last weekend was out one year anniversary. we celebrated with dinner at the restaurant that catered our wedding, and sunday kerri had a surprise for me.

i had no idea what it was. i knew we were going up to estes park, and that we had to get up there early, which meant we had to get up REALLY early. out the door before 6 with the camera gear, swing by starbucks for the drive, and on the road. we get to estes around 8, and park at  the visitor center, where the surprise is revealed.  a morning with landscape photographer and guide james frank.

it was an amazing time. we went in to rocky mountain national park, starting off at the lake where i proposed to kerri. we talked photography, landscape composition, where to shoot, when to shoot. of course, i left the house without any polarizers, which is requirement #3 in the landscape photography world, but made the most of it and fortunately james shoots nikon so i borrowed one of his lenses since we didn’t have any matching filter sizes.

here are a few shots we got out of the trip.

another unbelievably thoughtful gift. i’m not quite sure how she keeps outdoing herself, but she does!

there is a street that i pass every day that i’ve wanted to take countless pictures of. (of which i wanted to take countless pictures?) it’s got a cool little S-curve to it, and every time the road has a cool shimmer to it or the sky at the top of the hill looks dark and ominous, i drive by and think “i should stop and take a picture”, but i never do.

until this week! i started taking the old d70 with me now to work and just generally try to keep it around. of course, i always have the iphone, and i generally have the olympus, too, but i wanted to have the d-slr with a few lens options incase a bug bit me and i decided to get creative.

in any case, i was on my way home the other day and finally stopped. we had been getting a little bit of rain over the past few days, so the road was a little bit shiny and wet, and the sky had some clouds, and this is what came out.

i’m in the process of moving some of my photography related posts over to a new site dedicated to that side of my life at http://www.davidmonnerat.com. the site is a work in progress at this point, but i have goals!

there is a new post on the blog over there with some new pictures of kerri, too:

http://www.davidmonnerat.com/blog/2009/09/16/kerri-34-weeks/

took a few maternity shots last night, just messing around with some subtle lighting.

we picked up the baby furniture yesterday…

holy crap!

kerri and i got up early saturday morning and we took some shots in a field of black-eyed susan’s that i’ve been eyeballing for a few weeks. glad we got out there before they wilted, and glad kerri is a good sport!

you can see the set in the maternity shos here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/kettlepot/sets/72157620699564205/.

in two hours, i will be at the airport picking up my wife who was gone way too long. eight days would have been unbearable except for not really having a break since she left.

days 7 and 8 were all about finishing up everything. saturday was spent mostly doing the baseboards in the hallway, the stairs, and in the two rooms. i chickened out and decided to not do the master bedroom. the stairs wound up being a lot of work because we had the carpet ripped up and replaced with hardwood, so it required some hole pluggin’, some sandin’, and a couple of coats of paint. while not a professional job by any means, it does look way better than it did. i also wound up repainting the corner of the baby’s room. i was going to try to sponge from light to dark, since we wanted the corner to be part of a night scene. but the sponging just didn’t look right, so i repainted over everything and tried something different. hopefully it’ll get the thumbs up!

today was my last day to get everything done. unfortunately, last night i opened a can of ceiling paint and tried to touch up the ceiling on the baby’s room. this morning, it was pretty apparent that it was not the same ceiling paint that was actually on the ceiling. so in addition to another coat on the baseboards, hanging the shelves in the den, and finishing all the painting in the baby’s room, i wound up painting the ceiling, as well. (it turns out i missed a small spot, too, so i’ll have to do the touch up this week).  the shelves look nice, but i’ll need some extra screws to secure the boards. they have a slight warp to them, but between a few screws and the weight of the books, i think we’ll be fine.

there was a lot of cleanup to do. i basically threw everything away, and there was a lot of paper, tape, brushes, and empty paint cans to toss out. oh, and clothes:

here are some final shots:

the plan for tonight was to work on the corner of the baby’s room, and to start doing some of the trim.

and thats when it all went horribly, horribly wrong…

i did my due dilligence, and taped off the top of the baseboards and slid some paper between the bottom of the baseboard and the carpet. i popped the top off the “ultra white” paint and went at it. a few minutes in, i thought “huh, i wonder if the ultra white has a bit of a blue tint to it to make it look more white…you know, like how the camera adds blue to cool a warm light.” about halfway around the room, i looked back to where i started, and figured something was wrong. i went back and checked the label on the top of the can (which should have been my first sign…there was a label) and where i looked quickly and saw a bunch of 0’s, there were actually pigment numbers right below. 1/2 of the baseboards were now the same light blue as the baby’s room. awesome.

i went ahead and started taping off the other room and the stairs while the ultra white = blue paint dried. fortunately, that gave me a head start for saturday. i went ahead and did some of the baseboards in the baby’s room, then went back and did a coat or real white paint in the den.

dinner was uneventful, just some soup. oh, and about a bottle of wine. yay!

overall, still a better day than the boys at affliction had…

day 5 was relatively uneventful. dinner was a frozen pizza and 2 drumsticks (the iced cream, not the poultry). another coat of stain on the shelves, and the third and final coat of paint on the baby’s room. i started to paint the dark corner to go along with the theme last night, too. these will probably be the last pictures i put up until it’s done, just so the wife is surprised when she comes home!

day 4 was a realtively easy one. i got home and mowed the lawn, which wasn’t too bad. i do need to de-weed at some point, but that point was not last night! then i did another coat of stain on the shelves, which are starting to look nice but that gel was clumping up in a few spots, so may need to do some cleanup work. then i did another coat of paint on the walls of the baby’s room. the second coat really helped, it looks nice. i’ll still do a third coat, though, just to be sure its all covered, and probably start the dark blue segment, as well.

dinner: so i learned nothing from day 3, and had the same dinner of 2 x Hungry Man Friend Chicken dinners. why? i have no answer.