I’m sharing a Christmassy photo with some pretty little treasures and yummy goodies from my students, and gifts for friends and neighbors wrapped and ready to give this weekend.

I’m sharing photos of the Holiday Party my husband and I attended at the amazing Mission Inn landmark Hotel. The Mission Inn was built in 1876 and is gorgeous any time of year, but especially during the Holidays. Decorators go all out and the displays are always breathtaking. These are day-time photos, so we’re missing the spectacle of the lights, but it’s still a beautiful site to see, during the day.

In editing these photos, I used a fun selective focus feature that my upgrade to PSP Pro X4 enables. If you have some photo editing experience, you may know this as the tilt-shift effect. I really like this effect, from the first time I saw it in some professional photography galleries online, and then on film using tilt-shift lenses in a couple of recent movies (think Cambridge rowing scene/Henley Final from the Social Network).. awesome.

Click on the thumbnails to see a larger image.

Today, my typical photo for my typical Monday – 9/13/11

The house is quiet, lots of morning calls have been made, my laptop geared up with emails, study plans, and lesson planning materials. Today, hibiscus tea (and plenty of it) are part of the plan too.

I may not be going anywhere outside my home, but I still have a lot of road ahead of me. I make a plan to accomplish every last bit of my To-Do-List and accomplish it completely my way. That’s my plan for a successful Monday.  (And it was one!)

Today, this poem seemed fitting and a nice time to share.

You Can Be Whatever
You Want To Be!

There is inside you
all of the potential
to be whatever you want to be,
all of the energy
to do whatever you want to do.

Imagine yourself as you would like to be,
doing what you want to do,
and each day, take one step
towards your dream.

And though at times it may seem too
difficult to continue,
hold on to your dream.

One morning you will awake to find
that you are the person you dreamed of,
doing what you wanted to do,
simply because you had the courage
to believe in your potential
and to hold on to your dream.

~ Donna Levine ~

This weekend, my family and I enjoy a day trip to San Diego. This is usually a day-trip we take at least once a year, but it’s been a few years since our last visit. The kids are adults now and do their own thing, we are all working and attending college courses, etc.. C’est la vie. So hubby had this one day off and we took it to wander around, play “tourist” and visit one of our favorite place – Old Town, San Diego.

We always stop and have lunch and margaritas in the Barra Barra Saloon or one of the other yummy restaurants in Bazaar Del Mundo and then spend some time walking through the best shops in Old Town. Some of the ones we always stop at are Bailey & McGuire Pottery, Cousin’s Old Town Sandy Shop and the Coffee and Tea House (you have try the Hibiscus Key Lime herbal tea – Yum!). We usually like to revisit the old Mason Street school and some a couple of the other museums around town just to soak up some more San Diego history.

This trip, we took a tour of the haunted Whaley House for the first time and revisited the McCoy House Museum again. My son skipped the haunted tour and opted instead to check out Fred’s Mexican Cafe where he enjoyed a huge glass of Dos Equis beer, chips and salsa – all for just 95 cents. He has a knack for finding the deals, I don’t know. Meanwhile, we enjoyed out haunted walk-through of the Whaley house as you can see from the pictures. Trying to catch a photo of the “ghost dog” proved to be a challenge though! Oh well. The house has a very interesting and colorful past that was fun to frolic through for a while. I could tell that the folks who work in the home/museum enjoy what they do too and have some fun with the whole “haunted” thing too, which is refreshing.

Anvil Firing was something I was not familiar with before this most recent Old Town trip and so I learned a thing or two about it as we watched a couple of their demonstrations over in the Old Town Park. According to the anvil firing demonstrators, fireworks were too expensive to purchase back in the early days and when folks wanted to celebrate, they wanted some “boom!”. So shooting off anvils was something cheap, noisy and exciting that happened during the most festive of times. I tell you, it was LOUD! These anvils were going off about every half-hour during our visit this weekend. Something different to see anyway, for sure. I included a few of those photos in the mix below too.

We also visited the Racine & Laramie Tobacco shop this trip, which was new for us. We are not smokers, but my adult son has developed a fondness for an occasional cigar. Though I’m not into cigar’s myself, I have always enjoyed the fragrance of some of them through the years. It may be partially a reminiscent thing for me as it takes me back to my childhood and reminds me of my grandfather Dwight who smoked cigars too. I always liked the look of the traditional cigar boxes too, though I do not own a single one. So, anyway, this Racine & Laramie Tobacco shop is the oldest tobacco store in San Diego – dating back to 1868. It smells like a wonderful potpourri of vanillas and earthy spices inside and looks appealing in its sophisticated, frontier-like charm.

And that concludes another successful family visit to Old Town San Diego. Until next time…
Enjoy my photo share below and feel free to comment on your favorite Old Town stops!

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It was such a pleasure being treated to a lavish, delectable dinner this evening.. courtesy of my daughter and her friend. The complete meal consisted of four dishes and took them hours to create. Hours in a kitchen is no easy task in any kitchen, but, especially ours, with it’s tiny, cramped spaces, and crazy-hot temperatures due to it being the middle of summer and there’s no cooling in that part of the house. But the girls never complained and created such a fine dinner for us all.

Their (mostly) health-minded, vegetarian (Thank you girls!) meal consisted of:

• Pineapple, banana, cheddar-cheese and marshmallow salad
• Broccoli, tomato, mushroom and mozzarella on wheat pizza
• Fried potatoes with onion
• Cheesecake on graham-cracker crust

All dishes were made from scratch and tasted just perfect! I told the girls that I could sure get used to this and asked them when they thought they could do this again. It sounds like we’ll be in for a dinner treat every couple of weeks or so – Yay!

Take a look at a few photos I snatched up from tonight. :)

It is such a huge pleasure to experience the benefits of organic and whole food eating when the bounty comes from my own garden! Since our garden is still young and on the small side, we supplement what we need by buying fresh from our markets and local stands. I no longer purchase meat as I dropped all meat from my diet two years ago and have recently dropped way back in the amount of dairy I purchase and personally consume. My family still gets a good amount of dairy in their diet, but eat much less meat as they’ve developed a fondness for the fresher, more natural foods that are now abundant in our kitchen. As a teacher, I get a nice long summertime break and this is absolutely the best time to indulge in healthy seasonal foods from the backyard garden.

Whole foods are foods which contain no harmful additives which you will find in processed foods. Whole foods are foods that are unprocessed and unrefined, or processed and refined as little as possible. Foods which are considered to be whole foods do not contain added ingredients and are as natural as possible. They are absolutely the best source of nutrition and give us maximum nutritional value.

In my garden, I grow three different varieties of tomatoes, three varieties of peppers, zucchini, cucumber, pumpkin and strawberry. I also have a few herbs like rosemary and basil, and then there are our citrus trees – lemon, grapefruit and orange – yum!

If you are new to whole food health, I have a few of my favorite sites I’d like to share with you for information and ideas.

Leo Babauta’s Zen Habits is one of my all time favorite sites in general. He shares honest, and inspiring ideas about living well, healthy and minimally. Here is a link to one of his posts on diet and lifestyle.

I adore the Sprouted Kitchen, not only for it’s organic, health-minded recipes and ideas, but for it’s amazingly beautiful photography. This is a great resource and a visual delight!

The Whole Food Nutrition Kitchen and The Best Vegan Guide are two more very worthwhile blogs I subscribe to and visit often.

Heartsmith is offering an opportunity to win a $100 gift certificate by simply submitting a picture of your “four legged” best friend. I entered our Copper dog. If you’d like to check out his photo, you’ll see his listing under “view all entries”. You can enter your furry friend through December 15th. Then the voting phase begins. So, upload your pet’s photo today, then December 16 – December 31, invite your friends to vote for your photo. On January 1st, the Heartsmith staff, and one professional photographer will vote on the top 5 finalists. On January 3, the top finalist will be announced on the Heartsmith website and via email. The lucky winner will receive a $100.00 Heartsmith Gift Certificate to be used for any Heartsmith product currently online! Yay! Go upload your pet’s photo. Have fun and good luck!!

I carry my camera with me everywhere I go. It’s just a small digital camera, so it’s easy to tote around in my bag. I love photography and my family is pretty familiar with waiting around for me to get a variety of shots, especially in a scenic area like Oak Glen California. Our family has been visiting Oak Glen since we were all kids and our own parents brought us.

I think the perfect time to visit is fall. The scenic through drive through Yucaipa, up the mountain, with a variety of orchards and festivities along the way from the pumpkin patch, corn mazes, apple picking, antique browsing, wine tasting and more, gives you plenty to enjoy, taste and photograph.

Today’s is a photo share of very fall scenes (some family and furry friends too!), courtesy of Oak Glen.

Click on the thumbnail to view larger image.

Photos are property of me – Karlyn and not to be removed from this site, share or distributed anywhere or in any way without my permission. Thank you.

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Since photography has been a hobby of mine for years now; it’s pretty cool that I get to teach a photography workshop to kids. Three days a week, I instruct students in grades 3rd – 8th, how to use some of the more common camera settings, pass on some photo taking tips, introduce them to exciting photo editing techniques and put together some projects where they can practice, pull it all together and have some fun too. Fun in learning is important to me. We retain what we’ve learned so much better if we had some fun in that whole learning process. Last year was the first year I taught a photography workshop, and at the end of the year, when we reviewed our portfolios and talked about some of our favorite projects; macro photography was one of the students’ top choices. This year; I knew I wanted to bring that project back for the students to enjoy. So got my macro supplies all ready! Along with last year’s pretty glass marbles and heart-shaped pebbles – perfect for those close-up shots, hubby loaned me some industrial looking sprinkler nozzles and assorted parts from his Irrigation supply store and I found some new, fun little things from Alan Party Supply this weekend.. fall leaves, shiny coins, colorful spiders and adorable little ice-cream erasers. Macro photography is simply shooting photos close-up. What makes it interesting though, is the content in the photo, how the photographer sets the objects up and the different angles the photographer chooses to shoot at. I encourage my students to try shooting from above and even slightly-below to achieve some interesting results. I think practice like this helps students look at things in a new way and when they see their results on the computer – after we’ve uploaded their photos, they (and I) are usually quite impressed. Like I said.. a fun project! I’m looking forward to it next week.