Tag: photography

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?

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!), […]

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…

Sharks N Stuff

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This past weekend, Cobalt and I went to the Denver Aquarium with the Denver regional alumni club for my undergrad university. Knowing, as you do, about my love for sea creatures, you would think that the Denver Aquarium would be a place that I would frequently visit but actually, in my 4 years of living here, I had never once set foot in the building. So when I got the invitation for the regional club event, I pretty much instantly signed Cobalt and me up.

It was kind of a neat event (and three of us from my graduating year turned up!). We got to meet an African porcupine up close and personal (see below for pictures) and we got to go on a behind the scenes tour of the aquarium! On the tour, we met some of the sea turtles who are named after the ninja turtles (even the girls); we learned all about how the animals are trained, how their food is made, how their water is made, etc; and I pretty much decided that it is time for me to get dive certified so that I can volunteer in the shark tank! Anyway, after all of that, we got to go explore all the exhibits (it was really cool to look into the shark tank and be like “wow… we were standing right there!”) which is where I took this super awesome shark picture.

For those of you who are skeptical of aquariums in land locked states like I kind of am (having grown up in CA), I think this little aquarium actually does a pretty good job (and it is bigger than the one in Albuquerque!) though I was sad that they didn’t have an octopus…

Moving on…. porcupine! So this porcupine is like 6 months old and we got to meet her! A couple of pictures for you:

Here she is!!! She got really excited about being in a new room and shuffled off behind one of the tables before the trainer could get her leash on her. It was really neat to see how she is trained to follow a target and gets positively reinforced with food and a clicker when she goes to the target. The people in the room who have never heard of this training method before thought that she was making the clicker noise… Haha… Though she does ruffle her quills together to make this weird swishing sound if she thinks you are trying to eat her (this was her response to being put on a leash too…).


I just wanted to show you what her quills looked like in more detail. Apparently if she really wanted to quill you, she would back into you. Yikes! The trainer said that she is pretty much harmless and that she, the trainer, has only gotten quilled once – when she accidentally dropped the porcupine she was holding and then tried to catch it with her knee (>_<). She said that the only thing you really have to worry about is getting your shoes eaten. Apparently this little porcupine was on the news recently and the news anchor was freaking out because the porcupine was reallllly interested in her leather shoes… Hehe… aww porcupines…

Anyway, that pretty much concludes the aquarium summary. I will leave you with an Instagram of me and a shark at the gift shop…

What did you do this weekend? Cobalt and I also saw two movies, Moonrise Kingdom and Brave. Have you seen either of them? What do you think?

So many weddings!

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So Cobalt and I have been busy: this past weekend we made pasta and then the weekend before we went to see our friends A and T get married! What a great night! The ceremony was adorable and heartfelt. A made her own dress which is freaking awesome. This first picture shows off her dress as she stands all ready to get married to T! What a gorgeous bride! :)

During the ceremony, they sealed love letters in a box with a bottle of wine to be opened on their 10th anniversary. Look how cute it was! 10 years from now will be exciting!

Finally, I love this cake picture!

After all the cake shenanigans, we danced the evening away and that was awesome! Congratulations A and T! :):):):):)

Pasta Party!

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Yesterday, Cobalt and I went over to our friend L’s house to hang out with L and our friends T and C for a day of adventure. We made homemade pasta. L charged us with two tasks: making mushroom ravioli and spaghetti carbonara. So we divided into two teams – Cobalt and T on the spaghetti and C and me on the ravioli while L started on the ravioli filling. That picture up there is my sad looking mummy ravioli. He surprisingly didn’t explode when we cooked him so I guess I patched him up pretty well! C said he was delicious… :)
Anyway, it was really fun/tasty! Here are some more pictures:

First we have C mixing the ravioli dough:

Next we have Cobalt and T working on making the spaghetti… The pasta machines were of course the best part…

Once the spaghetti was ready to be cooked, everyone switched over to team ravioli and we had quite the assembly line going on (someone painting the dough, someone filling the dough, someone making the little raviolis, etc). Look at C’s cutting skill!

And two hours later, we have the final dishes:

Spaghetti Carbonara

Mushroom Ravioli

Oh man… it was so delicious… Have you ever made your own pasta? What is your favorite kind of pasta to make/eat? Did you do anything amazing this weekend?

Mr. and Mrs…. ????

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Let’s do a scandalous post today….

Let’s talk about last names.

I know I know… I can hear everyone get all awkward… or maybe that’s just me being awkward. Maybe everyone else is totally cool with it. If so, can you help me?

So the last name thing is a hot spot for me and I’ve blatantly shrugged it off over the past few weeks and months promising to deal with it later. Well, last weekend we had our last premarital counseling session with one of our officiants and we were working on planning the ceremony. He asked if we had thought about how we want to be introduced at the end of the ceremony (you know, after “You may kiss the bride,” there’s that part where you are announced as “for the first time ever…”). What’ll it be? Mr. and Mrs. [insert Cobalt’s last name here]? Cobalt [Cobalt’s last name] and Potassium [my last name]? Just Cobalt and Potassium, for the first time ever as husband and wife? The short answer is I don’t know.

For the entirety of my life, I always assumed that I would change my name to be my husband’s last name and become “Mrs. Whatever” because that is what you do. Then I even started joking about it and I was like Hey! My last name is cool! If he has a boring last name, then he should change his last name to match my awesome name… but then when it actually happened and I actually got engaged and actually had to think about changing my last name… it broke my heart. I have been Potassium [last name] for so long that it is part of my identity! Some of my nicknames even are based on that last name. It seemed like changing my name would be like changing my identity. Like lopping off my connection with my family and my past life and joining Cobalt’s family. I mean, I want to be a part of Cobalt’s family but not at the risk of completely losing my connection with my own. I know that is not what is going on here but it still seems weird to me that the girl is expected to do that but the guy doesn’t do anything like that for her family. I don’t know. These are the things that I think about.

So I’ve compiled a list of my feelings on this issue.
Reasons why Potassium doesn’t want to change her name

  • Read the above paragraph for all the emotional reasons Potassium is attached to her name: family, identity, etc.
  • I’ve published a paper in the scientific world with this name. And if you look up my last name in a certain scientific database, this paper along with papers published by my uncle and my grandfather pop up as well… Which is kind of cool. A nerdy family legacy if you will… Okay that is sort of a family issue but the real point here is that if I publish any other papers under any other name, then this one paper will be lost in a search for me and so people won’t have my complete paper publishing record… It’s a complicated science thing…
  • It’s a pain in the butt/very expensive to change your name!!!!! I don’t really think anyone LIKES going to the DMV so why would I purposely give myself a reason to have to go back there?

Reasons why Potassium does want to change her name

  • I still do kind of want to be Mrs. [Cobalt’s last name] because marriage is a joining of families and because it makes everything all tidy with kids and mail and checks and bills etc. Plus my mom didn’t change her last name and it made me feel like she didn’t want to be part of the family or something (it sounds stupid but it was kind of weird for me…)
  • I can keep my scientific name my maiden name so my papers could still be published under that name even if I legally had a new name.

I am sure there are plenty of other reasons to go in both categories but there are a few. Let’s discuss!

In other news, it is really exciting to get our RSVP postcards back in the mail every day.

In other other news, we are having problems coming up with the fortune for the inside of our fortune cookies. Any suggestions? Someone suggested that we put “lucky numbers” on the back that are 8, 4, and 12 (wedding date… hahaha) but what about the actual fortune? We have thought of jokes, trivia about the two of us, cute “ice breaker” questions like “When did you first meet Potassium/Cobalt?” and nothing has really stuck. Thoughts about those?

Okay… Here is your mission for today:

  1. What are your feelings about name changing?
  2. Be excited about RSVP postcards (and send yours in if you have one but otherwise just be excited)!!!
  3. Fortune ideas?

One more thing – the picture! It’s the cake for the bride and groom at the wedding Cobalt and I went to last weekend (hopefully a post about that coming soon!). Adorable, right? I love it. The groom’s mom made it too. Nice work!

I’d like my state medium well, please…

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So in case you haven’t heard, Colorado has a huge wildfire going on right now. The High Park Fire is currently 5% contained and it is the third largest wildfire in the history of the state at 43,400 acres. Keep us in your thoughts though. People are being evacuated and one person is thought to be dead… scary stuff! I was worried about this when we didn’t get much snow/rain this winter and spring… Booo…

Today’s pictures feature the picturesque Flatirons that look over Boulder. The top picture shows all the haze from the High Park Fire that we got here this morning. The bottom picture shows a Flatiron peaking up over some bushes in less hazy conditions this afternoon to give you an idea of the difference…

What sorts of natural disasters do you get in your area? Have you ever been evacuated? Btw, this week has been a bit ridiculous so my usual Wedding Wednesday post is probably going to be late… Also, for the record, I prefer my steaks medium or medium well… I like my states to be not charred too…