I know. I know. I know. It’s been forever. I promise I’ll explain, but since it’s been so long, I thought I’d post 8 million photos this time. To start, here’s a few fun things we’ve done since Valentine’s Day in our own lives (at least the few things we have photos of):
1. Hosted a few couchsurfers for the first time. This fellow, Angelo, was an Italian passing through KC. He was kind enough to let me snap a photo of him
2. I worked on my mending skills (which are pretty sub par, unfortunately). Brian was convinced that these pants of European origin that we found at a secondhand store were meant to wear with the top button unbuttoned. The pants professed to be his perfect size but were… a little tight. As walking around with your pants unbuttoned in public is NOT acceptable in my book (unless you’re preggers), I went about creating some extra “room” for Brian in this pair. In the process I broke 2 sewing machine needles in addition to the machine itself and therefore had to finish it all by hand. Told you mending is not my forte.
3. We took a few headshots for our nextdoor neighbor, Dwon Littlejohn, who is running for sherriff. (Jackson County residents, check out his website here!) Who WOULDN’T vote for him? Not only is he stellar and nice, but his last name is also Littlejohn.
4. Brian has (clearly) been growing his hair out. A few weeks back, while sporting said caveman hair, we met a pretty inspiring South African dude named Kuzaan. Interestingly enough, he lives in Estonia, so we’ll be visiting him and his family in a few short weeks’ time.
5. We are those annoying cat owners that think our cats are adorable. So we’ve been playing with them more since we no longer have Angry Birds on the phones.
6. As I’ve been wanting to do a henna party with ladies for some time, I tried my hand (or in this case, foot) at doing my own henna one night while Brian was hanging out with a friend. (Word to the wise, the box says it takes 45 minutes to 1 hour to dry. If you are a newbie, like me, and put way too much on by accident, even if you blowdry your foot for over an HOUR after the first hour, it will still be wet. So do NOT start your henna at 9:30 at night if you need to be at work the next morning.)
So here’s the substance I promised.
On my birthday I wrote about giving up our iPhones. It was ridiculously hard, but ridiculously GOOD. It’s funny, we’ll go to some gathering these days and come home and I’ll realize when we walk in our front door that I haven’t thought about e-mail or facebook for HOURS. And that, my friends, is indeed a sweet satisfaction. Last week I even asked Brian to change my facebook password and not tell me the new one. I still get on, but he has to log me on and my visits are much much shorter. To not be held captive to this ridiculously fast-pasted, media-centric universe has been a wonderful breath of fresh air.
So that brings me to this blog at hand. As we’ve stepped away from media lately, it’s given us some new perspectives. (In fact, last week we started a visual media fast. No TV. No Hulu. No Netflix. No Movies. It’s been AMAZING.) In the quietness and solitude we have begun working harder at our marriage, at relationships with those around us, at mending things (as you can see above), at hosting strangers, at our spiritual journeys. And my friends, it has been sweet indeed.
As such, however, we’ve felt less of a pull or compulsion to do the continual blogging that we once tried to maintain. I still love writing and will do it from time to time, but a vast majority of Avia updates will probably be via our facebook fan page. (You can find it here.) Trying to maintain a blog and update the facebook page and keep up with our clients all while actually working is really mentally and physically exhausting. Many weeks I work from 8:00 in the morning to 6:30 at night Monday through Friday with no real lunch break and STILL have so much left to do in addition to the shoots and weddings we do on Saturday. So, in light of realizing that we need more real life interactions and less media ones, I’m afraid that this blog will be falling a bit to the wayside.
We’ll be heading out on Monday, April 3rd, for a three week trip to Eastern Europe. There we’ll be exploring a few countries and will hopefully post a few pictures here along the way. On that trip we’ll be doing some serious soul searching. Those of you that have followed us thus far already know we’re planning to move there by next spring. If this is your first time reading this, you may be surprised to find that out. Regardless, we’re pretty darn stoked.
So, dear friends, it’s been fun, but I’m afraid we’ll be here in virtual land quite a bit less. But we’ll be present in real world quite a bit more. So give us a call and come hang out when we get back. We’d love to see you. For serious.
And, because we love you, here are a myriad of photos we’ve done over the last month in addition to all of the album design I’ve been doing, Whew! No wonder we have no time to update the blog!:
Love and peace and all things new,
Mallory & Brian (Photos of the kitchen update. Can you tell we like color? Click on it to see it bigger if you’re into that kind of thing.)
