It was a cold week, last week.  Thursday was a cold and foggy day and, as the day progressed, the trees and bushes slowly covered themselves in a layer of hoar frost.  I kept hoping for the sun to break through and shine some light – oh, what a beautiful sight that would have been, but it wasn’t to be.  The next day it was all gone.

It was another 100°+ day yesterday – 101° to be exact.  Too hot to work out in the yard, although I did do a weed check of the front yard.  My front yard looks awesome, by the way, with the exception of a couple of dry spots in the lawn that just won’t green up.  Ugh.

Yesterday morning the dogs got me up at 5:30 am.  On a Saturday!  I sat down at my laptop at 6:00 am fully intent on catching up on blog visits, but I remembered that I didn’t get all of the files downloaded from www.brand-ography.com that I mentioned in a post a few days ago.  I got my download started and noticed a link that sounded interesting so I went there and spent a couple of hours (yes, hours) checking it out.  It led me to someplace else where I spent an hour or so, which led me to another site and then another site, and so on and so forth.  I did manage to get a nap in there somewhere.  Anyway, I didn’t get restarted on my blog catching up until later in the evening and I didn’t completely catch up.  I will finish that today.

Tomorrow I will share some of those resources and links with you.  I think I bookmarked them all (eyeroll).

Sunday Spotlight with international flare.

• Luca Bobbiesi (aka BoB) is from Italy and he caught some spectacular light on his Memories in the Dust blog.
• Mohammadreza Rezania from Iran has some very creative portraits.  Check out My Bit Life for more inspiration.
• Olivier Jules is a master at HDR.  I’m not sure if this ocean shot is HDR or not, but I love it.  I do believe Olivier is from Italy.
• Sebastian Wahsner of cozmopics.de does a lot of portrait shots.  He always captures the intensity of the eyes.  Sepp is from Germany.

…and a dollar short.  Sunday was 100°.  I have no idea what the official temp was yesterday, as it wasn’t available at this writing, but it was much cooler and a whole lot windier.  I love all the little dots of bokeh in this shot, created from all the puppy dog  paw prints of Buddy and Buster.

I’ve been looking online for the last couple of months or longer for a “mother of the groom” dress.  The official mother of the bride dresses that you find on bridal dress sites are so over the top, not to mention expensive.  I’ve since been looking on other, more traditional, sites like jcrew.com, barriepace.com, macys.com, etc.  Do you have any suggestions as to where I can look online for a nice dress that would be wedding appropriate?  What are your favorite places to shop online?

Yes, Christmas in July.  Friday and Saturday we had temps of 100° or greater.  Whenever it does that, I’m posting a photo to remind me of the cold of winter and to quit whining.