I will admit, pink is perhaps one of my least favorite colors. I know, it's tragic. But there are somethings that just need to be pink. Little girls' rooms, lips, flowers... so I thought to myself that this wouldn't be such a bad assignment. And I was right. I LOVE these pictures! Love love love. :) It doesn't hurt that Chloe is just so darn cute. 

In other news, my camera is still not fixed. :( 

I cried a lot yesterday. A LOT.

I overreact. I know.

Today we went to Stonehenge and Salisbury. I had serious camera envy every time I passed someone with a DSLR. And I may or may not have been guilty of contemplating stealing some of them.... But I still had fun and I think I may have enjoyed it even more, knowing that all the beautiful details I saw would have to just stay in my mind. I guess this just gives me an excuse to come back and take all the photographs I want sometime in the future.  :)

We stumbled upon this statue towards the end of our visit to the British Museum. Immediately I thought to myself "this would be perfect for my photo-challenge assignment of love!" I don't know if it is a man and his wife, or a mother and her daughter, but either way, I thought it was neat that they were holding hands. It's not something I've seen a lot of in other statues, if I've even seen it at all. 

I must now also announce some very tragic news. After laboring diligently alongside myself in the pursuit of higher creativity for three blessedly artistic years, Edward, my trusty camera, has broken.

Yes, I teared up at one point.

I have looked up the problem on the internet (oh blessed, blessed internet. What would the world do without your vast bank of knowledge?) and am hopeful that a cure is possible.

But seriously. I still want to cry. And wanted to cry when we went on the London Eye and all I had was my mom's point and shoots. Don't get me wrong! Point and shoots have their place in the world.

Just not as your standing at the perfect vantage point with the sun set and beautiful lighting creating the most magnificent view of the British Parliament and Big Ben you've ever seen. Excuse me while I go find a quiet corner to be lonesomely depressed in.

Things are going to be a little out of order, as I didn't bring my hard drive with has all my photos to London with me. I will only have what I take while I'm here. Knowing me, I'm fairly confident that will not be a problem.

Anyway, the challenge for today was "Where I Stand", and standing by the window of the apartment we are renting for the week, this is what I see. At night the tree is all lit up. As I was saying to McKenna earlier, it is probably a good thing I'm not reading Harry Potter right now, because I would literally be waiting for wizards to walk down the street with me and attempt to flag the Knight Bus down on multiple occasions. The Londoners might think me a bit strange when they saw me standing on the street corner waving a flashlight around like crazed person...

I see these every morning when I look out my window, and they bring a smile to my soul everytime.

And you know what else makes me happy?

The fact that I am going to London tomorrow. And no, not London, Arkansas. I mean the real London. As in the one in the UK.

That definitely makes me happy. :)

Certain events today have made me feel the need to vent my frustration for the entire cyber-world to read... or just close friends and family. Late this morning, upon stumbling upstairs after a wonderful night's rest, my mom suggested we go vote today since today and tomorrow are the last days for early voting (otherwise read as the last days to vote without ridiculously long lines). "Great idea, mom! I'll go research the candidates a bit more and make sure I'm educated about who supports what policies, etc., etc." Sitting down at the computer for what I thought would be a  nice educational experience, my eagerness quickly (very quickly, I might add) turned into aggravation, and not long after that, complete frustration.

How in the world am I expected to be an educated, responsible voter if I can't even find who is running for what office in my county? 

Is it just me or does this seem like something that might be important to release to the public before an election. I know many people's tactic when it comes to voting is to either vote along party lines, or even scarier, pick the prettier sounding name, and I must say I can't blame them! If you can't find out what each candidate supports, who are you supposed to vote for? I'm starting to think it's down to either voting with their strategy in mind or just turning in a completely blank ballot. One could argue that technically you voted... even if you didn't vote FOR anyone... 

In the end I was able to locate some information on three candidates (just three out of the thirty or so running competitively for office this year), and even some of those didn't have any information on their actual political views. Just a little biography. Because, you know, since you have three kids, a lovely wife, and live in Benton County, that's definitely going to make me want to vote for you over the other candidates!

 Which leads me to my second point of frustration. When my mom, my dad, and I were finished casting our ballots, the people working the booths told us that I was the ONLY person my age who had come in and voted in the last two weeks! Are you serious?! Now that I know how hard it is to even figure out who's running for office, I must admit it's no wonder no one votes anymore. But seriously? Two weeks and one person has come in who is under the age of 25! It is a scary thought thinking that this amount of political awareness is what we have to look forward to in the future.

I will say though that this whole experience made me feel the dutiful citizen. Actually researching my candidates and then going in for early voting. Plus you get a cool sticker that says "I voted!" 

Guys, even though it's just family and maybe a few friends reading this, do this country a favor and VOTE! I'm serious. Do your civic duty and get out there and vote this year (or I will turn my rampaging rhinoceros herd on you)!

Remember when I was complaining about not knowing what favorite word to photograph? Well, I figured out what one of my favorite words is, and it is in another language: German. Even better.

The process of arriving at the realization that fleißig is one of my favorite words:

I thought it would be a good idea to pick some adjectives that either I feel apply to me, or that I value in other people and go from there. Even though I haven't ever always been the smartest person in school, I have always been hard-working and that is a very important difference. Being hard working goes a lot further than brains in my opinion.
But hard working is two words, or one hyphenated word, which doesn't count... and diligent didn't exactly fit either. So then I thought of the time when I was sitting in church in Vienna knitting, of course, when an older woman came up to me and said "Es ist so fleißig, dass du hier strickst." That is so hard working of you to knit here. She then taught me some different ways to do some stitches, which was awesome.

One of my favorite memories, by the way. :)

So there you have it, a one-worded version of hard working that is in a different language!

Now you're probably asking "what the heck do pointe shoes have to do with fleißig?"

My answer: What about pointe shoes doesn't have to do with that beautiful word? Every aspect of toe work is the definition of fleißig itself.

There are a lot of things I do everyday, which made it difficult to choose exactly what to photograph. I bet you have a lot of things you do everyday as well. So what would you choose to capture and preserve for remembering when you're older? I thought knitting was fitting. Ha. Knitting, fitting. I'm such a poet. :) I knew, though, that I wanted to photograph not just something that I did everyday, but something that I loved doing everyday, which led me to this subject. It's kind of inspiring me to take a photo of my finished projects every once in a while and post them on here. Then I can have a sort of chronicle on my knitting journey, as well as my photographic journey.

Food for thought.

Can I say that it bugs me when blog posts aren't centered. Does it bother anyone else, because it seems to me like that would be the way most people would prefer to have their readings formatted?

I'm pretty sure I have a job now (yay Maddie...!). I start June 1st and will be working at a tourist agency. Pretty sweet. :) Until then, more leisurely relaxing (being lazy) at home!

I don't know about you guys, but I don't think chocolate chip cookies in the oven need much of an explanation. :)

This one was hard, mainly because I hate taking pictures of myself. I would have the worst myspace profile. Truly.

I figured I would play around with lighting, since it's fairly easy to stand in front of a mirror and snap the shutter. This is what I got. I guess it's pretty cool.

So today's assignment is "a favourite word." What the heck. If I actually had a favorite word, that would be great. I could figure out how to represent that in a photograph... but I don't even have a favorite word! I like them all (except juxtaposition... uh, I cringe when I hear that word...)! So I thought, we'll what if I thought of my favorite words in other languages? That could be pretty cool and different. Pinkeln is quite inappropriate to photograph, though...

Needless to say, I am in a quandary. Do I pick a word that just sounds pretty, or a word because of its meaning? We'll I suppose I will go think about it some more.

Hopefully there won't be a picture of... well... pinkeln on the blog next.

Twice a year Northwest Arkansas has the Craft Fairs, which attracts a lot of crafters, as well as visitors, to the area. The crafters bring their wares (I feel so Medieval when I say that. Wares... haha) and sell them at the fair for the weekend. I LOVE the Craft Fairs! I'm pretty sure we went to close to every one when I was growing up. Since we've moved away, though, we haven't had the chance to go in what I'm pretty sure was five years. But last weekend we were actually here to enjoy them!

These birds were in one of the vendors stall, and I figured these would be much easier to photograph than an actual bird (they tend to fly away when you get close... who knew?)

Let's be honest here, what is more fun than a carnival wagon selling funnel cakes (and fried twinkies... and fried snickers... but I think that's just fun for southerners.)? Plus it doesn't hurt to have some awesome signs to up the hilarity:

As the sign in the window says "Don't be caught dead without Jesus." Haha. I love the South.

The assignment for the 3rd of May (I know, I'm a little behind on posting these, but hey, at least I'm taking the photos, right?) was something that I wore that day. My first thought was to photograph my ring, and not just because it's pretty, although that does help... :)

But I thought of this ring because it is special. The last year my family was in India my mom decided to get me something really nice as a souvenir for living there. I had seen this type of jewelry several places and had really wanted some of it, but with the necklaces having a price tag of upwards of $3,000, I decided I would have to scale it down... a LOT. I'm a small person though, so I think that was a good thing.

Anyway, we had seen a couple of rings around, but none of them were exactly right. They were round, instead of a tear drop, the band was a tiny little thing that looked as if it would break with the tiniest mistreatment (and we all know my luck with such delicate things), and so on. So my mom and I together designed a ring that was just right. The result was this ring... sort of...

I had been wearing the ring everyday for over a year (like I said, it was special to me! Of course I was going to wear it everyday!), when, on the way home one day while in Vienna, I looked down and noticed the whole face of the ring was gone. Such a huge bummer! Luckily my mom was still in touch with the jewelers who made it and when they heard what had happened they promised they would replace the ring free of charge if we could just get it back to India.

One must never doubt my mother's connections.

Long story short, a couple of weeks ago I finally got my ring back and it has since resided once again happily on my finger.

So that is the item I wore today.

The picture isn't that great... but this is Arkansas' definition of a skyline. Just trees and more trees. I thought since my picture was of trees yesterday I would push myself a little by doing some night exposures. I did get some that were pretty cool... but I couldn't argue that they were skyline, so thus I used this one. Maybe I'll share the others another time.

So I couldn't decide on just one, so here are the two photos from what I took today. And by the way, if anything I had to take the green in the photos DOWN a notch because it looked almost fake. It is that green here right now, and I'm loving it.