Author: iampotassium

Four Month Update

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Crazy that in 4 months it will be August and 4 months from today, Cobalt and I will be married for one day! That means we have a little over 3 months left to prepare. So I thought I would discuss some of the things we have been working on lately. Most of the big things are out of the way so it’s just on to the little details. THERE ARE SO MANY DETAILS. Just letting you know in case you didn’t already know.

Details (in no apparent order):

  1. Where/when to have the bachelor/bachelorette parties
    Our wedding is pretty much a destination wedding for most of the guests, excluding anyone who actually lives in my home town, so we thought it would be mean to have a separate weekend/location for parties. We’ve currently planned to frolic in San Francisco with our guests at our respective parties (we have yet to determine whether they will meet up) a few days before the wedding. That way everyone (including Cobalt and me) only has to travel once. As for the details of the parties… eh… not so much yet. We just wanted to nail down a day at least so our guests could start to book their plane tickets/hotel reservations.

  2. Where Cobalt and I are staying the night of our wedding
    Yeah… we really should figure that one out…

  3. Registry
    This one is almost done. In fact, I even posted our registries on the wedding website… though we are still updating one of them as we remember more things. Whew. Thanks Lauren for suggesting Myregistry.com to us! :)

  4. Rings
    Are still driving us crazy. We have decided to get matching titanium rings from Minter and Richter but we have had a hard time deciding exactly which rings we want and an even harder time getting sized for them. Since they are titanium, they can’t really be resized (but they will make you a new ring for 50% off if you need to change your size) so we really want to have the rings fit (well duh…). Back in February when we were visiting Cobalt’s family, we went and got our fingers sized at the local jewelers. Then a few weeks ago, we went to a jewelers here because someone (me) forgot their size (sorrrrrrry). They measured both of our fingers again and the sizes were completely different than the ones we got earlier. So yeah… Mysterious. Minter and Richter actually sell a ring sizer. I think it’s time we buy that guy!

  5. Ceremony
    Actually is outlined! We have a good idea of how we want it to run and we have two offiants (cuz we’re special like that. ;)). Now we just need to figure out the details (sooooo many…) like vow-writing, songs we want, what to do about music (live vs. recorded), etc. Woot.

  6. Flowers
    Cobalt and I are getting married in a garden (see above picture – that’s what it looks like in August… and why we pretty much fell in love with the place instantly) so we are not investing too much time and energy into flowers. I have contacted a florist about the availability and pricing of the flowers I want in my bouquet (anemones) and the flowers I want my bridesmaids to hold (Stargazer lilies) but they are not responding… So I think I should probably get on that…

  7. Gifts
    Cobalt has ordered his groomsmen their gifts but I am still having issues finding the perfect gift(s) for my girls. I just want to get something both special and meaningful but also useful/something that they will actually wear/use, you know? Blahhhhh… Back to the searching. Sorry I can’t talk much about it but I know that some of our groomsmen and bridesmaids actually read this blog (hi! and Thanks for reading!). We also need to put our heads together about gifts for our families. Ooooo…

  8. Centerpieces, favors, etc
    Still thinking fortune cookies for the favors but they will probably be felt instead of crochet because then Cobalt can actually help me make them. Centerpieces… BLAHHHHHHHH… yeah… that goes into the category of things that we should think about… also table numbers and seating charts. Everything table related, really…

  9. Wedding Showers
    I have two lined up. One in my home town and one in Cobalt’s home town. Getting to Cobalt’s home town is drivable so we actually have a date set for that one. Need to set a date for the other one but I’ve been kind of waiting for an airline sale so I can actually get to it… >_<

  10. Honeymoon
    Cobalt and I are too poor to afford a honeymoon after this crazy wedding. We hope that one day we can go to France and also New York City (in the same trip preferably) but for now, we are thinking about chilling for a few days around my home town and maybe going ziplining through the redwoods. Oooooo…

What was your favorite detail to plan for your wedding? Or if you’re not married, what are you the most excited about planning? Anyone want to finish planning our wedding?! :D Do you have anything you’d like us to talk about in future wedding Wednesday posts? Any questions about how we did something or how far along we are with planning something?

PS – Garden update: now we have THREE lemon cucumber sprouts and one spinach sprout!!!!!! :D:D:D:D:D:D (be happy I didn’t postpone the Wedding Wednesday post another day with more pictures of baby plants…)

Baby plants!

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Or at least one baby plant… This is a follow up to last Friday’s post about our garden. Look! A baby lemon cucumber has sprouted! Angelica the crocheted octopus is excited about it (and we are too)! It must have been all that warm weather we had last weekend (it was in the 80’s!). Too bad it was freezing and snowy yesterday (told you Colorado weather was weird)… Poor baby plants had to stay inside.

No worries all! Wedding Wednesday will be back on Thursday! Wedding… Thursday? I’m not sure it sounds that good but just go with it…

Skeleton bride head and such

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Skeleton bride head is excited about all the new friends I can make for her with all these fun pattern books. She just hopes that I make the rest of her body (and her veil) and possibly a skeleton groom first. They have a wedding to get to after all…

(Thanks to my sister and Cobalt’s family for the fun books! I want to quit grad school and crochet all the time now…)

Happy Birthday Dad!

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Today’s my dad’s birthday! Yay! Happy birthday Dad! Sorry I can’t be there to celebrate it with you in person but I love you and I hope you have an amazing day…
Today’s picture is a picture of my parents from last Christmas. You can see my Dad’s rocking his epic winter bear beard in this pic. Also you can see that I was playing with bokeh at the same time by turning all the lights on the tree into stars. :)

In other news, Cobalt and I planted the first few plants for our garden yesterday. I have been staring at the pots ever since waiting for the plants to sprout. I knowwwww they don’t sprout overnight but I still have the little kid in me who is so excited that she wants to watch the plants sprout right now!. Do you guys have gardens? Have you planted anything for them yet? Do you prefer flower gardens, vegetable gardens, or both?

Fun with High Dynamic Range

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In addition to hanging out with my mom and playing with my sharks last weekend, I also decided to play with a new form of photography (at least to me). HDR (high dynamic range) photography allows you to get both the bright stuff and the dark stuff in the frame to show up. You know, normally on a bright day to get your subject in focus, you have to overexpose the sky. Or to get the sky in focus, you have to underexpose anything else in the picture. So HDR is a technique where you take the same picture multiple times, changing the exposure time for each picture (I just walked down from 1/800 to 1/100 so I had 5 or so pictures at a variety of exposures). Then you use a fancy program like Photoshop to combine them all together into one image. Tada! Sky and subject are both viewable! Or in this case: the bark and the cracks between the bark on this tree are both viewable! That picture up there is from my second attempt – I had read about HDR and had played around with the HDR mode in photoshop so I knew what I wanted my pictures to look like.

This picture down below was from my first attempt when I just tried it out – no tripod, no reading up on how to do it/the best subjects, etc. I just took a few pictures at various exposure times. Because I didn’t use a tripod, I had to stick all the pictures into a program I generally use for microscopy images from work (ImageJ from NIH) to align all the images (note to self – when doing HDR work – USE A TRIPOD). ImageJ did a pretty good job though. The only things that didn’t get aligned were the clouds (note to self – when doing HDR work – DON’T PHOTOGRAPH MOVING OBJECTS… for obvious reasons! You are taking multiple pictures so when things move, they won’t line up right in the composite image!). So the clouds (and their shadows) look a little funny in this picture but there you have it: my first HDR attempt showing you the most well known sight in Boulder – the Flatirons.

Some people LOOOOOOVE HDR because of its ability to capture bright and dark things and some people hate it because they say that the midtones turn out so gray (my photography teacher said that). I didn’t like my pictures at first because Photoshop’s original HDR composite does turn out looking quite gray but then after playing with the colors a little in Photoshop using the Curves function, I think it turned out pretty neat (i.e. not gray). Thoughts? What should I try to photograph with HDR next?

Antsy Questions

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I am a girl of lists. At any given second of any given day, I have at least one list running through my head. Whether it’s the lab list (if I start my cells here then I can do this experiment here and then…) or the wedding list (why isn’t the registry done? We should order our rings… What song are we gonna play here?) or the Potassium list (pick up Mom from airport, text friends back, need… sleep….) or all of them at once, something is running through my head at all times. So for today’s wedding Wednesday post, I thought I would post some things going through my head about all of that. Ready? Let’s go!

  1. Tans
    So we live in Colorado. We are 5300 feet closer to the sun here than people who live at sea level. Basically, once spring hits, I can’t really go outside without getting tanned, burned, or both. So by the time we get to May, I am already sporting a pretty decent farmer’s tan just from walking to the bus stop/biking to work. Not to mention that I also look like a raccoon thanks to my sunglasses tan. Because we are getting married this summer, I am getting increasingly worried about having a farmer’s tan with my wedding dress. Sure, it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world but I would really rather not see a fat farmer’s tan/raccoon eyes on me every time I see my wedding pictures. So it’s going to be an interesting next few months I think – full of sunscreen and maybe less sunglasses use. We’ll just have to see because I refuse to do any fake tanning. Thoughts?
  2. Dress!
    My mom was here visiting earlier this week and we made progress on fitting the bodice of my dress. I think the next time I head out to California for a long weekend we are going to go pick out fabric!!!! So speaking of fabric, we went and looked a little at my mom’s favorite fabric shop here in Boulder (you know you’ve lived somewhere too long when your mother has a favorite fabric shop there…). I want my dress to be white with just a HINT of blue. Something that you could really only see in the sunlight. Unfortunately, there were no bolts of fabric that came anywhere close. The only “light blue” they had looked silver or gray to me. It was if, in order to make things lighter, they just took out all the hue in the color, if that makes sense. So instead of just making it less saturated (so still sky blue or whatever but fainter), they just took out everything that made it blue so that it looked dull and gray. I think a dress made out of the fabric would look dull and lifeless so I dunno if that would make for a very good wedding dress. Do you have a favorite fabric shop? Have you ever seen anyone in a blue wedding dress?

In other wedding news, I ordered my necklace to wear with my dress. It’s a shark (duh)! Click the picture to go to the Etsy page it is from.

Taking our whales for a walk

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Wow… it’s been a while since I’ve written. So much has been going on in lab recently that I have really only had time to eat, sleep, and think about science. Whew…. sometimes things get crazy with grad school.
Anyway, some of the craziness ended on Friday when we had a huge lab cleanup to prepare for the big lab move next month. It was ridiculously epic. I was sooooo busy taking care of all the old expired chemicals we found in the weirdest places (thanks to the student I inherited my workspace from… NOT happy with him right now). After all of that, A and I took our giant stuffed sharks on a walk. While we were out playing with my camera and the sharks, one lady walked past us and asked us if we were taking our whales for a walk. A and I just looked at each other for a second and nodded as we passed. Then we burst out laughing… they’re sharks, not whales! Geez! Anyway, we (and the sharks) had so much fun this past weekend so I thought I would share some pictures – up there they are both sitting in a pine tree (obviously). Down there, there’s Fernando trying to eat an out of focus Prius and Gustav and me doing a silly dance…


Did you guys do anything fun this weekend? Have you seen any fun sharks? (Thanks Natalie for the picture last week. Totally made my day!)

Shark Friday

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These past few weeks have been super busy for me mostly due to things going on in lab. However, while I was away in lab, my sharks got to have a lot of fun this week. First Banana Shark got to have Orange Julius and pie on Pi Day and then yesterday five of my sharks had the pleasure of chasing me around the apartment complex when I got home early from lab. These pictures were super fun for Cobalt and me to take… I have been planning this shoot for a while now. Unfortunately the sun got in our way a little bit (hence all the crazy flares) but no worries. We just might have to do it again… I had originally planned the shoot to use three people and not just two so we’ll just have to try it again… perhaps we’ll take the sharks to the park! :) I love Banana Shark in this bottom picture…


I hope you have good weekends!

Fun With Skype and Wedding Invitations

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Last night, Cobalt and I had the pleasure of Skyping with our friend T, who we have asked to design our wedding invitations. A few weeks ago, Cobalt and I sat down and made rough sketches of what we would want to see in our invitations – paper size, colors, wording, what the RSVP cards would look like, borders, drawings, etc. I drew it all up with my Wacom tablet and e-mailed them to T. So last night, she had them all open on her computer and we worked together so that she could have a better idea of what we were thinking. It was kind of a fun experience with her drawing away on her Wacom tablet and us watching via the “Share screen” option on Skype. We would pick part of the invitation, she would ask us a little about what we were thinking, and then she would go to work. It was sooooo cool to watch everything unfold. I am so incredibly excited for the way everything turns out. I think it is going to be amazing. Thanks T for being awesome!!!

Cobalt and I are super excited about how personal our invitations are going to be. How do you guys feel about invitations? Do you like super fancy frilly ones? Simple ones that just give the information? Something in between? Something with maybe… sharks? on them?

Also, Happy Pi Day! From me to you… Go get some pie! :D

Weather Report: ????

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I usually check the weather on Weather.com every day before I go wherever I am planning on going. Yesterday when I got up and checked the weather before my soccer game (first outdoor game of the year woooooooo!), I saw the following weather report. If you are thinking that this looks like a decent report of the weather, make sure you take a look at the current wind listed…

I am sure this was a random mistake on Weather.com’s part because when I reloaded the page a few minutes later it was fixed. But it still made me laugh and made me think of how appropriate the report was for the month of March in Boulder. You see, we don’t really get one of those “normal” springs where it gradually gets warmer in March and then the “April showers bring May flowers…” No, Boulder basically has a split personality for this whole part of the year which makes the weather almost completely unpredictable (hence “wind: ??? calm??? Maybe?!?!?”). So yes, one day it will be absolutely gorgeous and a nice 66 degrees outside and the next day it will snow 2 feet (or rain/snow, or drizzle, or just be freakin’ COLD for no reason, etc) and then the next day the sun will come back out, the temperature will go back up, and it will be like that day in the middle never existed.

Ohhhhh Boulder…

Is it spring-like where you are yet? Are your springs as two sided as ours? I know we technically have 8 days until spring starts according to the calendar but no one seems to have told our weather that…