365-8 Atoms Away!

Today on the first day of spring it snowed. Snowed! But i am tired of winter (i'm not much of a cold weather girl - once is enough for me and we've had more than once already). So instead of posting another snow picture......

The other day i took a walk in my neighborhood. It was a gorgeous day - the sun couldn't make up its mind whether to stay behind the clouds or shine its full glory. It was a good day to practice some more with my camera. Because of changing light i had to keep changing the settings in order to get the best shot. I came across one of these red berry-type bushes - the way the photo came out it almost looks like atoms flying at you - almost.

365-7 Reflections

After several tries I was finally able to manipulate the settings just right to get the reflection of the trees in the water to show up in the picture.

365-6 Fresh Dandelions

365-5 Photo project

You can barely see the suns rays stretching upwards as it was starting to go down at days end.

From Little Mermaid, Mary Kate/Ashley to Final Destination

My mom is having a garage sale this weekend so i decided to clean out a part of our movie collection. Mind you what you see here are just those movies on Video Cassette. Because back in the day when my kiddos were little we didn't have any of seasons of anything available - so this collection is almost all Movies. In the early 90s, you could begin to find seasons of things like Blues Clues, Barney and short 30 minute music type videos like Disney Sing-a-Longs. Its so funny to go through and see all the movies they loved  and how many of them keep returning in updated formats. So some of these we also have the same versions in DVD format. I refuse to buy them again in BluRay. They are old enough now that they can do that, but they might as well wait till they have kids of their own because who knows what type of format these will be shown in then. This is just part of that stash:

• Little Mermaid,
• Beauty and the Beast,
• Pocahantas
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 

As they they got older

• Mary Kate and Ashley (at least 10 different movies, there were more but we only have 10 - ones from when they were late grade school/junior highish)
• Sandlot, (this is a must see if you have grade/middle school boys - all about growing up in the 60s). The boys are all about playing baseball, one of them decides to let the new, nerdy kid on the block on the team and they end up being life long friends 
• Now & Then (same as above except the girl experience). The girls come to term with one girl's parents divorce, another with the death of her mother - also are lifelong friends.

Then eventually

• NSYNC  - great to watch on today's big screens!
•  Final Destination  - too scary and bloody

As you can see i didn't make too much of a dent but did get a nice pile in the garage sale box. The classic Disney's we'll watch again until the VCR totally breaks down as well as NSYNC. Its amazing how much we can accumulate through the years. Now i need to tackle getting those home movies on a DVD format. It never ends, but the memories are priceless. Oh and as you ca see i also have a huge LP collection. What are LPs you may ask, they are records. Most of you may also ask 'what is a record?' The pre-historic version of the CD. And getting all those on CDs or an iPod may be a task for when i retire -- we'll see.

Radiant Fruit 365-4

More and more lately i've been looking for ways to  cut back on spending (as is everyone else these days). One way is to cook more meals at home. This not only costs less than eating out, it helps with my weight goals as i can manage what i put in (salt, sugar, etc.) in my food and manage portion size. We were going to do a healthy potluck at work this week and i was thinking of taking a vegetable or fruit salad. Strawberries were on sale this weekend at the grocery store (buy 1 quart package, get one free) so i decided on the fruit salad. i found a great recipe on the Food Network site by Elie Krueger from Healthy Appetite. With minimal ingredients - strawberries, kiwis, melon and then a honey, lemon juice and mint (i did forget the mint in mine) for dressing. Very easy and very delicious.  

Shadows 365-3

Today's photo captures the late afternoon suns rays through my bedroom window on this first day of Daylight Savings Time. I thought the different intensity of the shadows was interesting - how same light coming through one window could cast such a variety of shades.