February Birthdays

This past weekend we celebrated my nieces 12th birthday. Time should not be able to pass this quickly. It is always fun when we get the family together to celebrate such occasions. Her birthday usually starts them off for the year and then Anna's is the next one in May and then it is a monthly occasion after that.

In addition, we had cute babies to play with and watch explore. They are both 9 months old and crawling everywhere. Following are pictures of the cuties.

Lisa and Ella Marie stayed at our house so I was able to snap a couple of shots of Ella Marie. These are straight out of the camera with no editing.

More pictures to come later.

Photo Shoot

I mentioned that I am trying to improve on my photography skills. I really want to be able to take great pictures like people I see on Flickr. They inspire me to get better. My oldest daughter likes to pose for me and she is really photogenic. I like to use her for practice. We recently did a photo shoot of her and our neighbor Megan. I am posting some of those pictures below.

In my quest to get better, you may be able to tell that I need help in certain areas. Mainly, lighting. I have bought some heavy duty lights and also used a powerful light from the garage, but I can's seem to get the lighting right so that there are no shadows. I still need to work on that. Also, as you will see in some photos I have edited them. I got Photoshop software for Christmas and I have been practicing my editing skills. I can only do the basics so far. Look for improvement there also.

Now, here are a few photos from a photo shoot a couple of weeks ago with my girls, one of the neighbors and my neice.

Ice Storm 2010

Hello, allow me to introduce myself. My name is Kelly Metaxas and I am the owner of this here blog. I find it kind of ironic that the last post was of a significant snow because we get so few and that is what I am posting about today. This year however it was primarily ice with a little snow thrown in. I didn't get any pictures of the snow/ice or the girls in it because we didn't really get out in it because ice is just no fun. Instead, I am including a picture of what happened to our house as a result of this ice.

We discovered this lovely huge spot in our garage that was leaking about 1:00 Sunday afternoon. My daughter saw it when she was going outside to shovel the driveway! That would have lasted all of five minutes if she had gotten there. As you can see in this picture, this hole is about the size of a sofa in length. It was just dripping when we noticed it and we were clueless of where it could be coming from. There are no bathrooms or anything to leak in that wall. The playroom is directly above that. So, we called our neighbor over because he used to do some plumbing work when he was in the service. We cut the sheetrock out so we could track the source of the leak. Apparently it is from the weight of the ice just sitting on the roof. Our gutters are clogged up with ice and so nothing was really draining so I guess the melted ice had to find somewhere to go. We really don't think we have a leak per se because we have never had any problems with that in the past. We have decided to just patch the hole and wait for another rain storm to see if it leaks anymore before we file a claim and search our roof for the leak. If we were to file a claim our insurance will likely go up because it will be our third claim. We filed for damage on our other house from Hurricane Elvis and then electricity hit our house about a year ago. We think our deductible is about $500 and it should be less than that to repair the hole.

So, that is my storm story of the Ice Storm of 2010. The schools were out on Friday because that is when the ice storm came. They are out again today even though the sun melted a good deal of it yesterday. The rural roads in the northern part of the county still have ice on them so we get a day off. The girls are excited. It is going to be hard to get them back in the groove because I don't think they have gone a full week since Christmas and they have a day off next week for President's day.

I am trying to take more and more pictures to improve my photography skills. I am going to try and post some of those pictures so I can track my progress. I hope to be able to see an improvement over time. So, for the future that will be my sole purpose of posting on this blog. Let's see if I can keep that up!