Author: iampotassium

Welcome back…

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So a few weeks ago, the T and I drove Cobalt’s car to California because it is bigger. Cobalt got to drive my car here in Colorado until he left to come to California.

Fast forward to this week. Upon returning to Colorado, Cobalt and I had a deal – I would get to cut off 10 inches of my hair to donate to Locks of Love and he would get to dye his hair red. So Wednesday afternoon, we headed out to go get my hair cut… only to discover that my car was not where Cobalt had parked it. In fact, it wasn’t anywhere on our apartment’s property. We both freaked out and headed to our apartment’s front office. They freaked out because the only reason a car would not be on our property is if someone stole it or if it got towed. But I pay for a parking permit every month so my car shouldn’t get towed….. ALSO the towing company e-mails the front office a list of cars that they think should get towed (and reasons) but then they aren’t actually allowed to tow anything unless the front office says yes, tow that stupid car.

So needless to say everyone was bewildered and freaking out. Then the lady in the front office checked her e-mails and it turns out that the towing company e-mailed her about towing my car the day after Cobalt left (citing a lack of permit)…. and then they just towed it without her permission (even though it definitely has a permit on it). She called them and they refused to tow it back because “it’s all wheel drive so it’s hard to tow…” UM… SOMEHOW YOU MANAGED TO TOW IT AWAY!

So we had to go get it. My car is fine at least. And we didn’t have to pay anything to get it back (which is good because it would have been almost $800 for the towing fee + sitting in their parking lot for 2 weeks). I am outraged and freaked out about the fact that my poor car was gone for two weeks and I didn’t even know about it. AND THAT I HAVE A PERMIT ON IT AND THEY TOWED IT ANYWAY!!!! The people in the front office are as livid as I am and they gave me a new (non sunbleached) parking permit so hopefully it won’t happen again. :-/ *sigh* Drama. Anger. Welcome back to Colorado I guess… :p

In other news, I eventually did get my hair cut and Cobalt did eventually dye his hair (and the bathroom) red. What do you think?

We’re married!!!

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Yay! We’re married!!!

Quick post today because we just got back to Colorado and our house is completely full of wedding presents and everything else that we brought back from California. We are about to have a fun week where we put the house back together again! What a fun newlywed activity.

Anyway, I really just wanted to give you a summary of our wedding in terms of our favorite thing and something we wished had gone better.

Without further ado….

Favorite thing

Cobalt and I felt overjoyed and blessed at the people who were at our wedding. Sure, not all of our family/favorite friends could be there but the people who did come just made it so special for us. We have been continuously talking about how great it was to have a lot of our favorite people in one spot. Not only that, but the cooler thing was that everyone got along. Actually, on our wedding night, Cobalt and I got a bunch of picture texts from our friends who were having an afterparty in honor of our wedding and in the pictures were friends from different parts of our lives hanging out together. First off – how cool and special is it that people who are important to each of us are now friends with each other?! And second of all – how AWESOME is it that our friends had an afterparty after our wedding? We thought it was awesome anyway.

Something sad

Well not really actually. I’d say the wedding was pretty much perfect. I’ll have to talk more in detail about it later. Anyway, the one thing that we are sad about was that we didn’t get to dance as much as we had hoped. Specifically, I am sad that I didn’t get to dance to the cupid shuffle in my wedding dress! Haha… No seriously… I’m kind of depressed about that. We had it on our playlist but it was so far down on the playlist that we had to leave before we got to it…

Picture: In case you are not my Facebook friend, here is the GORGEOUS wedding teaser from our amazing photographer Holly Carlyle. Can’t wait to see more! :) Also check out my dress that my mom made. Looks good, right? I love it.

I don’t know if I am back yet… but there is a lot that I want to talk about on here so maybe I will be back sooner rather than later.

Now that the wedding has happened, everything is up for grabs! Is there something you’ve been dying to know more about? Ceremony? Guest book? First dance? Bachelorette party? Silliest thing Holly had us do for our wedding pictures? Bridesmaid gifts? Our rings? My veil? Seriously guys, I am an open book now. :)

One more thing… My blog friend Lauren is getting married this weekend! Yaaaaay! I hope it is AMAZING Lauren! :):) It’s been fun to do all this wedding planning together!

The calm before the storm

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M, me, Cobalt, and my wee at the beach. I think I look weird taking the picture… At least you can see the tail shadow cast by my raptor hoodie… Yesssssss… :)

Last Wedding Wednesday ever (at least prewedding…)! Craziness!

Things are looking good. This past weekend, Cobalt and I got everything that needed be printed at Kinko’s (table seating assignments, etc) ready and then on Monday, we printed everything out AND ran our epic shopping trips to Costco, Target, etc. We paid the caterer her final check so we have now officially paid everything off. We are pretty much ready to sit back and watch everything just fall into place now… Yay! Let’s go!

Things got a little interesting on Monday when one of the groomsmen found out that he was actually flying to CA on Tuesday instead of today (we actually can’t decide if he chose the wrong day or if the airline totally just screwed him over) but everything seems to have worked out great! We picked him up Tuesday morning and then he and Cobalt ran errands while my mom, my sister (who came in Monday night! Yay!), and I went out and did girly things, like playing with makeup and shopping for jewelry. Then Cobalt, M (groomsman), wee (sis), and I took off for the beach to relax a little.

It was amazing out there. I am always in awe of the ocean whenever I see it (living in a landlocked state has totally intensified this feeling) but today just seemed perfect. The weather was perfect (not too hot, not too cold), there were seals and pelicans out playing around in the water for us to see (see below), and it was just a nice calm before the storm hanging out there with Cobalt and two people who are also very important to me.

Look at that pelican! Flapping away…
Dive pelican, dive! You should have seen them! They were dive bombing the ocean and as soon as one pelican found something, all these ducks, other pelicans, and seals would show up to try to grab it…

I’m signing off for a while. Friends and family are coming in today (safe travels everyone!), the bachelorette/bachelor parties are tomorrow, craziness Friday, and then WE GET MARRIED on SATURDAY!!!! Maybe I will be back next Wednesday for a wedding recap? Maybe the Wednesday after that… Only time will tell…

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!), […]