Perforation Problems

There are a few more days of Bahamas pictures. My set from October 31st is pretty bad... It took me awhile to realize I was probably trying to get a picture of the sunset as it ducked behind the trees. You can just barely make it out if you move your head up and down and look from different angles.  At least there's a moon in there? I guess this is fitting for Halloween.  By the way, guys, it's January and it's dismal outside. I haven't taken down the Christmas lights, which helps some, but it mostly just feels like I'm lying to myself. It's not Christmas, anymore, Haley. Time to move on. 

Anyone who knows me or has read more than a post or two on this blog will know that I love food. It's psychological and physical and emotional -- I know there are those of you out there who feel the same way, because you're my friends -- but there's nothing better than knowing there's something delicious in your future. I probably could write a book analyzing my relationship with food, but let's just say there's a direct correlation between my mood and the availability of good food around me. And by "good" I mean "Haley good," which is usually two steps below what other people think is good. The difference between a horrible 12 hour car ride and a completely fine 12 hour car ride? A stop for french fries and granola bars readily available in my purse. Have to go to a meeting that's going to be really boring? Totally fine with it if there are good cookies present. There were not many grocery stores or open restaurants on Eleuthera -- in ...

Well, this post may say 10/29/2013, but it's really 1/6/2014, which is officially 365 days since I started Project 365. I'm not sure if I can consider myself a success, since I missed several days and I'm 10 weeks behind on posting my pictures, but I'm not going to call myself a failure, either. The goal was to make myself feel more present in the day-to-day -- to have some kind of "bookmark" for my time -- and to be more creative/write more. I'd say that goal was accomplished. This will be my 331st post on a blog that until 2013 was mostly ignored. I also have THOUSANDS of pictures, though I'm not entirely sure that's a good thing. There's a balance between recording what happens /  what you do and spending so much time recording that you're experiencing everything through the filter of a camera lens. I read something somewhere the other day that said people remember more when they don't take pictures, which makes sense to me. I'...

Took walks along the beach -- picked up a coconut, some weird fruit I didn't recognize, and some shells. Saw a piece of metal that looked like it'd been ripped off a plane. Went swimming, ate hot dogs. Read.

Sunset over the pond on our first anniversary. We laid around all day, reading and swimming.

3:30 a.m, waiting for the airport shuttle. Cold but excited, because we're on VACATION. No work, no obligations, no stresses for a whole week.

This is the only picture I took today. It was a really good cookie. I went back for another.

I almost ate one of these cookies today, thinking they were chocolate chip. You can see where I started to pull back the wrapper. They are not, in fact, chocolate chip. They are oatmeal raisin. This is the subtle, cruel trickery of the oatmeal raisin cookie.

I like the discount barrel of flowers at Kroger. These purple tulips were $2. I've noticed that I go on color kicks. Red was my thing for awhile, then yellow. Purple didn't really do anything for me until recently. Now I want to see it everywhere. Does this happen to other people? 

Check out the new dents and scratches on my car. Someone backed into my car while it was in my mom's driveway for Haircut Friday. At first I was pretty irrationally upset. My poor car. I hate the idea that I'm driving around with a dent in it. It's embarrassing, plus it just makes me sad. I worked hard for that car. Yeah, it isn't brand-spankin' new anymore, but until now it hadn't had any serious body damage. Now it's got a smashed-in part.  But coupled with my anger over my car being messed up is this guilt that I'm worried about something so superficial. It could have been a lot worse. It's not a big deal in the grand scheme of things, right? At least I can drive it, and the dent could be a lot more noticeable. It could have smashed the headlights or messed up the wheel. Could be a LOT worse.  That being said, I've been trying to figure out ways to fix it -- I can't pound it out because the wheel well has plastic on the i...

Clyde got to go to Haircut Friday today. He did not really enjoy it. For those of you who do not know, my family has a weird tradition where we drive over an hour every 4 weeks to get our hair cut by Bev at Headliners in Marion, Indiana. I like to tell people it's more about having a regular opportunity to eat dinner with my grandparents, who live there, but we don't always do that. Sometimes we just drive a really long way to get our hair cut. Bev's been doing my grandma's hair forever. When we lived in Georgia, I remember visiting the salon during summer vacation so she could put highlights in my hair, and when we moved to Indianapolis, we started coming on a regular basis. It's cheaper than it would be in Indy, and though it means my entire Friday evening is pretty much a wash, it's time spent with my parents and usually dinner with some extended family. At this point, Bev is a family friend; my mom gives her a Christmas present each year, and it was a gi...

I only took one picture today -- me on the couch in my pjs editing one of our big holiday content projects. It's a 40 page recipe ebook. Do you know how annoying it is to edit recipes? There are all kinds of grammar conventions unique to recipes that you wouldn't have any reason to know unless you edit recipes on a normal basis. So it took awhile. But I'm pretty happy with the work the team did on it -- it made me hungry, which is exactly what a recipe book should do :)

We're going through some restructuring on the marketing team at work, and my team is being split up. The changes make sense for the longterm and will be good for everyone on my team, but it doesn't keep it from being a bit sad to say goodbye. We had our last lunch together today, and then later this afternoon they surprised me with chips, queso, and a card for Boss's Day. It was good closure to the last couple of years -- they're a really good group and they've made it fun to be at work. It took two waitresses and 15 attempts to get a non-blurry picture :)

When Michael is gone, I have to make the normally-still-sleeping Clyde get up and go outside before I leave for work. He also won't eat his breakfast unless he sees me sit down in the kitchen and pretend like I'm eating my breakfast, too. This morning we had a couple brushes with nature. First, Clyde stalked a deer munching acorns under our tree.  Then I caught this praying mantis underneath our table.  And before I got in the car, I had to catch a couple pictures of the pretty sunrise.  It's easy to forget, especially when winter means you don't see a lot of sunlight, that there's more world out there than your cubicle and computer screen. 

Today I looked at our circuit board for the first time. I was excited to flip some switches, but unfortunately, that wasn't the problem. I took this picture mostly to prove to Michael via text that a popped circuit wasn't the problem.  It ended up being that the outdoor light timer hadn't been changed back to the winter schedule, so I also got to mess with the outdoor lights for the first time, too. If I hadn't forgotten to put the trash out this week, I'd say I was being fairly successful at taking care of the house by myself. 

Which one do you like better? Psst. Pick the $2 one, not the $4 one. 

I texted this picture to Michael to show him what I had to do to console Clyde after he left us to go to San Francisco. Clyde loves pumpkin treats 200% more than normal treats. Scientifically proven.

Went to a movie theater tonight where they served food, including a hot chocolate milk shake. I ordered the "adult" one with Kahlua in it but they mistakenly brought me the nonalcoholic version...so I ended up with BOTH. HA. The nonalcoholic one was more ice cream than milkshake, but I'm not complaining. It was in a giant teacup. Also by the time they brought the correct dessert I was too full to really enjoy it. It's quite a thing to leave desserts uneaten. Quite a thing indeed. Now, after the fact, I feel kinda guilty because, you know, starving children in third world countries. But at the time I just very happily ate my two desserts. 

I went to a barn sale today, where I learned you can write recipes on index cards, make them look old, tie them with twine, and sell them for $9. I did end up buying two really cool bottles to put on my mantle, as well as a giraffe print that right now looks slightly out of place above the couch. It might end up moving.  There was some cool stuff, but what really struck me as I was walking around was the thought that here was probably a pretty good representative sample of Pinterest's daily traffic. You've got the sellers, whose goods looked like they came straight off of a pinboard (including those plates glued to candle sticks to make cake stands and the wine racks made out of pallets), the foragers who do things like buy old windows and DIY them into something for themselves, and the people who wish they had the time or energy to DIY things but who will just go ahead and buy the end result at a barn sale.  Which one am I? Probably the last, except for when it...

This is Clyde after I made all the hair on his head stand up.

I got my sample pack of holiday cookies from Cheryl' s today. Being selected for the Cheryl's Cookie Council MIGHT be the best thing to happen to me in 2013. Maybe. I tried a red velvet muffin first, mostly because there were 4 of them, so I didn't have to come to grips with the fact that once I ate one it would be gone.  It was good, but I'm so used to red velvet and cream cheese icing that it felt incomplete. The red velvet was lonely.  The best cookie out of this pack was the buttercream frosted salty caramel chocolate cookie, which deserves its long name because the measure of its deliciousness is also quite long...if deliciousness were a measure of length? I don't know where I'm going with that. But it was good.  Why do you think it is that cookies make me so happy? Because they genuinely do. I adore them. ADORE.

This looked much cooler in real life. Skies make me feel poetic, as do long expanses of lawn or fields, and tall stretches of trees.  *I cheated. This picture was taken 10-8, not 10-7. I don't have one for 10-7 and since I'm writing this on 11-12, I can't remember why. 

Michael and I went to our friends' house tonight for dinner. Clyde got to go because he and Olive, my friend Moriya's dog, are buddies -- and by buddies, I mean Olive runs around Clyde trying to get him to play while Clyde freezes and looks around warily. This is understandably very tiring.

Here's my high score on Galaga. Ignore the fact that everyone below me has 20000 points and alliterative initials. This means nothing. I'm a GALAGA MASTER.  We took a trip up to Lafayette today to hang out with some friends and celebrate an early birthday. Since said birthday girl has a healthy appreciation for wine, this meant a trip to her favorite winery, where we had a picnic and listened to a Beatles cover band, wine in our plastic cups and cheese on our crackers.  Those strawberries were seriously delicious.  Later we went to dinner in Lafayette and walked down the street to an old-school arcade, where the owner sat in the back repairing an old pinball machine, his dog loping up to greet me when I held my hand out over the roped-off doorway. I played the Chicago Cubs pinball game out of respect for my mother, but I spent most of my time with Galaga. Pinball seems kind of pointless, and I never get very far -- but killing alien ships? That'...

What makes tacos so delicious? Is it the cheese? Is it the crunch of the hard shell? The spicy meat? It's the cheese.  I had Mexican twice today, because that's the kind of person I am. The kind of person who celebrates National Taco Day in style. The kind of person who orders tacos without lettuce, tomatoes, sour cream, or anything except meat and cheese, even though every time she does it, the waitress/er says, "So you just want meat and cheese? Nothing else?" I would have stopped at lunch, really I would have. One devoted meal a day is enough to celebrate a national food holiday. But then Michael would have been left out, and I'm a good wife. So dinner at Red Habenero it was. YOLO.  Ugh, I can't believe I typed that.

Work gathering at the end of the day. I took several pictures where people were looking at the camera, but I really like candid pictures better. When you take pictures of people looking at the camera and smiling, to some extent you always know what they were thinking. "I'm getting my picture taken. I should smile and act like I'm having fun." In this kind of picture, you get to wonder what was going on and why people were making those faces. We ordered a lot of these pretzels. I think it's safe to say that any food that comes with cheese dip is probably delicious.