Pictures & Words, instead of the usual vice versa

Having finally acquired a camera phone, I'm snapping and clicking at regular intervals throughout the day.  Taking photos, too, LOL.  Starting to think more in terms of the visual.

So, here's some of that.  Old and new.

Age 7, pre-first communion.  I vividly remember biting the insides of my cheeks as I walked up the church aisle, trying to keep from breaking out in a nervous grin.  

This is the release of some balloons at a local stadium, a few weeks ago.  The occasion was a rally against youth violence in our community.  Good feeling of solidarity; seeing a diverse array of people all concerned with the same issue...

My mom (R) and her younger sister (L), wearing costumes Grandma made from scratch.  Grandma was a frustrated "Mama Rose," who always wanted to see her daughters on the stage.  She was always threatening to get me on the Lawrence Welk Show when I was small.

See?  I wasn't kidding about the geese.  This is but a sprinkling -- One afternoon I counted over 75.

"Mean Girls."  Colorized and everything...

Found this pepper in the store a few years back.  It really was huge; I posed it here for scale, but this picture doesn't convey how really unusually large it was. Especially for grocery-store produce, which most times is maddeningly uniform in size.

This is what one room in our house looked like just before we made our last move in 2006.  None of this is our stuff; it belonged to the guy who bought the house.  We technically rented from him for the last month.  With school still in session, we couldn't move until late May. So we cleared out one room for him and combined two as best we could:

Yikes...you better believe I don't miss THIS chaotic scene!

And while we waited for moving day, our house's new owner was already making some improvements on the  outside.  The driveway was too narrow for his taste, so he began widening it!

He soon got rid of nearly all the shrubs and trees.  We were relieved he didn't chop down the big front yard maple altogether, but he trimmed all the lower branches, giving it a distinctly unshady aspect.  All the shrubs in front got essentially chain-sawed down the same day we moved out!  The kitchen paint color went from a calm apricot to glaring yellow-green.  Until we went back and saw the transformation a couple of months later, we never understood the point of that TLC show "Moving Up."  Afterward, we could certainly relate.

Hard to believe that was only four years ago.  It could have been a lifetime, for all the changes we've experienced.

That's it for now.  Hope you enjoyed my random little slide show.