5 Years: An Anniversary Post

It's amazing how 5 years can feel like forever and an instant all at once.  It's amazing how when you feel like you can't love someone any more than you already do, but you find yourself more in love every year.  No one told me marriage would be this wonderful.  It was supposed to be a challenge.  It was supposed to be hard.  Very rarely it is, and the first couple years were a huge learning curve, but for the most part it's absolutely wonderful and I can't imagine my life without Nick.

We've done a lot in 5 years.  We've lived in three places.  600 square feet with a crazy landlord and the massive "L-shaped" desk Nick just had to have above all else!  417 square feet underneath rambunctious children.  And now our actual purchased home.  Oh, the photographer in me is going to be dying over the quality of 70% of the images in today's post.  Please know that we didn't own a real camera for the first 2/3rds of our marriage, lol!

We've changed careers 4 times between the two of us.  We've bought our first car, our first home, our first fridge.  (Sorry, but buying and owning appliances was really weird for us.  For the first 6 months of owning our place, we would walk into the kitchen, point at a random appliance, and say, "That's actually ours!").  We've been so poor that we've literally lived on beans, and recycled cans from my office's garbage for the extra spending money.  And we've been so well off that we've been able to invest a lot of money into gear, travel, and starting our own company.  We've been to San Diego once and Mexico twice.  We've even gone on an almost month-long road trip all across North America.  And we've been through way too many fish.  (I apparently suck at taking care of living things).

Nick, you introduced me to a lot of firsts:  First time renting a camp ground and pitching a tent.  First time picking out a live Christmas tree.  (Thank goodness our strata bylaws put a stop to that nonsense!  Haha).  You also took me on my first roller coaster (and subsequently probably my last!).  You introduced me to berry picking.  You even convinced me to like Nutella somewhat, and I think I've managed to give you at least an appreciation for Clamato juice ;).  We went on our first road trip with no destination together (other than driving sea to sea!).  I even played my first Euro-game with you the day we met, and many more since then :).  At least I can say that Disney Land on our honeymoon was YOUR first and not mine.

We've grown in who we are as people.  We've found a church home and joined in a number of ministries.  We've learned to trust God in huge ways.  God, we don't have any money for groceries this month.  God, we think You're calling us to quit our jobs and start over from scratch.  We've learned to hear Him more and better.  I'm even learning to trust Him which is a huge step from 5 years ago when I trusted no one at all.

This post was actually harder than I thought to write because my heart feels like it's just bursting with love and memories for this man I'm married to.  I feel like I'm the most blessed girl on earth to have been given him.  Nick Froese, I love you.  I love who you are and who you are becoming.  I don't love the fact that you still don't wipe the counters down when you're done in the kitchen, but hey, we're only 5 years in.  We'll keep working on that ;).

Here's hoping for another 50 years with you by my side and more memories and adventures than I can count!

Need vs. Want: One Month Without

We had an interesting question at our Life Group last night:  "How do you determine what is a need in your life versus what is a 'want.'"  I feel like we answered the question quickly.  Too quickly.   We need food.  We need water.  We don't need the latest renovations on our home.  We don't need the newest iteration of the iPhone.  It was of course followed up with the question of what are we going to do with this knowledge?  The obvious answer is, keep our perspectives right!  And then we moved on to the remainder of the study.  But I couldn't let it go in my heart or my head.  It stirred something deeper up inside me.

Ironically, when I got home Nick was updating our budget and announced how well we were doing this Fall with all the projects lined up.  This got me thinking even more about this need vs. want thing.  A couple weeks ago I cleaned up this blog and hid most of the older posts.  I was kind of annoying 5 years ago, and I didn't want it up here, lol.  Also, I didn't want all my old, crappy photos cluttering up what I'm gradually morphing into a personal / business blog.  However, while I was archiving old posts, I stumbled across memories from our first few years of marriage.  The time I dug a record amount of pop cans out of the office's garbage and we treated ourselves to Tim Horton's coffees, and then won a free one and were over the moon.  The time we had only $32 a week for groceries and God provided $1,000 worth of free groceries to us.  The times we did without.  The times we celebrated the little that we had.  The times we didn't take for granted all of the wonderful things that are ours in a first-world country.

And then I had an idea, which I pitched to Nick and convinced him to go along with.  For one month, starting today, we are not going to purchase anything extra.  We can fill the car with gas when it runs out.  I can renew my bus pass in a couple weeks.  We're going to buy a little treat for our anniversary dinner this Friday and pick up some fresh produce so we don't contract scurvy while pulling this off.  Other than that, Nick is contributing to a kick-starter campaign that needs to be completed this week and I had already planned to pay for a portfolio review mid-October.  But that's it.  (Oh, and for nutritional reasons only, I did agree to reconsider the not buying extra groceries in a couple weeks if we truly have no fruit or vegetables in the house, but given the state of our freezers, I think we'll be just fine).

Well, here's an update on how it's going.  I woke up and within 20 minutes I thought, "Oh, I need to pick up a pack of glitter from the dollar store for a photo idea... oh wait, no."  That's right.  I lasted 20 waking minutes before planning to buy something.  I think this will be really good for us, and I'm excited to learn to appreciate the little things again and be thankful for what we have.  When a coworker tossed me a free granola bar this morning I was already extra thankful for it because of this.  I may be less thankful when we run out of coffee next week, but I think that's the point.  It's not supposed to be easy!  And that pack of glitter?  I'm going to get it, but I'm going to do it the way I would have three years ago.  I already picked $0.65 of pop cans out of the office's garbage bin today.  I should have enough to buy it in another 2-3 weeks.  And guess what?  I'll be thankful for it!  Really, really, thankful.

Photography 365 Project: (Days 271 - 279)

Sunday, September 28th, I enjoyed a nice sleep in after getting up so early the previous day to accompany my dad to the shooting range.  Nick was an absolute sweet heart and let me rest while he prepared scrambled eggs with avocado, bacon, sliced salami, fruit, and toast for us with jam he brought home as a wedding favour from one of this season's many gigs:

Monday is currently my lightest teaching day as I have a gap before my students and am finished by 7:15.  So I sorted all the laundry and stripped the linens for Nick to throw in before I taught, and then we picked it up afterwards.  There are benefits to shared laundry - one being you can do an entire month's worth in one go!

Tuesday, Nick had to pick up some footage from downtown so I got a rare ride to work in the car with him (as he usually works locally and I transit to the office).  Being in the car means I get to sleep in 20 minutes later, spend time with Nick, AND don't have to shuffle from bus to bus in the morning rains.  It was a win all around for me!  Plus, I was really happy to have the extra time with Nick as it was a crazy editing week for him and we were like ships passing each other in the night for the majority of this week.

Wednesday night is Life Group night, and once a month it's guys' night.  However, Nick was absolutely slammed with work so we had a quick "chicken wings out of a box" dinner and he settled in to edit all evening.  It's a good thing chicken wings are pretty much my favourite food in the entire world because we eat them a lot!

Thursday my package arrived!  I sold my first canvas to a client (the small one on the left), and I also ordered one for the big empty space in our hallway as I had a Groupon and the price was amazing.  Nick picked our Grand Canyon photo, which will forever remind me of our Great Adventure from sea to sea!

Friday I came home from work, quickly taught one piano student, and then jumped in the car with Nick to head back downtown to enjoy dinner and board games with some friends of ours.  We've been trying to set up a time to get together with them for months and finally pulled it off!

Saturday, I shot a wedding for a local company and finished around 6pm.  Nick's wedding was scheduled to go until almost midnight and with his many all-night edits this week, I really hadn't seen him much besides at our friends' the night before.  Thus, I decided to head over and work on my laptop beside him while he edited.  I also scored a sweet meal out of the deal :).  During a lull, I pulled him outside to help me take this shot for my daily as I didn't have any tripod or remote gear with me.

If you're wondering how we did it with no tripod or remote, we just took turns taking a photo of the other person, and then I cut Nick out and pasted him into my photo afterwards:

Sunday, I had an engagement shoot to do with a friend of mine who asked me to second shoot with him.  I really wasn't in the mood to do two shoots back-to-back, but it ended up being a ton of fun!  I also got WAY more comfortable with off-camera lighting and used it for a number of the shots, which has been a goal of mine recently.  You can see more from this shoot here if you like :).  Afterwards, I met up with Nick downtown as we both had some file transferring to do, and then we headed off to a friend's 30th surprise birthday party.

Monday came a bit too early after such a late night at the birthday party, but thankfully it was a peaceful day at the office.  I met Nick at the train station on the way home where I handed him my bus pass so he could head back downtown for the evening, and I took the car from him to do my teaching.  The rest of the night I've just been catching up on editing, blogging, and emailing, and am about to pack it in and finally relax here as it's after 10:00pm already.  Netflix is calling me, so I'll leave you with my last daily, which brings me completely up to date again:

And because I have a bunch of photog friends that read this blog, I've been trying to include a bit more background behind some of my photos.  This one started out pretty lame.  I wanted to take a picture of Nick's missing jacket because it sucks that he's not home tonight or tomorrow night, and I'm gone the following night, too.  But when I went to take the shot initially, it seemed flat and boring.  I tried to hold open the hall door with my foot to let some directional light in, but even then it wasn't isolating the single hook the way I wanted.  My solution?  A cereal box with my flash inside it to fire out some directional light, which I just held in my left hand while taking the shot with my right hand:

Salima & Alym e-shoot

When my friend Clint first asked me if I wanted to second shoot an engagement session with him it seemed like an awesome idea.  Until I also got booked for a wedding the previous day.  I'm not a fan of back-to-back shoots on a weekend when I already work 5 days a week, plus evenings on top of that.  However, I'm so glad I did it.  The weather was gorgeous; the couple was lovely; and I got way more proficient using my off-camera flash.  

Ordinary Days and Adventures

I think I post about "adventures" a lot.  I call them adventures because I'm pretty easily amused and even going to the grocery store counts as an adventure to me.  An adventure, in my mind, is anything that is different or out of the ordinary.  Anything that isn't working or sleeping.  But in my eagerness to glaze over the "every day" because it seems boring to me, my life may seem more exciting than it actually is.  Or maybe not.  Maybe you are all just thinking, "Geeze, Laura, it's a trip to the grocery store.  It's really not as exciting as you think it is!"

Regardless, yesterday was a pretty ordinary day.  I woke up before dawn (silly winter sun schedule), and headed off to the office.  It was my colleague's turn to teach the class that day, so I settled in at my desk to provide user support.  I answered the phone as it rang, and I stayed on top of our inbox.  It was a fairly slow day, so I even had time to catch up on some personal stuff - like trying to see if my credit card, employee ID, and bus pass made their way to transit's lost-and-found from last week or if they really were stolen.

After work, I headed home to one of my light teaching days.  My heaviest loads are mid-week, so Monday and Friday are a little less packed.  I had 45 minutes before I needed to leave to teach my first student, so I tackled the things I have been avoiding the most on my to-do list.  I grabbed the pile of dirty clothes that needed some stain removing attention before they went in the laundry and pulled up a stool to the sink.  45 minutes later, I had gotten a little carried away and had four loads piled three feet high in baskets for Nick to help me take down to the laundry room on the first floor of our apartment complex.  Somehow it ended up being a strip-the-entire-bedroom-and-washroom-of-all-linens day.

While Nick took care of starting that, I ran out the door and drove up the hill to teach a couple little girls piano.  I was back home again shortly after 7:10pm, and transferred the laundry over to the dryers before heading upstairs to spend the next hour sweeping, washing the floors, dusting, rotating the dishwasher, and cleaning the washroom.  At this point it was after 8pm, but that still seemed super early to me because normally I would just be finishing teaching, so I felt miles ahead of the game!

I briefly considered making something for dinner, but decided against it.  I grabbed up my boots and hoodie and announced I was "going on a food finding adventure!" to Nick who was editing away like a mad man in the office.  See, the other benefit of making everything sound fun is that people want to do it with you.  Next thing I knew, we were both heading out the door to pick up some sushi and drinks for the evening.  When we returned home, we grabbed the last of the laundry and had it put away in record time.  By shortly before 9:30pm we managed to be all settled down in our freshly washed bedding and clean house with sushi in hand and enjoyed an episode of House.  By then it was approaching 10:30 and Nick still had almost 4 hours of editing to do, so he headed back to the spare room/office until the wee hours of the morning whereas I got almost a "normal person" amount of sleep that night!

Okay, well... maybe it wasn't a completely ordinary day in that I didn't stay up too late, work too long, and consume take-out burgers.  However, it was a day full of ordinary things.  Ordinary things that I don't normally easily have time for.  And thus, I loved it.  So I guess by my definition of adventure - Monday was a pretty decent one ;).  Yes, I just called cleaning my house an adventure.  I told you I was easily amused!