My next item of business is that it snowed again. Yes, that’s big news, because it hasn’t snowed since the last time I posted almost ten days ago. I’m starting to worry about where Larainy is going to get her water for next summer! The only good part is that without snow, we were able to go trail running yesterday (trail running- without mud- in January!) and now my buns are sooooore. Bum- baring bikini, here I come! (Just kidding. I try to find the most bum-covering swimwear I can find, no matter how steely my buns are).

And last but not least, Lauren is hosting a linky party about embarrassing stories, and you should all attend. I shared my old standby “Most Embarrassing Yard Sale” story, and there are some other good ones too. I suggest you head on over there!

So my wise, I-want-to-go-skiing side was thrilled to see this outside my window this morning:

It also happens to be doofer the dogger’s favorite weather.

Sure is pretty.

Back indoors, things are not so pretty.

We’re in the midst of some major de-junk and purge action. MAJOR.

I’m hungry.

My birthday is like that last pushup that you’re determined to finish after you’ve run 4 miles (Christmas shopping), done some yoga headstands (laboriously poring over Hotwire to find flights that won’t put you in the poor house), done some abs (making Christmas cards), lifted some weights (making Christmas dinner), and done some sprints (making it through Christmas with the fam without too many divisive political discussions…hehe). By the time my birthday comes along, everyone, including me, is spent.

Although I’m saying all this partially because I love whining and so you’ll all feel sorry for me, I’m also saying it for my wonderful family and friends. They’re the ones who make the extra special effort to make sure that my birthday doesn’t get forgotten, and I truly appreciate it. (As a kid, my mom even made sure to wrap my presents in non-Christmas paper!) I just love you guys. It’s also my “special birthday” or whatever you call it- I’m 27 on the 27th!

Any other December birthdays out there?

Gonna break the “wordless” rule to say I hope you all have a very Merry Christmas and/or Happy Holidays and a happy whatever you may or may not celebrate this winter (in the northern hemisphere) season!

I never did share these little cuties that we got on our honeymoon in Mexico- one of our only souvenirs. These were the perfect blend of sentimental and functional, since we needed S&P shakers anyway.

It seems obvious to me that red is for pepper (spicy) and blue is for salt (like the sea) but no one else seems to get that! Ah well.

Our souvenirs tend to be somewhat functional/something we needed anyway, like our Canadian pillows. But I want to hear about your honeymoon/special trip souvenirs!

The first challenge I did was to use the flash to eliminate dark shadows on a human face on a bright day. My subject (hmm… I could get used to calling him that… badum chh) helped me out here, and stood at an angle which cast shadows over half of his body.

Without flash:

Shutter 1/100; Aperture f/8.0; ISO 200; Flash Off

Although we’re in bright sunlight, here is the photo with the flash filling in the shadows:

Shutter 1/200; Aperture f/5.6; ISO 200; Flash On

This might be useful if you don’t have control over what angle of the sun you want your subject (for instance, if there’s a really cool waterfall behind your subject that you can’t conveniently move to a more flattering light).

I’m still not totally sold on the flash (it just has a weird look to it) but I can see how if you were taking a photo where you really needed everyone’s faces to be well-lit, it would be useful.

The other exercise I did was to use the fill flash to combat backlighting on a shadowed subject. I put my subject (Blanche) in the shade with a bright sunny backdrop behind her. (I think I probably could have found a better situation to illustrate this, but I’ll show you the pictures anyway.)

Without flash:

Shutter 1/250; Aperture 5.0; ISO 200 Flash Off

With flash:

Shutter 1/200; Aperture 5.0; ISO 200; Flash On

I encourage you to download the lesson, because they give a lot of helpful tips on how to use flash and the situations in which flash really can improve (gasp!) your photos.

This dude defending his thesis today

My family’s gift-giving tradition: Instead of gifts, we each put together a few scrapbook pages (fun shapes and cutesy sayings optional) of what happened in our lives that year. Each person makes enough copies of their own for everyone, so we all end up with a scrapbook of each others’ goings-on. (True, we’ve been slacking the past couple of years, but it’s back on!)

Blanche the Christmas Dog

Minimalist lights

Pepto-Bismol Christmas cookies

Cool paint jobs

On various things

Brown hair dye color

I know I’ve been neglecting the blog, and I do apologize to all of my wonderful fans. YOU guys are the real stars. Ha. Really though, thanks. Sometimes your life is just too crazy to blog, ya know? Or, you know, you just find yourself doing other things. We’ve been a little distracted lately because Stan is finishing school and we’re waiting to hear about his future employment, which could mean big changes for us. Oooh, I love being cryptic on the blog. Not that it’s that cryptic.

I hope you all are having a wonderful holiday season!

For months, I’ve “cared” about the mailbox on the corner and how crappy of a feeling I get when I turn onto our street. But passively cared, as in one time I think I googled graffiti removal services in my neighborhood and gave up after about 3 seconds. But this past weekend, by golly, I decided to actively care!

Of course now that I’ve already removed it, I find this link that looks super easy to use (if you live in my neighborhood, please use this!). I swear that was hiding from my previous google searches.

Anyhoo, I didn’t feel like waiting for anyone to come out anyway, so the link I found was this one from the Minneapolis Police Dept that had lots of good info on DIY graffiti removal. (Minneapolis- what a great city!)

There are a lot of options, so I headed down to the mailbox with a rag and an armful of supplies. These are the ones I trudged down with:

• Orange degreaser (I think Zep brand)
• Simple Green
• Mineral spirits
• Lacquer thinner
• Paint thinner (which I’m pretty sure is just mineral spirits)
• Goof-Off (says right on the label it can remove graffiti)

I’m just sad I didn’t get a picture, because I looked pretty ridiculous. Here’s a closer shot of the “artwork”:

Since the earth and I are friends, I started out with what I guessed was the least harsh of the chemicals: the orange degreaser and the Simple Green. Surprisingly, the orange degreaser took the paint marker (the yellow in the picture) right off. Simple Green would have done it too, but with much more scrubbing. Seriously, it wiped right off. Made me wonder why I waited so long!

But for the actual spray paint I had to pull out the big guns, and I finally determined that lacquer thinner is the only way to go. (Since that worked and I hadn’t opened the Goof-Off, I decided to save $4 and return it.) Surprisingly, it didn’t even remove the powder coating underneath. For some reason, some of the paint was more stubborn than others. The black stuff on the left wiped right off, but most of the stuff on the right had to be scrubbed with a Scotch Brite pad and lots of elbow grease, and copious amounts of lacquer thinner (wear gloves). There were a few parts that just would not come off, but in the end I decided that the result was satisfactory.

While I was at it, I even trimmed that bushy tree thing trying to grow. I debated digging up the grass and mulching it, but decided that the grass/weed mixture already looked 10x better than it had, so I saved my mulch.

While I’m glad to have found the SLC graffiti removal service, I think I’m going to make this particular mailbox my own special project. It’s been three days, and so far so good. They say the best thing to deter graffiti “artists” (sorry kid, but you’re not Banksy) is to remove it as soon as humanly possible, so that’s exactly what I intend to do. I will sit there like Walt Kowalski (minus the guns and racial slurs).

Oh and if you’re here to comment and tell me that I should have asked for permission before improving public property, you can go ahead and take your comments elsewhere. I had enough rude comments on my post about the dang fence, and if my act of public service offends you, you can find another blog to terrorize.

If you drive by ugly graffiti regularly and are hoping someone will come take care of it, I encourage you to channel Gandhi and “be the change you wish to see in the world”! Find a service in your area, or just head out there yourself! People will roll down their windows to thank you, and you will feel really superior/good about yourself.

Now, spill it: Does anyone else live in a ‘hood where this kind of thing is common? Or do bloggers usually only live in classier neighborhoods? Any more helpful/constructive tips on DIY graffiti removal?

This was taken of my subject with AWB as he dutifully works on completing his thesis:

Here it is with the Tungsten white balance setting:

And here it is with my custom white balance setting:

While he does look less jaundiced here, the custom white balance didn’t quite do the trick of capturing how he truly looked sitting there. He was somewhere between the second and third photos. He did look a little yellow, because he’s sitting under a bunch of incandescent lights (shh… don’t tell the green police- they’re the only ones we could find to fit the chandelier!).

Mr. Smartypants himself had a look, and after I complained that my custom white balance overcompensated and made him look a little blue, he pointed out the fact that his face was also being lit by the computer screen, which is a much different color of light than an incandescent bulb.

So the takeaway message is that white balance is tricky, especially when multiple light sources are involved. Honestly I will probably only worry about it when trying to take indoor nighttime photos, since in most other situations AWB seems to do a pretty good job.

Any white balance tips?