My niece...

I've already put these on FB so most of you who check here probably have already seen them but nonetheless....

















Here the kids were really just invading the couch/picture area and were begging to hold their little cousin. They look so sweet and angelic...wait...are those my kids?

Its butterfly season....

At the local butterfly exhibit anyway. I can only WISH it were true outside here. We are actually slated to get sn-sn-snow again. I just didn't want to say it. Yuck!

I'm sure I'll have more to post as I keep going through my pics and take a handful more trips back there. They get about 700- 1,000 new butterflies each week through the duration of the exhibit. All in all they guess about 6,000!! Can you imagine!! Each butterfly only lives about 2 weeks. SO anyway....I'm hoping to make it back when they have more Blue Morpho's which are extremely hard to photograph when open and flying and Tree Nymphs which I've taken several pics of in past years, but hoping for more.

Not positive about this one...a Scarlet Mormon maybe?:

Two Leopard Lacewings:

A postman of some sort (I believe):



More Postmans (there are many diff. varieties):



And two of my favorite little bugs:

More Icicle pics....

See the road in this last one? At one point there was a car coming down the road that pretty much stopped and I'm sure was watching me. They probably thought I was trying to peep at the neighbors somehow. I'm sure I looked funny hanging out the top of my tiny bathroom window with my camera. It looked even funnier from the inside since I was also standing on the toilet. I had visions of them calling the police and me having to show them my camera, that I wasn't shooting in the neighbors windows or anything, LOL. Today its already about 50* (a rare and short lived warm-up here) and all the ice is melted. It was pretty, but I can't say that I'm sad. I'm sure the roof is thankful too. I wouldn't doubt if we get more snow and icicles before spring though. We ARE in Michigan where ANYTHING can happen with the weather.

Gloating a little bit...

So I'm not sure if I mentioned anywhere in blog world back in Sept about an art/photography competition that I entered. It was actually through my work to win a spot in an Associate-Art gallery in the new hospital building. Really it turned out to be just a wall of really nice photo's but its in the main connecting hallway from the new building to the old, so it will be well traveled. I'm still not clear how many entries there were, but I think nearly 200. TWO of my photo's were chosen and are now on display. They are matted in gorgeous frames with little name plaques in-laid in the matting. Last night they had a little reception to honor the winners and let us see all the other winning photos as well. It was very nice and I am pretty stoked that my photos get to be shown off to lots of people (including other co-workers). Kind of free advertising too, if I ever want to really get more serious. I will have to take pics of the whole wall sometime to show you. So these were my winners, although they look even more cool with frames and all...
Please click on them to see a bigger size. I really had to shrink them to get them to show on the page right without having to scroll side to side to see it.

Do you know what this is?

It not that hard, but cool I think.



I still can't quite capture how cool these look each night as the light hits them just right. They look like tons of jewels hanging from the rafters. Icicles!!! I love how they sparkle and gleam in the light.

Black and White...

Mike:


Papa E:

Heart Ornaments....

These are my favorite ornaments. I think its because #1, my grandma gave them to me and #2 the way they catch the light and sparkle. Unfortunately many were broken this year due to the CED incident and my two year old throwing them at the fireplace :(