Some of my first photos with my new camera. Thought I would share:

So far I am madly in love. I mean seriously, who needs marriage?

"Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better."
Andre Gide

Man! You would think that since it's Summer and all that I would post on here more often.

Wrong.

The problem is my computer and all my photos are ALLTHEWAY downstairs in the basement, and even though that is where I now sleep, I never go down there because it's so lonely! So I never update my blog. Long story short.

Anyway,

On my birthday I went to work and got to run nifty errands, like depositing lots of money in my boss bank account, mailing things, and dropping packages off.... and did I mention I got to driver her BMW. Nifty? Nifty.

One of my bosses (the husband and wife own the company) brought me flowers. :) After work I went shopping with my mom and McKenna and got some new work pants/ sexy pants. Ha. Not really, just cute work pants.

I then had my traditional birthday dinner at Johnny Carino's where I opened gifts. I got:

- A cool ring from Megan that she found in Spain. It's black and has etchings of birds and plants and such. She also gave me a nifty screwdriver with exchangeable heads. I just want to go unscrew all the screws in everything. I love taking stuff apart, so thanks Megan! Right now I really want to take my iPhone apart and put a new screen on it.... I'm thinking this screwdriver is a sign from Heavenly Father. Or Megan just being really nice and helping me be prepared for every situation. Eh... who knows...

- A moonshine jug (it just says moonshine on it, unfortunately. Just kidding! I'm just kidding! Choose the right when a choice is placed before you...... ) from McKenna along with a wicked awesome mug that has a TARDIS on it that switches from one side of the mug to the other depending on the temperature of the water in it, and a bag of Trolli gummy worms. She sure does know the way to my heart. Alcohol, Sci-Fi nerdism, and a sugar overload. McKenna, I love you.

- A knitting needle set from my Aunt Stacy. Is it weird that when I say knitting needle I always want to spell it like so: knitting kneedle?

- Some cool knitting books and clothes from my grandma (and some money! Yes!)

And most importantly (sorry everyone else! You're gifts were awesome)

A NIKON D7000. I don't think I typed that large enough. Let's try again.

!!!!!!!!!A NIKON D7000!!!!!!!!!

 So now feeling completely fulfilled and happy, the lot of us jaunted over to the movie theater and saw Brave. Because, you know, it came out on my birthday. :)

I hate when I go through these phases of not posting anything on here. I do love you, my little blog! I wish I was a good enough blogger to post on here everyday, but I'm not. I will freely admit that.

Work has been going well. It's getting better as I get the hang of things. I think in the beginning I was mostly just dissapointed with myself because I wasn't doing everything perfectly and I would have to go back and fix something, or redo it a few times before they were happy. But I'm getting better and not making so many mistakes.

That makes the perfectionist in me smile.

In other news, my trusty D60 has finally met its end. Tear. My little camera was worked until the day it died, the  poor thing. Last week my mom wanted to get some pictures of all the kids together for Father's Day. Thinking my wonderful D60 was in working conditions we brought it along (and dumbly brought only the D60). While my mom directed everyone on where to sit, I began to set up the camera and get everything ready so that all my mom had to do was look in the viewfinder and click the shutter release button. Before I could take more than three pictures, the dreaded "Error. Press Shutter Release Button Again" Screen came on.

Well... dang it.

If you have a Nikon DSLR and this happens to you, start crying and be ready to cough up a lot of money to get it fixed. Just a heads up.

I wasn't really surprised, I'll admit. But I was dissapointed. In order to get the problem fixed, I would have to put more into the camera than it was actually worth. And take away from what I was hoping to spend on a new lens. No thank you. As is recommended by most professional photographers, I wanted to invest in a few quality pieces of glass before I upgraded my body. Right now I only have a kit lens and a portrait lens (50mm). I LOVE LOVE LOVE my portrait lens, but I don't take just portraits, and as I was explaining to my mom, putting a Nikon D60 kit lens (18-55mm) on a super nice new camera (lets say a Nikon D7000 (: ), would be like buying a Mercedes Benz with cloth seats. You just don't do that (sorry all you cloth-seat Mercedes-Benz drivers. But really? You would do that?).

Let's just say this forced my hand into quite a fortuitous situation, in that I bought myself a new camera! And since I found it for a good price (thank you dad for your 10% employee discount at walmart!), I also got a pretty good lens to go with it.

So long story short, I have a new camera! Huzzah!

Since I ordered it on Saturday night I have been tracking the order online religiously... as in probably every two hours... to the point that I knew it would arrive at my house today. I patiently made it all the way through work knowing that I would get it today. My new camera. :) I arrive home and the first place I go is the front door. No package. Lamesauce. Dad's sitting in his office, so I ask him. He informs me that the package did arrive. "WHERE IS IT?!?!?!?!" I'm thinking. Really I just asked "Where is it?"

"Ask mom."

Running over to my parent's room where mother is taking a nap. (It was worth waking the sleeping mother up and risk facing her... irritation.)

"You can't have it."

"What? WHY?!"

"It's not your birthday yet!"

So that is the story of why I have to wait until Friday to get my new camera. Sadness.

But I have a new camera. :) And I'm assuming its beautiful.

I don't know if you are aware of why my blog is called "Dancing Lessons from God", so I thought this would be a good post to explain. When I first started blogging (about four years ago now), I didn't want to do it on my own, mostly because I knew I didn't have much besides photographs that I had taken to offer and I'm not one of many words. So I enlisted the help of my sister, who at one point in her life was going to be an author and still enjoys writing. Her major was Public Relations, so if she didn't know what the public wanted, no one would. 

I'm getting distracted. When I asked her to help out with the blog (more like "we should do a blog together Megan! That way people will actually read it because you're contributing.") I asked if she had any suggestions for what it should be called. She told me about one of her favorite quotes (now one of mine) by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

I'm thinking you're probably with me now. It's the quote right below the picture of Chloe jumping on the beach, as seen above. So there you go, that's where that came from. That was probably way too long of an explanation...

Anyway, I thought it was a good preface for this post, because that is exactly what are trip two weeks ago to London was. Unexpected. Completely out of the blue, yet entirely awesome. And a lot of fun.

And by unexpected, I mean we found out on Friday we could go, and were at the airport Sunday morning on our way there.

Here are just a few highlights from the trip before my poor camera broke (and let's all be happy its fixed, if for no other reason than you don't have to listen to me whine about not having a camera anymore (: ):

London Bridge

The British Museum

If this needs a caption... suffice it to say you are dead to me.

My beautiful mother. :)

Changing of the guards at Buckingham Palace.

Favorite pic of the trip.

The London Eye

So I may or may not have been a little depressed about my camera breaking, which is why there were no posts for a while. But its fixed now, hence the posting!

We have been back from London for about a week and a half now. We got back Wednesday, McKenna and Robb left on Trek on Thursday, and Friday I started my job. So I now work Monday through Friday and most importantly, I am making money! Huzzah! So far I'm enjoying the work, and since they keep me busy pretty much the whole time I'm in the office, it goes by fairly quickly.

Anyway, here's a little picture of Kenn. Fashionable as always. :)

I thought I would update, as my last post leaves everyone with the impression that my camera is still broken. My dad and I have fixed it. Huzzah! I will be back out photographing the world again very soon I think. :)