A Week in the Life, Day 2

I must tell you how pleased and surprised I was with everyone’s interest in a little peek into my life!  Thanks again, everyone, who stopped by and left a comment – and those of you who popped over from Adventuroo, welcome!  I’m looking forward to peeking in on your lives too.

On to Tuesday!  It is always a busy,  non-stop kind of day for me, and today was no exception.  Not a holiday today, so back to work.  My work days start before the sun, with breakfast while it is still dark outside:

Bags ready to go, the girls head to the bus stop and I to my car when the sun has been up for maybe 15 minutes.

This is the time I pull into the parking lot at work (middle school in a neighboring town), while I listen to a last few comments of the DJ’s on my morning radio show.

Nice thing about being up and off to work so early is that it is still bright and sunny when it is time to go home.

Of course in this profession, school bus traffic is part of the commute.

Upon returning home, I found hubby hard at work on getting that darn pool closed.  Working on it, maybe tomorrow…

And Sarah needs help with her algebra homework (good thing I have a mind for numbers!)

Then it is time to drive dear daughter to dance.

And a swing by the grocery store for some fresh bread to go with dinner

Hubby had the day off (police officer, works nights, rotating day off schedule) and so he got dinner going.  Tonight it was tender, marinated brisket on the grill:

While dinner finished cooking, I made a bit more progress on the baby quilts.

After dinner, it was back to the dance studio – but for me!  Tap class at 7:00 and jazz at 8:00:

Home from dance, get stuff ready for work tomorrow, write this blog post!  I’m pooped!

The Elements of Dance

Tonight is our annual dance recital, and the main reason I’ve been away from the blogs this week.  I did pop around and comment to many of you this morning!  The theme for recital this year is “The Elements of Dance”:

 That is the very cool t-shirt our dance teacher had made up this year.  All of the dances relate in some way to either earth, air, fire or water.  My girls have been working very hard both on their dances (14 dances feature one or both of the girls or me!) and with helping out getting ready for the recital.  Dress rehearsal was last night, and the only time flash photography is allowed.  I took 124 photos last night!  Here are two of my favorites:

This is Meghan in a beautiful layout-prep for her jazz dance, “Rock You Like a Hurricane,” by the Scorpions.

This is Sarah in a wonderful heel-stretch during her jazz dance “Firework,” by Katy Perry.  Sarah worked hard stretching all year to be able to achieve this dance move.

I am MUCH happier with my camera this year than I was last year at this time, BUT I’ve made a new discovery.  I think my next purchase for my camera will have to be a Speedlite flash.  The built-in flash cannot keep up with the speed at which I was hoping to take photos.  Lighting conditions are absolutely terrible at a dress rehearsal and I could not find a combination of shutter speed and aperture that would have allowed me to go without flash AND have decent stop-action, at least with the lenses that I currently own.  I have the feeling that a lens that might allow such a combination is likely out of my price range.

I’m sure I’ll be sharing more photos when I have time to do some more editing.  In the meantime, wish us luck tonight!

What kept me so busy that I…

…forgot to do Scott’s assignment this month, which was due today!

As I was griping last week, it has been rather rainy here recently, but the sun poked out this weekend.  I was going to do Scott’s assignment (really!), but as happens to us all, life got in the way.  Spent Saturday morning running errands with hubby, getting those peppers we wanted, and while we were at the garden center, treated myself to this:

It is a big, beautiful fuschia plant!  I hung it near my hummingbird feeder, in the hopes of attracting more hummingbirds.  My hummingbird has been visibly absent lately – I hope I didn’t offend him or her when I let the feeder go a wee bit too long before cleaning it out.  Hey Mr. Hummingbird! It is clean now, I promise!  And I bought you a fuschia too!  Please come back.

After all the errands, I had to do what I am sure many of us had to do after all that rain – mow the lawn!  Saturday evening I spent working, working, working on a project I’m feeling pretty good about, but unfortunately cannot share with you all just yet.  There is an extremely, ridiculously slim chance the recipient of said project could happen to read this blog post, and I can’t have that!  I’ll fill you in on the mystery in a couple weeks.

Sunday was a practically-all-day-long-annual-affair for this dancing family.  The girls and I had picture day at the dance studio.  On this day, we go to the studio with all our costumes for recital to have professional photos done.  Doesn’t sound like it should be practically-all-day, does it?  It is when one purchases 15 costumes for recital!  Eight for Meghan, five for Sarah and two for me!  Ay-yi-yi!  Of course I took a few shots of my own too.  Here’s a little slide show sampler (please excuse the squinty eyes – not much shade to be found in the parking lot of the studio!):

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What do you think, Scott?  Are you buying my excuse?

Take Some Time Out – Picture Fall, day 12

Although I’m not sure exactly what today’s photo prompt has to do with fall, our instructor wanted us to “take some time out” today, and compose a photo showing something you love to do.  Besides taking photographs, dance is one of my loves.  I never studied it as a child, but I picked it up after watching my older daughter love it so much as a little one.  Now it has become two hours a week that I always put aside for myself, to enjoy being with other adults who enjoy the same activity, and get some great exercise in the process.  These days, my two daughters and I spend so much time at the dance studio among the three of us, our dance teacher joked at our last recital that it was our family show.

Butterfly Fly Away

The butterfly metaphor post.  After the comments I received in the “voting” post, I hope this doesn’t disappoint!

About a week ago, my girls and I received our video of our recital.  It is something we look forward to watching together each year.  We complain about the mistakes we made and how we wish the videographer had done this or that, but mostly we enjoy reliving our big night.  As we watch, we also talk about things we heard from friends and relatives who watched the show about things that happened and favorite parts of the show.  One unexpected reaction that we heard about was one of Sarah’s dances turning out to be the “tearjerker” of the show.  Usually, each year there is at least one dance that is so sweet is causes a few joyful tears to flow.  One year it was a beautiful mother-daughter duet done by dear friends of mine.  I didn’t have a strong reaction to this dance myself, I think, because I was caught up in the hurry, hurry of the night.  As I think back about it now, I understand.

(Sarah pictured center)

Sarah’s class was a group of 13 girls aged 9-12 dancing to Miley Cyrus’s Butterfly Fly Away.  We are not Miley fans in this house, but this song was sweet.  Included in this class is a darling girl who happens to have Down’s Syndrome.  She did well in the class but needed some prompting to be where she was supposed to be.  The girls in the class handled this very well, and their cooperation seemed to add to the charm of the dance.  The lyrics of the song couldn’t help but remind the families of the dancers that it wouldn’t be very long before our butterflies fly away.

(Sarah pictured left)

Sarah is my younger daughter, but as I’ve mentioned before, my older one is in high school.  It won’t be long before college is breathing down our necks.  Sarah “officially” becomes a teenager in a few weeks.  Where is the time going?   As parents, we all hope that we have “done right” by our children, so that when our butterflies do fly away, they will  be able to “take those dreams and make them all come true.”

Hatin’ on my Camera

I probably shouldn’t be saying this because the gods of Olympus will probably make me pay, but last night I was really hating my camera.  Granted, the situation I was trying to photograph was a difficult one: poor lighting and fast-moving subjects.  Then I went over to Scott’s site this morning and saw a beautifully exposed, complicated lighting situation, which made me dislike my camera even more!  Now part of my bad experience last night with my camera, I know, was because I didn’t take the time to go back to my camera manual again and review manual settings and what I have learned about exposure.  Why not you may ask?  The situation that caused my poor  photographing conditions was dress rehearsal for my daughters’ and my dance recital  tonight.  I was more concerned with making sure we had all the stuff we needed for the night ready to go, than thinking about my camera.  Instead of adjusting shutter speed, aperture and ISO myself, I tried two different settings I thought might work: the “sport” setting and “quick shutter.”  Those both sound good, don’t they?  Well, they weren’t.  The lament of point-and-shoot photographers everywhere, shutter-lag, confounded me on so many attempted shots.

Sarah’s back…

Sarah’s back…

Sarah’s back!

Sooooo frustrating!  Luckily, while the shots are so very far from perfect (these are also S.O.O.C. – I’m not in the mood for editing today, recital is tonight!) I managed to get a few that made me happy enough…

I liked the motion of this shot.. (Sarah is on the right in the foreground )

..and of this one.  This is my older daughter, Meghan.

Here she is on pointe; I’m very proud of her abilities in the beautiful style of dance.

A few other various shots from last night:

Another lady there last night was busily using her Canon Rebel to shoot away.  As I heard its shutter sounds behind me, the jealousy grew!  Sigh!

There are some other shots from last night on my Flickr photostream if you care to check them out.  Sorry, no pictures of me in my costumes – such is the problem for the family photographer; we are rarely featured in a photo unless we ask.  Wish us luck tonight!