Florida Wedding Pictures

Posted on by Jordan

Heather finished editing the pictures we brought back from Florida. I uploaded an album of the wedding related ones, it can be found: Here

Heather did a great job editing those. I am happy with a few of them, and I think careful cropping, and color adjustments did wonders for what you can see in the album. There are a handful of pictures that are disappointing because I know there was a much better picture three to five seconds earlier than the picture I took. Part of the problem was my camera being slow to boot up, and my not really managing the auto-focus. The major problem was just that I wasn’t really always in picture taking modes, so I didn’t have the camera out and ready, or I had it out but didn’t have it turned on.

Somewhere down the wish list for Heather and I is a much nicer camera. Although moving to something like an SLR style camera would take away a lot of the easy to carry, always with me aspects I like about my current compact camera. I suppose I shouldn’t worry too much, if we aren’t looking to get a camera for a while, it leaves time for all kinds of amazing advances in cameras! 🙂

-Jordan

Florida

Posted on by Jordan

img_1137

Over a week later, and I still haven’t managed to get a good post up on this trip 😦

Well, here is a quick summary:   (if you consider 1000+ words quick)

Wednesday night:

We left Omaha kind of late, didn’t get to Kansas City until 11:30 or so. Found out we needed to be at the airport by 6:00am the next morning.

Thursday:

Got up way too early, Heather’s dad drove us to the airport. Found out AirTran charges $15 for the first checked bag, checked one large bag, headed for the security checkpoint. KC airport was doing their inaugural run of the new luggage scanner, stood in line for a long time. Our flight stayed at the gate an extra 15 minutes so everyone could make it through the security checkpoint. Landed in Atlanta, practically ran to the gate for our connection. We made it there just in time to have them call general boarding. Landed in Orlando,  finally stepped outside and remembered what hot and humid feels like. Got a rental car, found out Budget Rent-a-car has run out of Florida maps. The guy at the counter sketches a rough map to our destination on the back of our reservation paper. We then drove about an hour and a half out to Palm Coast. We found out on the way that we were running late, so I dropped Heather off at the nail place, for the bridesmaids nail appointment, and then headed to the hotel. I checked in, hauled our bags up to the room and then passed out on the bed. Heather called a few hours later to tell me the guys were going out, and if I wanted to go with them I should get up and moving. The guys (including me) went to a Mexican place on the coast, and then hung out at a bar for a while. It was a fairly entertaining night, despite not really knowing anyone there. Heather was out with the Bridesmaids, I can’t remember what she said they did, but she really liked the other bridesmaids and assorted friends who were there.

Friday:

Heather and I slept in as much as we could, grabbed some breakfast at the hotel, and then I dropped her off for a wedding event nearby. A luncheon of some sort, I can’t speak for what Heather was doing during the day. I drove to the beach, and read until I started worrying about getting sunburned. Leaving the beach, I drove along the coastal highway for a little while, just enjoying the view, then started looking for someplace to have lunch. It was a rather late lunch, but my perspective on time was pretty much out the window at this point in the trip anyway. After lunch I headed back to the hotel, napped, and read until Heather got back. We got cleaned up and headed to the rehearsal.

The wedding location was beautiful. I spent some time just enjoying looking around the area, and then looking for interesting pictures to take of the rehearsal. It was the first rehearsal I have been to where I didn’t have a role of some sort in the wedding. Rehearsals are less interesting to watch than to be in. I probably could have been more aggressive taking pictures, but there was a professional on hand, and I didn’t want to get in the way. The dinner that followed was really nice, but for the sake of brevity, I wont give you the play-by-play.

Saturday:

Heather and I got up early and drove out to the beach. We were able to spend about an hour walking along the beach. It was easily my favorite hour of the entire weekend. Heather wouldn’t allow any pictures, something about having rolled out of bed and gone straight to the beach. You will just have to take my word for it that she was beautiful, and the beach was amazing in the early morning. We then headed back to the hotel, where Heather was soon picked up by the bridal party on their way to the salon to get hair done. This left me with something like seven hours to kill, so I headed back to the beach, dressed to swim. I soon discovered that the water was really cold, and that swimming by yourself is kind of boring. The waves were kind of rough, so I don’t know that Heather would have been up for swimming, even if it hadn’t been so cold. I then headed back into town to find some lunch, and a new book, having finished both of the books I brought with me.

I spent the afternoon sleeping, and reading, then headed over to the wedding. Conditions for the wedding were perfect. A very light breeze was blowing, and the temperature was something like 75 degrees. It may have been a little warm for the guys in the tuxes, but from where I was setting it couldn’t have been better. I won’t go into detail of the wedding, Heather keeps telling me I describe things in odd ways, but the short version is that it was beautiful.

After the wedding, we danced a little, walked down by the beach, and realized what time we would have to get up to make our flight the next day. All of those things were memorable, two of them because they were fun. By the time we got back to the hotel and into bed it was midnight, setting us up perfectly for the next day!

Sunday:

We started the day at 4:20 (EST), and managed to be packed and on the road by shortly after 5. An hour and a half later we managed to find our way into the car return area of the Orlando airport, despite their “signage so bad you would think its personal” policy with respect to rental returns. We stood in a number of lines eventually making it to our flight just as they called for boarding, leaving just enough time to hit the bathrooms before piling onto the plane. It is at this point that I started reading “Dauntless” its 304 pages long. By the time we landed (the captain said something about a headwind slowing us down) I was 3/4 of the way through the book. We landed in Kansas City, and Heather’s mom picked us up. We napped for an hour or so, and then went to lunch. After lunch we loaded up and drove to Omaha. I didn’t feel like I could sleep until I unwound some, so I ended up finishing the book, bringing my grand total to 3 for the weekend…

Speaking of books, this post got really really long, sorry. It should have been a multi-post thing, but here it is.

-Jordan

Punt!

Posted on by Jordan

Heather and I made it back from Florida!

In the next day or two I hope to get a nice summary post up, but I am still recovering from the trip.

This post is mainly just to say I don’t see any hope of getting the gallery hosted on this site ordered properly in a timely manner. Having admitted that fact, I just pushed the entire Picasa gallery online, neatly side-stepping the entire issue.

The gallery can be found here

I plan to have a link to those off the main site in a day or so too.

For people wishing to order prints, I hope to get a handful of the best pictures from the wedding hosted here, in their full resolution glory, for that purpose. In the meantime, I can always e-mail them out if somebody knows what they want.

-Jordan

Up Up And Away!

Posted on by Jordan

Heather and I will be Heading to Florida for Chrissie’s wedding. The same Chrissie who was in our wedding, and now in a nice turnabout, Heather gets to be in her wedding. I will be mostly trying to avoid getting sunburned.

I feel bad saying this, but I am hoping this weekend isn’t another of the hit and miss amazingly nice spring weekends Omaha has been seeing. That would be such a waste 🙂

-Jordan

Wrapped Up Another Month

Posted on by Jordan

Heather and I just finished our first full month using our budgeting system. I won’t go into detail, except to say it was fairly painless. I don’t know how much of our success was due to our really being on the same page, or due to the fact that very little happened last month to complicate things.

We are loosely following Dave Ramsey’s system. I never would have guessed being married to a business major with some accounting classes under her belt, that I would be the one to get to do all the detail work of getting the budget together and keeping track of receipts. Somehow that’s how things worked out though. I shouldn’t complain though, Heather has been really supportive, and I am happy with the system I worked out.

As I mentioned a few days back, we finished paying off my Escape. Our next goal is to build up a substantial “emergency fund.” We are using <online bank’s name censored> for an online savings account, it’s not quite by the FPU book, but I had an account with them already, and they sync really well with the existing <bank name censored> accounts I have. Back when I opened my account the interest rate was incredible too… It’s not quite as good now, but still considerably better than just a normal savings account.

-Jordan

** note: my editorial review board felt naming the banks posed a security threat, so the post has been edited accordingly.

A Milestone Of Sorts

Posted on by Jordan

Not too much to post about today, but I wanted to observe that, according to site-meter, there have been over 1000 visitors to heatherandjordan.com!

given the number of ways browsers can be hidden from sitemeeter, its not a hugely meaningful number, but interesting none the less.

also, Heather and I got the picture DVDs burned over the weekend. Now we just have to figure out a way to mail them safely. I also uploaded the entire CD worth of pictures to the website, but as I feared the order is a colossal mess, and we are still trying to decide what to do. Plan A would be to re-order the pictures in the gallery, plan B is to cull the album down to a handful of our favorites so they aren’t so painful to sort.

I will keep you posted 🙂

-Jordan

Finished A Few Things!

Posted on by Jordan

Ok, so its going to be a short list… But I am still excited about it.

Over the weekend, Heather got the finishing touches on the picture CD that has been in production for months now! We still have to burn copies, but having the pictures all together, edited and in order is a huge step. I hope to upload them to this website soon, but may end up settling for a Picasa web album as I know Gallery is going to mess up the order of the pictures. I don’t really relish the thought of fixing the order one-by-one in their clunky web interface when there  are over 500 pictures in the album.

The second item is my car loan! Its an amazing feeling to be done paying that off. Heather and I were planning to aggressively work on that loan, as per the Dave Ramsey school of thought, but we were afraid it would take much longer to actually knock anything out. We are very grateful for the generous gifts people gave us for the wedding, allowing us to get a huge head start on that.

-Jordan

Didn’t Make It to Oz Last Night

Posted on by Jordan

The weather forecast was pretty dire yesterday afternoon. As the evening progressed, the sky to the west started to look rather dire too. Heather and I were setting on our bed, looking out the window while keeping one eye on the weather maps via. the laptop. We have a rather good view looking west, there is basically nothing blocking our line of sight for miles.

At some point during the more exciting part of the storm, I started pondering the fact that our apartment was rather exposed. The complex is named “Whispering Hills” I started thinking of new, more accurate names:

  • Wind-Raked Hills
  • Wind Buffeted Hills
  • Roaring Hills

I am sure there are more, but I can’t seem to think of them right now. In the end, the storm didn’t amount to much more than some wind and rain. I was thinking the entire time that I should take pictures, but the lighting wouldn’t have been great, and wind is remarkably hard to photograph. It would have been ideal to have some sort of web-cam rig doing a picture every five seconds, then I could have stitched together a video showing how quickly it got dark, then light again once things blew over.

-Jordan

Mid Week Updates

Posted on by Jordan

I went to the dentist today! I really don’t have much of a story to post. Its odd though, I went almost six years without going to the dentist, and when I finally went in had a grand total of two cavities. Six months later, I go back in and have two more cavities. The worst part is that I eat so much less of the kinds of things that would encourage tooth decay now. The only consolation is that the cavities were declared “minor” whereas the ones I had before required hours of grinding to remove.

In less dental related news, I feel really guilty about not having pictures posted on the website yet. Heather nearly had the photo set for the CDs ready, and I was going to load the same set to the website. Unfortunelately somehow I broke the smoke and mirrors that Picasa uses to do its “I auto-save as you work, but don’t write out to disk until you click save” as you edit pictures. Lucky for us it only damaged something like three pictures. Between that and the sheer number of thank you cards Heather still has to author, enthusiasm for the photo project has been pretty thoroughly sapped. I still hope we can get something started on that before the end of this week.

-Jordan

Decorating

Posted on by Jordan

Heather claims that we are *done* decorating the apartment now. That statement comes with the implicit disclaimer that once she gets wedding pictures ordered, we will get to take down all the frames on the walls and load them with new pictures.

Not to say that I dislike the decorations we have, or even minded putting them all up, I just didn’t realize we needed so many.

decorating

That’s me, hanging one of a number of stars we just recently added to the walls in our bedroom. The decorations look good now, and will look great once we have pictures of people we actually know in the frames! 🙂

As of this past weekend, I finally found a home for every last wedding present. The weekend before that, I spent a fair amount of time hiding cables and computers. Before I got married I honestly couldn’t think of a reason you wouldn’t want over-sized computer cases, and who cares what color they are, as long as they have good airflow and the internal layout is easy to work with. As it turns out, huge blue glowing PC towers are offensive to the apartment decor. Also, the idea of CAT-5 cable running to all corners of the apartment was a tough sell, I did manage to hide it pretty well. Maybe Heather is just graciously ignoring it…. I wont ask 🙂

I am still trying to track down a replacement TV connector for an NVIDIA 7800, and our media center will be hooked up and running on the TV. Heather has the decorations looking amazing, sans pictures, and we don’t have huge piles of sutff in the corners! It seems like we should have people over to visit just to see how nice it is now, but a two bedroom apartment can get pretty crowded… So I won’t invite everyone over at once 🙂

-Jordan