Here we go again...

So Tuesday after a long day of standardized testing at school, the hubs and I decided to go to a nearby town for dinner.  As we were waiting at the stoplight, we suddenly heard a BAM! and the car shook.  I looked at my husband and said, "Are you @*!&%*$! kidding me??!"(mostly because this would be the 2nd time I had been rear-ended in this same car!) and then looked behind and saw an older Chevy Blazer halfway wedged into the back end of my car and the ginormous cattle trailer in the lane next to us.

The husband was driving so he got out of the car as did the other people.  The driver of the other car ran off to talk to someone else in traffic but his wife started apologizing and said their brakes went out.   I took down their license plate number before we moved off to the side of the road, just in case.

We pulled over and I called the cops.  While I was on the phone, my husband comes back from talking to the people and says they wanted to know if we would follow them to a gas station because they were about out of gas.  Seriously?!  You hit my car and want me to run errands with you?!  No.  We did not go to the gas station.

The cops get there and do their thing and we find out that the people who hit us have no insurance. Winning!  So, that just makes me even madder than I already am.  They keep apologizing, but that was just making me even more pissed because they are also telling us they knew their brakes were bad and my husband said they had taped their brake lines with electrical tape, trying to keep the fluid in!  If we weren't there for them to run into, they could have ended up in the intersection getting killed or killing someone else!  They had NO business driving a car without insurance, let alone one they knew the brakes didn't work on!

Anyway, the police said they would be taking one of them to jail, so that made me feel slightly better.  My insurance rocks and I already have my car in the shop and a rental car!  So by April 19th I should have my car back.  Why is that taking so long? Well...they have to replace the bumper and rear tail light, and if they can't fix the side panel, they will have to replace that too. If the paint doesn't match well, I will have one patchwork looking car! Thanks, stupid morons. 

A man and his dog

November

Yesterday was Thanksgiving.  We hosted the dinner and I cooked a turkey by myself!  Thankfully I had some help from Facebook when I couldn't locate the giblet bag.  We had kind of smelled some plastic and my husband was trying to blame it on my oven bag.  No, no.  It would be the giblet bag that was still in the turkey.  Luckily the bird had only been in the oven for 20 minutes and we were able to fish out the bag before a total catastrophe occurred.

We had a small gathering.  My husband's aunt and one of her daughters attended, along with her SIL and grandson.  Her son's daughter also attended.  And the husband's uncle too.  We had a ton of food and it turned out ok.  Thankfully I bought a small turkey, so I don't have much for leftovers.

In other news...I got to help shoot a wedding earlier this month and that was my first real test of shooting in manual mode.  My pictures came out better than I expected and everyone was pleased.  That's a good feeling! 

Last weekend I got to enjoy the perks of working with photographers and was able to get my pictures taken for our Christmas card this year.  I edited the pics and designed my own Christmas card, so I am pretty excited to send them out this year.  Here is just one of the pics from the shoot...I may share the Christmas one later.  I hope you all had a nice Thanksgiving!

Busy much?

Hmmm, I haven't posted anything since mid-August...what happened?  I'll tell you what happened.  School started and photography business picked up and I have been busy, busy, busy!  Here's a quick rundown of what's been happening the past couple months:

*We have a new superintendent and with that comes a lot of new "stuff" we have to do.  It's been quite a change and quite an adjustment.

*I have been helping the photographers with sessions, diva parties, and editing photos.  Lots of this is after working at school all day, so I'm not getting much couch potato time!

*My neighbor with the THREE dead pine trees at the back of our property and his is being a turd after one of his trees fell and took out my fence and broke windows in my garage.  I guess technically he now has two dead trees, but I might make sure he gets every piece of the one on my fence back.

*My washing machine went out and I got to buy a new one.  The new one plays music when it finishes a cycle!

That's my life in a nutshell!

Photoshop!

Ok, so I will soon be helping a local photography studio with some of their editing.  This is the same studio that I help with the Diva birthday parties, and just recently have helped with lighting some location photo shoots.  So I have been studying up on Photoshop, got a mini-lesson from one of the photographers on how to use it, and have been reading tutorials online and playing around some more.  I thought I would share some of my pics I have edited with you!  Now these are edited a bit more than you would someone's portrait, but I am having fun playing. :) Just a reminder that if you click on the actual picture, it will blow it up larger for you to see.

A Letter to Lowes

Dear Lowes,

I am very disappointed with Lowes.  I needed to replace my cooktop, and since I live 40 miles away from a Lowes store I started browsing Lowes and other websites. I found Lowes had the best price, and found the model I wanted, but according to the website my store didn't carry it and I would have to order it.  So I did.  I waited 3 weeks and then called to check the status of the order.  Previously I had checked and was told I would be called by an associate as soon as it arrived.  Yes, the phone number they had on file was correct.  Well, I never got a call, so when I called today they said that it had been ready for pickup for a while.  This was mildly irritating because being without a cooktop for 3 weeks is tricky. So tonight my husband and I arrived at Lowes to pick up the cooktop and when they brought it we noticed the styrofoam packing block was busted. (We have driven the 40 miles back home just to open boxes of broken stuff before, so we try to always check before we leave now.) So we lifted that up and the cooktop we waited 3 weeks for was dented.  So the customer service guy thinks about what to do for a minute and then informs us that they actually carry that model in the store!  So I waited 3 weeks for a dented cooktop that I ordered only because the Lowes website said it wasn't carried in the store, and that no one was apparently going to call and let me know it had arrived anyway.  I guess next time I need something I will pay more and go to Home Depot.

Sincerely,

Heather

(I did actually send this to Lowes already...jerks!  And we did get a non-dented cooktop that the store had in stock. Grrr)

Random Ireland Observations

• The people are super-duper nice.  Seriously.
• There are not many fat Irish people.  I think part of this is because they don't drink soda like we do.  When I did order a Coke, it always came in a small size (with no ice) and there were no free refills.  I think the other part is because a lot of them walk or ride bicycles everywhere.
• The Irish don't use ice!  Our hotel room was lacking an ice bucket.  When we got water with our meals, there were no cups full of ice.  However, the beer was chilled!
• Using an ATM was an extremely easy and effective way to manage money while we were there.  Credit cards worked fine too.  Also, Post Offices would exchange currency.
• The paid parking system confused the tar out of us.  Parking garages had you pay the fee at a kiosk before you got back in your car to leave.  Pay-and-display parking was scratch-off ticket looking things for sale at the Post Office and maybe elsewhere in Limerick.  In Ennis there was a machine on the sidewalk that printed out a ticket for you to put in your car.  It was all just very strange because we didn't know how it all worked the first few days. 
• Bono sings about "where the streets have no name", and many of the streets in fact had no name.  Thankful for the GPS, even though I cursed at it 80% of the time.
• The roads are crazy narrow and curvy, with stone walls overgrown with shrubs that will scrape the side of your car constantly if you stay on your "side".
• The people are really nice!
• The countryside was so breathtakingly beautiful...yet stinky.  Sheep don't smell great.