I have a wedding outside of Austin to go to this weekend, we leave tomorrow and will stay the weekend with the wizard’s mama.  It’s for his cousin Jacob and his lovely fiance, who’ve been among our only friends since we’ve come to Fort Worth.  It’s one of those fancy affairs, I’ve actually done trial runs with my hair to try and figure out what I’m going to do with it.  My bangs have gotten to the point where I have to brush them to the side to be able to see, appointment to get them trimmed comes a week too late.  But I love weddings and especially wedding pictures.  The bride and groom always look so very happy.

This was my grandparents wedding, I can’t get over how adorable they both were.  And young, he proposed at her high school prom, he had graduated the previous year.  They recently celebrated their 56th wedding anniversary.  Not related to this post really, but I felt the picture was too good not to share.  They look like movie stars to me.  And I love that my grandmother is wearing glasses, I wish I could have done the same.  That dress is still hanging in her closet.  (Actually, my dress is still hanging in one of her closets too.)

While my mind was on weddings this week, I came across this website, OnceWed.com, with the most beautiful wedding blog which I spent HOURS looking through pictures on.  Go there and I warn you, it will make you want to plan a wedding.  When the wiz came home and saw what I was up to, I said it was making me want to do it all over again and he said he always figured we would renew our vows at 10 years and do things our way.  So yay!  Only gotta be married another 6 years and I get another wedding.  I know much better what I’m doing these days, I think it would be fun now.  I hated wedding planning the first time around.

Here we were sealing the deal.

Ok, so this month’s contest is a flimsy excuse for market research.  Time to put in for another order of business cards.  But it has a picture on both the front and the back and I thought an update on those would be nice, but I’m having trouble deciding which to use.  I’ve narrowed it down, so those of you kind enough to tell me your two favorite photographs from this list will be entered into the end of July giveaway.

Tell me your two favorite to be entered!

1. 2. 3.

4. 5. 6.

7. 8. 9.

That’s all it takes is your input and you’ll be automatically entered to win your choice of any one item from my SALE section.  Winner will be chosen in a random drawing.  I do believe this is the last month that this particular prize will be available, so if there’s anything you’ve had your eye on, this may be your last chance!  AND THANKS!

You have until Monday, August 10th to enter.  The winner will be announced on Tuesday, August 11th.

PS, if you’re curious to see my business cards, you can view the original here.

The wizard is proud to announce the redesign of his website.  I’m quite proud to announce it myself, I had a large part in the new look.  He’s been asking me for a while to pretty up his site and then he came to me last week with a more specific request for me to design mp3 player skin for him to use on his front page, so I finally did both.

He wanted percent meters for his Current Projects, so I started with those and they sort of set the stage for everything else.  I designed the Tuesday Night Story player skin in Photoshop and then our awesome friend David, whose voice you hear in the recordings, converted it into a working mp3 player in flash for the weekly podcasts.  Then I made 9 buttons to points of interest on his site which he coded to randomly appear in sets of three at the buttom of the page.  To make the rest of the website match, I redesigned his alternating banners to match and made him three new coordinating blog buttons.

His front page is now loaded with all these neat little features and I’m left feeling like I oughtta do some work on my own site.  But what?

Ok, not really.  But that hasn’t stopped my wish list from growing(or the desire for cooler climates!).  It’s just far too easy to find awesomeness on Etsy.  For real.

And I want it all.  You can find these lovely Sam-gifts(or you know, whoever) in my favorites or in the following shops: iamanie, artsychaos, necessityisthemother, HaveFaithBelieve, Bokononist, ashleydietrich, ReclaimTheThrone, beadstyle, lorenabarrezueta, backstashandbygones, BeSomethingNew, vintology, monkeysalwayslook, sagittariusgallery, VerseauVintage, and RoseLullabyDolls.

I know I just shared some pictures of my summer the other day, but I was just too excited about this not to share.  My sister-in-law I visited in Houston earlier this summer is a photographer, so once a year she takes new pictures of me and the wizard and once a year I get to feel like a model.  She’s so good.

These were all taken in a busy city park in the middle of downtown Houston on a weekday.  Traffic was slowing down to see what was going on, which was a little bit nerve wracking and very distracting.

Amanda’s taken pictures of us every year we’ve been married so far and we feel so lucky to have this sort of documentation of our life now, there aren’t any pictures of us in the 5 years we were together before we got married at all.  These are just a few of our favorites, if you’d like to see the whole set, you’re welcome to.  Now comes the difficult task of selecting just one to update my about page with.  It’s a very tough call.