Obviously I haven’t been posting recently, I’ve been off on a beach excursion and I have had extremely limited internet connection the whole time. I thought I’d share the videos I have first.

The beach at Sunset Beach, NC.

Tubing in the Intracoastal Waterway.

Josh tubing.

Robert tubing.

Two days ago I went on a photo shoot hunt, and I decided I would go to the Arboretum located in Tanglewood Park this time. As I was nearing the gate after a drive down the highway I started to get nervous because there was a massive rain cloud above the park. Luckily it didn’t rain while I was there, just on the way home. I picked up a brochure and started to walk around, finding out that many of the flowers were not blooming or some of the gardens were under construction. Through it all I did get some shots.

I also went down to one of the fields and got a video and some photos of the horses that were grazing that day.

Enjoy!

Partly Mangled “Arboretum Visitor Guide”
  

“Dolphin Fountain”

Mural on the Garden Shed

Massive Spider with Her Web

A friend “Pond Diving”

“Cheese”

“Misplaced Daffodil”

The bunny thought he was hiding, but he wasn’t

“Blue Flower Shrub”

The Blue Flower Shrub was “Working on Blossoming” still

Two Grazing Horses

Beautiful Horse Sunset

Waking up this morning reminded me of three mornings ago when I arose to find this on my chest:

In my groggy stretching state I felt this little pest chilling right on me. I freaked out when I tried to brush him off, because he wouldn’t budge and it hurt. I thought to myself “Ah! %$@% there’s a tic on me!!!!”. Sure enough it wasn’t a tic, but I have no clue what this thing is. After trying to find some tweezers and what not, he just kinda fell off me. Random tidbit of nonsense I know, but man that’s not something you want to wake up to.

About 4 months ago I ran across Kevin Nalts website looking for Revver information, and I found his own rendition of an online video site at CubeBreak.com. Cube break was made by Nalts for those at work to get away from what they’re actually supposed to be doing by providing humorous videos to watch. After looking around I then found his video on how to make your own online video site. I said to myself, “Eh, that’s easy.. I could do that in 2 seconds”. I tried to just throw some videos on a page and be done with it, but I couldn’t persuade myself to publish something that looked like videos on a blank page. It hurt my feelings not to have any kind of structure. After that I still thought about it, but moved on to other things…….

Until last night, or about 10 hours ago, I found myself procrastinating from doing school. Instead of messing around with pictures, going to the pool, watching a movie or TV I was making my own online video site powered by Revver. I decided to choose CAFA = Cute and Funny Animal videos due to my passion and love for them. Who can resist a little puppy wrestling with her brother, or a sleepy kitten? I know I can’t.

The website it… drum roll please… CAFAvids.com

Well I hope you enjoy! I’m off to get a little rest after my all night 10 hour excursion into video site land.

I love to have an outlet for being creative. The internet gives me all sorts of outlets, from graphic design to facebook. I’ve been wanting to have another type of outlet and after thinking about different possiblities I came up with one. Gel candles! Have you ever seen them in the store, those squishy candles. I wanted to understand what they were made out of and how to make them, and I learned just that. The possibilities are endless, from seascapes to plain clear. The process to me is fun; melt, add and pour.

I’ve made about 10 so far, without counting the test subjects. It does take sometime, but it’s enjoyable!

Here are some pictures of them:

Where have I been? Off in the world.

Over the past couple of weeks the biggest event that unfortunately comes to my mind first would be that I was in a wreck while driving the Lexus LX470. Some people would rather use the term “accident”, but I have come to not like this term. Why not? Because from my perspective an accident means that it was unexpected and no one was at fault. Someone is always at fault in an “automobile accident”. My conclusion is to say wreck instead.

Off of my rant and onto what happened.. I was driving down the road and the car in front of me slammed on there brakes giving me no time to slow down in time. No, I was not tailgating them, and no, I was not talking/texting on my phone. Yes, I was paying attention, and yes, I was far behind them. I’ll start out by saying that no one involved was seriously hurt, which was my main concern. The person that was in the car with me and I were still a little sore for a couple days after, but nothing severe. Thankgoodness. The car was a whole different story, it’s officially totaled and I was saddened to see it leave the wreck in the condition it was in. It held special meaning because it was my grandfather’s, who passed away in 1999. This one event has taken up most of my time and thoughts the past little bit. Thankfully some pressure has been taken off by getting a new car.

Other things that have been keeping me busy have been: running errands, looking for cars, apartment hunting, planning beach get-a-ways and other daily nonsense.

It’s good to be typing again.

(My mother tends to read my blog on a regular basis and has asked not to see any pictures of the car, so to see pictures click where it says “read more”)

With the hood already taken off.

The hood where the collision occurred.

The fun of having quick shutter speeds. =]

Have you ever been sitting on a bench and looked down to find these little red bugs? I have to clue what the are, but I was sitting on a mountain of them.

Copyright. All Rights Reserved.
Send me an email if you would like to use any of these images.

Yesterday, at Tanglewood Park in Clemmons, NC, it went from raining to sunny back to raining in an hour. Below are some of the photos that were taken with my Sony DSC-T100 during the time I was there.

Looking Through the Rain, Canadian Goose
Copyright. All Rights Reserved.

Canadian Goose
Copyright. All Rights Reserved.

Abstract Lake, One
Copyright. All Rights Reserved.

Abstract Lake, Two
Copyright. All Rights Reserved.

Clouds of Love, One
Copyright. All Rights Reserved.

Clouds of Love, Two
Copyright. All Rights Reserved.

Clouds of Love, Three
Copyright. All Rights Reserved.

Clouds of Love, Four
Copyright. All Rights Reserved.

Clouds of Love, Five
Copyright. All Rights Reserved.

Clouds of Love, Six
Copyright. All Rights Reserved.

Grazing Horse in a Field of Buttercups
Copyright. All Rights Reserved.

Today I noticed that on some of my blogs there was now a “Possibly Related” link section at the end of my blogs and I checked the HTML seeing if some how I had accidently added this to those blogs. Nope, it was a WordPress announcement that I hadn’t noticed yet, called “Possibly an Announcement“. I’m hoping this will work out well. Seeing the fact that I’m afraid it’s going to make my blogs looked cluttered and not actually have relitive links I’m not possitive that I will be keeping this new feature or not.

From the announcement:
In a feature we’re calling possibly related posts we’ll now try to show posts related to yours a little section at the end. If we find any posts on your blog that are related, we’ll put those at the very top and in bold. Next we’ll show other posts from around WordPress.com, and finally we’ll check if there’s anything in the mainstream media.The result is a handful of links that should provide you and your visitors something interesting to check out. On blogs that cover the same topics frequently related posts could cause a 5-10% increase in traffic overnight. You could also start to see traffic from lots of other blogs. It’s a bit of an experiment, and we’ll be tweaking it a lot based on your feedback and the data that we collect once everything is live.

Right now this is just for English blogs, but we’re working on the technology to roll this out for every language we support. We’ll also be adding some ways for you to tweak the results to your liking.

Copyright. All Rights Reserved.

Camera make: Sony
Camera model: DSC-T100
Focal length: 5.8
Exposure time: 1/500
Edited with: iPhoto 

Copyright. All Rights Reserved.

Camera make: Sony
Camera model: DSC-T100
Focal length: 5.8
Exposure time: 1/125
Edited with: iPhoto 

Copyright. All Rights Reserved.

Transylvania County has been named the “Land of Waterfalls” in North Carolina. Last weekend I was able to spend the day at the Pisgah National Forest and take pictures of the “Looking Glass Falls”. I also took some video of the fall which you can find here.

Camera make: Sony
Camera model: DSC-T100
Focal length: 9.62
Exposure time: 1/200
Edited with: iPhoto 

I had just finished visiting the graveyard and was on the way to meet up with a friend to go grab a bite to eat. Out of the corner of my eye I saw a goose take off on the other side of the road in front of me. By the time I saw that we were going to collide I couldn’t do anything and ran straight into the goose, after honking at him (I was hoping he’d move). I pulled over in shock, noticed the windshield to the car had completely spidered on the passenger side, and then jumped out of the car to see if Mr. Goose was alright. At first I was sure I had killed the poor guy, but sure enough he wasn’t in the middle of the road. After calling insurance and all that mess, I saw him and his mate right next to the car. They stayed right by the car for about an hour while I straighten everything out and made plans to get it fixed. I never imagined hitting a goose ever, but I found out the insurance company had heard of people hitting owls and pigeons before, though I was the first person that hit a goose.

I recently posted about the birds building a nest in my den, crazy huh? I didn’t think it could get anymore entertaining around here until yesterday. I was looking outside in my backyard and I caught another glimpse of a confused animal. This time it was a squirrel who kept attempting on jumping on a branch that could not support his weight. Take a look at it by clicking on the thumbnail below.

While writing this I thought of a unique story about an encounter that my grandfather had with a flying squirrel. I don’t remember exactly how the flying squirrel was found by him but the basic story is that he found this baby squirrel that he been living in his attic. It was old enough that if it was let back into the wild it would have trouble living, since it knew nothing about self-defense. So instead of him being put through those troubles my grandfather decided to keep him in the house and keep him as a pet. He acquired the name Radar. I remember eating dinner there and him flying from atop the curtains over the table and onto a bench that was on the other side of the room. After my grandfather illness worsened and my parents and I moved into his house my mother figured it probably wouldn’t be the best to have him in the house. Just to be safe since his natural instincts could kick in and she didn’t want me to have to get a rabbis shot. Radar was the adopted by my grandfathers girlfriends sister and carried out a long life with her.

Intersting Links:
An article on About.com about Flying Squirrels and keeping them as pets
An article on Exotic Nutritions also about Flying Squirrels and keeping them as pets
A video called “Weird Animal Fun: Feeding a Cute Little Flying Squirrel“

Here we go.. a merge has happend. My photoblog will now be found here under Photography. I hope that this will not cause confusion! =]

I was looking through Google Trends and one popped out to me, pregnant man. The only time that I remember anything about hearing about a pregnant man was in the movie Junior with Arnold Schwarzenegger. I researched some and found an article at Advocate.com called “Labor of Love“. It turns out that this article was posted today and that a man by the name of Thomas Beatie is actually pregnant. To find out more about this go to the article at Advocate.com. I’m predicting that this is going to start a big hype due to the broad range of people with different beliefs.

This reminded me of a story that my mother was talking about that she found on AOL, where a mother gave pregnancy to her daughters baby because her daughter could not carry a baby. This story caused quite the uproar but the baby, mother, and grandson are doing perfectly wonderful. (Credit: OCRegister.com)

The way I think about it is when I’m ready to have a baby and for some reason I’m not able to carry her or him, I would be ecstatic if someone close to me would carry my baby for me. Yes, some people think this is unethical and/or just flat out wrong, but we’re all in-titled to our own opinions. Right?

Wow, I saw these videos a while back. It was very interesting what a bottle of diet coke and mentos could do together. Then due to EepyBird.com it became a phenomenon. I thought I’d list a couple of the videos that I found very interesting for your viewing pleasure! (Click on the thumbnail to see the video)

- The Original, consisting of 101 2-liter bottles of Diet Coke and 500 Mentos mints.

- The Domino Effect, consisting of 251 2-liter bottles of Diet Coke and 1,506 Mentos mints.

- Experiment #144: Super-Soaking Fountain, which consits of 180 2-liter bottles of Diet Coke and over 1,000 Mentos mints.

And how about the ones that didn’t work? 

- Experiment# 6 goes wrong, where they drop a string of mentos down into a tube then it hits the Diet Coke.

- Experiment #156: Dominos gone wrong, the boys aren’t getting to much luck with it working correctly.

For more information check out Eepybird.com.

Oh yes, I thought I’d lost my iPhone again! I haven’t had any problems with my iPhone since the scare with the volume. Until I tried to set my phone in my iHome and it just went blank. I took it back out and it wouldn’t respond to me trying to turn it back on.

The first thing I did was try to plug it in just to see for some reason the battery went dead, since it was sort-of on low juice. Nothing happend.

Then I plugged it into my computer, and just iTunes picked it up, but it said that it could not read “” iPhone. I was panicking at this point.

Finally the turning point, I had it plugged in and the held down the top button and home button at the same time for 15-30 seconds. Viola! The Apple logo popped up and I was back in business!

I hope this helped!! Good iPhone-ing to everyone!

Copyright. All Rights Reserved.

Copyright. All Rights Reserved.

Copyright. All Rights Reserved.

Copyright. All Rights Reserved.

Copyright. All Rights Reserved.

Checkers, my 10-year-old dog, recently had a leg amputated and just went through her last chemo treatment about 2 weeks ago. She’s been adjusting extremely well to walking on only one leg, but cannot get through the dog door.

What does this have to do with birds? Since the door has been open for her to go in and out of the house as she pleases, we’ve had some new guests living in our house. As I was walking towards the den I notice a couple of birds fly back outside, I didn’t think anything of it. Then the next day the exact thing happend so I began to investigate. And surely enough they were building a bird house on top of an antique clock that was in our den. Moral of the story: Don’t leave doors open for long periods of time during this time of year, or you might have a bird hotel inside.

‘Ello! I’ve finally added a Facebook page! You can find it here: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Cathryn/9775626951

Q: Why I have chosen a Facebook page instead of giving out my personal Facebook?
A: I’ve struggled with this for sometime now. The conclusion of a page instead of giving out my actual Facebook is because I saw what happend when my friends went huge on Myspace. I received messages and spam from the “friends” that I had, which becomes extremly annoying. I love communicating with people and hearing what they have to say about many different topics, but sometimes I just would like to keep up with close personal friends. I feel like giving out my Facebook would invade my privacy and cause unwanted spamming. I hope everyone enjoys my facebook page!

Stay in touch!