the best of 2009
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Category Archives: Northern Virginia
As a military family, our children rarely spend Christmas in the same place twice. So working with that, we try to make family traditions flexible worldwide. For example, we take them to the Nutcracker each year and recount years passed how many cities across the globe we’ve seen it in during the holidays. We have tickets for today’s Septime Webre’s The Nutcracker starring George Washington as the heroic Nutcracker and England’s King George III as the villainous Rat King. I can’t wait. Our tickets are for the showing at D.C.’s historic Warner Theater.
Only we woke up this morning to all this snow!
So we went sledding instead!
The blizzard continues, D.C. is shut down. We’re inside now, all warmed up and sipping hot chocolate. This might be the year we reschedule the Nutcracker for January, which makes 2010 the historic year that we’ll see it twice!
Carlos is heartbroken, stuck indoors on a day the Saints are playing. :) (thinking of you, Tommy and Katie!)
And I digress here, but sledding down that tiny treeless hill this morning brought back so many fond memories of recklessly sailing down mountains on Les Schwab tire tubes, dodging evergreens, and the completely insane hooky-bobbing of my youth. On days like today, I think of all my Oregon friends and smile. :) Miss you guys!
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Lisa Semerad magnificently explodes my mind with her art instruction prowess. I love her class.
This week, our assignment was to create a continuous, organic shape in a square, rectangle and circle that:
1. does not touch the edges
2. runs off two different sides once
3. runs off three different sides once
4. runs off one side once and another twice
No holes, no points and no tangents.
!
Of course, she gives us an incredible amount of instruction and knowledge before she sends us off with india ink and scissors to play…
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It’s been raining like [west of the Cascades] Oregon here the last few months! Today the sun came out and made the humidity feel like just this side of an East Coast summer — which is too quick because I was still getting the hang of spring. As we turn the corner into summer, most of my pictures of spring sit unedited and unposted.
Like this.
And this.
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Memorial Day weekend started early for us. My husband took a day off work, we poured our coffee into to-go cups and drove the kids to school on the way to the course. The golf course. To play golf.
I know! That’s what I said: I don’t play golf!
It all started at the school auction where my husband won several games at Top Golf. There’s only three in the U.S., and one of them is right in our backyard. The best I can describe it is that it’s like bowling, only with golf. We’ve had such great fun through this rainy spring season playing golf there with our kids.
Today was my first day on a real course. We played 9 holes on a par 3 (am I saying this correctly?). My husband gave me one of his monogramed golf balls to start. It took me 4 tries to hit it into the hole by the first flag.
On the second hole, concentrating very hard on all the things I’d been told (there’s so much to remember! Keep your left arm straight, relax, draw an imaginary straight line on the ground with the tip of your club as you swing, use your core to pull your swing, don’t try to kill the ball, make your club do the work for you, keep your eye on the ball, don’t lift your head…those of you who play have already heard all of this a gazillion times I’m certain. So I digress.), I wasn’t aware at first that I was no longer aiming at the monogrammed ball. Right about the time I noticed the sand trap, I saw he’d replaced the cute little sentimental ball with one stamped PRACTICE. !
Walking along the course, birds chirping background to a perfect Northern Virginia day, I caught myself really, really, really enjoying life.
We topped tonight off with dinner out with longtime and dear friends. Such a great way to start a holiday weekend. And even when it’s over, the end of the holiday means the opening of all the local pools and the beginning of summer. I love this time of year.
Have a happy and safe Memorial Day!
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When I first queried Carl Zoch Photography for a family session, I let him know straight-up that I’m a photographer. Photographing the photographer can be tricky business, and a simple Google search of my name will bring up my portfolio. I didn’t want him to think this was some kind of feint maneuver.
Carl is stunning at engagement and wedding photos. When my husband and I were engaged, Carl might have been saying to us, “Uh, hey, guys? Over here?” It’s been 12 years and 2 kids since our engagement, so instead of interrupting our kisses to get his shot, Carl had to crash-course us on kissing in public! Walking down the center of a cobblestone street at sunset with our children in tow isn’t an everyday experience — but maybe it should be, at least occasionally.
I chose Carl for a number of reasons:
He’s likable;
He’s a former Oregonian;
He’s mastered Oklahoma sun;
Photographs are important to him.
Sitting on the other side of the lens is an experience I’m still digesting, but I’ve decided this much: photographers should be showing up in the posts of photography blogs, not just in the comment section.
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