Thursday, August 25, 2011

Old Ugly Photos

I enjoy my cameras. I picked up photography as a hobby around our 2nd trip to Africa when I got a real DSLR camera. Since then I've been taking lots of photos and videos with that camera, my Lumix point-and-shoot, video camera, and iPhone. I first started using Instagram about a year ago. It's an easy-to-use iPhone app with a social feature. It also allows you to use "lomography" style filter to make your photos looked aged, bring up the temps, etc.
We've been lucky enough to go to the same beautiful destination in the British Virgin Islands for several years straight. I've taken the same pictures year-after-year. So this year I was excited to do something different using Instagram. I think my photos were fun.......
Mike Newell from Mouse World Radio and the WDW Today Podcast posted this on Facebook July 7th:

Holly joined the conversation:

So I join in and "promote" my art:







you can link to the jvdpics site from our Links section on the right. Here are some samples:

http://jvdpics.tumblr.com/archive

http://jvdpics.tumblr.com/archive

So...Art or Ugly?

Tuesday, August 16, 2011

Chicago Rock 'N' Roll Half Marathon

August 14th was Chicago's 3rd Rock 'N' Roll Half Marathon. We'll have more to post about the event in a few days. Until then, here's the video.

Saturday, August 13, 2011

Chip & Dale Relay Medal and other New RunDisney Medals

Holly was at the Rock and Roll Half Marathon Chicago Expo yesterday and visited the RunDisney booth.  At the booth they displayed the new medals for all the upcoming races.  Here are a few of the medals:

Chip and Dale Relay



Mickey Marathon


Goofy Challenge


Halloween 5K


TinkerBell Half





Thursday, August 11, 2011

Pin Trading Update: June Hidden Mickeys

Pin trading has become a part of our Disney vacations. Here's how it works:
  • You buy official Disney pins
  • You bring them to Walt Disney World with you
  • You stare at Cast Members, who wear pins on lanyards, for an awkward amount of time and wander through stores much longer than you'd like
  • If a Cast Member has a pin you like you ask them to trade with you for one of your pins
That's a real simple explanation. We mentioned in our vinylmation update that we love trading at the parks because it brings a scavenger hunt into every trip. We estimate that at any given time Cast Members in WDW are wearing 10,000 pins daily.

Most pins can be purchased in stores or at special events. There are some pins you can only get through trading called Hidden Mickey (aka Cast Lanyard pins). These pins have a small Mickey outline somewhere on the pin. Each year Disney releases a new batch of these pins with smaller subsets of themes.


This shot from Pinpics.com includes most of 2011 WDW Hidden Mickey pins on the bottom of the shot:

We are trying for all the pins after the letter "Z" in the picture except for the "good" pins. We got all the blue "D"s with the characters and made good progress on the other sets.

Yeti and Orange Bird

Yes that is Dave's foot. The silver pins are "chasers" which are rarer versions of their painted counterparts. Don't like them as much as the painted pins.

Retro Icons

DeeBees

Anyone else collectting these sets? Any other sets?

Thursday, August 4, 2011

It's "Like" This

We created teamtizzel.com to help with our fundraising efforts to fight breast cancer with Team AllEars. We plan on using this site as a way to communicate with family, friends, and strangers what we are doing to help others while having a little fun and keeping healthy at the same time. It's given Dave a chance to learn how to integrate blogging with social media sites.

That part has come with challenges. We created the Team Tizzel Facebook page and we both imported the blog posts into our personal feed notes. That ended up flaming folks with each blog post - for some folks 3 times. Live and learn! Our twitter icon still doesn't match our blog icon.... Trying to do it like a pro and Dave is coming up short.

We could use your help on Facebook. If you are willing to, would you please "Like" Team Tizzel? We need more likes to get a FB URL. We promise not to post too much. We'll let you know when there are new blog posts to read and the FB page will be THE go-to place to see photos from Holly's races and other events.

Just click the Like button below: