Freezing Weather in Texas?

I thought it was supposed to be warm here! What's with this 1/2 an inch of ice on my car and icicles dangling from everywhere. Everything closed and everyone was afraid to venture out of their house for fear of slipping and breaking something. I walked to the office and only slipped twice. It wasn't that bad, but the world completely stopped!

ENGAGE! Chelsea and Ray!

ENGAGE: Amanda and Joe!

TWO RINGS BIND THEM: Britney and David at the Double D Ranch!

Britney and David had their wedding on a Zebra Ranch in Columbus, Texas. Oddly I didn't see any zebras at all the whole time I was out there. Everything is bigger in Texas and the house on the property was not different. It had just barely been finished. The railing these kids are leaning on was just secured by a few nails rather than the bolts that would normally hold it. That was a little freaky to find out. HA!

The guys came charging in on an old fire engine. Britney was escorted down the isle by her brother and David ended up in the pool, not once but three times. It was a fun wedding. I suppose any wedding that ends in a pool is a fun wedding. Wouldn't you think so?

ENGAGE: Farah and Spence!

Britney!

Britney had her bridals done in a very hot October, but somehow found a way to look cool and collected. I'll have to take lessons from her on how to achieve this because I was covered in sweat! Her bridals are some of my favorite from 2006!



I've been freed to try some new lighting techniques lately and have been enjoying the outcome tremendously. I don't like to get stuck in a rut for too long. I start feeling kind of odd. Always strive to be better!

TWO RINGS BIND THEM: Sara and Damion at the Barr Mansion!

Friday The 13th was their day of choice and I guess the Barr Mansion wasn't booked. these two were very fun and had an interesting career: Video game designers. Sara said, 'Yeah, programmers can make more money working at Microsoft making spreadsheets, but they prefer to work for us and blow $*#^& up.' I'm not really much of a gamer so I laughed and made some comment that showcased my lack of knowledge.

I figured the wedding was going to be all Goth or something dark to go along with the date, but it was pretty normal with fabulous flowers, dinner and cake all provided by the Barr Mansion. They had this raisin bread there that I just found irresistable and I wandered around shooting chewing that fabulous baked good until the last of it was gone.

32,000 flushes

Typically I enjoy paying my bills. Perhaps I'm somewhat of an oddity, but I find it very therapeutic to send all of my money away to happy people in other states that provide electricity, water and gas to my house as well as the occasional insurance bill to continue driving my cars. I know what it's going to cost and I always know what the bills are going to be. Sometimes I'm a little bit surprised but for most part not. I set up our budget once again when we returned to Texas in September.

My brother had left a note on our master bath toilet saying that the bob had broken and he had shut it off a few days earlier. I was happy to find it shut off and proceeded to buy the parts that I needed to fix the problem. I learned a valuable lesson that day. NEVER buy anything that is not factory sealed from Home Depot. I think they take customer returns, and put them back on the shelf with out even looking at the contents. I bought the first part and found bits missing, got rather upset because I couldn't remember which of the 500 Home Depots I bought it at and bought another one with out taking the other back. I got it all fixed and was quite happy with out acconplishments for the day. At last I could have a toilet to myself once again. Happy days.

Well, since then we took over one of the kids bedrooms as an office while waiting to get a real office, rebuilt the website after hackers took down our server and spent an arm and a leg on having a part fixed on my air conditioning. All in a days work for the self employed home owner. Then it happened. I got the mail with zeal like I always do. There was a bunch of crap that went into the recycling pile, and a couple of bills. One was a bogus bill from an internet company trying to tell me I owe them money for advertising my website when they have never done anything for me and are just hoping that I'm stupid enough to send them money and the other was the water bill. Yes, the water bill. Sure, to people who have been living in their house, taking showers, washing clothes and watering their lawn it wasn't that much money. But I had only been living in the house for two of the weeks that they were billing me for and it seemed a little high for that. I did the math and figured out that we had used about 5-6 times as much water as usual in our two weeks back. Kind of odd. It was about 45,000 gallons more then we usually use. It turned out that that had run though the toilet after the bob broke before my brother shut the water off. On our toilets thats about 32,000 flushes. It's kind of a bargain if you think that it only cost about $80 extra.

ENGAGE: Britney and David!

They called me up and said, 'we want you to shoot our wedding and engagement,' 5 days before I was going to leave for 3 months to shoot weddings on the West Coast. So I rounded up some time and went to work on a pretty humid June day. This was my first real experience shooting in humidity. Some how people from Texas have figured out how to not sweat. It's crazy. These two where masters of it.