May Flowers

Well it was a great weekend here at the Pruitt house! Hope you all had a fabulous weekend as well. On Friday night we went to a party with Jake's classmates and as always had a blast. They are a very entertaining bunch! Yesterday Jake and I were super productive with housework and homework so we treated ourselves to a date night out to go see Iron Man 2... great movie! And today we went to a great service at church and then spent most of the day relaxing and finishing up some work. Nothing too special about our weekend but sometimes that's just what we need. But hey, we've got big plans for next weekend (Memorial Day)! More details on that later...

For now I thought I'd show you some of the lovely flower decor that has entered our house this month. First let me say that I LOVE flowers... I mean, who doesn't right? They just make everything pretty and happy and fresh. Since we will probably be moving at the end of the summer, I didn't want to invest a lot of time and money into planting a garden out front; instead I decided to just do pots this year. I won't show you all of them but here are my favorites. The first picture below is of my front porch pots. The one on the left is the pot of flowers I got with Allison a few weekends ago and the pretty little one on the right was a "get well" present from Ann from the day I got my braces on. I can't wait to see these beautiful flowers bloom and grow! The second picture is of my pretty new wreath for the front door and the third picture is of my begonias on the back porch, which are growing so fast that I think I'm going to need a bigger pot for them! I just can't wait until we have a little bit more permanent home so I can plant a real garden - Martha Stewart style :)

Photoshop Assignment 1

As you know I have started design school as of May 1st. The first two weeks of school were actually just an orientation to the program so last week was my first actual class and assignment. With the certificate program I am in, I basically start a new course every six weeks and turn in one project a week. I plan to document a lot of the work I do in my program on this blog so I can look back and see how my skills have grown over time. 

My first six-week course is Photoshop and I was really happy to start out with this because I already have a pretty basic understanding of it (so hopefully this will help me sort of ease into the challenge and stress of school). Our first project was pretty simple but I had a lot of fun doing it and definitely learned some new tricks and tips along the way. For this assignment, we had to take the yellow taxi cab you see below and alter it into a basic ad for an unknown client who wanted to see the cab in multiple colors. The details of the assignment were pretty specific and did not leave much room for creativity but I still tried to add in extra touches where I deemed appropriate. For the first part of the assignment, we practiced using different selection techniques to take the taxi cab out of the street scene, black out the windows and ads, and clean up any rough details (such as making both tires rotated the same way). Then we had to take the selection further by duplicating it and recoloring it several times. The final step was to place the cars in a "colorful cabs" layout with a basic gradient background.

Anyways, like I said, pretty basic but still it was lots of fun and I have to say that it's so amazing to be in a school program that has no tests or papers, just hands-on projects. The instructor seemed to like that I did a couple things in the assignment that were not required (such as adding the text, flipping the orientation of some of the cabs, adding sample text to the ad boxes, etc.) so I think that means its safe for me to go outside the bounds of the instructions and go farther with my creativity next time. This weekend I will be working on my next assignment which focuses on image retouching. I'm really excited to learn more about that because its something I can never quite figure out how to do right. Hopefully after this next lesson I will be a pro and will be fully equipped to erase the braces off myself in Jake's upcoming graduation photos :)

Air Force Thunderbirds

With all the excitement of launching my new site, I never got a chance to tell you all about the super fun weekend I had! Last Saturday and Sunday our base hosted an air show featuring the amazing Air Force Thunderbirds and on Friday night, we actually got to go to a party at the Club on base to welcome the Thunderbirds! It was really cool to meet the people who pilot the jets and do all those crazy flying maneuvers. On Saturday, Jake and I spent the whole day at the air show and had a blast! Tons of planes flew in (including Jake's top two choices for his assignment) and we got to walk around and check them out. I love looking at planes and always end up asking Jake a million questions about each of them. Planes just really fascinate me and it still blows my mind that Jake gets to fly one every single day. Maybe if we win the lottery one day I will take some flying lessons :) Later that afternoon, the Thunderbirds took to the sky and I stood there in awe watching them. There's something so inspiring and patriotic about seeing them fly. And it was really cool on Sunday watching them fly again right over our backyard.

Below are some pictures from the air show. I'm trying out a new javascript photo gallery for my blog posts. To see what I mean, click on one of the pictures below... Cool right?

Lindsay + Braces

Welllll here's the new me! Braceface. But can I just say that I am so thankful to have gotten the porcelin kind? I mean I still have metal ones on my bottom teeth but having the top be almost clear makes a big difference. But don't be fooled by my smiles in the photos below... yesterday was a really tough day for me. It's amazing how getting braces on can give you a full blow to your self esteem just about instantly. It's not so much the look of them that bothers me but more so how I talk with them on. I just don't feel like me. They also had to put spacers on the back of my front teeth so that my top teeth don't sit on my bottom brackets and those are very strange; in fact, my back teeth don't even touch now, making it very hard to chew anything. And unfortunately the spacers have also given me a lisp although the dentist says that will go away once I get used to talking (hopefully soon!). My boss asked me if I wanted her to answer the phones at work today but I think forcing me to talk will be the best way to get used to having these things on my teeth. Especially when I am saying "QueSt Group, thiS iS LindSay"... notice how many times my lovely new lisp comes into play when saying that greeting! Oh yeah I'll get these things figured out in no time.

What's funny is that I went home and pulled out some pictures from when I was 14 and had braces and the similarity to how I look now (in the picture below) is uncanny. Seriously, I am 14 again... except for the fact that now I don't have acne and my clothes are definitely cuter. I know this will all be worth it in the long run but now it's not fun. I do have to say though that I have the best support system ever! Before even going into my appointment, everyone on facebook gave me lots of love and encouragement. If you were one of those people, thank you so much. It may seem silly but it really, really helped. And then when I got home yesterday, Allison brought me over a macaroni casserole, hot out of the oven, knowing that I wouldn't want to cook and would only want to eat something soft. It was sooo yummy and really made my day that she was so thoughtful. Thanks Allison! Then when Jake got home he was really great too. He assured me I was still beautiful and that they weren't actually so bad, and then for the rest of the night he just acted like nothing was different about me and we didn't talk about them anymore... I'm not sure how he knew but that was just what I needed him to do. And I came to the conclusion that if he doesn't think its a big deal, why should I? Now if I can just learn to talk right, I will be just fine. Thanks for listening to my braces vent... I'm sure there will be many more to come over the next year.

A Mississippi Weekend

Wow, sorry I went all MIA on my blog this weekend! I was surprisingly busy even though Jake was away. On Friday after work, I headed over to assignment night on base and then met up with Ann for a girls night. There was this "Ladies Night" thing on base so we went over to check it out and got some wonderful free pedicures... yes! Afterward we headed to town to grab some Mexican food at our favorite place and then went back to my house to watch a chick flick. If you remember, the book we read for our Book Club in March was My Sisters Keeper... well, we had never seen the movie so we wanted to watch it and see how similar it was to the book. I have to say that we were shocked at how the ending is completely different! Its funny how they will change an ending to make it more pleasing to a movie audience.

Yesterday, I actually didn't have any plans at all but then all this fun stuff kind of fell into place and it turned out to be an awesome day! I was lazy until about noon (love it!) and then Allison and I decided to walk the dogs to the park for some playtime. It was such a nice day out and she mentioned she was going to get some flowers and plants at the Caledonia nursery. I was thrilled when she asked me to come along because I've been meaning to get some flowers for the porch for a while now. Here's a picture of us on our way back, so happy about all the beautiful flowers we found. Mission accomplished!

Then we heard through the grapevine that there was this festival going on downtown in Columbus. Being that we had nothing better to do and did not really want to sit around the house by ourselves for the afternoon, we decided to go check it out! Hmmm it was definitely interesting! Mississippi is just a totally different world, but we really had fun just walking around and taking random pictures (and laughing at just about everything!).... Good times :)

Crawfish everywhere... yuck...

Allison with the random boxes of junk for sale... You call this a festival Columbus?

On the porch of Tennessee Williams' first house! Very cool!

Walking through the Columbus riverwalk...

While we were walking around the festival we both started to get hungry and so even though it was only like 4:30 we decided to go get some dinner. One of my favorite restaurants, Harveys, is downtown so we were able to just walk over and eat. I ordered the messiest, yummiest pasta with peppers and onions and diced veggies... mmmm something I will NOT be able to eat easily once the braces go on (which oh yeah, that's tomorrow... ugh). But yesterday was really fun and we had a good time exploring the crazy little southern town that we live in.

Now about Jake's weekend. As I mentioned, he was on his T-1 cross-country trip this weekend. I was really excited for him to get to go because of what happened with his T-6 cross-country trip. He was gone Friday to Sunday and went to Charleston, Myrtle Beach, Tampa, and a few other amazing places. He basically flew all day, every day this weekend and when he got home this afternoon he was exhausted! But no time to relax for Jake tonight... he has a test tomorrow and another flight on Tuesday so he's been studying basically since he got home. Poor guy :( I'm glad he had a fun time though this weekend, getting out of Columbus for a few days, flying with friends, and seeing new places. It's really tough work but its amazing to see how much he truly loves his job!

Anyways, another new week starts tomorrow and its sure to be a challenging one for me. Please pray for me that tomorrow goes well as I go to the orthodontic appointment I've been dreading. Having braces again will definitely be something to get used to... time to get going though and get it over with! On a different note, I have 4 new blog designs I've been meaning to post for you and will try to do that tomorrow. Hope everyone had a wonderful weekend!