monday mash up, february 6

I swear we are still recovering from the holidays. All we want to do is sit around and watch movies. That is very unlike this family. Oh we did some stuff this weekend, but our default lately seems to be to sloth. We're all suffering a Superbowl hangover this morning, and it seems like Callum is getting sick again. What the what!? I didn't get nearly as much done as I wanted, but I did play around with making some collage templates in Lightroom (not that I used them here, mind you).You'll see a project of Neel's on the blog this week, and one of mine too, and sometime this afternoon, I'll load my final pick for last week's Project 52. This week's theme is Culture, perhaps something that is part of our family's culture or pop culture. I've had a thought about this, but if you want to weigh in with ideas, please do.

Friday night we took Callum out to celebrate his 2nd quarter report card. He chose hibachi. We were all stunned. Kidding. Saturday was basketball in the morning and a nice supper that evening. We're trying. We caught up on Project Runway and Top Chef Texas, but I'm scared to talk about it! Yesterday I tried to get some stuff done. Hmmm. Little accomplished, but sometimes you have to stop everything and cuddle your kid. Neel did manage to fix the light in our foyer, and we're SO happy about that. For starters, it was pretty dark in there, but also, that little chandelier is original to the house and so lovely. It's nice to have it back. We ended up at an impromptu Superbowl party for the first half of the game last night, and finished things off at home with meatball subs (Neel's choice). I have to say, the highlight of the weekend was the fact that Neel and Callum watched these videos over and over and laughed themselves silly each time. Like, until-they-cried silly.

My to-do list feels long this week, plus our drier seems to be broken as does one of our cars! Happy Monday, everybody. Woo-hoo. Are you as excited to be up and at 'em as I am?

monday mash up, january 30

Hey gang! How was your weekend?

We rested, rested, rested and I'm feeling much better. We all are. Callum and I got over the bug much faster than Neel, and I'm convinced that it's because we took time to stop and rest. Neel's at about where we are recovery-wise, and we caught it a whole four days after he did. So ha. I actually woke up feeling better on Saturday, but after a quick flurry of errand running and cleaning, I totally lost my mojo. We came home and watched episodes of Emergency! all afternoon. I know none of you young chicklets will remember Emergency! But Neel and I grew up on it. I remember impatiently waiting for the Lawerence Welk Show to end each Saturday evening before Emergency! would come on. Some weeks, I'd think, "Oh, I'll just watch the Lawrence Welk show and the time will go faster." People. The time did not go faster! Emergency! follows the early paramedic program in the 1970s in Los Angeles on calls as they save lives. It's totally awesome. Last night Roy and Johnny (those are the paramedics) rescued a baby who was locked and napping in the backseat of his mom's car while she was getting her hair done, and when she came out of the beauty salon she totally chewed them out for getting him out of a hot car! And the people in the 70s look so old. They'll be on a call, and Neel and I will think the guy is 55 and having a heart attack, and it'll turn out that he's 24 and having a drug overdose. One summer when I was away at camp, I missed my favorite episode of Emergency! (We got the TV Guide each week so I'd know what was coming up.), and my dad wrote me a long letter describing what happened. He used acronyms for the names of everybody, and the one I remember the most is LAC for L.A. Cop. So everytime the L.A. Cop shows up now, I automatically think, LAC. Back then I had the hugest crush on Dr. Kelly Brackett, but now I'm thinking Captain Stanley is pretty dreamy. Callum loves these, and we've been having a blast sitting on the sofa under all the blankets and a hound or two and watching a marathon of them.

Callum had a ton of make-up work to do on Sunday so we lit a fire in the living room, and I'm working on a day in the life project (lots of lounging and reading pictures, I'm afraid). When I get the galleries organized on the photography page, I'll let you know. And today the bottom braces go on. Woo. Hoo. Smoothies and soup for lunch and dinner. Probably for the rest of the week. The best part is that he's getting his expander out so the roof of his mouth will be free at last! And aren't those UPS trucks cute? The theme for this week's Project 52 is "Best Friends," and I'd totally use that, but she said we can't use objects. Has to be people. Boo.

So check back tomorrow for some outtakes from my bokeh shoot, and one other thing. I'm still so irritated about Picnick. I use Lightroom for 90+% of my photo editing, and I can do collages, etc. in Photoshop (I have Elements), but I have to say, nothing beat the ease of Picnick for dragging and dropping and getting collages on the blog. As Violet would say (first left on the bottom), "I'm mad." Anyhoo, I did today's collage from FotoFlexer. They don't have all the collages I use, but most of them, so it might be an option. I found them from this blog post on the SITS Site, and there was even more info in the comments. Just sayin'.

Oh! Wait! Project Runway gals?! I totally thought Mondo should have won that challenge, but Michael's face was SO happy. And I won't miss whiny, mopy April. Anybody watching Top Chef Texas out there?