Time for a Reformat

Since my husband works in computers, he's always hounding me to reformat my computer every so often as the ultimate form of defragging the hard drive. Which I guess is a good thing, although it annoys me to no end when he does it because it takes me weeks to get things back to the way I want!

But it's nice, especially around spring time, to redo everything and get a fresh start. So when my computer started having some performance issues last week, I knew what my muscle man was going to suggest... And I figured, sure, why not, I've just completed a full cycle of my 365 photo-a-day project so I pull all the photos from that 'year' off and onto an external drive anyway, and I got a new version of photoshop as well that needed to be installed... So now that I'm getting my computer back to normal (and getting used to that new version of photoshop, grr...) it's time for some updates! =D

OH and then there's that new camera thing to get used to as well! I've been wanting to upgrade my camera for quite a while now, so I figured I'd do something special for myself for the 5th anniversary of my project-27 photo-a-day thing. It's so much better than my little rebel xt I've been using for most of the past 5 years, but there's a lot to get used to as well!

This has got to be one of the best features of my new camera, it is absolutely wonderful at taking low light images! Or well, as good as I can expect haha... But the iso range is practically triple what I used to have, so noisy or not, I love having the ability to take photos with lower light! 


And we've got some lovely newness outside, with the nice spring weather it's finally time we did something about the junky mess of a front yard the prior homeowners left us with... The planter in the front was overgrown with big shrubby-trees, you could barely see the house any more! So with the help of a ton of rocks, a chainsaw and some good old fashioned elbow grease provided by my muscle man and our new roommate(see below), we've now got a decent enough looking front yard. We decided to dig up the old barrier in parts of the flower bed and change the shape from an awkward half circle-half oval to a slightly less awkward true half circle that's not in line with the house, but is inline with the shrubs that we left in the bed and is kinda inline with the street.. (we're cheap, so we cut down the shrubs that didn't work, kept the ones that did, and covered the rest with mulch, no pricey new plants for us this year!) The back yard is still a totally different story, but baby steps...



We've also gained a few more residents, when we got such a large house we let several friends know that if they wanted, they could rent out our 4th bedroom in the basement, and one of my muscle man's good friends decided to take him up on the offer, if we could also accommodate a second roomie as well:

Puppy!! haha 120 pounds of purebred great-dang-thats-a-big-dog hehe! She's a super sweetheart, getting her to stand still for a photo was really hard because she kept wanting to snuggle! We had planned on her being a mostly outside dog, but after she escaped from our 6 foot fence while we were at work we decided it would be ok for her to stay inside, especially to keep our other dog company. I think dog is glad to have puppy around, she gives him some company while we're away at work, and despite her size, she is so well mannered! We did have a little issue with the trash can, but when it's at snout level you can't really blame her for being curious haha!