valentine {still+life}

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.

I love thee to the depth and breadth and height

My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight

For the ends of Being and ideal Grace.

I love thee to the level of everyday's

Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.

I love thee freely, as men strive for Right;

I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise.

I love thee with a passion put to use

In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith.

I love thee with a love I seemed to lose

With my lost saints, --- I love thee with the breath,

Smiles, tears, of all my life! --- and, if God choose,

I shall but love thee better after death.

     Elizabeth Barrett Browning

monday mash up, february 13

The simple fact that this collage exists makes me so happy. I lurve Lightroom. We've become really good friends lately, but I still have so much to learn about it. For this, I'll take a class. Maybe this summer when I can devote some attention to it. So I made this collage in Lightroom, and I think I'm slowly, slowly coming to terms with the death of Picnick. So ha!

We had a great weekend; how was yours? I got to spend a lot of time in the studio figuring some things out. I calibrated my lenses and fiddled with some of the exposure problems I've been having. Slowly, slowly, I'm getting there. Neel came with me to take the pictures I needed for last week's Project 52 (The theme was culture, and the blog post about it will come on Wednesday.), and then we ran some errands together. If Wait, Wait Don't Tell Me is on, I could ride around in the car all day. Neel finished the destruction of the playstructure, and our yard looks SO much bigger!

We went French-ish for dinner with mussels and brie and crusty bread. I am totally digging our tradition of Saturday night dinners. Callum loves it too, and we're thinking of doing themes. Greek one week, Indian another. Callum suggested Irish too. After dinner it snowed! And thundered! Thunder-snow. Crazytown. It didn't really stick, but it's all we've had this winter. I'll take what I can get. When we got up Sunday morning, it must have snowed in the night. Another tiny bit, but enough to make doggie footprints on the back step. Oh, and we watched Julie and Julia, but fast forwarded through the Julie bits. The Julia stuff is the best part anyway.

Laundry is SO annoying right now. Our dryer sort of dries stuff. It just doesn't get hot, so it takes about seven cycles. If someone can find me some time, I'll get right on replacing it.

So it's super cold and Sunday we had a fire in the fireplace and I made roast chicken. This might be another tradition. Can you get tired of roast chicken?

Oh, and I made a watermark! I'm still getting the kinks out, but you'll see it below. Let me know what you think. And let me know which of those two photos I should use for my best friends Project 52 shot. Or both?!

So that's us. What happened for you guys this weekend? Anybody have anything fun to report?