My camera arrived home last week and I immediately broke in the new lens by (what else?) taking pictures of the dogs:

Shortly after the camera returned the dogs and I went hiking.   Here are my favorite pictures (and video) from that trip:

Have you ever tried to pose a dog in front of a waterfall?  It’s quite amusing  (“Sit.  Stay.  Look pretty.  Good girl.  No, stay.  Don’t look at the waterfall.  Good girl.  Stay there. Look at me.  Good girl”).

The entire photo/video set is here.

I have been on a sock knitting kick for months now and lately I’ve stopped being monogamous and have been spreading my sock love around.  (I guess you could say I’m  a sock knitting hussy.)

These three pairs of socks are being knit from yarn that I dyed:

This pair is from a sock blank I received in a swap:

I am test knitting this pattern for the designer (isn’t it fantastic?):

I also have a blanket freshly on the needles:

I was absolutely overwhelmed and a little gobsmacked at the comments and emails that encouraged me to continue with my photo-a-day project.  Thank you so much for your kind words and the inspiration to continue.  I really appreciate it and you almost talked me into continuing the project.   However, I have decided not to continue the project.

I enjoyed taking a lot of photos and I did learn a lot in the short time that I took a picture every day.  However, the bottom line is that the commitment the project required ended up sucking a lot of fun out of both blogging and photography.  I had many days where I happily snapped a ton of pictures.  But, I also had more than a few days where I absolutely didn’t feel like taking a single picture and did not enjoy the process at all.

The project did teach me something, though.  Before the project I always had pictures I wanted to toss up on the blog, but I felt like if I posted a picture I needed to do a whole blog post about it and sometimes I just don’t feel like talking (seriously).  This project taught me that I can just post a picture and people will find it interesting.

So, moving forward I will sometimes do a ‘proper’ blog post and sometimes I’ll just post pictures that I’ve taken.

But, before we move forward, I’m going to look back for a moment. I went through all of my photos of the day and these are my favorites: