :( About the picture – I didn’t want to go through the trouble of redoing all my makeup and costume for Halloween but I just had to do the hair again… :)

We’ll end this post on a higher note – Tuesday was the 5 year anniversary of Cobalt’s and my first date! There is such an adventure between that first date and the two of us actually getting married but I think that might be a story for another time. Wow… 5 years of adventures with you, Cobalt… Can’t wait to see what craziness the next 5 bring! :)

Halloweekend 2012!

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Yay! Halloween is this week! Cobalt and I celebrated all weekend! On Friday evening, we had a Halloween party at our apartment. We dressed up like Frankenstein’s monster and his bride as you can see in this picture.


Then on Sunday, we had some friends over and we carved our pumpkins we got at the pumpkin patch last week. I of course made my pumpkin into a shark. It was a bit tricky because over the course of last week, a squirrel decided that my pumpkin would make a tasty snack and started taking little bites out of the whole pumpkin. Needless to say, I moved my pumpkin inside before too much damage was done but I did have to think cleverly about how I carved it to get rid of the bite marks. The picture on top has most of our pumpkins – Cobalt’s was a little too dark to be see in this picture so I posted another picture below with just my shark pumpkin and his skull pumpkin.


Yay!

My mom is in town for the beginning of this week! I am excited to hang out with her. What are you guys up to? Did you do anything special for Halloween this weekend?

First Snow 2012

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I love the Flatirons above Boulder when they are lightly dusted in snow… I think it’s my favorite version of them…

Hard to believe these guys were on fire only a few months ago…

In other news, I voted last night. Have you?

In other other news, what are you up to this weekend?! It’s Halloween weekend for us and then my mom comes to visit! :D

The ring debacle

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That blue ring seems mighty small…

I promise, professional wedding pictures are coming soon… The proofs are supposed to be uploaded any time between now and tomorrow. It’s making me ridiculously impatient now that I know that we will almost have them. I check the website pretty much every hour…. Hopefully, next week’s Wedding Wednesday will be filled with glorious wedding photos. If not, never fear, the post will still be interesting. :)

Anyway, today we are going to talk about rings! I have been wanting to do this post for a while but I decided I would wait until the ring debacle was over and now it finally is. So here we go!

Cobalt and I ordered lovely titanium rings from Minter and Richter and they arrived in California shortly before we did (thus, my mom was too impatient to wait for me to get home and opened the package without us… :-/). They were packaged in wonderful red and black tissue paper (the effect was only slightly ruined by my mom’s sneaking around with the package ;)) and nestled inside a little tiny black envelope in the center. They were so awesome! One problem… my ring didn’t fit.

Apparently I had totally underestimated the sizing when we had had the sizers a few months back and I had still guessed the wrong size! The wedding was in just a few days at this point and I was a stressed out bride who couldn’t deal with the idea that her ring didn’t fit. So we got married and poor Cobalt had to shove my tiny ring over my fat knuckle at the ceremony. After the wedding, I wore it on a necklace until we got back to CO.

It might sound crazy but I was actually really upset about my ring not fitting. Maybe it was the lack of sleep that goes into planning and executing a wedding but regardless, there was some major unhappiness on my part. Meanwhile, Cobalt contacted Minter and Richter about the issue and they said they’d send out a new batch of sizers and make a brand new ring FOR FREE (these people are awesome, seriously). They sent me four new sizers that varied in 0.25 sizings for me to try out and wear. I found that my ring size is actually about 0.5 sizes bigger than my original ring! We ordered my new ring and it finally showed up last Friday. It was packaged again in an envelope in the middle of that red/black tissue paper, which meant that I got to open it (so it’s okay that you opened that other one, Mom)! I am so excited. Now I’m legit! ;)

Did you have any wedding drama? Did you have to get your ring(s) resized? Do you want Minter and Richter to make your wedding rings? We have a coupon for you… ;)

Pumpkins acquired + rocks!

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Busy weekend here in Boulder! I think I can safely say I got most of the stuff on my to do list done. Could always have more relaxing of course but you know…

Anyway, as mentioned in Friday’s post, we went to the pumpkin patch on Saturday! I got that epically sized pumpkin shown up there and my friend A got that normal sized pumpkin that she’s standing with. I had originally chosen a similarly sized pumpkin with the perfect orange hue but then I found that fatty and fell in love. You know how it is…

I also like him because he has such a good stem… looks like a shark fin. Wahaha… stay tuned till next week to see the carved version!

Anyway, we all got nice pumpkins and then we headed up into the mountains above Boulder for some rock climbing in the afternoon. It was a perfect day for it: warm, sunny, not too many people on the rocks. It was my first time actually bouldering outside so it was a neat experience. After we tried bouldering a little, we just scrambled around on the rocks. Here is a picture of Cobalt and our friend M staring off at Boulder.

In case you don’t believe that we were actually that high off the ground, here’s what the city of Boulder looked like from our perch. I love the colors of the trees and I love how small everything looks in this picture:

Awesomeness! I had so much fun this weekend! Can’t wait to go climbing again! And I definitely can’t wait to carve my pumpkin. I am thinking a shark because of that awesome stem but I don’t know. Anyone else have any ideas? What did you do this weekend? Something fun I hope? How’s the weather where you are? Still fall-like? We’re supposed to get some snow later this week… :-/

It’s Time for Pumpkins!

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It’s that time of year again! This weekend, Cobalt and I (and friends I am sure) are headed to the pumpkin patch to pick out our pumpkins for Halloween! Yay! I think going to the pumpkin patch makes both Cobalt and I go a little crazy as shown by the top picture (Cobalt and our friend P at the pumpkin patch last year) and the bottom picture (me and P at the pumpkin patch in our very first year of grad school… awww… so wee…). Heheheheh… pumpkins… PS- If you live in CO and you want to go to the pumpkin patch with us, let us know! :)

Do you like going to the pumpkin patch? Do you still get dressed up for Halloween? If so what are you going to be this year? If not, what was your favorite Halloween costume of the past? Cobalt and I are still working out the kinks for our costumes but I promise that they will be super awesome!

That awkward moment

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when you realize you can’t be two places at once.

Let’s start up the Wedding Wednesday posts again! First of all, I think we are supposedly going to get our professional wedding pictures soon (finalllllly) and second of all, there is stuff that I never finished talking about.

So let’s start. We’re married now (yaaaaay!) and the holidays are quickly approaching… What are we going to do about Christmas? For those of you who don’t know, Christmas is a big deal to both of our families. However, Cobalt’s immediate family is in NM and my immediate family is in CA. Every year before this year, Cobalt has gone to NM and I have gone to CA for at least Christmas Eve and Christmas Day so this year marks the first year we will be together on the actual Christmas holiday. The problem is… which family do we spend the holiday with? We already decided that we want to try to see both families during the Christmas season but of course only one family can see us for the actual holiday. Cobalt and I have been stressing out over this issue… mmmm since we got married… because we know that at least one family is going to be sad and one of us will be sad because we won’t be spending Christmas proper all together. That said, we love both of our families a lot so Christmas is still going to be special… just… different. However, it’s time to stop freaking out about it and actually buy tickets because holy crap they are getting really expensive.

Now it’s your turn. Any advice for the newlyweds? What did you do your first Christmas together?

Picture: One of the many crochet sharks I made, “Licky shark,” licking an ornament on my family’s Christmas tree last year. I took this picture when I was playing with the out of focus light so you can see that the reflection on Licky shark’s eye (and all the other out of focus light) is in the shape of a star. I like it…

Sisters in Seattle!

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This weekend, I got to fly to Seattle for SACNAS, a conference for minority students in science/math/engineering/etc. I know I have many friends in Seattle so before you get mad at me for not telling you I would be up there, know that I spent the majority of my time in Seattle recruiting students to come to grad school at CU and talking to potential future employers. I did get to spend a lot of time with my sister who was also at the conference with her grad school. It was a ton of fun to wander around the conference with her. We got stuffed stem cells from the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center booth, caught up on our lives (the last time we saw each other was for my wedding), and kind of freaked people out. “Uh… Are you guys… related?” Ahahahaha… My first day in Seattle, we headed to the aquarium before going to the conference. I loved the Seattle Aquarium when I was in Washington for undergrad so it was nice going back. We learned a lot of neat facts about fish and marine mammals.
Here are some pictures from our day at the aquarium (taken with my iPhone because I didn’t feel like flying with my DSLR):

The octopus was lurking in the corner of its tank…

We really liked this fish!

There’s a cuddlefish hiding in this picture…

Sisters in Seattle! Look at the sweet skull hat she found for me! :)

Picture at the top – Mt. Rainier, which is the 14’er that looms over Seattle, and the mountains to the south of it. I took that picture from the plane.

It was so nice being back in Washington after so long. I love that state. Seattle is probably one of my favorite cities in the US. Plus I got to see my sister, which was awesome. Booo… I hate that we live so far apart… :(

What did you guys do this weekend? What is your favorite city in the US? Have you been to Seattle (next time I go, I promise I will go for a longer time and I will actually let people know so we can hang out!)? Do you live far away from your family? How do you handle that? It makes me sad. :(

Backseat driver…

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Craziness here in Colorado. We got our first taste of winter this weekend with lows in the 20s and highs in the 30s. Thrilling. It’s all back to “normal” now – I think it almost reached 70 yesterday! Unfortunately, I am going to be really busy this week (giving presentations at two different lab meetings and then going to a conference) so I probably won’t post much. Never fear though, I leave you with this awesome picture from this weekend. That’s Finn the shark watching A drive…

Goin’ to the zoo, part two!

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I thought I’d continue on with my zoo post from Monday today. I apologize for those of you wanting a Wedding Wednesday post. I have stuff to talk about on that front (the minimoon will make an appearance!) but I felt like talking about the zoo again today.

So when we left off in our story Monday, Cobalt, A, and I had returned to the booth where we rented out camera equipment. I went up to the guy at the Nikon table and said “What else you got?!” Not that I was unhappy with my 18-300 mm zoom lens from Monday. Mostly, I just wanted to see what else I could play with. The Nikon guy hooked me up with an 85 mm prime lens. Really, the only word you need to take away from that sentence is the word “prime” as in a fixed, non zoom lens. He told me it would be excellent for low light conditions (the 18-300 mm lens really wasn’t that great for low light conditions) and then sent us back off into the zoo.

At first, I was regretting being so bold about switching lenses. Here we were in the middle of a BRIGHT day and I had a non-zoomable lens that was good at taking pictures in low light conditions. Ohhhh greattttt. Cobalt and A were zooming in on monkeys and I was grumpily glaring at my lens. Then we came to the spider monkey up above and I realized this lens had some potential. This lens is so good in low light conditions because it can do really low f numbers – this is something that controls the amount of light that goes into the lens as well as controlling the depth of field. When you set the lens to take pictures with really low f numbers, you are asking it to let a ton of light into the camera and as a result, it has a very shallow depth of field. Shallow enough that anything you are NOT focusing on gets really blurry… like the fence in front of the spider monkey. You can’t really see it at all even though there was definitely a fence between him and me. Wahaha… The other tricky thing about the spider monkey pictures was that the holes in the fence were really small. The camera’s autofocus function couldn’t find the monkey behind the fence so I had to manually focus the lens to find him. I think it turned out pretty good!

It was at this point that I felt a challenge rising. Zooming was one way to take cool pictures of animals, what about playing with the lighting and the depth of field? Challenge accepted, prime lens!

Okay, it’s no zoom lens but to be honest, the idea of a lens that could seemingly do everything (wide angle and crazy zoomed in) left me kind of suspicious as to what it COULDN’T do. Hence the bold “what else you got?!” and the handing over of the prime lens. And by the end, I had a healthy respect for the prime lens – especially after we visited the reptile house and my lens totally ruled at getting cool pictures of those creatures that like to lurk in the dark (without using a flash)…

Really, I think if anything, this experience with the prime lens reminded me why it’s good to have a variety of lenses – a zoom lens of course for zooming in on cool things that are far away, but also a prime lens that is really good at taking pictures at that one focal length and makes me focus on the details of the picture I am taking (the lighting and the composition of the picture). Makes me happy that I do have both (an 18 to 70 mm lens – nowhere near the zooming capability of Monday’s lens – and a 50 mm prime lens)!

And now without further rambling – some more prime lens pictures!

Another one of the adorable spider monkey…

The flamingo on the left wants to be the center of attention. Ooo ooo! Look at me!

This frog looks like it knows something we don’t. Also, I love how fat he is…

Hey guys… how’s it goin’? I’m just chillin’ here… you know how it is…

And finally, a penguin for those of you who asked…

Do you have a favorite picture (either from Monday or today)? Do you like the zoom lens pictures or the prime lens pictures better? Also, I love it when a picture tells a story. You guys want to play the caption game with my pictures? Let’s go! What are all the animals saying?