Coming in late July....

Yes, yes, I realize it's been almost a month since I posted anything.

I managed to be at home for three weeks and not write a thing, and then when I had to go back to work, I've been working 10 hour days and just haven't had the energy to do much of anything when I get home.

So here I am, back again. It was incredible to see everyone this past weekend. We're really glad that we and so many others decided to make the trip.

Pictures from the weekend are up at Flickr (you can see them over there on the right), but I'm going to post a few of my favorite.

Just a quick retrospective of what we were doing three years ago this month:

The wedding, three years ago today...

And our three week honeymoon:

Big Bend area...

That's Mexico behind us in both pictures.

New Mexico...

Bandelier National Monument (north of Santa Fe)

Colorado...

Rocky Mountain National Park

Both of these pictures were taken on Trail Ridge Road...the top one was taken at about 12,000 feet above sea level, and yes, that's snow on the ground behind us. The second was taken somewhere significantly farther down the road, and about 20 degrees warmer.

Wyoming...
Grand Teton National Park

Yellowstone National Park

And finally, South Dakota...
Mount Rushmore

The Badlands

Happy Anniversary, Monica!

Judy took these today. I'll follow up with some pictures from the party this past weekend and pictures of her trick or treating tonight.

Except for the part where you have to drive almost 3 hours there and 3 hours back with a screaming child that won't go to sleep. Other than that, it was a wonderful day!

You can see more of the pictures from our "relaxing" day at the beach here

I found a new online video tool last week through an ed tech blog that I read. Animoto is so easy to use...just upload your pictures, pick the music you want, and it does the rest! It will cut and add effects to your photos to match the music. You can do as many 30 second videos as you want for free, or you can pay $3 for a "full length" video, or pay $30 for an annual pass and create as many full length videos as you want!

Here's my first creation:

There are 15 days left to vote for photos for the newest issue of JPG Magazine. One of the categories is "family" and I submitted this photo for the magazine:

If it gets enough votes, it will appear in the magazine. You can vote for it here. Thanks for your support!

Rachel and I went swimming after Monica has left for class today. On the way home, I gave Rachel a towel to hold onto since it was a bit chilly for her. She got really quiet as we got close to home, and at a stoplight, I turned around to see if she had fallen asleep, and was greeted with this sight. I laughed really hard for a minute, then decided that I had to take a picture.

You know, I've been crazy busy this month. I can't believe it's almost the end of May and I've only made three posts. I'm sure ya'll are getting bored seeing the same old thing every time you visit Laleblog...and my sister has four posts for the month, so I need to step it up.

Speaking of my sister, she's about to become very famous. She's signed up to be a part of Bill Waldman's 365 portraits. She'll do her photo shoot tomorrow (her birthday...Happy Birthday sis), and her picture should be up Tuesday morning.

I also realized recently that it's been quite a while since I took Rachel's picture. Or posted video. I don't have any new video to post (I've shot some, but haven't had the time to pull in down yet) and we went to take pictures of the little one yesterday so we'd have a recent picture for her birthday invitations.

Rachel is learning to walk, and while she started off none too happy about going place on two feet - in fact, she cried every time we tried to get her to do it - she's getting a lot better at it...and she doesn't cry so much anymore.