Monday, October 15, 2012

a pumpkin picking excursion

I had been looking forward to this day for weeks. It is so easy for me to go through life these days without really feeling like I am experiencing it, you know what I mean? Well, no, I guess you probably don't. The thing is, I work retail. And without getting into the daily life specifics about how I work nights and weekends, rarely get two days off in a row, and otherwise have a challenging social life, I will make the point I was trying to make. About experiencing life as it occurs.

A few days ago I received our new Holiday Concept Book. Holiday as in Christmas. As in, I'm looking at pictures of gift boxes and shiny red balls and thinking Black Friday, Christmas music, trees, and decorations. And it wasn't even my birthday yet. So I made a promise to myself that I would set that lovely book aside and experience a little bit of fall activities first. Go pumpkin picking. See some autumn color changing leaves (for some reason those around us haven't really changed yet, but out west they have! Yay!)

So we did. And it was good. 


Monday, October 8, 2012

a little late, but...

I finally sat down and made myself figure out iMovie. Well, a little bit. While I quite enjoy the idea of making videos, and some of the process was satisfying and enjoyable, there were about as many moments of pulling my hair out sheer frustration. I'm sure once you spend quite a bit of time with the program and you become familiar with its quirks it gets better. But it is far from intuitive and quite prohibitive at times. Hello? No Save File? For reals?

But I digress.

I made a little video with clips from our stay-at-home vacation a few months back. We decided to save money and not do anything big. Instead, we each came up with several ideas and wrote them on scraps of paper to put in a grab bag. Things like "go to the zoo" "see a museum we haven't been to yet" "get cupcakes" "have a picnic" "movie marathon" etc. Every day we picked something out of the bag and attempted to do it. I say attempted because we learned that after walking around at the zoo and the county fair we maybe didn't want to spend the day walking around Kings Dominion. So we tossed it and picked something else. When we realized that the beach we thought we could take our dog to actually did not allow dogs in the summer, we tossed it and picked something else. The grab bag was a good idea, I think, but maybe not for an entire week. Sometimes a girl just needs to relax. mmhmm.