Michigan

A few weeks ago we hopped in the Shaffer minivan around 6 pm and with 3 babies and 4 adults drove all night to Michigan for Jon and Kim Pt. 2 (The strategy worked wonderfully well, the babies slept almost the whole 13 hour drive). Our family has been going to a cottage on Glen Lake for our whole lives and it has always been my favorite place in the world.

Since Jon and Kim had a tiny backyard wedding with just immediate family, our trip to Glen Lake was a chance for another party with the whole family. Aunt Mimi was in charge of this one and she went all out. The details were incredible. Our little cottage and beachfront was absolutlely transformed into this gorgeous lakeside, DIY, delicious, barefoot party.
Aunt Mimi made all the decorations, we spent the morning arranging fresh-cut wildflowers in blue-glass jars, we snacked on cherry everything (Northern Michigan is all about the cherries), we took breaks to go swimming.






Jon and Kim came straight from their honeymoon. They're still all glowy.


We cousins are very close, we all like each other so much and we keep in touch and hang out as much as we can. Almost everyone was at the lake this year, it was wonderful.
Glen Lake trips are chock full of traditions and things we always do, but one of the more recent traditions is putting the boy cousins through a 'gauntlet' before in order to deserve their bride. This year's gauntlet was pretty light-hearted, and this particular task involved Jon rowing to a few different rafts to find a candy ring for Kim.

The Nike Club is an ancient secret society founded with the purpose of ...no one knows what. But it's a big deal and is resurrected every year at the Lake in one form or another.

Obviously I didn't take these last pics, but they are of the day after the reception before we hopped back in the minivan to come home. I miss that place when we're not there. I wouldn't mind living in Northern Michigan. Not at all.

Ohio

A few weeks ago the boy and I took what I'm referring to as our second honeymoon. Just us and no internet and no cell phone coverage in a cabin in the Ohio hills. We've never had even an overnight trip, just the two of us since we've been married. It was absolutely perfect.

The house frame was ancient, but totally re-done in a kind of rustic modern style. Elegant butcher block counters combined with a huge massaging showerhead with an original stone fireplace and quirky little details. Sometimes I get scared of the overly-floral bed and breakfasts out there, it's really hard to find a modern tasteful one, and this one was perfect, we couldn't have asked for more.

Matches for the grill kept in there.

There were so many porches and little outdoor spaces, I spent every minute I could reading or eating or drinking outside, just soaking up the green and clearing my mind.

We drank that champagne on a perfect rainy afternoon. I have a problem with saving things forever, and I was determined to go ahead and drink this, in an effort to enjoy life minute by minute, before it turned to vinegar. I'm not going to say it blew my mind, but maybe it should have. Having never had anything so fancy my tongue had no idea how to process it, I think. It was really really good. It was miles above anything I've ever tasted before, but it wasn't pure nirvana. In the end it was a nice champagne for sipping on a tree-top level porch with my love. I wrote down a lot of thoughts about what it takes to drink a bottle of champagne like that, kind of Gourmet Rhapsody style, but I will save that for another time.

During the daily thunderstorms we would grab a glass of something nice and go out onto the porches and talk. I learned some new things about my boy, stories, thoughts and opinions that I had never heard before. Sometimes I forget that we don't know every single thing about each other. We only entered each other's worlds a few (ten!) years ago and there are whole lives full of experiences from pre-us. It's so crazy and fun to learn something new about him and it keeps happening, all the time.

I would kind of like to live in Ohio now.

It's always been our goal to eventually live on some kind of land, and this just reaffirmed how good that would be for our souls.

The only bad thing about the location was the lack of good food (for any trip to be worth its beans it must have great food in my book). We did our best with Wal-Mart's finest, and I hope I'm not offending anyone when I say that their top of the line steak and crab legs were pretty terrible. The best meal we had was a little pasta made with produce and herbs that I'd brought from home. If we did actually live in rural Ohio I guess we'd just have to grow our own steak and crab legs.

I hated to leave, hated it. But gosh darn that real life calls and we dove right back in.

It's The Little Things

I never cease to be amazed at how much I can gripe about things that go wrong without equally stopping to be thankful for the things that go right. Those good little things just pass me by with nary a notice, but the minute something mildly wrong happens you won't hear the end of it. But when I sit down and look at it the good really does outweight the bad if I'll only take note of it.

Just this week:
1. Bad - my camera's focus system broke at the beginning of a wedding (panic). Good -Canon fixed the poor thing in just 5 days and for free! Yay for good customer service!
2. All Good - Free asian pear ginger kombucha. My coworker bought it, took one sip, and declared she couldn't stand it. I gladly took it off her hands.
3. Bad - three years ago when we got married we bought the cheapest mattress Ikea carried and our backs have been ruing the purchase ever since. Good - the mattress in the cheap rented NYC flat we stayed in this last weekend was even worse, making us actually look forward to getting back to our own comparatively cushy bed.
4. All Good - I am lucky enough to have a friend and a sibling who work at our local concert venue so courtesy of them today I get to see Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros over lunch and also The Cowboy Junkies tonight. I'm giddy about both.

5. Bad - the air conditioner in our house in Boise broke. Good - the new tenant is an HVAC guy and he can fix it cheap!
6. All good - our homeowners insurance premium is actually going down. That like never happens.
7. All good - squash blossoms in the CSA. Those are fun.

Things That Have Made Me Cry Lately

Things that have made me cry lately:

Act Three of this episode.

This story (via Kelly).

Home birth photos (NSFW).

A few of the things Bonnie said when I interviewed her for the Annapolis Sound.

This movie.

Good news in the family.

My cousin's wedding.

Summer Solstice

It's hard to know what to blog without referencing the photography explosion that has taken over my little world. I thought summer would bring reading in the sun on the lawn and a re-do of the dining room and grinding my own flour and porch dinners with friends, but instead it's brought jobs, a different kind of blessing. In the last six weeks I've shot seven weddings as well as numerous other projects for The Sound in addition to my day job which I don't like to speak of. I don't want this blog to turn into a catalog of photography jobs, yet that's about all I have to show for myself right now. Another blog is in the works dedicated to photography work (though I might still show a few of my favorites here) but even though photography as a job depends on personal investment I want to figure out some boundaries, especially among my blogs. For now the personal is on hold a bit while I'm lucky enough to be working my tail off.
This weekend the boy and I are combining a wedding with a little second honeymoon of our own at a cabin in the Ohio hills. After I download the the photos I'm going to try to keep the computer off and spend a few days at a more quiet pace before diving back into July. I'm tired but it's good, it will all even out eventually so I'm trying to be as grateful for the busy as I will be someday for a lack of work if that's what life brings.

Mr. Kutler

This is my favorite photo that I took this week, of one of my tutors for a new feature over at the Annapolis Sound.

A Look Back at a Big Week

Tonight's drive home was spectacular in so many ways. There was the sunset, as seen here. And the fact that the boy and I, for the first time in our whole relationship, drove fast with the windows down and old Wilco blaring from the stereo. The fast and windows down part are nothing new, but until this week we've never had a working stereo so we usually drive to the tune of our own conversation. Which isn't bad at all. But nothing quite compares to the mood created by the music you love. Especially enhanced by a warm dusky evening on the Chesapeake Bay.

This week was big in some ways. I had a birthday, my 29th to be exact. And almost all my favorite (local) people came out to help me celebrate with a major fancy picnic. I didn't get a single photo, I just soaked it in. As I write I'm reliving it through leftovers - 'The Birthday Sequal: Birthday Harder' Zeb called it tonight - blue cheese, truffle honey, homemade bread, an olive assortment, rosemary olive oil cake and champagne.

A day later we hit 3 years of lucky in love, and we spent that day buying our first joint car, a traumatic, funny, and ultimately bonding experience that I can't imagine we'll top in terms of memorable anniversaries. We took breaks from the pushy salesmen to wine taste in Virginia, and ended up at a 10 pm dinner at Ceiba with our new ride.

Tonight, driving back from an Annapolis Sound job, in that new ride with the windows down and this sunset and those tunes and my husband of three years I felt my mind calm a bit, and remembered how good life is right now.