Hello friends!
I’m back with the second half of my vacation pictures from our recent trip to OBX. Today’s post will feel sort of like an “Etcetera” collection since it features all the random photos that didn’t fit into the last one.
Read on for Jeep duckies, beach flowers, good eats, and a proud pigeon. Enjoy this random collection!
Hello, dears!
Last Saturday evening I decided to wander around our farm and take some pictures, and I’m so glad I did! The woods and fields looked so peaceful and gorgeous in the golden light. ❤ Since the lighting was perfect, I focused on adjusting the settings in the moment to capture beauty without having to edit it later.
I absolutely love how the photos turned out, but instead of just saying that after every photo, I’m going to share some of my favorite music interspersed throughout with a link to a YouTube video for each of them. 🙂 I mostly listen to Christian music, but I also have a few pop, country, classical/instrumental, and folk songs on my playlist. Pretty much whatever strikes my fancy. XD They’re all clean, though; you don’t have to worry about that. 😉
Now, I hope you enjoy the photoshoot and maybe even find some new music to add to your collection!
Hello, dears!
Today I have even more spring photos for you! Are you shocked? I thought not. But spring is my favorite season and it’s just so photogenic… *sighs happily*
I went through the past few weeks of photography and picked my favorites from several different mini shoots to combine into one post. I love these photos, and I hope you do too!
Hello, dears!
Is it a bit dismal outside where you live too? This winter has been pretty warm for us, but SO cloudy and rainy. 
If you’re in need of some sunlight, I have just the post for you! 😀
I took these two sets of pictures with my Canadian cousins way back in October, at the 50th anniversary celebration, and just haven’t gotten around to posting this second part till now – oops! I LOVE both photoshoots, though, and I hope you guys will too!
Hello, dears!
I hear tell it’s getting CLOSE TO CHRISTMAS. Do you think the rumors are true? XD Since it is still November, I thought I’d show you guys some last fall photos I haven’t posted yet before the advent countdown officially begins. I absolutely LOVE how some of these turned out, and I hope you will too!
Hello, dears!
I’m back with another random photos post and BOY did I need to make one! I found over a hundred miscellaneous photos I wanted to use today. :O Heh heh, but don’t worry, I cut it down to about half that amount with much labor. 😛 Sit back, relax, and start scrolling! Continue reading
Hello, dears!
I’m SO excited to post this photoshoot, because I think it’s one of my favorites ever! The evening was certainly wonderful. ❤ Plus, the lighting was so perfect I didn’t have to edit most of these at all! Definitely a bonus. Continue reading
Hello, dears!
It’s been AGES since I made the last “Moving On” post, but I wanted to wait until I could finish up this mini-series. And now I can! We are all moved in to the big house now, except for one room of unpacked boxes… yeah, that might take us a while. XD But now, enjoy this account of the most recent phase in our moving process! I can’t go over every single part in detail, so I’m just going to highlight some major chunks: packing and unpacking the house, packing up Dad’s shop, and taking down the old log cabin. Enjoy!
Packing up our old house was exhausting and kind of sad. I can’t remember the rooms ever being empty, since we moved there when I was one. However, it WAS exciting to finally be ready to move into the big house! One day while we were packing I saw this box which used to hold bittersweet vine found on our farm, and I had to get a picture. Moving really is…
Often when I got up in the mornings, I would step between this curtain and the window…
and look out at this view, to see what the weather was like, and wonder what would happen today.
The last evening at our old house was gorgeous. It was sad to think I’ll never see these views from the upstairs windows anymore. I’ll miss them. *sigh*
Some of our family as well as people from church helped us pack up, which was wonderful! Dad got a (not the most beautiful) trailer for our semi, to load up all our stuff. We fit practically our whole house into one trailer. It was strange to see all our familiar furniture stacked together in an unfamiliar place like that.
And then we left. We can come back again, of course, but it will never be the same since the house and the farm are no longer ours. *sigh*
Goodbye, old farm. ❤
The semi trailer got to our new farm a couple days later, and since my Dad and brothers weren’t available to unpack as soon as we hoped, the girls decided to start in ourselves! We got probably 2/3 of the semi trailer unpacked with just my mom, my grandmother, us three girls. 😀 It was great. I didn’t get too many pictures of this, but I got a ton of videos! I want to make a fast-motion video of us unloading the trailer. 🙂 Here’s a picture of Logan helping us, at least:
It took us two days, I believe, to get to this: AN EMPTY TRAILER!
After we unpacked our dining room table + chairs, we sat down to the first “official” meal in the big house, with delicious food that some of our friends from church kindly brought us. ❤
HA HA, here’s one last bonus picture for this section. XD Gram was like, “Allison, where’s your camera? You need a picture of this!” And I hurried off to get it. 😛
In case you’re wondering, the package is a fridge. One of many, sadly. Dear me, the first fridge we got from Lowes wasn’t the right kind, the second one didn’t work, the third one leaked, the fourth was the wrong kind AGAIN, and we’re still waiting for Lowes to bring the fifth one and HOPEFULLY IT WILL BE RIGHT THIS TIME. Goodness gracious, WHAT ON EARTH IS WRONG WITH LOWES?
Once we got the house stuff moved, we went back to our old farm and packed up Dad’s entire shop (which he uses for fixing farm machinery). Let me tell you, that was a job! Over 40 years, the shop had accumulated enough nuts, bolts, screws, paint, ratchets, wrenches, etc. to seriously open their own hardware shop. XD Only it would be an extremely dusty hardware shop.
For some reason I think this looks really neat…
As you can see, Dad has SO many tools in all different sizes, particularly wrenches. I really like this picture. 😀
The best part of packing was having pizza for lunch. 😛
Remember this old, fallen-down log cabin in our backyard?
Well just a few weeks ago, we took it down the rest of the way. I was hoping to find some more neat old letters or other interesting artifacts, but sadly we mostly found… a lot of junk. It was a bigger project to take it down than I expected, but it’s nice not to have to stare at it from half the windows now. 🙂
First, Dad and the boys pushed it over with the telehandler. Next we all clambered up on the roof with a couple of hammers and started extracting the nails so we could peel off the metal. The tar paper under the metal was covered with dead ladybugs and stinkbugs. O.o That was nice.
After we dragged away the roof skeleton, we had to pick out all the leftover boards and junk. That took quite a while.
Thankfully we had the skidloader to help!
Like I said, we didn’t find many valuable old things, but we did find some interesting junk! Including…
We are keeping the second half of the aforementioned items. Also some of the century-old heart pine wood.
It was finally cleared away about supper time. We were planning to make a patio around the chimney, but it’s not in the best shape so we might take the chimney down later after all.
And there you have it! A VERY abbreviated account of some moving-related things that we did recently. We are all enjoying living in the big house immensely. It’s just so huge and beautiful! Maybe once we get it decorated I can give you guys a tour. 😉
What was your favorite section of this post? Do you think Megan should fix up the flamingo? Ever have troubles like we did with our fridge? And what is your favorite kind of pizza?
Thanks for reading, dears, and have a lovely day!
***Allison***
Hello, dears!
Just recently I got to meet one of my dearest blogging friends, Aria. She and her family stayed at our farm for a weekend and we all had SUCH a great time together! We had never actually seen each other in real life, but we’d become super close through emailing, letter writing, phone calls, etc. It was almost surreal to finally meet her, but SO, SO EXCITING AHHHH.
I won’t go tell you guys everything today or it would be as long as three posts, but one of the things we did together was a best friends photoshoot! We both love photography and Aria actually has a photography business over at Aria Photo! Some of these pictures Aria took herself, and some we asked my sister Megan to take (well, to press the button) for us. I basically did nothing with these pictures except be in them, heh heh.
Still, Aria gave me permission to post my favorites today along with some amusing behind-the-scenes tidbits, after which you can check out Aria’s post to see HER favorites, and read about how we became friends.
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The first night Aria came, we took the Mule (a brand of UTV, similar to an ATV, not a literal mule XD) and drove around our farm, looking for good photography sites. It was SO much fun and the land looked gorgeous in the golden light. The evening we started with this path leading into the woods.
We wanted to get coordinating outfits for the shoot, and then Aria came up with the idea to get matching skirts but in different colors. (You might remember mine from the barn dance pictures.)
It turned out so well! This skirt is SUPER twirly and fun to wear, although it’s a bit delicate and has to be handwashed. It also has like a bajillion color options. You can see the Amazon listing right here.
HA HA we had such troubles with this pose. XD Actually no, I had troubles with this pose… and several others, actually. XD Poor Aria. But in my defense, some poses are a LITTLE difficult when you’re very tall and your best friend is only an average height. It was hard for me to bend back far enough without pulling her with me. XD
I LOVE THIS PICTURE! I just think it’s so cute and sweet. ❤ Also Aria kept exclaiming over how much more tanned her arm was than mine in this picture, but I said IT WAS JUST THE LIGHT. XD Seriously though, in real life our skin tone looked the same. *nods emphatically*
Ahh, I love this photo location because of the stunning light! We tried to twirl each other, but… ahem, I kind of kept messing it up. *facepalm* Thank you so much for being patient with me, dear Aria. ❤ I’m not USUALLY so hard to pose. XD
Ahh, the backlighting is just… INCREDIBLE. I took some more golden hour photos of this location last night that I can’t wait to show you guys! In another post. 🙂
Now the third location. Megan thought we looked like midgets here, and also Aria kind of fell backwards while sitting down, but it was worth it. XD I love this picture.
Oh yes, Aria wanted to do my hair AND my makeup for me, and she did them both beautifully! I never use full makeup and don’t normally style my hair much, so that felt different. I wouldn’t want to go to all the trouble and time normally, but it WAS fun to just be stereotypical teenage girls for a little while. 🙂
❤ ❤ ❤ (Also SEE. Now MY arm is tanner than hers. It’s probably still the lighting. *nods wisely*)
This pose, the outfits, the lighting, the location… they all went together PERFECTLY on this one!
Now we’re into the photos Aria took with her remote. This is by an old, rustic shed we have by our driveway. It’s a great backdrop! By this point my hair was getting kind of frizzy from the humidity, but Aria’s still looks gorgeous, don’t you agree? ❤
The whole time she was there we were both like, “I keep wanting to email you about this trip but then I realize I can just TELL you!” XD It was so strange because we do tell each other anything and everything by email usually.
AHHH I LOVE THIS. Aria said she wants to get a print of this one. ❤ I think Aria is possibly my long-lost sister? Or maybe a long-lost cousin. Whatever she is, I’m awfully glad she’s not lost anymore. ❤
THIS WAS SURPRISINGLY HARD. For one thing, my fingers are a lot longer than Aria’s, so at first the heart was lopsided. XD And apparently even though Aria was more flexible than I was for, say, the bending-backwards photos, her fingers were not as flexible as mine. BUT WE GOT IT. SORT OF.
Now both of our curls were kind of disintegrating at this point. BAD HUMIDITY.
Next we tried some photos in the corn but it didn’t really work out. The corn leaves intruded into our faces too much. XD But it worked quite well to be in front of the field!
Isn’t this one so cute?
Lastly, we took (or re-took) this picture the day before she left. I like to tease Aria that her eyes are blue because she says they’re green. What do you think? I think we’re both right and they’re mint or aqua… or just beautiful. 🙂
Since this is the kind of picture that I think looks good when you can tell it’s edited, I took the liberty of editing it. Tell me if you would rather not, Aria, and I’ll take it off. 😉 I don’t know why I love eyes so much, but I sure do. ❤ They’re just so gorgeous and unique!
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Lessons learned:
Thanks SO much to my sister Megan for helping us with the photoshoot. We couldn’t have done (at least part of it) without you! Also thank you, Aria, for too many things to count, but especially for listening to anything I tell you, for the looooong and honest emails and letters about everything from faith to health to politics, and for being my best friend forever. ❤ PLEASE COME BACK SOON.
I hope you enjoyed that post, guys! Be sure to check out Aria’s post to see a few different photos (and some photos of just me that I didn’t put on here), and follow her blog to see more posts about her visit in upcoming weeks. And tell me…
Isn’t Aria’s/Megan’s photography gorgeous? Have you ever had a friends photoshoot? Which pose or picture was your favorite? Have you ever met an internet friend?
Thank you so much for reading, dears, and have a lovely day!
***Allison***
P. S. Also, a big thank you to guys for participating in the first week of The Summer Bored Games! We LOVED hearing your feedback and seeing your photos from those challenges – I can’t wait to show you guys the pictures too. 🙂 Ready for some new boredom busters? Check out Megan’s post here!
Allison Marie 