I Love to Cook

I love cooking, I'm constantly looking for new recipies to try and I have tons of cookbooks that I pour over looking for yummy stuff to make for dinner but most of the dishes I make don't have a written recipie, it's all in my head. I spend a lot of time thinking up different ways to make dishes, most of the time it turns out pretty good but sometimes they are a flop.

Since I haven't had much to say here on my blog these past few days I decided to tell you what was for dinner tonight. All of these items were very easy and great for a quick, good dinner after a long day at work.

First on the menu, fresh salmon cooked on the grill with lemon pepper

Mmmmm, you can see the steam wafting into the air. Wash and dry the salmon thoroughly, sprinkle it with lemmon pepper and let sit for several minutes. Pre heat the George Forman grill (George is one of my best freinds in the kitchen) spray a good coat of olive oil PAM all over the grill, place on the salmon and let that cook until done, usually about 10-15 minutes depending on how thick your salmon is.

Oven Roasted Asparagus

This is amazingling fast, easy and delicious. Just wash the asparagus, cut off the ends, dry with paper towell and place on a cookie sheet. Spray a generous coating of olive oil PAM, don't be shy, olive oil is good for you. Sprinkly on some kosher salt (don't use table salt, it's a sin) and fresh ground pepper, you can use the powered pepper if you want, I won't tell anyone. Place into preheated 450 oven and cook for 10 minutes. Dont try to cheat and put it in the oven before it's hot, it'll ruin this dish.

Texas Toast

You can use any kind of bread for this, tonight's was french bread. Just heat up a non stick frying pan, melt some butter into the pan, place the bread on top of the butter and cook until brown. If you want you can melt more butter, flip it over and cook both sides. If you're feeling frisky you can sprinkle on some kosher salt or grated cheese.

Baked potatoe, I'll spare you the details on this because honestly, who doesn't know how to make a baked potatoe?

Put this all together and you've got a quick, easy hearty meal. Enjoy.

Momma's Hands

My poor mother must have been sleeping when they were handing (no pun intended) out hands. Her hands have been badly deformed from arthritis for the past several years. She finally decided it was time to have something done about this so she had surgery to repair a lot of the damage that was done by the hands (again, no pun intended) of time. The surgery went well and she's doing great but get a look at the contraption she has to wear around!





Never mind the mule or the horse in the background, they don't know how to mind their own business.

Happy Thanksgiving - the day after

We had an awsome Thanksgiving dinner, it was nice and quiet with just John, Me, Luke Trish and Riley. Of course I still made a big dinner with all of the trimmimgs and we got to enjoy each others company.

Of course what would Thanksgiving be without PICTURES!


Yesterday (Thanksgiving) I learned that in order to take a good indoor portrait in low light with no flash I need to use a very high ISO (1600), a wide open aperature (1.8) and find the appropriate shutter speed to go with that combination. Unfortunately I didn't learn that until after they left.

But, not for the lack of trying, I did manage to get one or two decent shots.

Every Day I Shall Learn Somthing New

I'm obsessed with learning about photography and Photoshop, sometimes I think there is no stopping me. Many times I lay awake at night thinking about all of the different angles I should shoot a portrait at, how I can achieve better light effects behind my subjects, different ways to enhance my photos in Photoshop and making a mental list of all of the photography accessories I'll buy if I ever win the lottery. I doubt I'll ever win the lottery or be rich enough to buy the lens of my dreams since it costs well over $8000.00 so at this point I'll just keep myself happy with learning all I can about photography and Photoshop because other than the electricity to run my laptop, it's free.

I did buy a new lens for my camera today but I swear, I NEEDED IT! I've gotten to the point where I'm just not happy with the quality of photos I get out of the kit lens, the portraits are too soft and the colors just are not as vibrant as I want them to be. This new lense was inexpensive but wow oh wow does it ever make my heart go pitter pat every time I view a photo I took with it, the quality is outstanding.

Here is an example:

Just compare the quality of this photo to the ones in yesterdays entry and you can see the difference, there is just no comparison.

And then of course I had to spend my allotted time for the day learning something new and the Pioneer Woman didn't post a new tutorial for me so I found the COOLEST website that has Photoshop effects step by step for FREE and learned out to do this:



When I was researching actions last week I found one that does this effect for sale for over $70.00!!!!! I wanted it BAD, but not that bad. Now I can do it myself, step by step anytime I want for free. I love that word, free free free free.

How to Make your Christmas Cactus Bloom

First off I think I need to begin today's entry with a quick disclaimer. I love plants, really I do. I fully enjoy looking at and smelling flowers and appreciate their beauty just as much as the next person. The problem I have is simply taking care of them. I cannot be held responsible for any plant that is brought to this house.


Right now I have two house plants a jade and a Christmas cactus. Both of these plants were brought here and abandoned by my mother. I had no choice in the matter, she brought them to my house one at a time and insisted that I needed them, quite honestly I think she just wanted to be rid of them and I was the closest unsuspecting victim. This would be one of the hazards of having your mother living on your property. The fact that both of these plants have managed to stay alive is a miracle in itself but for some reason these two plants seem to love it here in my house. The jade actually BLOOMS, yes you read that right, it blooms, how or why....I have no idea. Not only has it survived my lack of plant care skills, but it also survived an attack from a crazy cat(Read the story here). Other then the one time the jade did bloom, it just sits there collecting dust, shedding leaves and begging for water every now and then. After it's leaves look shriveled and pathetic I'm guilted into giving it some water so it doesn't croak.



The Christmas cactus, now that is a different story. That plant and I have a very unique relationship. Since as I've mentioned already, I am not good at taking care of plants in fact you would safely assume that I seriously SUCK, this plant is just flat out lucky to be alive. The first couple of weeks that I had it I of course did not water it at all, the only attention I ever gave it was to grimace at it and complain about the mess it makes and the space it occupies. I finally was guilted into watering the danged thing by my husband who was complaining about all of the brown leaves on it. Of course since it hadn't been watered in several days I watered it a LOT, one week later the plant was completely covered with hundreds of blooms. Every year, about 4 times each year that plant puts out more blooms then the Oregon Rose Garden and I get thousands of compliments on the plant and praised for my flowering skills. Bwwahahahaha, little do they know! Anyway, they always ask me the same question - How do you get that plant to bloom so heavily so many times per year? My answer is simple; I have it on the shock and awe program. I shock it with water, it awes me with flowers. HA!



So, all of the photos in today's entry are courtesy of me (of course) and my Christmas Cactus that is currently in the awe stage. Actually, I was watching an educational DVD on my camera, photography and photoshop and picked on the plant while trying to learn how to get macro shots. Although the photos are nice, they are not at all what I was after, I was trying to focus solely on the stamen of the plant and have everything else blurred out. Obviously I still have a lot to learn about spot focusing and metering. **sigh**



Never fear though, I still learned some new tricks.

I think I'm Stuck in Black and White

I never have been one to follow the crowd with anything that I do. These days it seems that everyone is putting out bright, colorful photographs and here I can barely resist the urge to desaturate or sepia almost every photo I take lately. I just love the depth that a black and white picture has and the way it makes me feel when I see one that really looks good.

Here's an example of one that I did recently.

This house is across the street from my Dad's place. It was a very bright, sunny day and I still didn't have a complete grip on what ISO setting was the best for each situation. I mistakingly thought that since I had plenty of light I could get away with the fastest ISO my camera offered - 1600. Most of the pictures were sadely overexposed, noisy and too soft. :( In reality, it was the perfect opportunity to use the slowest ISO setting - 100 and have a more crisp, clear photograph. Fortunately, I am definately someone who learns from my mistakes and I'm not always one to accept defeat easily.

I spent a lot of time in Photoshop trying to salvage this photo. I had to use several different layers and play with the opacity of each and every one of them until the picture finally had the effect I was looking for. I'm happy with the result, what I'm not happy with is the fact that I can't remember exactly how I did it.

F stops and F bombs and the Man in the Moon

I've come to refer to F stops as F bombs. Why? Because they are beginning to drive me crazy so I occasionally drop several F bombs while trying to get that oh so perfect shot that always seems to be just out of my reach. Trying to master the perfect ISO, aperature value, white balance, distance, angle etc etc etc is begining to turn me into a mad woman. Of course I have a few select family members that are rolling their eyes saying to their computer screen, "I don't think you're a mad woman, I KNOW you're a mad woman!"

Anyway, I've been trying to shoot our full moon for 3 days now and today I finally figured out that I've been going about it all wrong. I've been setting my camera up to shoot night shots and the moon is a big fat bright light (reflection from the sun). Duh. First, I set my camera to single focus and took it out to infinety. What that means is whatever I focus the tiny dot in the center of the lense on and anything else that is exactly the same distance away is the only thing that focuses in the picture. Next, I set my 75x300 lense on the longest focal length it had, basically I got as close to the moon as I could. I could only see the moon, the whole moon and nothing but the moon. Now, since my hand is not as steady as it used to be I set my camera up on the tripot and set my timer to a 10 second delay. This way the camera isn't swaying around while I'm trying to hold it steady and when I push the shutter it won't take the picture until after the camera is stabelized. Brilliant right? Then, here is the tricky part, expose for the moon and not for the black sky. THIS is the main thing that has caused me so much grief lately. All this time I was using my widest aperture setting, the slowest possible shutter speed to let enough light in, and a high ISO setting. All of my shots looked overexposed and the moon was blurry, partely because I was letting way too much light in and partley because believe it or not, my shutter was open for so long that the moon actually MOOVED before it closed.

So, here's what I finally ended up with:


Imagine my sheer and utter delight when I dowloaded this shot, you can see all of the craters and I do believe the man in the moon is winking at me! This is what I had my camera set at shutter speed of 1/500, aperture setting of 4.0, and ISO setting of 800. I tried the ISO at 200, 400 and 600 but in each one the moon was either too dark or yellow any higher and it had the over exposed blur effect which although can sometimes be cool, but it just wasn't what I was after, 800 was the magic number. With just a little sharpening in Photoshop I finally jumped over the moon!

An Early Morning Attempt

I decided to get up early this morning and take advantage of the morning light and how it plays on the landscapes. Once I got outside and saw the moon I was thrilled, I thought "Oh YEAH I can get some great shots of the full moon hanging just above the mountains playing peak-a-boo with the clouds!" After many failed attempts at figuring out what ISO, F stop etc. to use the moon disappeared behind the clouds just before it the "hanging just above the mountains part", yet another failed attempt at getting just what I was looking for, the story of my life.



Yeah great, thanks for nothing. I went back into the barn to finish feeding the horses that were waiting so patiently. Not to be one to accept defeat easily, I kept looking out the door to make sure I wasn't missing anything and spied upon this:



This is straight out of the camera so please excuse the dark foreground. I took a lot of pictures of this while playing with my nemesis, the polarizer filter. I swear some day I WILL conquer that thing! At this point the horses have stopped being patient and began banging on their stalls to let me know that picture time is OVER and food time is REQUIRED.....NOW! So, I got the horses all finished up and happy and shot this picture of Big Mare:



I took this shot in RAW, I've been reading about how wonderful RAW is and that if I start shooting in RAW I'll never go back to jpg. Well, I soon figured out that in order to fully enjoy RAW I need to learn a LOT more about Photoshop and buy Lightroom so I'm back to jpg for awhile. Anyway, I did make some adjustments to this photo, I lightened it up of course, boosted the color, did a glausean blur, and brought back the horse and the mud with the layer mask.

After playing around with all of that I took just one last look at all of the shots I got this morning before hitting the delete button and found THIS ONE!



I did have to do some work to this one too. I did some color matching with another photo I got later in the morning so the trees were greener, sharpened it up a bit, boosted, etc. I cloned the darker clouds from a corner I was going to crop off over next to the moon, did the cropping and sat back to enjoy the result. NICE! At least the morning wasn’t a total loss.

Time to Pick on ME!

I am having so much fun with Photoshop I could just spit. For those of you who know me and I mean REALLY know me know that is a big statement for me to make! I don't spit, it makes my nauseous to see people spit, I've been known to bawl out strangers for spitting in front of me. Okay, back to Photoshop. Recently I have fallen in love with Actions. Actions are my new lover, (don't tell the old guy I said that.) For those of you who don't know what an action is, in a nutshell it is a command that does a bunch of commands for you to create an excellent final product. I have been spending WAY too much time researching and reviewing different actions on the web and have come up with some really fun ones. Tonight I downloaded a couple of fun actions that I just HAD to try out.

Okay here is the picture that I decided to pick on tonight, yes that's me. Like most women, I rarely see a picture of myself that I like but here is one I like.....well, mostely. HA!



There were some things I didn't like. The background had some things in it that were distracting, my skin has that 44 year old woman (did I just admit my age?) look about it and there are a couple of blemishes I'd like to be rid of. The first thing I did was run an action called "Perfect Skin" this action is wonderful, it does a very slight glausean blur on the photo, stops for you to make any adjustments in the opacity and smoothes out the skin. Okay, now I have smoother skin but it still needs more help. I created a new layer, did a manual glausean blur with a higher opacity that blurred out the background for me. It actually blurs out the entire picture but not to worry, that is what layer masks are for. I did a layer mask and painted over any part of the picture that I didn't want blurred, that of course would be me. :) Okay now I'm almost done but my teeth are a little yellow - that darned coffee that there is no way I'll give up. I dodged my teeth and while I was at it, the whites of my eyes to make them more white. Then I lassoed my eyes and sharped them up a lot to make them pop a bit. My eyes are squinted in the photo making them look small so they needed all the help they could get. Finally, I used the clone tool to get rid of that pesky red dot on my chin and erase that one white hare in my eyebrow. I really liked where this photo was going, it just need a leeeetle more work. I used the "Lovely and Etheral" action to make the colors pop out a bit and then I used the "Slightely Lighten" action because I thought it was a little to dark. Unfortunately, this lightened up my skin a litte more then I wanted, (I've always been proud of my dark skin tones)so luckily for me, before I used the slightely lighten action I had created a new layer (whew) so I did another layer mask and used the brush to bring my skin back to it's original color. Here is what I ended up with.

After adjustments


Before adjustments


At this point I sat back and thought, "Wow,I've done it!" Time to get some chocolate cake and blackberry ice cream.

Fall Colors and Other Silly Stuff

I love fall. It is when I get to say goodbye to all of the dust on our road, the fields turn green again, I can BURN and all of the rain freshens the air up. My FAVORITE thing about fall is that I get to enjoy all of the wonderful colors that Mother Nature blasts into the leaves of the trees and shrubs.

I have a long drive to work every day and am one of the lucky few in that my drive is 95% out in the country. Every day I get to take in nature’s beauty with a few man made wonders tossed in for good measure, every once in awhile I’ll pull over and take a picture of something that catches my eye. I can’t let myself do this too often or else I would have 100’s of excellent photos but I would never get to work and the bills would not get paid.

Today’s photo is one of the opportunities for a picture that presented itself on my way to work last week. I have been eyeballing this old barn for quite awhile because, well….. I just love old barns and of course also because you just never know when the lighting and colors will be right for that oh so perfect photograph. Once I got home and downloaded the shots I thought they looked great but I did do a few adjustments in Photoshop to make the colors on the leaves pop out a little more and put some definition in the sky and on the barn. That together with a little creative cropping I ended up with a pretty good finished product.

Got to Play with Sophia for Awhile

John jr. came out Sunday and brought Sophia with him. Sophia and I got to play with all of the toys and the horses while Grandpa and Dad went up into the woods to play with their guns. We don't get to see Sophia very much so I like to enjoy every minute that I have with her. Here is a fun shot I got of Sophia being silly!



John still hasn't found a job yet but not for the lack of looking. I think he looks to hard sometimes and have to kick him out of the house so he can get some fresh air and move around a bit.

Back From Vacation

We are finally back from our vacation in Hawaii. John and I really enjoyed our trip but we were both very glad to get back home too. It felt so good to go out and visit with all of my critters, my poor dog missed me. Everything went pretty well here while we were gone with many thanks to all of the people that came out every day to feed, clean etc. we could not have enjoyed our trip without their help.

Today's picture is a cool sillouette that I got out at Wikiki Beach while waiting for the sunset

Having fun in Hawaii

A mongoose at Hanauma Bay


A plover that visited while we sun bathed


Hanauma Bay, we spent all day out there snorkling and sun soaking. We saw millions of amazingly colorful fish and sea turtles


A good sunset we caught at Wikiki Beach


The surfer dudes (John and Tom) comming in


Yes, another bird.


Playing with the boogie boards


Theresa wipes out face first!


Tom Clowing around


The fire dancer




Germain's Luau


Before the Luau


Our first sunrise in Hawaii


Teresa braving the waves


A sea turtle swimming just below our room



A museum we visited, the name of it escapes me.


Looking down at a lighthouse from the top of Diamond Head


The view from the top of Diamond Head


A cute little bird that joined our picnic


An extreme zoom into the sand.


Sunset Friday night


A cute little red bird


Tom playing in the sunset


A little beach crab that visited