New Month resolution

I have fallen off the face of the earth.

My mother even called to see if I was still alive.

I hate it when I come on here to write, and the only thing I can say for three paragraphs is how boo-hoo sorry I am that I haven't written for so long, and all the things that have happened, and bla bla bla.

Water under the bridge.

My resolution for May: Write one entry EVERY DAY.

Here's a brief catch-up.

I have rented three different macro lenses over the last 3 weeks. I want to win a lottery and buy one of them. But if I won a lottery, I would have to bail out our school district first, because we are up to our chins in a poo-storm thanks to the Lehman Brothers (yeah, us and about a hundred million other people who are feeling the sting of that bankruptcy)

First, I rented the Tamron 90mm macro. It was really nice, but I didn't realize how slow those lenses are in 'auto-focus' mode. I missed a few shots because of it slowly buzzing through its various focal lengths.

The next week, I rented a Nikon 85mm. It was the lens I used to grab those great shots of the vulture on our family nature hike.

This past week, I've rented (and just returned in the last hour) a Nikon 105mm micro lens. This puppy is NICE! It's heavy as lead, and my arms got great work-outs holding that lens up. Just one shot from this lens in this entry: Last night, I took it out one last time, and went to the local lake, looking for frogs and toads. Well, you can hear hundreds, but they are sneaky little ninja toads, because you can't SEE them at all. I nearly gave up, until I followed the sound of someone in the lake, and realized that I was walking towards the water at the same pace as another little creature following the 'call of the wild' too.

Hello little Sierra Tree Frog.

This little one is about an inch and a half from nose to butt. I nearly fell into the pond in my excitement to actually FINALLY see a frog! And that would have been a tragedy, because I think the lens that I was renting would have been nearly a thousand dollars to replace.

I texted Ken from the pond: "I have found and photographed a frog. My work here is done!"

Hah.

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In other news...

One of Kelly's friends showed up at school on Wednesday with short hair. And she wasn't all that happy about it. Her dad had cut her hair for her, and hadn't done a particularly even job. I was talking to the mom, who said "And now I'm trying to figure out how to find some time to get her to a salon to have them fix the cut" and I caught myself saying "Why pay for a fix? I can trim it up for free."

WHAT WAS I THINKING?

Fortunately, this girl is the most easy-going girl on the planet, because she came over for a play-date the next day, and let me mess with her hair, and spent the whole time saying "This is JUST LIKE a make-over!" and "Finally, a professional is fixing my hair... no offense to my dad, of course" (and the funny thing is that her dad is a surgeon, and is probably WAY better at professionally cutting things than I'll ever be)

She loved her flippy-dippy hairdo when it was done (I barely took a half inch off of the bits that needed to be evened-up.) and the next thing, Kelly was saying "Hey! Can you cut mine, too? And we can donate it!"

Um... ok.

So she sat right down, and while they all finished watching Alvin and the Chipmunks (classy high-brow TV, I tell you!), I took twelve inches off her hair, and then cut layers into it to make it all flippy and pouffy, too.

I predict that by the time this month is over, there may be as many as a dozen girls in Kelly's grade sporting new hairdos. Yesterday at school, everyone wanted to 'fluff' her hair. She's having so much fun with the new do.

Today, Kelly's BFF is over, and has been making "Maybe you could cut my hair, too" noises. But I know that her mom has already made an apointment for her with an ACTUAL hair-cutter type parent at the school (who is probably looking at Kelly and Kara's hairdos and rolling her eyes thinking "Those kids LET THAT WOMAN MASSACRE THEIR HAIR!")

Well, enough 'catching up' for one day. I still need to call my mother back and let her know I am still alive. And we've got folks coming over tonight for games, so I should clean bird poop off the floor, and put out some snacks.