I love, love, love capturing candid moments. Even more than that I love capturing candid moments of random strangers. It makes me feel like I am Julia Roberts in the movie Closer. I’m just borrowing their lives. Right now, this is one of my favorites.

I was at Huntington Beach and when I sat down I saw this couple cuddling, I couldn’t help but to snap a few shots of them. He seemed so very protective of her and I thought it was absolutely adorable.

So new challenge for the week: go out and take candid pictures of random strangers.

I meant to post this forever ago but I forgot. While going through my pictures today I found some before and afters of Operation monster office makeover and thought I should post these. I had already painted the walls the tan color but the ceiling and trim was yellow. Yes, whoever had this house before me really liked yellow because they painted the entire house floorboards walls and ceiling the exact same color throughout the entire house. It’s nauseating. So the ceiling and trim were painted, the shelves were hung and then I added the desks.

I will warn you that the before shots are gruesome. It looks so scary that when I’m looking at it now I don’t know how I ever got anything done in this room. I’m so much happier now and I actually enjoy sitting in front of the computer sometimes.

Before – The Desk

Before – The Craft Station

Before – Storage

After the shelves were up and the ceiling and trim was painted bright white

Desks are put together and installed

The lighting in here is just gorgeous now, I actually open the shades on a daily basis

After filling up the shelves and putting in the computey

The desks are from Ikea, I get a lot of questions about them. I’ve heard positive and negative things about Ikea, personally, I love their furniture. It’s relatively inexpensive and looks great.

I still need two new matching office chairs, one for each side and some lighting then I would say this room is officially done. I use one side of the room as my office and the other side is for crafting, sewing, scrapbooking or whatever else I feel like making at the time. I always wanted a “craft room” and now I feel like I really have one. This room is so pretty now I feel like I could live in it, which is funny because I kind of do. I spend more time in this room than I do in the rest of my house combined (not counting the pool, of course).

Charla and Carlos were married on 6-19-2010. I put together the video footage and compressed it down to a decent 11 minutes. I was asked to upload this so here it is. Enjoy.

And now a picture for design purposes.

I was at the apple store the other day and I heard one of the Mac guys ask a customer, “On a scale of 1 to 10 how big of a nerd are you?” I pondered this question and of course eavesdropped on the conversation out of pure curiosity. How would I have answered? Well. My current office situation looks a little something like this.

Mac Vs PC

Uber nerd station? I think so. This is not permanent. Heaven forbid that anyone ever need this amount of technology on one desk. I feel as if the room is ready to explode with electricity at any moment, toasting me like a crispy piece of bacon. Soon the Mac will be the only thing occuping this desk while my PC gets shoved away, never to be heard from again. Actually, I’m doing some comparisons before making the switch.

Now. Onto the pretty stuff. New photos. This is the only one I’m going to post here. There are more but I’m scattering them across the interwebs like breadcrumbs. I call this one Ode to the Pirate.

eye patch ftw

Afterwards I couldn’t help but have a little photobooth fun. It’s not everyday that a girl puts on fake eyelashes and sews up her only black pencil skirt for the sake of a picture. I figured that I should get my moneys worth.

Photobooth fun

I’m happy to say that this lost dog story has a happy ending! I picked up this little cutie pie near Boulder Hwy. She was so tiny I just couldn’t leave her there walking down the gutter. She did make it back home three days later.

Some tips when you find a lost dog:

1. Place fliers in the neighborhood where you found the dog. They are pretty inexpensive if you print them out at home and they make a huge difference. It turns out, the owner of my found dog lived across the street from where we picked her up at.
2. Fax the flier to all of the local animal shelters. The animal shelter usually has a lost and found book that they will place the flier.
3. Call your local newspaper and see if they run free ads for found pets. It just so happens that the Las Vegas Review Journal will run an a free ad for four days.
4. Use the internet. Craigslist is a good place to start but there are also dozens of other lost pet databases like Petharbor.com and AnimalFoundation.com. These websites will even email you if there is a close match to your post.
5. Try to keep the pet for as long as you can because most shelters are only obligated to hold the pet for 3 days before putting them down. If you absolutely cannot hold onto the pet any longer try calling local rescues to see if they have any room. Rescues and the SPCA are no-kill shelters but they do not have to take the pet. They will only take pets if they have the room. There are dozens of no-kill shelters and rescues in all major cities so try to find one of those before taking a pet to the city-run shelter.