Sweet Sorrow

Tonia is in Orlando this week, so we got together for lunch yesterday at Crispers - I was 30 minutes late because I always forget about rush hour traffic. It was interesting to see how Crispers redid the inside to look more like a cafe, with high tables on one side and leather chairs on the other. We drove to Miriam's house at 6:30pm where she & Tonia got ready for the shoot. (It was so flattering to see pictures of baby Matilda that I took last year framed around her house. Also note how she used a stick to hold her necklaces. Very cool!)

Since we ran out of time (sunlight wise) at the first location, we drove around for a bit until we decided to stop at Leader's - a patio furniture store. The over head lighting was great against the dark sky. And I found that the lights from traffic added a cool bokeh effect in the background, so we stuck with that for a while. Miriam told me about a new editing site called Pixlr, which is what I used to edit the following photos:

I was going crazy with experimental edits and ended up loving them way more than anticipated. It may have helped more that I was listing to upbeat "club" music as I was tweaking them.

Portraits ~ Alana "Ashley Anna" Grace

We had been trying to plan a 3-day get together for ourselves (Alana, Cody, Michael and I) since January, however, our schedules didn't work out until this past weekend. I drove up to Tallahassee on Friday after a lunch date with Michael at Panera. He couldn't come with me because he was working all day on Friday. & I should note that although I called my mom on the drive up "with nothing to say", we ended up talking for over an hour! I felt a calm, mature sensation during our conversation. 
Friday night Alana and I spent a couple hours chatting and picking out outfits for the photo shoots. On Saturday, we spent three hours in the hot afternoon at the barn while Alana got the horses ready, then went back to her house for second showers and lunch, before making our way back to the barn for photos.

Although I took over 1,000 photos, we narrow it down to about 500, then me picking out my personal 60 favorites, these two are my very favorite. In my next posts I will show off photos of Alana and Cody then give her horses their own post.

"def da best"

Today Sana came over around 2pm because we both had the day off from work. We went to the mall (and Platos Closet) to try and find a white dress for a possible anniversary shoot I would like to do with Michael ~ haven't mentioned that to him yet.. No such luck though and the other dresses I did try on looked much better on the hanger.

We had lunch at a place called Teak Neighborhood Grill. It really was back through all these nice neighborhoods. Sana said the menu looked good, as well as the reviews including one that simply said "def da best". After that we used the phrase to describe everything we liked. The place was small and although there were hardly any customers when we got there, the waitress seemed to take a while. She was nice though and the food was really good. I got the Hawaiian burger with a house salad. 

 They had some inventive burgers - such as one with two glazed donuts in place of a bun! This means I can add another tally to my "10 restraurants I haven't been to before". Afterward we stopped by the big Dollar Store. Sana was amazed that everything really was only a dollar, just as I was when I went there a couple months ago. I got Sasha a pretty rope for her to pull on. She likes it! 

Then I was convinced to drive back around near the Universal area to find Fresh Market. I got it confused with Whole Foods, but we still made it. I was very fascinated with the "per pound" area. But instead of candy (however, they had candy too) it was trail mix, pretzels, peanuts and dried fruits. I was feeling adventurous and got a good handful-sized bag of a few. Including dried strawberries, kiwis and cantaloupe! Sometimes I get really excited to eat healthy foods. Today it got to the happy point where I confessed that I was sad that we have been friends for three months and hadn't hugged yet. Ha, so we hugged right there.

I made it home just in time for the new Glee episode (Whitney Huston tribute). Michael got home around 9pm from another full day on the zombie shoot. Then we watched my Netflix movie, The Change Up with Ryan Reynolds, Jason Bateman and Olivia Wilde (Michael's new girlfriend). I liked it, aside from how many times the F-word was used and a couple other scenes, but it was rated R. It was nice getting to see him for a couple hours. Of course he is sleeping again and I still have one last load of laundry in the dryer that I probably won't get put away to until (honestly) Friday?