estacey
Here's her photostream: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jclutter/
And here's her story:
The day before Thanksgiving I went to Home Depot with Evan's Mom to pick up a few things and left with a cat. Arg. Employees were trying to find someone who could take the sweet boy home as they were going to have to call Animal Control. He's a beautiful little man and he has done an amazing job adjusting to life in my laundry room :)I have no earthly idea what I'm going to do with him as we are really maxed out with the care and feeding of 4 cats and a dog on a very limited budget.. and there is no room for him at local rescues and his chances at Animal Control are slim. He'll be here and safe until we figure it out though.Something about the little man spoke to us and so Evan's Mom and I sent Evan home to get a carrier. He is not fixed and judging from the condition of his coat, skin and nerves he had been on his own for a while. He is terribly terribly sweet though. Even as nervous as he was you can tell he just desperately wants to give and receive good lovin'. I've spent the morning looking into low cost alternatives to get the man fixed and vetted, and will go get a voucher for him on Saturday. Even low cost is going to go well beyond what we can afford. So.... I'm reaching out for a little help. I'm estimating at this point with neutering, FeLV/FIV testing, and vaccines, along with food and litter costs it will cost me about $150 to keep the boy until I can find him the perfect home. This cat is going to make someone VERY happy. I just need a little help getting there.Thank you for reading this. If you can.. please donate. Seriously, even a dollar or two will make a HUGE difference. Anything I do not spend on Home Depot (if I can qualify for a free program) will be donated to First Coast/No More Homeless Pets. Read about them and what they do.. here
To donate click here I will continue to post updates so you know how your donation has helped!I feel more than silly asking for help for this little man but... while this may be cheesy, the thing that makes me feel better is a quote that often runs through my head..."If you can't feed a hundred people, then feed just one."For now this little guy is my one... thanks again for reading this far. Oh, and if you can't donate... just give your animals a kiss for me and that'll do fine :) ¶ 7:47 PM 0 comments
oh, i've been so quiet!
we're in key west right now. one of those awesome paid-by-work weekends. we brought two dogs with us... our friends were teasing us that we should have not kids and if we did how we would not be able to do this kind of thing anymore, going to key west and stuff. i had to laugh tonight because this has been THE TAMEST TRIP ever. we usually go out and get tipseh at least one night, but not this trip... we have eaten, walked the dogs a lot, watched tv (no cable at home remember), and today we took a nap. i was like, um, yeah, i am pretty sure we can do this with a baby in tow.
my sister got in a bad car accident last week. she broke her pelvis in several places and her collarbone, and hit her head a good one. everything will be OK but it sounds like it will take a while for her to heal. i'm heading home wednesday for a couple of weeks and may go back again after christmas. i have to wait to get the details about her condition and plan of recovery before i go making any plans, though. it's so hard to be so far from home and useless and helpless.. i could have flown home right away, of course, but i wanted to time it to where i could be of most use instead of rushing home only to sit around and do nothing. so i guess i'll be helping with her and the kids. she really should be going to a rehab hospital for a while, but last i heard that was really up in the air.
practicing photography on the dogs, as you see here. this was in our friends' yard where we went for thanksgiving. it was reeeeally late in the day, so all the pics are at a slowish shutter speed, but overall i'm pretty happy with th e results.
ok, off to snooze.
www.luvabun.net
These baby buns are the offspring of a mama bunny who was rescued from a hoarding situation. See the website for information. I'll just say that these adorable babies (and their mom) were so so so lucky that they were taken out of their former home. We visited last Saturday and OH MY do I wish I had room for more bunnies! The babies were absolutely irresistible. I would've stayed all day snuggling on them if they would've let me! Or, if Chris would've let me that is. ;)
This is the place where we got our Piper.
Also, I reprocessed this pic. Why? Because I love it.. or the idea of it.. whatever.. and it was an amazing time, alone on the beach, no one at all there. And WHY exactly did I reprocess? Let me explain:
Byron came over tonight and said something along the lines of, oh, your wedding photographer in Fiji must've sucked because I saw that pic he took. Which pic? I asked. He meant this one. I'm like, um, that was a self portrait with the timer...
I cropped it more strategically and changed the processing.
Hopefully this sucks less. :P
I'll get to doing a wedding post at some point... I think I'm done processing pics for the time being. This weekend Chris's sister is having her bridal shower. (In 7 hrs! Meep!) Obviously, I still have not recovered from Fiji time.
I'm training my replacement at work, so just a few days to go... Yipee!
And I'm deep in planning this whole BUSINESS thing. The part that makes me really nervous is the pictures part. Gotta practice on strange dogs.. and cats and horses and stuff. Byron's boss is apparently like me on steroids - she has 7 dogs and 3 cats and 2 bunnies and some amount of tortoises and some horses....!!! I figure I could make a whole portfolio by just visiting her for the day!!!
Anyway, off to lay in bed and wish I were sleeping!
So far just a screen grab from a video we had the hairdresser do with the Powershot. I look very serious -- too serious -- but Chris looks cute. :)
Being married feels remarkably similar to shackin' up or being engaged. Except you say you're the "wife" and you have a new name and you can tease your husband (!) that he's stuck with you forever any time you're being a pain in the ass because SOMEONE doesn't believe in divorce. :D
False killer whales and Hawaiian spinner dolphins, originally uploaded by Wild Side Specialty Tours.
We saw false killer whales off the boat in Taveuni. One was really close to the boat, right under the water.. Pretty awesome. :)
¶ 1:28 PM 0 comments
We actually got back reeeeeally early on Sunday, but I basically went into a coma until Monday night.
Oh, get this... So we get to the Miami airport at like 6 a.m., we get our bags, run to Whole Foods in time for them to open so I could get breakfast, then go home. I snuggle the animals and promptly collapse in bed. Chris cleans the kitchen, goes to mass, goes to the hospital to visit a patient, goes to Costco, goes to Patty's to pick up the dogs, comes home, unpacks, mows the yard... You get the picture. I waved at him periodically from my spot on the bed.
I have NO idea why I was so tired. I slept well in Fiji. Slept on the plane. Slept in the hotel in LA where we camped out for our layover. Slept on the second plane. Not only am I tired when I would've been sleeping in Fiji, but I'm tired the rest of the time too! Except I seem to be sleep saturated and now I'm just tired during the day... I had to take a sleeping pill at 4 a.m. so I could get SOME sleep before I came to work.
Anyway, enough of that. Fiji was awesome. The first place we stayed was a 10-minute boat ride from the island where they filmed Castaway, to give you an idea of what it looked like there. Our island was tiny and had just a couple of other couples on it at any given time, so it was really quiet and private-feeling and lovely. There was nothing to do but relax, except eat and snorkel and do honeymoon-type activities. :) There were baby black-tip reef sharks all over in the water, which I loved. We'd have breakfast, play in the water, read, nap in the hammock ("where did those two hours go?!")... When dusk approached, we watched the sunset and I harassed the hermit crabs. It was just so quiet and pretty, perfectly what you would expect Fiji to be.
The second place we stayed was more real Fiji rather than a resort. You know that on the whole island there was not one place to buy a postcard? That's how not-touristy it is. The corals there were amazing... We went diving and snorkeling. Both were amazing, but I could not get over how beautiful and healthy the coral were just yards from the road. Unfortunately we didn't bring the underwater camera EITHER time when we snorkeled, which kills me because the pics would've been way better than the diving pics we took 50 feet underwater.
The only negatives were: 1) I didn't get many pics with the SLR at all. There were all these cute kids on the coastal walk we did, for example, but we were hiking to a waterfall, so I didn't really want to lug the big, expensive camrea along. Sigh. 2) It is their spring there, and it was a bit chilly for us! Not chilly, really, except for when it comes to swimming. It was, I dunno, upper 70s? 3) Turns out Fiji has sad stray dogs. All of whom limp. I decided that if I found a puppy I would bring it home and give it to my mom as a souvenir or something, but the only little ones I saw were a little older and snuggling happily with their mom (and their fleas), so it was a no-go. The folks who run the resort there have taken in four dogs (their limit), one of which was so small they thought it was a rat or something. It's grown into a super beagle. :D
So yeah, I'm Mrs. Chen now. Doesn't feel quiet real.
Will be uploading pics in the next couple of days.. So far this is the only one I've posted. Goes to show how quiet the island was. No photoshopping any people out! :)
