Category: self portrait

Self portrait

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HOW IS IT ALREADY DECEMBER?!

It feels like the eclipse was just yesterday!

The sun goes down SO EARLY now, guys. You know it’s sad days when you’re in Seattle on the first day of December and you think “Wow! The sun is up so late here!” :-/

Anyway, on Sunday, I was sitting in our office so that the last glimpse of sun hit me in the face. It was great – so warm and bright. Then I looked up and saw that the sun was illuminating my face in a reflection in the window. I decided to try to capture it with my camera. I think it turned out pretty well. I love that you can’t even see the camera. There are just some Potassium eyes hovering there. Wahaaaaa.

In case you wanted to see the self-portrait part even closer – here is a crop.

Creeeeeepyyyyyy. Where’d that Potassium come from?

Apparently it’s a creepy-themed week. On Saturday, Cobalt and I took advantage of the super low hanging fog we had to make some silly monster flicks. Then I made the creepy self portrait. And then, when I tried to photograph this weekend’s super moon, the clouds decided that it needed to be creepy too.

Everything’s better in orange!

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Hey all, life is currently causing me rage and anguish so instead of a post, I leave you with this picture of my awesome orange hair. Cobalt and I had a hair dying party this weekend to commiserate life being meh right now and I think my orange turned out pretty well!

Now if only it would stop fading epically…

PS- who wants to guess what fun color Cobalt’s hair is?

Photo Grab bag

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Today is a random assortment type of a post. Here we go:

Lately I’ve been:

  • Doing an Instagram photo challenge with my friends – some of my favorite entries are below
    This was day 3: 5pm

    This was day 6: self portrait
  • Teaching high school students about DNA/heredity/genetics research. I got them excited about the concept by first having them extract DNA from strawberries using household supplies (dish soap, water, salt, and rubbing alcohol). The boys thought it was COOL and the girls thought it was GROSS but it got them asking questions.

    This was also an Instagram Challenge pic. Luckily for me, the day of the DNA workshop was also day 4: food
  • Making delicious egg and bacon sandwiches in home made biscuits and pondering how to make Cobalt’s and my meals more healthy but also delicious while on a budget… Ideas?

    Yummmmmmmmm
  • Running another glow in the dark 5K and actually running it this time (last time I was out of shape and it was so disorganized there was no way we could actually run anyway…)
    Potassium and A before the race with all their glowy stuff on

    Potassium, A, and Cobalt being silly before the race…
  • Finally getting around to hanging the beautiful wall hanging Cobalt and I got as a (late) wedding present from a family friend

    I am so mesmerized by the patterns on this quilt…. I could stare at it all day.
  • Getting excited about art and painting and the idea of art journals?
  • Finishing my challenge of reading 50 books this year (up to 53 now… guess I should go back to trying to tackle Crime and Punishment…)
  • Feeling super excited for all my friends who just got engaged or married recently!!!!!!!! So much love! Also, if any of my said engaged friends want some sweet engagement pictures, I happen to know someone who’s pretty good at that kind of stuff… her name’s Potassium… Seriously. Let me know! I would love to take some pictures for you!

Your turn: what have you been up to?

Fun with Christmas Lights!

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I’ve decided that today’s and Thursday’s posts will be full of fun with lights! Today we focus on Christmas lights! I bought some purple Christmas lights (though they look red in these pictures…) this weekend and put them up around mine and Cobalt’s office. So immediately, the camera came out and I had to play with various settings. Today we are exploring starbursts! I briefly talked about them last week in my post about A but here’s how it works. If you have a prime lens (so it doesn’t zoom) and you set your aperture really narrow (= a small hole in the lens), any out of focus light will be the shape of the petals of the aperture (Click here for a picture of a large (top) and small (bottom) aperture from Wikipedia). So the smaller the aperture, the more starbursty the out of focus light becomes. It’s kind of fun to play with…

Anyway, here are a few more pictures of me playing with my Christmas lights…

Those of you who are my friends on Facebook have probably seen this one by now (It’s a self portrait taken with my awwwwesome remote control for my camera… TOTALLY worth the extra cash btw for those of you who are thinking of purchasing DSLRs… makes family pictures during the holidays SUPER fun/easy):

More starbursts:

Getting these Christmas lights was actually one of the highlights of my weekend. Life has been fairly ridiculous for us lately so anything that I can do to make our office/house more relaxing/comforting/etc is a huuuuge plus.

Tell me how you feel about Christmas lights! Do you like them? Hate them? How much is too much? I’ve seen a lot of people wrapping Christmas lights around just the tree trunks in their front yards this year… I’ve gotta tell you that I’m not so sure I’m a fan. It looks like a lit up post in the middle of a dark yard… :-/

Speaking of Christmas lights, here is my favorite picture I took with Instagram in downtown Denver this weekend:

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! :)

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!

I am what a scientist looks like

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You should check out this Tumblr blog called This is what a Scientist Looks Like because it is my new favorite blog. The goal of the blog is to show that anyone can be a scientist, regardless of gender, race, etc. It shows that scientists can have a variety of hobbies (like photography for example) and obsessions (like my love of sharks :-/) even though they also love science. Yay! I find this so empowering… Let’s get away from the stereotype that all scientists are white men with frizzy hair in lab coats and glasses, people! :)

Shark girl says: Have a good weekend!

Snow acceptance

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It’s around this time of year that I learn to just accept the snow and the cold which I guess is good because it doesn’t seem like they’re going away soon. I start to notice my acceptance because now, every time I see an untouched snow drift I just want to play in it (which I won’t unless I am all bundled up in my awesome snow pants, etc but still!) and I wonder why it is still untouched… Am I the only one who has these urges?

What do you do to survive winter (or whatever your least favorite season is)?

Picture: Sometimes I do something really crazy, like go skiing at night!