A green wedding?

Once a week, I put out some time catching up on my favorite's blogs. I do not have a big list of blogs, only about 5 blogs, so within an hour I can be up-to-date with all of them. In Anne Ruthmann's blog she described an idea of Green Wedding photo services, in which it reduces or eliminates possible wastes. For example, do not print a photo unless it's going to be framed. Do not send out photo products, but create photo slide show or put up high resolution photos online instead. It sounds unreasonable at first, but the more I think about it, it makes sense. However, this would not work for my mom. The computer mouse was not design to compensate for her trembling hands. So, how could I convince her to use the online album instead of stack and stack of photos bound by rubber bands?

My mother still favors prints of the grandson's wedding over the online slide show I made. She also has her own system of organizing those 4x6s, so she does not need standard photo albums. For past time, my mom performs her own artistic cropping of pictures. No need of the Photoshop's aid, just a pair of scissor will do. She can put together a 11x20 photos collage, with each picture carefully trimmed out by hand just to show the interested subject. Together one by one, she has photos of the whole family root to cover the wall.

Each time I visit my mom, I always want to check out her photo products. And each time, I notice a bit of new thing. Whether it's a face of a grandson or nephew, she cut it out of its own print and paste it on a larger print. So, I think, just for my mom, I continue to make prints and feed her the raw materials to keep our family photo root tree up-to-date.

A morning in Nags Head

We were in Nags Head, North Carolina for the 2008 Thanksgiving. It is getaway kind of vacation. None of us has ever been there during the cold winter months, so we just want to try it. For being a famous summer vacation spot, we knew that the town is going to be empty in November. Another reason is that we definitely want to relax, go with the flow, do whatever we feel like, and don't have to cook the bird if can help it. Isn't that what holidays supposed to be? It took us around 5 hours to get there, but as soon as we stepped in the rented condo, we realized that it's worth the trip. We got there around 8pm, the sun already went down for couple hours now. Opened the sliding door to the big balcony facing the ocean, I was looking for the ocean but it was too dark; though I can hear the wave crashing on the beach. Leaning against the balcony I was enjoying the ocean sound, the gentle breeze, the salt water smell and quickly realized ... "What stress? I long left it behind and did not even miss it."

Woke up early in the morning the next day, ran out to my favorite spot: the balcony, to see the ocean, the wave, the sand and the sun rise. It was just a beautiful sight. Went in and made coffee. Anh Linh was still sleeping on the couch in the living room. The kids were sleeping in their room. Hương was already up, but did not want to get out of that toasty, comfortable king bed. Chị Lan was still sleeping in her room. I don't blame her for her flight came in pretty late on Monday. The place was quiet except for the waves. Nothing beats early morning drinking coffee, looking out the ocean, watching sun rise, and see dolphins swim.