One year ago today...

Love you, babe.

Durango Trip - Take 2

This trip, to celebrate our anniversary, was much better than the trip over Christmas. Infinitely better. My love for Durango has been restored. We also found an ad for a zip-line canopy tour so we are already planning our next trip.

I have been going here since I was a kid and my favorite awesome things to do in Durango include riding the train to Silverton, Skiiing (in winter, obviously), hanging out on main street, hiking, or just running around taking pictures of the awesome signage. There is also whitewater rafting, which I have done before and highly recommend. We couldn't cram it into our weekend, though, with 2 days more or less dedicated to driving. So, here are some snaps from around Durango and Silverton.

Weekly Coffee Homage

Playing Flickr curator with some fun coffee-themed images. Enjoy!

1. Coffee made with Love, 2. falling in love at a coffee shop [39/182.5] (explore!), 3. you're the cream in my coffee, 4. I love coffee, especially Monday morning..., 5. coffee & the city, 6. Coffee can wait, 7. Coffee has two virtues: it is wet and warm., 8. coffee art, 9. in the morning, while he waits for the coffee to be served, 10. "Strong coffee", 11. coffee in the shade, 12. DSC_6885 Coffee beans

What Love Looks Like

Click HERE to help with Sara's campaign for marriage equality. Get yourself a free bumper sticker and a cool awesome sidebar like mine. Even though I don't live in California, I'll do my part. Hopefully Arizona will recognize marriage equality someday.

A bit of disneyland

Just one shot of Disneyland before I have to go finish packing for our trip to Colorado for the holiday weekend (cross your fingers that we actually have fun this time). 

Don't you just love ride cameras and the fun you can have with them? The pose was Bryce's idea. 

More later and have a great long weekend!! 

Weekly Coffee Homage

Cafes that create art in the milk on your latte are too much fun. Here is some of the best latte art I've ever seen. 

(source)

These are so detailed! It's amazing. For other photos of this temporary art form, go check out this flickr group. To replicate at home, there are tons of youtube tutorial videos out there. Go nuts!

Things I want for my birthday that I'm totally not going to get

Things that I want for my birthday that I'm totally not going to get by Jelitan on Polyvore.com


A girl can dream, can't she?

Weekly Coffee Homage

Why not drink your coffee out of a cool vintage cup, or pour it from a groovy glass carafe? Don't you love these? I found them all on etsy vintage.

See the bottom for links.

Available here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

Question - how do you feel about giving/receiving vintage gifts? Is there some stigma attached to them? Like they are "used" or "cheap"? I would be thrilled to get any of these vintage coffee items.

When the Pirates of the Carribean breaks down, the pirates don't eat the tourists.

I'm off this weekend to a magical place that looks sorta kinda not very much at all like this:

(photo source)

Who remembers the skyride? I loved that ride. Also, the original Submarine Voyage was always my favorite. (Did I just date myself?) I'm excited to take my Mom on the new one. (Anyone else think that those choices are extremely odd given my fears of both heights and enclosed spaces? I know I do.)

I love vintage Disneyland ephemera. In my internet searches I have found the famous "E ticket" which my Dad always talked about, but I never knew what it looked like. 43 cents, eh?

(photo source)

I'm not sure how the cherry blossom girl manages to make all her [Paris] Disneyland photos look so amazing but I will try to emulate them and avoid the awkward posed family shots this go-round (though there will be some of those). Wondering if it would be too much of a pain to cart around my SX-70 for one of the days.

Go look at her blog, it's gorgeous. Her Ueno Park shots make me want to go back to Tokyo just to take pictures like those. I wish I had appreciated photography then as much as I do now.

I'm looking forward to being a kid again for the weekend!! YAY!

Dream Job

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Originally uploaded by The Official White House Photostream

Can I please have this job? You just follow the president around all day, taking his picture, and then upload the photos to the Official White House Flickr Photostream.

You never know when you might be taking some epic photo that would appear on posters and in books for years to come.

Weekly Coffee Homage

Turning my addiction into a semi-regular feature - all things coffee.


Add milk in precise quantities to match the color palette inside the rim. I would love these, even though I usually take my coffee and tea black. Available from SUCKUK.

Animoto videos

If you haven't heard of Animoto yet, you should check it out. It auto-creates funky slideshows with your photos, customized to music. Here is a little test video I did with photos from my etsy shop (jelitan.etsy.com).



P.S. - I even wrote this blog entry from the animoto site and it auto-embeds. It also pulled all the photos from flickr for me!

Jerome Trip Re-Cap!

A few weeks ago, the husband and I took a trip to Jerome for the weekend. Jerome is an old copper mining ghost town in Northern Arizona. We have been several times, but only for day trips as it is very close to our home town of Prescott. This time, we stayed at the Jerome Grand Hotel which used to be the hospital back when the mine was active. The thing that seems crazy to me is that Jerome is built literally into the side of a mountain, with the hospital at the highest point and the mine down at the foot. I can't imagine it was easy to get an injured miner to the hospital. 

With the hotel's history as a hospital and the mysterious death of an orderly who was crushed under the elevator, this place is considered haunted. We didn't experience any ghostly activity, but I did get to cross "Stay someplace that is haunted" off my 101 things list. 

The deadly elevator is still in the hotel, here are some pics. It is one of those where you have to close the outer doors manually before pushing the floor button. We stayed on the first floor above the lobby, but we still took the elevator every time because it was so cool. 

It was a very fancy elevator. I think that modern elevators should have little benches and lamps in them. 

Most of the photos that I took that weekend were for my photography class and thus on film and in black and white. My goal is to eventually scan in all of those  negatives after my class ends (in a couple of weeks). I'll be posting more of those at some point. 

For now, here are my polaroids that I took that day. Several of them I have already posted here. 

Here is an antique streetlight. You can see where the wire comes off - it actually stretches to the building next to it, rather than running underground like a modern streetlight. 

A pretty flowered tree that stretched out over the valley. 

There were a lot of funky hydrants of various heights, shapes and colors. Here is one of them. Most of them are probably pretty ancient. I think that if humans were to die out, our fire hydrants would outlive us by hundreds of years. 

I love this quaint, crumbling town. So many great photo ops. 

Yum.

We went wine tasting at the Jerome Winery. Ironically, their vineyard is just outside of Tucson, where we went to school, but we never knew about it. The wine was quite tasty and we ended up buying a few bottles. We pretended we knew things about wine and swirled and smelled it and pretended we could taste the oakiness. For us, however, it comes down to "it tastes good" vs "I wouldn't want more than one glass" to make our purchasing choices. We did identify a chocolaty flavor in the first couple of wines we tasted, so that was something! Maybe we should learn about wine. 

Here's evidence of our sophisticated note-taking during the tasting process. 

We finished up with lunch at the Haunted Hamburger, which is my favorite place to eat in Jerome. Unfortunately, it's everyone else's favorite too so we had to wait forever and eat at the bar. But, it was worth it. I had a yummy prickly pear margarita (it's an Arizona thing, but try it if you're ever here!). We also made a list on the bar napkin of possible trips to take for our wedding anniversary. 

A fun trip, I recommend making a stopover if you're ever in the area.