A little bit on "home"

Typically I like to share about our adventures in the great land of "away". Mark and I love to travel and with family and friends living far and farther, it seems we are always on the go somewhere. However, we have lived in Seattle, Santa Barbara/Goleta, and now we live in Los Angeles, CA and soon we're going to live somewhere else. Right now we're living in a part of LA that's nestled in right by LAX. I thought today I would share a little bit about what it's like living in the land of ten million and what our lives are like in between our great adventures.

We live in a Costco-sized apartment complex, but our unit is more like those fun-sized candy bars. Very tiny! A few weeks ago we had a very clear day after a bunch of rain and Mark took some pictures from the roof of our six story parking garage.

Mark actually parks in garage B (we have two six story parking garages) and I park out on the street. So you can just think about that for a minute. Our apartment complex has two six story parking garages and I still have to park on the street. Here is the street where I park, with a view of the snowy mountains. We lived here for five months before the smog cleared enough for us to see the mountains, and then we almost crashed our cars out of shock. 

What, you can't see the snow? Ok, here's another picture of it. 

As you know, Mark as been working at LMU this year. The campus is beautiful and has some of the best views we've been able to find of LA. I should note that all of these pictures were taken on the clearest day we've had so far since moving here in August.

Living in our part of LA means we also shop at what we are told is the busiest and highest grossing Trader Joe's in the country. It is airport-themed (right down the street from LAX) and though the lines are always long and the aisles crowded, we find it a fun place to shop. They are always fully staffed, the people shopping there are used to it being crowded and don't do dumb things, and just like at all TJs you might find yourself discussing the merits of cooking with wine you would drink vs. cooking sherry with the person next you in line. But shopping anywhere in LA always means shopping with a rent-a-cop. For some reason the prevalence of store security guards is completely standard here. We have slowly gotten used to seeing these underpaid uniformed people with flashlights who text instead of watch for shoplifters, but nothing screams "our neighborhood is ghetto!" more than having mall cops at every storefront. (Photo stolen from the interwebs... yelp.com)



And then there's the commute... While Mark may only have a ten minute drive into work, it takes me about forty-five minutes to drive twelve miles every day (one way). Everywhere in town is 15-30minutes away and getting honked at or hearing someone else get honked at is completely normal. I am going to need new brakes before we move.

So when we're not commuting, standing in line at the grocery store, choking the smog, sneaking away to Disneyland.... I'm usually here, in my favorite place in the apartment. Note the Tide, since my kitchen is also my laundry room, my garage, and my attic. I keep my china in my pantry and my Christmas decorations in my cupboards.

So that's home for us! It's going to be different soon...

Rain and Showers

I just got back from spending four fantastic days in Seattle. I think this is a record for shortest time in between visits! Our very good friends Emily and Nathan (Check out Emily's stamping over at stamped and delivered) are having a baby so we decided to throw them a shower. Together with my good friend Annie, we planned a DIY shower full of crafty fun.

I flew in on Thursday and spent the afternoon shopping with Emily. Few things are better than spending the afternoon at the mall with a good friend! Living far away my trips are often filled with very focused bouts of visiting time, parties, and activities. The luxury of an afternoon at the mall made me ~almost~ feel like I was home.

Thursday night through Saturday was filled with girlfriends, shower prep, and so much baby talk! Annie made a fantastic cake...

Christie made a really beautiful paper sign...

Cat and Annie constructed the diaper cake...

I made the favors (heat/ice packs filled with rice, flax seeds, and lavender)...

And somehow all the food got made too!

At the shower we played pictionary with baby themed items. Not surprisingly the couple in the group who already has a kid totally rocked this! Carley cleverly illustrated "PackNPlay". She's got a little one on the way too, due just a month after Emily.

Maija took a turn at pictionary. She drew a BIG baby! (Looks like an ultrasound to me!)

Finally we took a big group picture and eventually had to say our goodbyes. Suddenly we are older, grown up, at that age where everyone is having babies and jobs and houses and they are so with it. I came home with the edge of baby giddiness worn off and a little bit weary about my friends getting old! Luckily I'm not anywhere near as old and not nearly half as successful as they are hehe.Here we are, all old and grown up and just the thought makes me overcome with an urge to do something completely irresponsible.

I want to talk for a bit about pictures and beginner photography. So for those of you only tuning in to stalk my life, feel free to tune out now. Up until recently Mark and I have been taking pictures in the beginner mode known as "auto/no flash", AKA "point and shoot". This has been working out in our favor as we have been taking a lot of pictures outdoors or in very well lit areas. A few times Mark has had the time and patience to mess with the settings. An example is the amazing pictures he got of the St. Louis Arch. To be fair to myself, I have messed around a lot with the preprogrammed settings like "kid" or "pet" or "sports" and I have read enough about cameras to not feel dumb when other people talk about them. Ultimately though neither of us have really truly set the camera in manual and made it fly. However, after looking through our pictures from the shower we saw that they turned out a little less than fantastic and that has us pondering how to make future pictures better.

So the debate is this. Should we have shot in the dim indoor setting with the flash? We have a crappy flash. Mark wonders if we had a really nice flash if that would have helped. Or should we have shot in... gasp.... manual... with a wider aperture and F-Stop or some other configuration. Those of you real photographers out there can stop laughing now. But we're learning as we go, and this was this first real "huh" moment for us and to be honest the first time that shooting in plain old auto/no flash didn't give us pictures we felt really happy with. Here are the two group shots: one with flash and one without. Clearly the flash picture turned out better. Now we know!

I'm not entirely convinced a flash (even a nice one) would have done the trick. But alas, I can't go back and retake the exact pictures again with different manual settings. I can play with the pictures in picnik and expose them a little more and saturate the colors and what not. I did that with this cake picture and feel "okay" about the results vs. time and effort.

From what I've been able to tell is that a lot of photographers really value the time and effort spend on photoshop or other picture editing programs as far as making their pictures look good. I don't agree or disagree with this style of picture making, but I do have a goal (and so does Mark) of making the straight-out-of-the-camera shot as good as it possibly can be. My reasoning for this is that why do with a mouse and arrows and 15 minutes what you can do with a twist and click in 5 seconds on the camera? Plus, realistically, just getting those pictures off the SD card, into Picasa, sorted, and uploaded is kind of a miracle. I say let's make them come out of the camera as good as we can!

Regardless of what mode to be shooting in, one thing's for certain. The more pictures we take, the better we'll be! Oh... and I think we might also need a tripod.

Seattle Christmas, 2010

After four days in Illinois, it was time say our goodbyes and catch our flight to Seattle. I just checked my calendar and Christmas was our 5th (FIFTH!) trip to Seattle in 2010. If it seems like we're always there... well we are! Over the last five and half years we seem to be averaging somewhere between four and six trips per year, though they are usually very short. We were excited to be able to spend eight days with family.

If you were to look at our pictures, you might think the only exciting thing that happened was putting Christmas ribbons on the cats.

Mme. Batch

Mr. Oscar

Miss Cleo 

Mark, holding Oscar and Cleo

This is in fact a lie propagated by the cats and their interest in keeping themselves at the center of our attention. But the truth is that our week was filled with a lot more than cats. We hung out with friends, spent time with family, and generally enjoyed not rushing for once!

We even had time to go over to Bremerton to see some of my mom's side of the family. We took the ferry to and from Bremerton. It was a rainy day but we still enjoyed the ride (ask me sometime why I love ferries). How many people can say they spent a little of the holidays with so many branches of their family? We were truly fortunate this Christmas.

We also managed to find time to go skiing, but the trusty camera stayed at home and the snowy day did not lend to great pictures. The other really cool thing we did was go to the Harry Potter Exhibition at the Seattle Center. This was a Christmas present from my mother-in-law (MIL WIN!!!) and it was really awesome! Unfortunately though, there were absolutely no pictures allowed and there just is no sneaking around with our DSLR. It was still a fantastic afternoon and an extremely well done exhibition, even to my very picky fan eyes.

Even the longest trips come to an end though, and soon we were saying our goodbyes and flying home. Till the next time, Seattle!

There is no NOISE in Illinois!

My dad is from Illinois. Not Illinoise. FYI, the s is silent, and I cringe when I hear people pronounce it like there is a /z/ at the end. Thanks Dad for teaching me the really important things in life!

But back to my dad being from Illinois. His brother and much of his family still live there. 50 years ago my Uncle Terry married a wonderful woman named Kathie and I've been fortunate enough to grow up having a fantastic "Uncle Terry and Aunt Kathie" in my life. Every niece should grow up with an Uncle Terry and an Aunt Kathie. When I received an invitation their anniversary party, I immediately started checking airline prices and playing around with our frequent flier miles. Sure enough, we were able to swing it! Leaving just 4 days after our San Diego Brady Christmas weekend, our trip to Illinois started our 12 days of Christmas.

It was really fun helping getting all the last minute stuff (food) together. Terry and Kathie did all the hard stuff and I got to do the fun things. This is me being a dork for the camera. Need I say more?  

My Aunt and Uncle had their party in their basement and we estimated about 50-60 people came throughout the afternoon.

It was amazing to reconnect with family I haven't seen in years and some family I have never even met before! At one point we gathered some of the distant cousins together for a picture. There was a lot of debate about "removed" vs. "3rd or 4th" but I mostly just liked that we were able to say we were actually related!

The party also featured a skit, written by my Uncle and performed by various family members. My dad was the narrator and of course the stars were my aunt and uncle. It was super cheesy and full of win! 

Later in the afternoon my aunt (on a whim) ran upstairs, dug out her wedding dress, and put it on to surprise Uncle Terry. It was SO fun to see her dance around in it and then they cut their party cake with her in her dress and Terry in his jeans. 

In the couple of days after the party, we looked at albums and albums of old pictures...

Made cookies...

And generally had a fantastic time. On our last day in town, Mark and I managed to sneak in a day in the nearby city, St. Louis, MO with my Aunt and Uncle. We went to the St. Louis Arch:

And then spent some time at the St. Louis Zoo where my aunt and uncle worked for (13?) years before retiring a couple of months ago. We had such a wonderful day and it was really amazing to get to spend such great time with them!

I'm having a hard time not posting ALL of our pictures... so please check them out here! There are some really amazing ones (and some boring ones) but overall lots of pictures from the whole trip.

Had to end on a family pic... That's (L-R) Uncle Terry, Aunt Kathie, my brother Rick, me, Mark, Mom, and Dad. 

A Very Brady Christmas, 2010

The first part of our epic 2010 holiday travels was the Brady Christmas gathering. Mark and I drove down to San Diego to celebrate Christmas with the immediate Brady family. When you have a large family and each spouse has family and everyone is spread out all over the place, Christmas has to be a flexible holiday. For us, the important thing is time together. We celebrate when we can and make the most of the time we have. Every year is a compromise and every year we wish we had more time, but it is better to enjoy the time we do have than to dwell on the time we don't have!

This year was especially hard as my brother Aaron is in in the US Navy and is deployed to Afghanistan. We were so very lucky to get to put him on speaker phone after dinner. Anyone who has had family deployed knows that phone time is precious, and having it come at a time when we were all together was fantastic. We are so proud of him but we can't wait for him to get his butt home safely. 

Here are some highlights of our day together:

My niece Lillie couldn't wait for us to open presents. It turned out it was because she wanted to GIVE us her present! She has been taking painting lessons and made both Aunties and Grandma (me, Michelle, and my Mom) a personal painting! They are absolutely amazing and mine is getting hung right above my kitchen sink. Lillie was so proud of herself and thrilled to give such a heartfelt gift. 

Later in the day we convinced Sunny to make us all cupcakes. YUM! They didn't last long between all of us. 

When Mom, Sunny, Michelle and I decided to go get mani/pedis, we left the kids with the guys. The girls were thrilled to play Barbies with Uncle Mark. And the ladies had so much fun getting a little bit pampered! 

Dad got all the of guys these super crazy powerful lasers. You can't point them at airplanes but at night they look like light sabers. Awesome.

This is Dad explaining how seriously dangerous the lasers are and why they are only "mostly" legal and we should be really careful. "No seriously," he says. Rick looks skeptical in the background.

Collin thinks, "Sure Grandpa! Not a toy.... Whatever you say! Look it makes my water green hehehe."

And that wraps up the Very Brady Christmas 2010!

Happy 2011!

Happy 2011 everyone! Mark and I made it home yesterday after nearly three weeks of travel, including one 12 day long trip sandwiched by two shorter trips. Whew! Go huge or go home, we say! Here is the timeline:

December 11-12: Brady Christmas in San Diego
December 17-21: 50th wedding anniversary celebration in Glen Carbon, IL
December 21-29: Lingwood Christmas in Seattle + a million other things
December 30-31: Holiday Bowl in San Diego (GO DAWGS!!!)

We had a great trip, did a ton of stuff, and saw a lot of family. It was epic! Stay tuned for more posts about each part of our trip... I'll write them eventually :)

To tide you over, here is a picture of my Uncle Terry's super duper awesome epic Christmas Tree.

As I told Mark, getting a huge Christmas tree isn't really even a need or a want... it's just something that's in my genes.

Oh! Don't forget: you can always click the link to my Picasa web albums if you want to browse through the thousands of pictures I have up online from various travels. I usually only put a couple of shots in each blog post but if you want the real deal, check out the web albums. Mark is turning into a fantastic photographer and some of his shots are absolutely amazing! In Picasa you can leave public comments on the pictures, so feel free to do so.

Happy New Year everyone! Let's practice saying it "twenty-eleven"... I don't want to hear it any other way!