Summer Idaho Trip Part 2

Charlie! Five minutes after he hopped down off of me, Jon texted me this next picture:

^I spy a sneaky, long puppy^

Annie, Joseph, Jon

Selfie gone wrong.

Weenies 'n s'mores roast

Ada had a cell phone in-hand and was posing and snapping pictures of Corinne. "Now do this..."

At the zoo. Please zoom in and note Ada in the background.

Shooting with Jon and my dad. I don't want to talk about my shotgun skill level, but I showed no mercy on those clay pigeons with the .22. Somehow I shot the middle out of this while the rest remained perfectly intact?

Weird circumstances led to my dad and Jon bathing Joseph with hand soap in the mud sink (?).

Annie and ma!

Jon and The General out doing some sort of repair in the pasture

Gorgeous countryside

Per tradition, we drove to Driggs for lunch. Corinne spotted a good view on the way back and asked my mom to pull over so she could hike up this hill and snap a picture.

It was a cloudy day and the peak of Grand Teton was obscured, but still made for amazing scenery.

Headed from the water park to get snow cones. Totally unprompted. My little heart melted.

Hot tubbin'

My favorite picture of the trip? Ada waiting to go boating with Jon and The General. Corinne thought they were more ready than they were to leave and sent Ada outside to wait. So she did, and very patiently. She stood like this, holding her banana, staring into space, for four straight minutes while Corinne and I looked on from inside, laughing, before my mom sprinted out to keep her company.

While Ada was boating, we rode horses.

Corinne texted Jon to see how Ada was. Jon replied with this photo, captioned "Cool as hell."

One more post and done.

Summer Idaho Trip Part 1

Two weeks ago was our annual summer trip to Idaho! We drove all the way to Annie's house in Heber City, Utah from Chandler (12 hours) after I'd worked half a day on Thursday, so we got in pretty late. That didn't stop me from a morning visit with Owen, Christa's brand new baby (!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!), the next day in American Fork, though.

This first picture was what it looked like when she told me she was pregnant, when she told me she was in labor, when her sister told me he'd been born, when I saw the first picture of him, when she announced his name, when I met him (pictured), and a week later when I saw this photo. I'm typically not an emotional person (I think this might have been the only time Christa has ever seen me cry?), but this baby has done me in. Love him. Love her.

Lunch at SLAB pizza in Provo

Strolling with Annie to feed her friend's chickens and collect (multi-colored!!!) eggs.

View on the way.

Jon was there. Funny story: Annie had warned us that one of the black chickens is evil. She went in and aggressively rid the hutch of all chickens before inviting me in to hunt for eggs. I kept hearing a chickeny sound but it took a good 20 seconds to realize it was coming from inside the hutch and another 10 to locate it -- the mean black chicken was perched up high in the shadows, 3 feet directly over my head, watching us. I screamed.

Owen was blessed that Sunday so we swung by Christa's chapel on our way up to Idaho. Jon was sweet and stayed in the parking lot with Penny (who was suffering a horrific, window-pane-rattling cough that was RUINING OUR LIVES) so that Annie and I could attend Sacrament meeting. Partway through, Christa passed Owen down the row to me and I got to hold him for most of the meeting. Highlight of the trip.

HIS LITTLE HAND ON MY ARM!!!! I forced Annie to capture the moment.

The drive to Idaho. I sat in the back seat with the little invalid. This was her position for most of the trip: Clinging fiercely to my body, head wrapped around my shoulder. She likely had kennel cough which is really contagious between dogs, so she lived the trip quarantined in Annie's laundry room and my parents' bathroom.

Jon playing with Ada and Joseph right after we arrived in Idaho

Frolicking. Please note their nearly identical outfits.

Inventing games. Ada "reviving" Jon by honking his nose.

Sandbar!! Love this picture of all the kids (plus Jon) waiting dutifully in line for the slide.

Me and Manny

So proud of this shot. One more, for fun:

Joseph, the Slowest Slider

With PopPop

Compare to two years ago

Flock of pelicans

Ada was ready for round 2 after she warmed up a bit

The sisters Sweet

Headed to the cheap theater to see Edge of Tomorrow (2nd viewing for all parties. Fun flick.)

Classy gas station lunch. Corinne even hired a sitter!

I honestly did not think I'd taken so many pictures. At least one more post to come...

"See Yourself in the Temple" Silhouette: Faux Tutorial

We moved to Chandler three weeks ago to be closer to my new office. Same company, new location. For my final Sunday with my Laurels (my calling was pretty much the only thing I was sad to leave behind) I gave them these prints:

Image Source

There were six total, one for each girl (using their own silhouettes and favorite temples) but this one turned out the best. You could say I am pretty damn impressed with myself. You can download it here on Mediafire, or follow my (very brief) instructions below to make your own. This isn't really a tutorial because I'm lazy and don't feel like teaching the whole internet how to use Photoshop, so for the rest of the post I assume a certain level of Photoshop experience, and link to other tutorials along the way. No need to reinvent the wheel here.

First you have to make the shape of the silhouette from a photo. Here's an explanation of one way to do that. (I personally used the Pen tool to create a vector shape, which allows more precision but does require some practice.)

Tracing a silhouette using the Pen tool.

Open a new 8x10 file in Photoshop, 300 pixels per inch (this is important since you'll be printing it), with a white background.

Create a new layer and place your silhouette. If you made a vector shape, fill it with any color. But pick a pretty one, just cuz.

Create a new layer and place the temple image of your choice.  Make sure it's high resolution.

Right click the temple layer and select "Create clipping mask." This will trim the temple picture to the shape of your silhouette. Resize and move the temple photo until you like the positioning.

Use the color picker tool to select a color from the palette of the image then create a new layer for the text. I used a typeface called "Orange" but can't for the life of me figure out where I got it from. 30 seconds of Googling didn't help so I gave up. ("This is the worst tutorial ever!!!!")

The completed layers will look like this:

Save as jpeg, print on 8.5x11 cardstock, trim down to 8x10, frame, kthxbai.

Noah

This started as a Facebook status but grew.

I'm going on the record saying that I liked Noah. I tried to avoid spoilers below by being vague, but if you plan to see it and you’re anything like me (I refuse to read any reviews before seeing a movie I'm interested in), you might want to skip to the bottom.

Stuff I liked:

• The creation scene. WHOA. Worth the cost of admission alone.
• Noah’s underwater vision.
• The scene where the Watchers fell to earth and crawled out of the mire.
• The scene after the flood hits when they’re all just sitting there in the dark listening to the whole world die. So awful. So awesome.
• The scene between Noah and Ila where he tells her she has worth even though she’s barren. I maybe got a little choked up.
• That it draws from multiple literary sources (e.g. the Dead Sea Scrolls) in addition to the KJV. Related: That it gave me the opportunity to Google “Nephilim.”
• LOTR meets the Bible. Come on.

Stuff I didn’t like:

• The CGI pangolin-dog at the beginning. Took me a while to forgive that.
• That subplot in the second half (though the more I think about it, the more I realize why Aronofsky put it in there – Noah trying to figure out God’s purpose for the flood and what role he (Noah) was supposed to play in fulfilling his flawed perception of that purpose. The movie took it too far, though, and gave it way too much screen time.)
• The stowaway.
• The immediate consequence of Methuselah’s blessing. I nearly laughed out loud.

I do agree that it deviated majorly from the Biblical account because at no point is it EVER mentioned in the Bible that Noah wore a henley.

In conclusion, visually stunning (and not just because of Emma Watson) and thought provoking. B+

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(Unrelated: here's my most recent post for BCC!)