Kelley Bromley

The time had come. My hair was so long that it was starting to bother me and it took forever to wash. I never did anything with it but tie it back in a ponytail. It had no style. It deserved a better home. Since I had planned on cutting it pretty drastically I decided to donate it to charity — the first thing that came to mind was Locks of Love, but I saw that this was for people in the United States. Then I found Pantene Beautiful Lengths, which accepts hair donations to make wigs for cancer patients in collaboration with the Canadian Cancer Society. So I printed my form, researched on the web for a Vancouver stylist who would tell me what would look good on me, and headed out!

You can see the results by clicking on the image, it will take you to the gallery where I have before and after shots. I LOVE the haircut! It’s the best hair cut I’ve had in my entire life. I went to Taylor Smit at Ego Salon on Granville Street and he was amazing. I didn’t really know what I wanted, and he convinced me to go shorter than I had anticipated because he had to cut off some of my dead ends before donating my ponytail and we wanted to donate as much as possible — over a foot! There were layers, which I was afraid of since the last time I had layers it looked more like a mullet… granted, it was a $12 hair cut from First Choice Hair Cutters, so I guess you get what you pay for. He chose the style and cut my hair and it is so easy to maintain! I even got a fringe! I will go back there for all my hair cuts until I move away from BC, LOL.

For those who are still left in the dark, Lionel and I are expecting our first child, a boy, in mid- to end-October. We’re very excited! We had our ultrasound on May 23, 2008. Unfortunately we couldn’t take a video — we bought an HDTV camcorder for this purpose, but it was against hospital policy. In fact, the technician said that if she caught Lionel she would ask him to leave. We thought that was a bit unnecessary, as we are very cooperative people, but there it was.

During the procedure the technician didn’t want me to ask questions because she was concentrating, and I couldn’t really see the screen, so Lionel would tell me what he was seeing every now and then — torso, foot, head, etc. She had some trouble getting some of the pictures and she shook my abdomen kind of roughly and I could see the baby shaking around! Eep. She said he was fine though. After she got her measurements and determined that everything was OK she was nice enough and showed us Baby’s face, feet, etc. It was hospital policy not to tell the parents the sex of the baby, but we asked very nicely and she said it was a boy — and yup, the image confirmed it. Definitely not a girl!

When we heard it was a boy Lionel and I just looked at each other and were like, “Uh oh!” We didn’t have a name picked out for a boy! We still don’t… but we’re working on it. All this time I was envisioning that it would be a girl, I guess because we have two nieces and I found it easy to imagine, and we had a name picked out for a girl, l and I was imagining my life raising a little girl… then this was kind of a shock, lol. I’m happy of course — we wanted more than one and I think it’s best to have an older brother, it worked out great for me!, it’s just that I was surprised. We’re going to get peed on!

We have to wait 30 days to get the digital copy of the ultrasound photos, but the technician gave us a print out of a few that we’ve scanned in. Click the image to see the rest!

Ok, so in other posts I have mentioned that I found some old photos that I had scanned years ago when my screen resolution was 800×600 and I thought 100dpi and a 300×400 picture was a good idea. The original scanning session, via parallel port, took forever, and it took me the majority of one summer to scan all the photos. Now, I thought these photos were left back in Newfoundland, but I was going through what I thought was my “photo box” and it turned out not to be filled with prints, but with ALL the original negatives! Now I had forgotten that I had packed these when moving from Newfoundland, as the majority of the packing happened in the wee hours of the morning, and in fact up to the morning the day the movers were scheduled to take our stuff. Anywho, when Lionel and I got to Vancouver we bought a flatbed scanner with a negative attachment that can scan 35mm film at 1200dpi and we tried it and they’re AWESOME! Of course most of the pictures were taken with a $20 Regal camera and are dark and horrid, but nothing a little photoshop won’t fix. I’m so happy! So, over the next few weeks I will work on the photos and have some nostalgic photos up from junior high and high school!

So Lionel and I upgraded to the Nikon D80 camera a few weeks ago with Linda and Charles’ help and we’ve really been enjoying it! I have some pictures of my greenhouse assembly to post, along with a big backlog of pictures from the Toshiba, but in the meantime I thought I would share these cool bug shots. THE CAMERA IS INSANE!!! If you look at the large version of the picture you can actually see the little hairs on it’s body!!

I’m not sure what kind of beetle this is but we see him or her every now and then on our patio, it sticks around for a few days, and then goes away for another month or two. Despite the long seven-story climb it never comes inside our house even though we leave the patio door open all the time. It likes to stay by the patio glass. When I saw it again I just had to take a picture! My attempts at documenting it with the Toshiba have been laughable and in no way as cool as these!

I’ve finally added some old pictures I scanned while I was still in Newfoundland. I’ve adjusted all of them, but I just wanted to point out some examples below.

Before	After	Description
		Repaired tears and folds. Could have done better, but I’m pleased with the results.
		Adjusted colour and levels, removed mold and burns, corrected for camera motion blur.
		Adjusted colour, levels, and smart sharpened.
		Repaired several folds, cloned over holes. Adjusted color and levels. Sharpened.
		Gradient color adjustment for nonuniform colour deterioration. Sharpened.
		Adjusted color and levels. Sharpened.
		Repaired fold, adjusted levels, sharpened.
		Gradient levels adjustment for nonuniform darkening. Sharpened.

To see these and other photos from the past visit my Oldies album by clicking the photo to your left. Lionel did a great job on Sam and Steve’s photos where they’re wearing sweaters and just graduated from Kindergarten because they were printed on textured paper and he removed most of the texture using a Fourier transform. You can see these by going to Sam or Steve’s album within Oldies.

Lionel and I are really trying to improve our eating habits. We picked up the book The World’s Healthiest Foods by George Mateljan as a guide and it’s FANTASTIC. He has done his research and has a lot of information on the biochemical properties of the food, and references nutrition journals. He’ll talk about ATP, reactive oxygen species, and enzymology, but in a way even someone not into the biosciences can understand. He selected foods that are not only nutrient dense (a lot of nutrients per calorie) but also affordable and available at many locations around the world. Each chapter tells you how to select and store the food, and great cooking methods which only take 5 to 7 minutes. Our cooking style was very similar to his to begin with, and we’ve kept some things he doesn’t recommend, heh, but the book has given us many useful ideas, especially when it comes to fresh produce and incorporating more vegetables into our diet.

In either case, I was so proud of the supper I made today that I had to blog about it :) I baked trout with fresh dill from our urban garden, butter, and lemon juice. I’ve done this a lot before but never with fresh herbs :) With that a made a chickpea salad with chickpeas, tomatoes, green onion, sunflower seeds, chopped pecans, and fresh cilantro and basil from the garden, seasoned with salt and pepper and a drizzle of olive oil.

To go with it I made a sweet tossed salad to balance the savoury chickpeas. I used romaine lettuce, cucumber, dried cranberries, and dried blueberries with raspberry vinaigrette. Woo! And to top it off as a snack that day we had edamame, which is steamed soy beans in the pods with salt, a really good chip substitute and delicious too!

Two days before this Lionel made an AMAZING pasta salad. He lightly steamed some fresh broccoli and mixed it with whole wheat bowtie pasta, tomatoes, boiled egg, fresh basil, dried oregano, olive oil, salt, and pepper. WOW. Best broccoli EVER!!!

I’m so excited to do some more cooking soon :)

Now that I don’t have a wedding to plan I can upload all the photos I’ve been meaning to upload! The following albums have been added:

Grouse Mountain	Terra Nova	Girl’s Night BBQ
James & Alyssa’s Wedding	I recently came across a bunch of very old pictures from when I borrowed everyone’s photos to scan during high school. Unfortunately at the time I had a parallel port scanner which went dead slow at 300dpi, so to speed things up I scanned everything at 100dpi. At the time it looked great on my 800×600 screen. Now most pics are 600×400 or less and wouldn’t even be able to be printed *sigh* but nice to have in any case. I’ll think about putting them up if there’s any interest.

Lionel has been wanting to make boerewors, a traditional South African sausage, for quite some time. Traditionally they are made of pork and beef, but since we don’t eat beef we decided to use lamb. On Monday we bought a beautiful boneless leg of lamb roast - 2kg worth. On Thursday we painstakingly trimmed the skin and fat away and cut it into pieces small enough to fit through the food grinder attachment of our KitchenAid. An hour and a half later we had a bowlful of ground lamb, excellent quality. Then we looked at it. Speckled throughout was pieces of grease from the food grinder. It was ruined. Now, this happened last time with carrots I was grating for a carrot cake (5lbs worth!), and so this time we were prepared and THOROUGHLY cleaned the device. But to no avail. Four pounds of lamb ended up in the garbage. This was quite upsetting. Did I mention we did all this after running 9.8 km the previous day, and me working from 6pm the previous day until 6:30pm that day, and then coming home to make sausage?! It hit us hard, heh.

So we went out and bought some ground lamb today and tried again. It was a success! Unfortunately the meat was ground very fine and was very lean (the recipe calls for bacon and we didn’t put it in). Next time the bacon goes in and we’ll request coarsely ground. In the meantime, the spicing was excellent!

Lionel and I received our wedding photos in the mail today. WOW! We got all the full resolution images on a DVD and they are CRAZY. Nate did an awesome job. He had such a great personality, was very accommodating, and took amazing photos. You can see his other work by going to his website, www.nategates.com.

Anyway, I have updated the gallery on my website — if you’d like to see the photos, follow this link. We haven’t decided which ones to make larger copies of, but the one on Signal Hill is pretty cool and a few at Bowring Park would make nice enlargements too!

I really love the photos he took at the reception. Besides the portraits we set up he took random photos during the night and those ones I find are the best. He didn’t get everybody in those kinds of shots, but here are some people he did get!

Lionel’s friend James recommended a garden store downtown called Art Knapps. It was great! It had everything you need to start an Urban Garden. We got a little carried away… Lionel wanted to get some basil, so we got a big pot of that and a massive planter to hang on the railing of our 7th floor apartment.

Well, after I got in there I wanted to garden too! I got a smaller planter and some Cilantro, Dwarf dill, and Parsley to go in it.

I also got some English Mint, but I’ll need to buy another pot for it. In addition, I got a baby tomato plant! Lionel wants to grow Campari’s from seeds, but even though we don’t know what kind of tomato these will be, the plant was only $2.49 and already had little tomatoes on it! So we got a nice terracotta pot and I gave it a home :)

I still have to plant my Mint, and I want to get one more small railing planter to put some flowers in, but for a start I think it’s looking pretty awesome! To see all the pictures, click here.