Amelia Island Part 1

August 19, 2017August 19, 2017 | Allison

We just got back from a lovely vacation with our friends at Amelia Island, Florida. Of course I took hundreds of pictures, and thusly I’m going to divide this into two posts, heh heh. Get ready for a huge photo dump!

Pictures from the drive there…

My siblings counted different kinds of trailers on the way there and back, keeping tally with a dry-erase marker on the window. They got a lot more than this till the trip was over. 🙂 (And yes, they did manage to get one truck honk in the end. XD)

Now we’re at the island! The trees at the resort are GORGEOUS, all old and gnarly, and covered in ferns and dripping with Spanish moss. It makes the whole place look really neat and mysterious.

And now for tons of beach pictures! You will be proud of me, guys: I managed not to ruin my camera this time like I have at pretty much every other beach vacation. XD

Going down the boardwalk…

Look what we found!

This beach is absolutely gorgeous. ♥

I love all the shells along the beach!

Isn’t this neat? You can’t see it too well in the picture, but I found a hollowed out shell that fit me perfectly as a ring, like it was made for me! Maybe it was. 🙂 Wow, my fingers look weirdly long in this picture. O.o ~~Probably because they are.~~

Can you spot the pretty little purple cochina shell?

And the waves are wonderful too… (Can you tell I just really like the beach? XD)

It’s amazing how powerful water can be.

Isn’t this picture neat? I like how the wave is rolling. 🙂

And we’ll end with this cute little tree frog we found stuck to a window of the beach house. He’s all tucked into a little frog package. 😛

Whew! Done with the first part! I hope you enjoyed. But I have to say, I think the rest of the pictures are even better. 😉 I can’t wait to show you!

What is your favorite part of the beach? The waves? The sand? The shells?

Thanks for visiting and see you later, dear readers! 😀

***Allison***

County Fair Photo Entries 2016

August 4, 2016June 8, 2017 | Allison

Greetings and salutations! XD

Our county fair opens in about two weeks, and I’m so excited! These are my entries for the photography section of the fair. (The fair categories are in bold). The links will take you to the post where the photo was first featured on my blog. Enjoy!

Abstract: {Flower Overload, Part 2}

Action: {The View from the Roof}

Artistic (which means creative photo editing): {CWWC}

Close Up: {More Snow Pictures!}

Humorous: {Bunny Therapy}

Landscape: {Vacation, Part 1: Niagara Falls}

Patriotic: {Boom, Crackle, Bang!}

People: {The View from the Roof}

Pets: {Meet Casey the Kitten}

Pictorial: {Mystery Revealed! #8}

Rural (Um, I’ll take out the county name): {Gone Fishing}

Wildlife: {BIBPC #2: Praying Mantis’ Feast (and Other Critters)}

There we go – a few photography highlights from 2016. 🙂

Which photo was your favorite? Do you have an annual fair where you live? Do you enter things in it?

**Allison**

P. S. Hayley and I are renovating Art Lab! We’re adding a few more artists to the group and starting it up again. We’re also going to collect and repost all of the Art Lab posts onto the official Art Lab blog, so you can scroll through the posts with ease. 🙂 You can follow it if you like! Hopefully there will be an Art Lab post up tomorrow. 😀

BIBPC #2: Praying Mantis’ Feast (and Other Critters)

April 20, 2016April 20, 2016 | Allison

Hi, guys! I’m participating in my sister Megan’s fun photo contest, BIBPC. (Read about it here.) The second prompt was “critters,” meaning animals like insects, frogs, etc. I collected several fun critter photos, but I can only enter one. 😦 😉 So I decided to show you the one I’m entering, and the other ones I wish I could enter too! 😀

I’m entering the first of these pictures, and the second one is just a bonus. 🙂

Isn’t it neat? And super gross?! XD

Story behind the picture: I took this photo a couple of years ago in September 2014. These particular pictures are actually still photos from a video I took. (You can see it here on my YouTube channel. I’m afraid the video is a bit jerky. Hold on tight! 😛 ) One day right outside our porch I saw this amazing and gross scene on one of our chrysanthemum bushes: a praying mantis was sitting there, calmly eating a bumblebee! I was so excited to get to see that! It seems like the bee would have killed the praying mantis first by stinging it, but apparently not.

So, Megan, since I have two critters in the picture I get double the points, right? No? Aww, shucks. XD

Now here are the ‘reject’ pictures. Poor lil’ guys. Don’t worry, I like you too! 😀

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Spring peeper: so cute and tiny!

Cicada (from this post)

Honeybees (from this post)

And I believe this is a bullfrog. I was almost going to enter him in, but I thought maybe a frog was too normal. (More normal than a praying mantis eating a bumblebee anyway. 🙂 )

His eyes were so pretty!

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Which picture was your favorite?

***Allison***

Creation Series: Day 7

October 24, 2015October 24, 2015 | Allison

After all that he had done, God rested. Not that he needed the rest – he NEVER needs rest – but to set an example for us, to show us how we should set aside a day of rest, a day to worship him.

Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them. ²And on the seventh day God finished his work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all his work that he had done. ³So God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it God rested from all his work that he had done in creation.

Here’s a nice little (uh… big) collage of most of the pictures. In fact, I think I got all the pictures that I used on there except for two. If you’re up for a challenge, which two pictures from the series didn’t I include in this collage?

I had a lot of fun making this series and I hope you had a lot of fun reading it. Thanks for following along!

***Allison***

Creation Series: Day 6

October 23, 2015October 24, 2015 | Allison

Oh yeah – day 6! Humans come into the picture, not to mention a lot of fun and furry (well, sometimes not so furry) animals.

²⁴And God said, “Let the earth bring forth living creatures according to their kinds—livestock and creeping things and beasts of the earth according to their kinds.” And it was so. ²⁵And God made the beasts of the earth according to their kinds and the livestock according to their kinds, and everything that creeps on the ground according to its kind. And God saw that it was good.

²⁶Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”

²⁷So God created man in his own image,
in the image of God he created him;
male and female he created them.

[I left out a few verses because the passage was pretty long. If you want to see it all, click here.]

³¹And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day.

What is your favorite of God’s creations? (Not including humans.☺)

***Allison***

Tidbits

December 19, 2014April 20, 2016 | Allison

I have lots of little things to post about, so I thought I’d just post them all together. Here goes!

************************************************************* Sunset

Several days ago we saw this GORGEOUS sunset. I seriously think this was the prettiest sunset I have ever seen. The colors were so bright, and the clouds were all swirly.

Isn’t it gorgeous?!

Scents

If you haven’t tried this, you should! Put orange or clementine peels in a small pot. Put some water in the pot, and add some cinnamon and whole cloves. This makes your house smell amazing! Surprise!

This is a gross but true story: We got our Christmas tree a couple of days ago, and the kids insisted that we move the furniture so we could put the Christmas tree in its customary spot by the window. Since we moved the couch, we had to sweep all the dust up. My brother was trying to vacuum up a dust bunny, but it wasn’t going too well. You’ll never guess why. Do you give up? Ok: it didn’t sweep up well because it wasn’t dust at all – it was a dead frog!! Yep, a really-truly dead frog. Actually, it was more like a petrified frog chip, it was so dry and hard. Why this is so funny is because that frog was the one that had hopped out of its cage months before, and we never knew what happened to it. We thought maybe the cat got it, but nope! My mom said that maybe the dead frog was what we had been smelling a while ago. Gross!!

Oh, and one other little thing: Complete-the-Set game

This is just a little game I made up that’s fun to play while traveling or waiting for something.

1. Choose one person to be “it” for the first round.

2. The “it” person thinks of a set (primary colors, initials, etc.)

3. “It” tells the other players all but one of the items in that set. (For example, if the set was “primary colors”, the “it” person could say “blue, red, and…”, or “red, yellow, and…”, but they couldn’t say “blue, red, yellow,” because there wouldn’t be any part of the set left to complete!)

4. The other players take turns trying to complete the set.

5. Whoever guesses correctly first gets to be the new “it”.

Have fun!

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Happy Holidays!

***Allison***