A Picture's Worth A Thousand Retakes

HAPPY HALLOWEEN!  I love love LOVE Halloween!  The entire month of October, really.  This fall has been absolutely gorgeous and I've been trying to get out and hike as often as possible.  I've been taking some awesome pictures of the fall foliage and hope to actually print them out and put them into a collage or something.  I'm a picture taking maniac and currently have thousands of pictures on my phone.  I need to pare down, as it's hard to keep up with.  I try to get them all onto Snapfish so they're saved somewhere in case my phone takes a swim in a duck pond or what have you, but that doesn't always pan out that way.  My last phone (which was waterlogged at the beach this summer) contains a gazillion pictures that never made it to snapfish.  It makes me wonder if we take too many pictures.  Back in the day when I was growing up, my dad would pull out the old Nikkon Camera and take a few pics of each holiday, birthday, etc.  Back when you had to buy film and load it into the camera.  A roll of 20 would probably last him at least a few holidays. He'd have them printed out and put them into photo albums which are neatly perserved in the basement along with several rotary phones.  When I'm feeling nostalgic I can look through the photo albums.  It wasn't overkill...one album contains the first 5 years of my life. Some pics are blurry or off center, and that's ok.   Now, I feel like we take so many pictures trying to capture perfection that it kind of gets "watered down"...know what I mean?  I could fill an entire album of Lauren's first Christmas.  And it's hard to go back and look through 200 pictures of one holiday and pare them down to say 10 pics to represent that first Christmas.  I have printed out pics laying around all over the house, not quite sure what to do with them, and thousands on my phone that have yet to even be printed.  It's forever on my "to-do" list to sit down and sift through them, but it's a huge undertaking. I know this is a silly "first world problem" in the scheme of things, but it makes me realize that overall I need to simplify. Take less pictures, be present in the moment and enjoy it versus trying to get the perfect picture of it.

Yes, I take a lot of pictures at cemeteries.  I totally have an obsession with cemeteries....



In other news (and silly first world issues) I find myself totally baffled over this current mystery unravelling here in my very own kitchen.  So - on most ovens - probably all ovens- there's a setting that says "Self Clean".  If I'm understanding this correctly, the oven is suggesting that it will clean itself once that button has been pushed. Right?

So...let's say, for example, that an applie pie exploded in my oven, leaving a sticky, gooey mess behind that now burns off each time I turn my oven letting off enough smoke to set off every fire detector in the house (this is a hypothetical, of course).  So my choices are either 1) Go out to the store, purchase "Easy Off" oven cleaner, latex gloves and a huge sponge.  Come home, spray in on the inside of my oven, wait 3 hours while it "sets", open all the windows to avoid the aersol chemical shitstorm I've just unleashed in my kitchen, then procede to put the entire top half of my body INTO the oven emitting said fumes, and scrub down the mess by hand....undoubtedly needing some type of bucket filled with water in which to rinse out my huge sponge in between wipes.  OR...
B)  Turn on the "Self Clean" option and let the oven clean itself while I go watch my neighbor's yard guy bag leaves in hopes he'll get hot and take his shirt off.

Do you see where I'm going with this?  Well obviously, that I need one of those 80 degree fall days and a good pair of binolculars.  Sure.  But as far as this oven dilemma, why would anyone chose to clean it themselves if this self cleaning option exists??  I mean, it almost seems too easy.  Like a trick.  I admit, I'm kind of nervous to push that button.  Like, what if I hit it, and suddenly a team of oven cleaners screeches down my street and into my driveway, hops out with all their oven cleaning gear and pushes me out of the way as they make a beeline for my kitchen.  Then once the oven cleaning is complete, I get billed for it at the end of the month?  Like an "on demand" movie?  There has to be some catch to this whole thing.  Has anyone every used the self cleaning option?  Have YOU?  What happens?  I'm dying to know.  WHAT THE HELL IS THE CATCH????  

Anyway, while that mystery gets worked...life here is all kinds of crazy, so of course it seemed like a great time to bring in a foster dog!  And so a few weeks ago, we welcomed Molly Luna Star, a sweet pup out of the Manhattan Shelter who was on "doggie death row".  In all honestly there was no plan to take any more animals in....but somehow, Molly's story (FKA Estrella) found me and I couldn't get her sweet little face out of my head.  She'd clearly been bred many times, and then dumped in a shelter.  It killed me to think that she may never know the love of a real family and to be treated like a little princess.  She's a black dog...and typically they don't get adopted out of the shelter, so the odds were stacked against her.  So she's here with us, and we're fostering her through Imagine Pet rescue.  I'm honeslty amazed that such an awesome dog was almost put down.  This dog rocks.  She's about 5 yrs old and all she wants is snuggles and to follow her humans around.  That's it.  She's great with the kids and our dog, Brynn.  Please "like" her Facebook page and share it...we're on a quest to find her the perfect forever home..

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Molly-Is-Looking-For-Her-Furever-Home/301167683422742?ref=aymt_homepage_panel
             

MOLLY LUNA STAR :)


Have a Happy, Haunted & Safe Halloween!!