something i love

that i'd love for you to love:

click right HERE!

ryan & katie's wedding

here are a few of my favorite shots from the wedding last saturday.
it was such an honor to work as shannon's second shooter at such a beautiful wedding!


beautiful weather- it rained in the morning and cleared up in time for wonderfully lit pictures

Katie and all her girls



it's probably cruel to cut off the heads of such beautiful people, but i really like this shot!

Katie with her matron of honor, also Katie


with her sister


Taking communion...


i love this one, blurriness and all



you can see some that shannon took here! she's amazing. leave her some feedback!

irrational fear #45

sewing machines.

for my entire life, i have been so intimidated by them. my mom and my sister are both brilliant on a sewing machine, and i've also had a few friends who have been sewing machine whizzes (that sounds funny..). I have been jealous on repeated occasions that those people can alter or even make their own clothes, and so multiple times i have tried my hand at it.
failure.
complete and utter failure. not to mention the loss of dignity that goes along with something like that.
i always ended up with a million tangled pieces of thread- a jigsaw of string intertwined in and through the deceptively simplistic mechanical innards.
the chip at one's sense of femininity after such a domestic disaster.

somehow tonight, a night unlike any other night, i decided to give it another go. it has been over a year since my last attempt, which involved an interchange of unkind words between a certain sister and i, but i felt this time would be different. i would teach myself.

i am thrilled to say that after about two hours (two hours i don't really have to spare these days....but i'm proving that i am a clever procrastinator), i finished sewing the shirt i intended to resize. i'm not sure i really understand how the machine works, but apparently i figured it out well enough by trial and error.

this is my masterpiece....even though you can't even see the sides, where i doctored it.



lesson 1: sometimes you can learn things you didn't think you ever would/could.
lesson 2: sometimes these lessons are easier when you're alone.
lesson 3: when you have a million other things to do that you don't really want to do, that's when you'll overcome your irrational fear and learn it.
and then you might blog about it, just to use up some more time.

what are some things you're afraid of doing slash wish you knew how to do?

my good friend carrie, a down-to-earth sartorialist

i talked to my friend carrie (from seattle) today, and we exchanged blog info. imagine my surprise and delight at going to hers and discovering that she who introduced me to the sartorialist (which i JUST blogged about) has a blog of her own that is a very similar idea.
i like hers better.

check it out.
and leave her some feedback! comment!

the sartorialist, part 2

so i've written about this site before, but every time i check i am just so intrigued.
the sartorialist is Scott Schuman, who, along with a team of ten others, travels around the world looking for interesting street fashions (in addition to attending designer shows) and posts photographs of the findings.
impressively, the sartorialist was deemed "one of the top 100 Design Influencers" by Time Magazine, whatever that means.

i stumbled across this picture today, and was inspired.


i wish i dressed cooler.

pictures from san fran!

these are just a couple from our spontaneous orange wall photoshoot. shan was in need of some up-to-date pics for her blog.
i think i'll steal that vest soon.


in front of amoeba music, holding the new beirut cd i just bought there. i'm such a nerd.


the accidental pensive shot.


i happened to wear both my map shirt and my map purse, which made for some interesting pictures.






there was a lady on the bus who really liked my bag and even asked where i got it. sorry m'am, yard sale find. she then pointed out a few interesting spots. also, my bag AND my shirt both have russia as the USSR, which is funny. authentically vintage.



the bus was *really* crowded, and the driver was kind of a maniac.


so shan made some new friends on accident.

saturday in san fran with shan.

shan asked me to be her second shooter at a wedding in healdsburg (about 2 hrs north of san fran) on friday, so we flew into oakland (or "oak-town", as Mark, the super-hip TSA employee at LAX informed us) on thursday night, shot the wedding on friday, and hung out in san francisco on saturday.

we stayed at three different houses the three different nights- thursday night we got a ride from the bride's family friends who were picking up their daughter who flew in from portland about twenty minutes earlier. shannon called them and Liz, the mom, told her that her husband would be "the man in the white turtleneck holding a sign that says BLYTHE." !!! best. moment. of. my. life. shan took a couple quick blurry pictures of that, so maybe i'll post those soon.
so they drove us north to Petaluma , where we spent the night with a junior high pastor and his wife. they had an amazing house that was built in 1908, but they were also in the process of moving out, so everything was boxed up. we slept on the couches. we got to their house at about 1 am, and went to sleep around 2. we woke up at 6, after an amusing cell phone-light flashing scenario (shan's phone alarm went off and she didn't wake up, so i used it to flash light in her face repeatedly). dave, the youth pastor, had said we could DRIVE HIS CAR to get breakfast, so we went to this adorable little diner called hallie's. surprisingly amazing. good food, good coffee, fast service, and norah jones' music. then we stopped by peet's, which was right on the main boulevard.
i'm still really jealous of how many peet's there are in northern california. downtown san fran has one on pretty much every block. AND since they have a different bakery that they get their pastries from, they have different pastries. there was a fat free oatmeal berry vegan scone that was incredible. i had two over the course of the weekend...which may not seem like many, but i'm really not a scone advocate, usually.
anyway, we got picked up at about 9 and went and shot the wedding preparation and then the whole wedding...got finished at about 10pm. I'll post some pictures from the wedding later. it was a beautiful day- rained in the morning and cleared up for perfect soft lighting by the afternoon.

we spent friday night at the groom's mom's house. she was *so nice*!! she even took us to santa rosa the next morning to catch our bus to san fran.
ok, TIP: do NOT use the golden gate transit bus if you have any sort of luggage. there was no under-the-bus storage, and the overhead space was positively tiny. AND the driver was a major douche bag who was just really rude about the whole thing. "this is a transit bus, there's no space for those bags" and he kept giving us this are-you-kidding-me staredown. "you can put them in the seats for now, but if we get full, i can't have them taking up seats." the bus seriously had five people on it, including us and the driver. after about an hour, we started getting full though, so we stacked three of the bags on top of each other to take up one seat, and my duffel bag fit overhead.

we had been worried about what the heck we would do with our bags once we got to san fran, since we weren't meeting up with shannon's grandpa and mom (who was randomly in town to plan her high school reunion) until dinner time, but this really nice lady sat next to me and we were telling her about our adventurous weekend, and she said, "oh, well if you want to, you can keep them in my shop for the day."
hooray! that was so lucky! ANDDDD then i asked a little later, "so, what kind of shop do you work at?"
"I manage a Peet's Coffee." !!!!!
"You do!??! I work at Peet's!!"
wow, oh wow. Cheryl from peet's at the ferry station in san fran, if you're reading this, THANK YOU SO MUCH! You saved our day!

So we were able to trek around san fran for the day- we went to haight ashbury, the original amoeba, the farmer's market by the ferry station (i bought a persimmon that will be ready to eat in approx. one week! thanks fruit stand guys!), and then met shannon's grandparents and mom for dinner in little italy- the steps of rome trattoria. mmm.
we spent that night (last night) at the grandparents' house in san jose, and then shan's mum took us to the airport this morning.

seriously one of the greatest weekends i've ever had. i love you shannie.

blythe dolls.

these exist. did you know?
their eyes change colors, which is pretty creepy, i know, but overall it's pretty cool for me to have my own doll. except they're really expensive so i don't actually have one, per se.

more than you'd ever need to know:

surrender

in the face of not knowing where and what i'll be doing next year, i've been doing a lot of wondering. now, i'm not what you would call an impulsive person. quite the opposite: i'm a planner. i like to know things. where i'm going, what i'm doing, who i'll be seeing and talking to at said events. i make lists, from to-do lists to lists of pros and cons to weigh certain difficult decisions, often far in advance before they are even pressing decisions. so, in that way, i guess i even plan my decisions before i make them. surprisingly, my hyper-tendency to freak out and have an anxiety attack at not knowing what the future holds has not kicked in just yet.
of course, i have listed out all the possibilities:

*go to grad school (which contains a sub-list in itself of the five schools i could potentially get into and choose to go to)
*move to france to teach english for a year (this one is mainly for the five-grad-schools-rejected-me, sanity-saving back up plan)
*find a job. or an internship. (scariest possibility)
*get married and immediately pop out tons of children (this is the if-you-believe-this-than-you-don't-know-me-at-all option)

something i'm realizing more and more as things become more complicated, as time seems to move faster, and as decisions never become any clearer is that none of this is really in my hands. i mean, sure, i'm the one filling out the applications and looking into certain things, but the opportunities themselves are only there because they're supposed to be, and sometimes the fact that they are there at all is the end of the path. doors only open when they're meant to. i really believe that. a really cheesy analogy: when a guy and a girl like each other and nothing happens. i really think it's for the best that, for whatever reason, nothing comes of it. instead of reacting with frustration and trying to force doors to open, we ought to trust that things are going according to a higher plan. and thank God for it, because i'm pretty sure anyone who knows me knows that I make a mess of things when I take try to take control of the situation or, my life. but maybe you've tried too and found the same thing.

the funny thing about time is that it doesn't seem to pass by quickly when you're in it looking around, and then all of a sudden, you stop and think about that day you went and saw that movie with that friend, that movie that made your heart swell and your eyes water and resonated with your hopes and your worries, that day that seems like just a moment ago, just a month ago at max, and then you figure out that it's been two years. time tricks us like that. i know this isn't an original thing to be saying, but when you can remember the emotion of a moment, the absolute purity of that extreme optimism or devastation, it doesn't feel so far away. those moments become a part of who we are, and so, in carrying a collection of moments and emotions with us at all times, it becomes a mystery that we don't also carry time, which births them.

the only response we have, once we stop kidding ourselves about the amount of control we have in our lives, is to surrender. i kind of suspect that time exists to remind us of this; that really we are so very small and have so little control or influence over anything on our own. the most control you or i can have is in the acknowledgment of that fact and the choice to surrender our control, our plans, our dreams and hopes to the one who was always in control from the start. it must all look so devastatingly amusing to Him.