Photo of the week – from a trip to the science center with my husband and nephew.

I love how this shot turned out.

I’m glad to hear that most New Jersey residents like myself hate Jersey Shore and wish it would go away. (People.com)

Entertainment Weekly did a “Sexy Beast” competition and here is the final results bracket. (EW.com)

1001 Free Fonts!

My Little Pony as Lady Gaga? Love.

Click here for more pictures of the Lady Gaga My Little Pony from Spippo on DeviantArt.

11 ways to promote your Facebook page outside of Facebook. (JohnHaydon.com)

I know it’s been everywhere, but this is such a great song, and the fact that it is so upbeat and happy makes it so much better. Not safe for work!

Week 15!

Photo of the week, from a few weeks ago. We spent the day with our nephew and met up with our grandfather/great-grandfather for dinner at the slightly-famous Tick Tock Diner.  The sky was beautiful and so I took some shots.

I need a makeup lesson from the beautiful Keiko Lynn, and she lets us in on some of her secrets here.

Your Followings Will Affect Your Social Media Experience, from Corvida Raven of SheGeeks. This was posted a long time ago but is still totally relevant.

Jamie Hyneman of Mythbusters gave the commencement speech at Villanova University in May. Here is the transcription of that speech.

I’ve been a big pop music fan for my whole life it seems. However, Lady Gaga is a genius and I love her more and more every time I see something new from her, and her little video announcing herself as “Queen of Twitter” is no exception.

I was really pleased today that a photo I took a while back is appearing on Time Out New York’s website in the Apartment section!

My friend Kelly Kreth is featured, her apartment is designed around the colors black, white and red.  It’s pretty spectacular and you should definitely check out the photos.

Had to take screenshots of my images though – my husband‘s photo of Kelly’s awesome dog Mini appears as well.

My image of Kelly on the TONY Apartment section homepage.

Wider shot of the photo of Kelly against the wall, on the same wall.

Will's photo of Kelly's Dachschund, Mini.

Miss Darling has questions this week on marriage.

Let’s talk marriage!

Love & marriage, love & marriage, go together like a horse & carriage…

I look slightly crazy, but this is one of my favorites from that day.

1. How do you feel about marriage as a concept? Realistic? Romantic? A pipe-dream?

I didn’t think about it too much until I met Will, who I knew I wanted to be with for the rest of my life pretty much as soon as we met. I think it is very realistic for many people.

2. Do you think you’ll ever want to get married?

I already did, almost 4 years ago!

3. If you did get married, would you want a big blow-out celebration or would you keep it low-key?

We went through lots of back-and-forth about planning our wedding. We were having it here in NJ, then we were thinking about having it in Florida because I grew up there, then we wanted to go to Las Vegas, and then we ended up back in New Jersey.  It was definitely the biggest party I’ve ever planned, although it was small to some people at only around 120 guests.

My next wedding will be a vow renewal on 11-11-11, which is our 5-year anniversary and is just cool.  We will be going to Las Vegas for this one – I am bouncing between trying to find something beautiful and classy and on the other end of the spectrum, finding a spectacularly cheesy chapel with Elvis performing the ceremony. I do know that I want another dress, no matter where we end up.  Also on the list? A better photographer.

4. If you are married now, how has that changed your relationship?

I didn’t think it would matter or change anything, but mostly it solidified the fact that we have created our own little family, and we are officially allowed to make that a priority.  I’m sure some people have it all figured out and are fine without being married, but it really is a big thing to legally tie yourselves together in that way and there are many traditional people still in the world that will not respect your relationship the way it should be respected until you are married.

5. If you’re married, how did you celebrate it? Knowing what you know now, would you have done it differently?

I know that what we had was smallish compared to some of the crazy weddings I’ve been to, but we still had quite the soiree. Everything was in a hotel as we had something like 90%+ of the guests coming in from out of town. We had the ceremony in a ballroom, and it was performed by one of my closest friends, who I had gotten ordained online. (It is totally legal in the state of NJ.) The ceremony was about 8-10 minutes long, and I wrote it using a book on, you guessed it, “writing your own wedding ceremony.” We had a little bit of traditional stuff, a reading from Neruda, we wrote our own vows, and ta-da! Married.  It was short and sweet and by the time it was done, everyone was able to get to the cocktail hour on time. Cocktail hour was ridiculous – 4 stations where hot food was being prepared, other food being passed by waiters, and huge displays of cheese, bread, etc. I never really saw any of it, which is too bad.  I would go back now and take pictures of my own – I had my point-and-shoot camera with me but only took one photo during the wedding.

Dark, but cute. This was at our little table.

Then we moved upstairs to the ballroom on the top floor (with a lovely view of the NY skyline), and ate more food and drank and danced and had a great time. It is a complete blur in my head, but it was really fun. The best thing about weddings is that for a couple, there is almost no other time that all of those people who have been in your life for one reason or another will ever all be in the same place again.  This is especially true for us because we both don’t live near where we grew up.

It was a beautiful day, even though the stress leading up to it was pretty ridiculous. I am looking forward to Vegas re-wedding.

Photo of the week:

I actually have new photos! My husband and I went to a fair yesterday and saw this chicken with lots of ribbons and a trophy.

It's a prize-winning chicken.

The rest of the photos of my visit to the fair are here.

While I’m promoting my own stuff, I’d like to call out a post I wrote late last week for The Daily Wishlist. 5 tips for starting your holiday shopping now!

25 Common Media and Web Marketing Mistakes. (Online Social Networking)

Nutella Caramel Hazelnut Brownies? Are you kidding me? (The Pioneer Woman)

I’m going to Florida next month, and we’ve obtained reservations at Bern’s Steakhouse. If you’re in the Tampa area and looking for a great meal with some fabulous ambience, I highly recommend it.

This company recovered my hard drive.

How to tie a scarf, for girls (mostly). (Wikifashion)

If you read this blog, you know that I’m a massive fan of Mythbusters. Here’s a video of Adam Savage giving a presentation on obsessions at the Entertainment Gathering in December 2008.

From Miss Gala Darling.

What were your family vacations like?

Where did you go? What did you do? What always happened? What was the best holiday you took together? What was the worst?

My sister on the left, me on the right, Mickey in the middle.

We did a lot of vacations when I was a kid – my parents always took us somewhere. The photo here is from a trip I have a bit of memory of – although we didn’t do the Disney thing too much, especially once we moved to Florida.  We went on a lot of cruises, but that was more in my tween/teenage years.  The cruises were fun even though all 4 of us in the one room was a bit tricky.

I think my favorite of our trips was a cruise to Bermuda when I was around 13 – I got to ride on the back of the moped with my Dad.  My poor brother rode with my mom and they crashed a little bit.  Anyway, that trip was great, it was really beautiful there.  We always had fun though, and did a lot of snorkeling and torturing my mom.

I can’t think of anything as being the worst. Maybe the cruise where we went to St Maarten (amongst other islands). My brother and I stayed in the sun WAY too long and ended up getting hideous sunburns. My chest had actual blisters, which matched well (sarcasm) with the lace dress I had to wear for “cruise formal night.”  Ahh, memories.

I’ll always be grateful for the trips we took with our parents when growing up – we always had a good time.

Photo of the week. An old one from a trip to Seattle a few years ago. I took this from the top of the Space Needle.

Seattle is one of my favorite cities.

Twitalyzer has cool Twitter stats. I love stats.

Are all URL shorteners created equal? From Edelman Digital.

This should maybe be posted on The Daily Wishlist, but oh well. Here’s a gallery of fabulous jewelry for geeks, from Mashable.

I have a few videos to add this week too.

This video is from late 2009. Tori Amos, performing one of my favorite songs of hers live – “Doughnut Song.”

My friend Kelly made this hilarious video about wanting all of your friends to have Blackberry Messenger. I love to BBM so I found this hysterical. It is NSFW.

This next video is an excerpt from the Life series.  My husband bought it for us, but because he knows what is up, we have the BBC version, narrated by David Attenborough.

Anyway, this video shows 2 Clark’s Grebes in a mating ritual. It isn’t dirty or anything. I find it particularly touching and it makes me so happy to watch. I think that true love feels like what the dancing birds look like at 2:04 in the video.

From Miss Gala Darling, Curious Tuesday 011.

1. What is your style direction for the upcoming season?

Fall, please be here right now so I can start wearing jeans and cute sweaters and go photograph things.  Seriously, I own many pairs of jeans and many black sweaters. I get my pop of color from whatever camisole thing I put under the sweaters which are generally v-neck.

We load up on photography outings in the fall.

2. What is your favourite song right now?

My husband messaged me today with news that Scala & Kolacny Brothers had covered Nine Inch Nails’ “Underneath It All” and I’ve been listening to it on repeat all afternoon. Haunting and gorgeous.   Otherwise, I don’t have a big favorite of the moment, I’ve been listening to lots of stuff.  Here’s the NIN cover:

3. What’s your best love advice?

Don’t be with someone you don’t trust. Period.

4. Who is the most exciting person you’ve met recently?

I can’t really think of anyone particularly exciting, at least to me.

5. Are you doing anything wonderful this week? What is it?

Tomorrow I am getting to hang out with my younger nephew ( I have 2), so I’m looking forward to that. I’ve been having fun with the Coach Poppy Project on The Daily Wishlist, although I’m getting creamed by the competition there.  Lots of good things.

Photo of the week. From a day out at the park – check out my sparkly nail polish. My husband thinks that I look scary in this photo, but whatever.

Artistic interpretations of the Twitter fail whale. (URLesque)

4 Reasons Lady Gaga has Fans and You Don’t. (Mack Collier)

I think I’ve mentioned that I am exposed to a lot of wedding blogs and such now, with the new job? Anyway, here are beautiful photos of a vintage-inspired wedding with lots of DIY touches. Beautiful. (StyleMePretty)

Flickr stream of the week – Rosie Hardy is so young and brilliant. If I had her manipulation skills, I would probably be doing it for a living.

Video: High Fidelity is one of my favorite movies. I’ve watched it a few times in the last few weeks, it is crazy quotable and the music is great and you should watch it again if you’ve seen it, and if you haven’t seen it, get on it.

Anyway, here’s a scene from the movie.

Photo of the week. From last year’s NJ Hot Air Balloon Festival. I haven’t been taking a lot of photos lately so I’m reaching back a bit.

Angelina Jolie wore an amazing red dress to the Salt premiere in Moscow. I love her. (Red Carpet Fashion Awards)

An introduction to smoke art photography, from Digital Photography School.

Loyalty lessons from Lady Gaga, from the Church of Customer blog.

Some cute free backgrounds for Twitter.

An update to a previously wonderful slide set, Marta Kagan has created “What The F**k is Social Media NOW?

This week’s video is the first music video from Lady Gaga. This song came up on my iPod in shuffle the other day, and I remember seeing the video watching NewNowNext on Logo and thinking “I love this girl!”  Then she became a megastar.  Anyway, I love the video.