Man's best friend

Seeing Butters and Tony together just warms my soul.  The way he looks at Tony is the cutest thing.  He is always waiting for his first opportunity to lay a big kiss on Tony's nose!

Photo rejects

Tony and I have just started the process of getting our house ready for sale.  Soon we will be making the listing available on a public website, but for now we have started with just a private listing.  To help market the house, we put together a website containing pictures of each of the rooms and the features of the home.  You can see the finished product here: Snyder Cape Cod for Sale

Putting this together took longer than we expected, largely due to one little dog.  Butters feels the need to be in every picture he can get his paws in, and this was no exception.  We would finally set up the shot just right and then...

... yup... there's Butters.

Seriously, dog.  Can't you just handle not being the center of attention for one minute!!  I could swear he was just trying to pose right in the center of the shots.










And, then came the sneaky slide throughs: the shots where at the last minute he would fit his butt or head right into where I was aiming.  There were a lot of those.

 Yes, Butters.  Don't worry.  We could still see you.

Photography Walkabout

My Dad and I both share a love for photography.  We enjoy exchanging photos with each other, and it is fun to talk about different lenses, techniques, and processing.  We especially enjoy when we have opportunities to take photos together.  Something we discovered over the last year is the "Photo Walkabout."  We first tried this out last spring with a morning walk with the doggies.

With the walkabouts, we take photos of the same location from different angles.  We walk together but ignore what each other captures.  At the end, we put our photos together and compare what we each saw.   It is cool to see what we both noticed, and the aspects of the shooting spot that we saw completely differently.

This weekend, Dad and I tried this out again in a local cemetery in Ithaca, NY.  This very old cemetery has fallen into some disrepair, but the uneven tombstones and shadows from the ancient trees created some very interesting shots.  Here are the results:

On our way walking to and from the cemetery, we also tried out photographing the colorful fire hydrants from different angles.  The end collage was pretty neat:

Dessert Drinks

It has become a tradition over the last few years to end an Ithaca night with my parents over dessert and a special drink.  Tony has become the official mixologist recently, and boy can he make a tasty drink.  This weekend, the drinks Tony made were Irish coffees with a special twist.. a dash of amaretto!

 Perfect way to end the night, especially with the perfect dessert selection by my mom: German chocolate cake and strawberries!

The Pack

Being the only child dog in the household, Butters (our Cavalier King Charles Spaniel) is used to being king of the house

He has it pretty rough being all on his own...

This weekend, we made the trip from Buffalo to Ithaca to visit with my parents.  Butters loves the extra human kisses, but gets extra excited because he gets to hang with his buds: Missy (the Brittany Spaniel), Xena (the warrior princess chihuahua), and Molson (the golden retriever).  Now that he has been visiting several times, he has really formed a close relationship with his 3 pals.

He was naturally attracted to Missy when we brought him over for the first time.  I think he thought she was his mom, as she certainly looks like a much bigger version of him.  He would follow her around the house, try to lick her ears, and pounce on her face when she was sleeping.  The old girl was not ready for this young brat.  I think they have come to a mutual understanding now... no more pouncing!

Xena was the most confusing for him... I think he didn't know for sure if she actually was a dog.  With her one remaining tooth, she certainly let Butters know that she did not appreciate him tasting her tail!  Xena is the one in the house whom usually gets first pick of the laps, so she wasn't thrilled when this lap-hogging tyrant came in to steal her humans!  She is starting to come around on the sharing bit.
















... But, I think his favorite is Molson.  They were fast made best friends from the beginning.  Butters likes to snuggle with him the most, and luckily Molson is pretty agreeable.

It was called yellow...

At the beginning of our relationship, Tony and I were separated by many miles.  He was in his sophomore year at Clarkson University and I was a freshman at Cornell. We had spent our entire lives growing up in the same town, but it took 350 miles of distance to truly get to know one another.  After reconnecting through Facebook, we found ourselves talking night after night.  We would discuss many different topics, from books and science to pop culture and dreams for the future.  However, of all the topics that we shared, music was our favorite.  With the help of free iTunes codes hidden under Diet Pepsi bottle caps, we discovered songs together that grabbed our souls.  We would tear the lyrics apart and then piece them back together to find the meaning beneath the tunes.  And during the day, I found myself listening to these songs as I was studying and walking to class.  As I later learned, these songs lingered with Tony too. We fell in love to these songs. 

Of all the songs that we came across, “Yellow” by Coldplay was our favorite.  There was something about the feeling that the music left us with.  As we dissected the song, we identified with the lines.  The song seemed to capture exactly how we were feeling for one another: “Yellow” came to mean the glowing brightness of our relationship persisting despite the miles that stood between us.  It felt like this song was written about us, for us.  We fell in love to this song.

Years later, after Tony transferred to Cornell, we actually looked up what the Coldplay artists intended when writing the song.  It surprised us when we came across a 60 Minutes interview with lead singer Chris Martin.  In this interview, Martin tried to dispel to journalist Steve Kroft the meaning behind “Yellow.”  He laughingly said, "What's it about? F… knows… I've got no idea. I still think about that every day. I love playing it. I love the tune. I love the chords. I love the balloons that we use live. But I still can't quite work out what it's about.” 

To Tony and I, this couldn’t help but make us smile.  In the 7 years that we have been together, we have fallen asleep listening to this song.  We danced together to this song at our wedding, and we can’t help but hold hands when it comes on the radio.  To us, this song represents the times we share discovering and rediscovering it together.

This blog is about the “Yellow” things in life. I want to fill it with things that inspire me, stories to remember, and moments that catch me by surprise.  There certainly will be lots of photos (and probably a lot of them will be of my little doggie, Butters).  I have no idea what it is about yet, but I am looking forward to discovering it along the way.