The Sprague Lab

And just like normal, no matter how hard I try, I keep missing days posting.

Last night was an adrenaline-and-okay-some-Diet.-Mt.-Dew-fueled race to the finish line as we held the registration for Candice Stringham’s digital photography class at JessicaSprague.com. The class sold out in less than 10 minutes, setting a new record, and nearly putting Jared in his grave for anxiety over whether the server would support the traffic. It slowed for a couple of minutes of heart-pounding action (see? This is what action is for geeks), and then came back just from the brink - there were times when we were getting 1000 connections a second.

Last night as we were going to bed I told him how proud I am of him and the server he built (we rent a dedicated box in a secure center - they provide us the hardware and Jared installed everything from the ground up),  he said, “Only a quad-core processor with 4 GB of RAM could have handled it.” And then he kissed me. MMM. What can I say? I love ‘em nerdy.

We also had some friends over for dinner for the FIRST time since our new backyard was done. We just barely escaped a rainstorm, and were able to grill chicken and hotdogs for the kids, and then roast marshmallows over our firepit (wood-burning, of course, since apparently Jared cannot call himself a man and have a gas-burning firepit). It was SO much fun. All 4 of the kids disappeared to the playset, and the parents sat around the firepit laughing and holding a little informal competition in marshmallow roasting. True to the nature of our personalities, I lit 3 in a row on fire, and Jared, ever the patient one, quietly rolled his in the heat for 10 minutes had three PERFECTLY roasted marshmallows literally drooping off of the skewer. That sort of sums up the difference between us right there. And why we make such a perfect team. It was also really funny to joke about how much his marshmallows that looked like flabby arms. HA. (As I licked marshmallow char off of my fingers…)

Back to the news:

• Candice will be offering another photography class this fall, so if you missed out on registration AND you own a digital SLR camera that you haven’t taken off of the Green Camera mode, check it out.
• I’ll be traveling this weekend to the First (Annual?) Spraground Meet-Up in Chicago. There’ll be nearly two dozen scrapbookers from all over the world who’ve found online homes and lifelong friendship, coming together for a fun weekend of par-tay! Can’t wait to meet some friends I’ve gotten to know online in the past year!
• Our awesome summer intern, Benjamin, is working hard on posting the Photoshop Friday tutorials from the index here to a much easier-to-use interface at JessicaSprague.com. Check his progress here as he gets more tutorials up! You can print, email, and save these tutorials to PDF files for further enjoyment! This will become the main hub for tutorials after they are posted here, of course!

You’ve no doubt noticed that the blog has been, ahem, a little lacking in photographic appeal lately. I blame that on needing to install my new copy of Lightroom and on not having a file server in working order. Both of these things were resolved over the weekend, so back to pictures! Yay! Except not now. ;) Now I must go wake up two sleeping kids.