February 14th, 2021

 Happy Valentine's Day! 

We've never been big into celebrating so Matt is at work and I'm chilling in the house. I'm fine with it, had a pretty rough day yesterday, to the point where after posting this I may start day drinking and building Lego. 

I'm super excited this week because I've FINALLY finished my Christmas presents. Yes I know it's February. I decided this year to make crocheted blankets for my mom, sister and brother. I literally started this project in July and that clearly wasn't enough time. But with my work schedule being awesome and giving me 7 days off at a time, I sat my ass on the couch and finally finished my brother's blanket. You'd think I would love a project that involves sitting on the couch, watching Netflix and being able to call it getting work done, but after awhile you just get sick of it. Plus I have a really long to do list at this point. I will say, I'm proud of what I accomplished. The blankets turned out better than I ever could have expected and I love them. 

I used a moss stitch pattern from Daisy Farm Crafts. I loved the pattern itself - it was very easy and quick to do. For the yarn I used Caron One Pound yarn. I really like using it, plus the one pound skeins get you pretty far AND it's machine washable, which is a great feature. The other nice thing about this pattern is you can play around with the color schemes really easily, which I took full advantage of. Problem is, I way overestimated how much yarn I would need and now I have crap tons of yarn. Thank God for friends having babies this year! Really the worst part of all this was the border. I'm still a novice and hadn't yet tackled doing a border but with the pattern you really need one to hide where the colors switch over. I finally just did a row of shells around the edge and it came out well! It's so funny seeing the size differences now between the blankets. I'm really bad at judging size and I'm someone that enjoys oversized blankets so I don't 100% follow how many stitches/rows to do, but of course it ends in a lot of variation.  

My mom's I wanted to make more nautical themed because she lives in Florida. Her colors ended up being navy blue, sky blue, yellow and white. The white was the accent row and I made the border in yellow. 

This one was my sister's. She tends to steer towards blues and grays so she got teal blue, sky blue, white and gray. Gray was her accent color and border color. 

I was kind of nervous about my brother's because he tends to enjoy darker colors as far as clothing, but I don't see his house enough to know much about his decor. So I just went with some darker "manly" colors. He got navy blue, dark gray and teal blue for the main colors with a sage green as the accent and border. I loved how his turned out and fell in love with the sage green in the process. 

All in all, this was a very satisfying project to take on. It felt good to actually make my presents this year and I do enjoy crocheting. With that said, I'm taking a break for now for the puppy.

Speaking of the puppy! We got to meet them last weekend! Honestly, if my version of heaven is puppies crawling all over me, I would be so content. They were 5 weeks old and so incredibly adorable. Once the excitement of a new person wore off they all crawled between my legs and fell asleep. It was magical. And if I had an endless income I'd be taking all of them. We're still not exactly sure which one we're getting though which is making me so antsy. But whichever one we get, it will be so worth it. They're literally perfect and I'm already in love. Those shark teeth though! I forgot how sharp they are! Phew! We spent the rest of the day getting toys and supplies at the pet store. Sometimes it's so awesome to just go to the pet store and peruse the aisles for cool pet stuff. Usually when I go it's with a specific purpose in mind so the occasional browsing trips are fun. I know, I'm weird. Seems like we're pretty close to having everything we need though. Don't get me wrong, I'm still nervous as hell, but we're excited and I think Mara and Lilo will like having another friend in the house.....at least I hope they do. Until then, I'm going to keep counting down the days until March 4th!

We've finally started seeing some sun around here lately and it has been so nice.......except for the part where now it's literally too cold to even exist outside. I just can't win haha. We've had some really gorgeous sunsets - some of which I was lucky enough to get outside to capture, but the others I just couldn't bring myself to go out there. We obviously haven't been going far, just to Black Creek Park. Have even taken Mara on a few adventures. The last time we went to the park she lost her bananas in the car. As soon as we turned in she started crying and howling and carrying on like a basket case. I'm guessing by the fact that she then started dragging us around everywhere means she was excited. 

I'm trying to toy around a little bit with trying to get good sunset photos. I feel like the color of the sky could be a little more crisp and vivid, but I need to work on this a little bit more. And unfortunately I need it to be a little bit warmer so I can tolerate being out there to learn these skills. Regardless, I've started messing around with the aperture and shutter speed to try and allow in as much light as possible and it seems to be improving. I've also tried adjusting the ambient light setting. This is definitely a project I'm going to be revisiting more now that I don't have a bunch of crocheting to do. I really want to go up to the lake and some of the other parks just to look at the landscapes, but again, cold. Anyway, here's some photos from my recent adventures. 

It's nights like these that have taught me it's just as important to look behind you because honestly the view from the east on this night was more beautiful than the sunset itself. This one was kind of tough just because it was colorful but not super colorful once the clouds floated away. Still worth the trip though.

These pictures are pretty much the perfect example of the issues I've been having. If I leave my exposure setting alone, the colors of the sky get washed out. If I make my exposure a little darker, I can get those colors, but it darkens the whole picture. So this is definitely what I need to work on.

This sunset was really pretty. Had a lot more clouds to help add some color in there. And I actually think I did decently well! I wish the photos with the sun peeking between the trees was just a little more crisp but overall can't complain about this trip. I really do love photographing in the snow. It really adds some beauty in there. 

Well this one ended up being longer than anticipated, but it had been awhile and we've done a lot in the past couple weeks so it was overdue. NOW it's time to day drink and build Lego.