Don't Be a Pickle Bump

Photography is my second love after writing. I can spend hours with a camera and just shooting pictures. Most of what I shoot is, quite honestly, crap, but every once in a while I take something I really like. And I post it over on my photography blog.

I’m not one for overly photoshopped pictures. My understanding of photography comes working in an the actual darkroom and with people who cared enough to teach me a lot of good basic techniques with the camera to get the kinds of shots I want. I can usually tell when an image has been overly photoshopped and it’s become a wierd version of the original.

That being said, For Christmas, R got me Adobe Photoshop Elements & Premiere Elements 7 and I have a full blown version of Photoshop on my work computer. Add Pioneer Woman’s Photoshop Actions and the photography section of her web site and I’m experimenting just a little.  Nothing too extravagant mind you, but still, I am experimenting a little bit. I’ve had two successful experiments in this little endeavour of mine.

The first one came when Pioneer Woman explained how to use masking. I went to Kemah last weekend and I had a picture from the carousel that I really like.

I thought it would be fun to take the background out of the equation and make it sepia toned using the actions from Pioneer Woman’s Action Set 2.

However I wasn’t happy with the background being sepia. I feel like it didn’t make the Dragon Horse pop enough. So I turned down the saturation so it was set to 0. And made the background black and white.

I just love how the colors pop.

I’ve also started shooting in the RAW format. I took a picture last night of a chair down on the dock and I love what I was able to achieve just by making a few adjustments to the RAW file. I call this one “Infinity Chair”

Enjoy!

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The decision to eat 2-3 servings of whole grain, 5 servings of fruit and 5 servings of veggies seems to be a good one for me. I’m down 5 lbs for the month and the weight is not flucuating as much as it was.  It appears to be a more steady trend. I’ll see if I can get a pretty little graph from Open Office here in a bit to illustrate what I mean.  If I just look at the numbers, I seem to be bouncing around a bit more.

So for now, this goal continues as is, even though at times all those good things seem like a pain in the rear end to eat because it’s a lot of food!

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While I am not really into heavily photoshopping stuff, I do kind of like this experiment.

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There have been books about other people’s projects that I have read and R has perused because I have them sitting on the table next to the bed. The titles have included Going Gray: What I Learned about Beauty, Sex, Work, Motherhood, Authenticity, and Everything Else That Really Matters, Helping Me Help Myself: One Skeptic, Ten Self-Help Gurus, and a Year on the Brink of the Comfort Zone, and The Writing Diet: Write Yourself Right-Size.

His comment to me is always “You could have written this book.” While I appreciate the sentiment, the problem is that I haven’t come up with a good project in the “Self-Help/Self-Esteem/Life Journey” genre. Until now.

A couple weeks ago, LO and I were exchanging e-mails when I casually stated, “I wish I could come up with a cool project like yours.” Little did I know what was going to land in my lap about 10 days later.

Last week, someone brought in a HomeLife Magazine from LifeWay Ministries in at work. In it, there was there was an article about about forgiveness and how you you have to practice forgiveness repeatedly in order to get to the place where you have truly frogiven the person. In it the following scripture from Matthew was quoted (MATT 18:21-22)

Then Peter came to Jesus and asked him, “Lord, how often do I have to forgive a believer who wrongs me? Seven times?”

Jesus answered him, “I tell you, not just seven times, but seventy times seven.”

Between this article and a post on a fitness board by my friend RedLefty about stepping outside his personal comfort zone and stretching his personal boundaries at least once a day, it made me wonder if I could take this principle of practicing forgiveness 490 times and apply it to other areas of my life.

So essentially what I am doing for the next 490 days (well make that 487 days since I’m already 3 days in), is stretching my personal boundaries and making a practice of living my life very intentionally. I’ve got a blog for this little idea of mine in the works, and I’ll post the link by the weekend since I’m still working on the framework.

Does anyone see the irony that I do? I rushed head long into a project about living intentionally.

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I have to admit, I’ve been struggling with staying on the wagon. I know what to do, but I just can’t quite get fully there. So I’m taking babysteps to get back up on the exercise and diet wagon.

The first step is getting out of the fast food habit I developed over the course of the hurricane and it’s aftermath. So I’m focusing on making sure I prep my own food. While I’m not counting every single calorie that goes into my mouth (babysteps remember!), I am making sure that  I focus on the following things every day when I prep my food:

• Eating 2-3 servings of whole grain/legumes/dried beans. Seriously you get lots of fiber and can add some protein to your diet by doing this. Not to mention that it fills you up and keeps things moving from all the fiber.
• Eating 5 servings of fruit. This one was eaiser to achieve than I thought. A banana added to my oatmeal; berries in my plain yogurt; an apple, orange or tangerine here and there to help curb my hunger. The sugar from the fruit definitely helps curb my sweet tooth.
• Eating 5 Servings of veggies – and I’m not talking about huge bowls of salad (there’s only so much salad a girl can take!). I’m talking sweet potatoes, corn, turnips, beets, peas, green beans and broccoli just to name a few. I try and eat at least two servings of veggies with my main meals. Although I am finding that a small salad before I fix my main dinner is a good way to stop me from gnoshing while I cook.

The best thing is that by eating this way I can eat more volume without packing in a ton of calories and I feel fuller longer.

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