Mermaid or whale?

Great post on Alaina's blog. Check it out!

Also, I have a phone interview this afternoon, and a face-to-face interview on Thursday morning.. both with "financial institutions."

Both are for part time jobs, but I keep prodding around the idea of doing my own photography thing, so maybe that would give me time to do that...?

I've started doing some trial Photoshop work for a photographer in Iowa, to see if I meet their expectations for quality retouching.. hopefully that leads into something good. :) (And if you're reading this, which you might be, I just want to thank you again for this opportunity.. :D)

Along the same lines, I've had a domain name reserved for quite a while for my 'Baseman Studios', so any thoughts on developing that into a website? I'd like to, but still don't know if I want to jump in head first to my own photography business. It starts to overwhelm me... dealing with lawyers, making everything official, etc.

Joel's out on the road again this week, but it was great to have him home last week. Friday night we went down to Ripon. Joel got a new 4-wheeler a week ago, and so he wanted to test that out. We took the pontoon boat out on the lake for a cruise in the coooold weather, but ended up seeing a nice display of fireworks over Green Lake right as we pulled up to the dock. They were amazing.. we didn't get to see any over the 4th since we were in Houston.

Yesterday we were invited over to Franke's with the Topinka's.. spent the whole day there! It was a great time!

I've done a "complete cricket carnage" this weekend, finishing up the rest of my spraying this morning, and vacuuming up about 10 dead ones in the basement. Phew!

Tomorrow is Corn Day at Marion, and the first prep day was last Saturday.. we got a lot accomplished! I'm team shooting a wedding this Saturday, so will miss that prep day.

This is pretty short and sweet, compared to how my updates usually go... Lots going on, especially for not having a job.. haha. Have a good Monday!


Ps. I've got a hankering for almond cookies... so I might make myself a batch. Anyone want to share them so I don't eat them all myself? :)

Note to self #6382

No more long blog posts.

Sigh. The drama of html formatting, pictures, and center/left align.





(But you know it will happen again.)

*Whooosh*

You can finally stop holding your breath. I'm going to do this super-long post. Bear with me. And I'm going to work backwards, since that's how I remember things.

So today: I'm filling in as secretary/receptionist for Baseman Floors since MMJ made a quick trip to Vanderbilt Convention in MI, and Becky was off. Wooo. I've taken one prank call from Jess asking for "Doug," quite a few from Jeff, one from Jon, one from some chick asking for a schedule, and apparently someone on hold on line 5.. (oh wait, no line five, thanks for that, Jess, as I'm freaking out.) Fun. Tonight we might go to the races with Ron and Jeanine. Or go down to Ripon so Joel can ride this new 4-wheeler he got to go to California this winter. Except it's rainy and really cold.. so.. we'll see.

This week: I did a nice big senior session with Mariah, which was amazing. We had so much fun shootin' up the town of Neenah. If you still didn't check out the pictures, well, by golly, look at them now!

Last weekend, on Sunday a bunch of us girls went to High Cliff park, south of Appleton. It was a good time.. we walked on some trails, brought a picnic supper... We took some more pics of Mariah too.. but none of them turned out as well as the ones from the other days. Enjoy!

View from the "tower" at High Cliff

Suz's mad skills

Mad, mad skills

Lovely Sarah

Rock climbing

Sweet pic of Trista

Mariah and Trista

We left for Virginia last Monday (10th) in the afternoon. They had to do some warranty work on a floor down there, so Mary Jo and I went along with Mike and Joel. It was actually a lot of fun... lots of driving, lots of talking time. We played games, read books, ate at McDonalds... :) I think it was like a 13-15 hour drive one way, somewhere in there. On the way home though, we got stuck in traffic through Chicago... it took 3 hours to get all the way through the city. Then we got stuck again in Milwaukee. Wow. I've never seen traffic that bad. Just a lot of construction, and then there was an accident in Chicago or something. We got back Friday just in time for supper, which we ate at this neat Mexican restaurant a couple blocks from our plexer.

Random: I left my ring at the very first motel we stayed at on our way down... and didn't realize it until we were almost to Cincinnati. Ooops! We ended up just keeping on going, and picked it back up on our way back through. I'm a smartie.

Driving home through the Smoky mountains. I had never been anywhere in the eastern US, so this was pretty cool.

The neat motel at Georgetown, KY.. very nicely decorated. The beds/rooms were even cooler, but I didn't take a picture before we mussed it all up with our luggage, etc. I loved this motel, but MJ didn't... I guess their showerhead didn't work.





I've never seen this much rain ever! They got 6 inches in 2.5 hours.. we could hardly get back to our motel because every street around it was flooded. Water was actually coming out of the drain holes in the streets.

The first day we got there we had to bum around waiting for the power to come on.. Joel being goofy.


So the week before that, I went out to Iowa for one of my high school friend's wedding. I left on Tuesday and stopped in Waterloo for the night. Had supper with the Simons, and spent the night with Lisa. It was really fun! Wednesday I continued on to Mom and Dad's. Blair had his Pre-All State Camp concert that night, so I went to that down in Sioux City.

Lawnmowers in the streets... only in small-twon Iowa.



The group shot of the concert.

After the concert, I went back up to Rock Valley for Amy's bachlorette party that night at a campground. A bunch of their friends from Central College were there. I had a great time getting to know them.. after camping over, we made sandwhiches the next morning for the wedding the next day.

Then we went to Butler's for lunch, a little coffee shop in SC.. we sat there for over 2 hours chatting and having a good time.

That afternoon, I went out and shot some senior pictures with Blair.. his are also on my Baseman Studios blog.

The next day was the wedding day! Amy and David McAlpine; 08.07.09

The group of us girls at the reception.

This should wrap everything up! Have a great weekend!