Memory lane

I've had such a great time reminiscing with the scanner today.

I found family history photos--

Isn't my mom sweet in her poodle skirt?

Holy guacamole...she looks like someone...

And what pretty wedding colors...someone else should use those...

I genuinely love this dress. My aunt is like spun sugar in it.

And I found lots of old photos of our friends...

This is my high school, Emmanuel Christian Academy. The girl on the left is Kisha, who has been one of my best friends since high school and is one of Arthur's godparents. She is amazing.

This is us and all of our friends at a Roger Waters show in Dallas around 2000 or so. Yep, I rock a fanny pack.

I also found some terrific pics from my bachelorette party--

--at least from the publishable parts of the evening.
I love these ladies so much.

I also found some wonderful forgotten images from our wedding--

Those colors! How pretty. They look familiar...

I made the flower arrangements, by the way.

...along with the floral wreath on my head. A girlfriend made my gown. Isn't it lovely? Sigh.

What a great time. I can't wait for our anniversary party in May!

We were dragging Hello Kitties all the way to Colorado.

I also found some more pics from our trip to Europe...

This was inside a castle. A castle, I say!

...and images of many other places I hope to see in my sweet, sweet dreams.

Good-night, friends. Be happy!

More Yummy Photos

I have a few more pretty pics from the OWL project.  Feel free to use them if you would like...just please say that I took them somewhere or something.  I won't sue you or anything...it's just bad karma.

Enjoy!

Birds by the sea, Gulf of Mexico.

Little boy learning what not to put in his mouth.

My first meeting with a chipmunk, Rocky Mountain National Park, Colorado, on our honeymoon in 2001.  He was very, very small.

Germany, 2006.

Fluffy white clouds.

Two of the best people I'll ever know, Miles Davis and Maynard James Keenan, the canine versions.  Miles was eight years old when we lost him suddenly to cancer.  I used to lean against his 120-pound body like a pillow and paint his toenails purple.  He was the best dog ever (sorry Maynard!).

We believe Miles was mastiff-rott and Maynard is Corgi-beagle.  Any thoughts?

Flamingos, the old Discovery Island at Disney World, circa 1994.  Follow this link to find out more about this amazing place.  It was one of my favorites!

Gargoyle, castle in Bamberg.

Fire garden, Bonnaroo.

Owen Park, the goose king.

Lions, Tulsa Zoo.

Marina, Corpus Christi.

Church, Corpus Christi.

One of Tulsa's many penguins.

Rooftops, from Nurnberg Castle.

Beach, Corpus Christi.

My kitchen (needs a makeover).  Guess what I love?

Fun with Photos

While working on the Amazing, Super-Spectacular OWL, we recently ran into an Attribution Nightmare.  We soon found we were spending more time attributing photos we used than developing content for our tutorials...yikes! 
To solve this problem, B, who is heading up the project, looked to her own photo stash, and the rest of us soon followed suit. 

It didn't take long before I ran out of pics, however, as just about every photo I've taken in the last 2.5 years has been Arthur-centric.  I found myself one recent morning sprawled across the hardwood surrounded by literally hundreds of old photos in a strange postmodern mandala formation.  I took everything I thought I could use and tossed it into a lined apple basket and put our lab assistant to work scanning them.  They were badly cropped, taken with cheap cameras, etc., so I am now going through in my down time and using a photo editing program to spruce them up a bit.

The cool by-product of this time vampire is that I get to revisit places I've been and things I've done with new eyes.

Here are some of my favorites.

This is a church we visited in Nurnberg when we were over there in 2006 or so.

Niagara falls, taken when I was a teenager in the early 90s.

The inaugural Bonnaroo (from the VIP stage), 2002.

 A little church in South Texas where we attended a friend's wedding 10 or so years ago.

Keith and Melissia's wedding reception in 1997 or 98.

Justin contemplating the Oklahoma City Memorial.

Cinderella Castle at Walt Disney World in Florida, 1994.

Corpus Christi.

Yorktown Owens Heart Philbrook Museum

We would like to thank all the little elves that brought us sweet little pressies, both old and new.

We are especially grateful that Santa brought our family a membership to the Philbrook art museum, so now we won't have to look at the calendar to determine if it's free day when we want to go.

For my non-Tulsan readers, Philbrook is a pretty rad museum that's quite close to our little Yorktown hobbit hole, with gardens possessing magical properties of teleportation right into Lewis Carroll's merry luncheon with Jane Austen, Oscar Wilde, the Cheshire cat and the Dalai Lama. Matter of fact, it would be a magical spot for the Arthur's Adventures in Wonderland party we are planning for his birthday.

Arthur loves the place. And J and I love it too; most of my friends probably don't know that I have a degree in Humanities as well as language arts...and the boy's Grammy and Papi are artists...and we love free places to hang out as a family...oh, and our walls are literally overrun with art...anyway. it's a sweet, rocking gift. Remember this, people: memberships and gift certs. Eco-friendly, family friendly.

Here are some pics from a summer visit to Philbrook with the Abot and big J. The museum is housed in what was once the Phillips' (of Phillips Petroleum: read: big-time Tulsa oil tycoon/philanthropist family) mansion. As a little girl, I used to fantasize about living there; we would walk through from room to room and I imagined myself playing piano in one of the sitting rooms, surrounded by frescos and lush vistas and 17th century French tchotchkes, one of which I recently learned bears a depiction of one of my great-grandsisters.

17th century French tchotchkes

Yorktown Owens are unanimously nuts about this Tony Oursler installation:

And the museum recently hosted the most incredible modern appliance-as-art-exhibit. I forget what it was called. Alls I know is I should have brought my big purse that day.

So now you know. Museum memberships are great gifts. And if you are in Tulsa, check out the Philbrook at 21st and Peoria-ish. There's a pretty sweet park over right next to it, and there's lots of other free coolness there for the economically challenged, including the Tulsa Historical Society and Garden Center, which includes the Linnaeus Garden and these amazing greenhouses.