Valentine's Vlogging

Hi everyone!

Chris and MJ are STILL ALIVE! and keeping the candle burning.

"Our love will never fade"

-E.E. Milne

To celebrate our love, (and our love for our readers (xoxo <3...)) we are finally posting the vlog we did over the holidays. Please take a few minutes to watch our vlog on how to make shadow puppets AND plum pudding. It's like Michigan's Adventure, 2 parks for the price of one! Except without the motion sickness- there's literally nothing to lose.

Again, Happy Valentine's Day...

Greetings!

Turned out we actually DID make a paper plane tutorial! It wasn't in Chris' dream like he thought. I was a bit confused as well as I had just come down with amnesia, my brain was a bit fuzzy. I found it on my desktop the other day when looking for my plum pudding recipe I had saved. Never the less, here is the video. See if you can follow along with the easy step by step instruction! If you succeed in making a paper airplane, we'd love to see a picture of what yours turned out like!

Thanks for watching!

Love,

Chris and MJ

Life apart

Hi.

Over the last couple months, you may have noticed the gaping hole in your life left by the absence of our blogging efforts. MJ and I had the best intentions of making an instructional video on the fine art of making paper airplanes, but that ended up only happening in a dream. However, in my dream, you all enjoyed the video a lot and it was a reasonable length! You’re welcome!

For the last few months, MJ and I have been confronting a new challenge in our married life: separation. Since the end of the summer, I’ve been managing to act as acting manager at the famed recycling plant in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. While most laymen only know the Baton Rouge recycling plant from the famous scene in Scarface, us industry insiders know the place as one of only three plants in the world capable of recycling #7 plastic jugs. I’d been keeping an eye on their manager for a while, and when she started getting especially pregnant in August, I was apparently the only person in the whole country who called their office and inquired as to who would act as manager during her maternity leave.

Though, of course, this is an exciting step in my career, the time apart from home and MJ has been extremely difficult. All sorts of things became issues that I’d never even considered before. When do we find the time to talk? How do I physically prevent her from having sex with other people? How do I make sure she’s using the correct shampoo? Seriously, what if she’s using my shampoo? Or having sex with other guys and then they use my shampoo? That stuff is $4.75 a bottle, for Christ’s sake.

Skype has helped a lot. For those of you who don’t know what Skype is, it’s pretty much impossible to explain. That is, unless you’ve seen 2001: A Space Odyssey, in which case I can tell you it’s a lot like that robot that runs everyone’s lives and then goes crazy and kills people.


Yeah, it’s like that.

We’ve also sent a lot of paper airplanes back and forth, and sometimes I tie a ribbon to the train and I know that when the train passes by MJ’s house in Walla Walla she’ll see the ribbon and remember not to use my shampoo.

All in all, it’s been a very trying time and I’m very much looking forward to being back in WA! Who knows, maybe we’ll even make a video about paper airplanes. Although, I wouldn’t hold your breath. If, theoretically, we even made such footage, it would have to sit around on MJ’s computer for at least two whole months and still it would not have been edited, which is a perfectly reasonable timeline for such a thing.

In our new house! Answering questions

The Burning Candle Show Answers Your Questions from Mari Jo Koedyker on Vimeo.

House shopping!

Hey, readers.

Life, in case you haven't figured it out yet, is full of difficult questions. Questions like: when should we start a family? Why did the cow go to the cinema? How much wallpaper is too much? Is that spring I smell in the air?

Those are all questions I've had to answer at one time or another. (Not right now, because it was "free-range", if the entire wall is covered in wallpaper that's too much, nope just lysol.) Now, we find ourselves facing another difficult question, which is: let's buy a house! A tricky question indeed, especially because if you don't say it with the right inflection it's not really a question in the first place.

MJ and I have been perusing the market for some time now. Some crazy homeless guy told me it was a good time to buy "houses and donkeys! houses and donkeys!" which, after I pried his hands off of my slacks, got me thinking first about finding a different route to the coffee shop, and then about getting a bigger space for us to live. Up until now, MJ and I have been very happily renting our cute little apartment in downtown Walla Walla. We love the convenience of being so close to the nightlife and also the colorful art on the walls:

I don't get it, but still, it gives me a vague sense that I don't want to leave. Anyway, MJ and I went to some wonderful open houses this week, and one thing that turned out not to be an open house but just some lady making brownies with the door open. Here's the first house we looked at:



I liked its old world charm and the fact that it was red, but MJ thought that the trees were too close to the windows... there was also too much wallpaper. See above.

Another house we looked at was this one:


This was a perfectly nice house, but apparently in 1800 some old guy tripped in the bathtub or something and got a little bruise on his arm. I don't want that kind of history in a place I'm going to live.

So, for now, the hunt continues. Who knew house shopping could be such hard work? Also, is that spring I smell in the air??

Valentine's Day

Happy Valentine's Day to all my blogging friends! Hope you and your loved one are snuggling up and enjoying that love that you enjoy and cherish so much. It's so hard to believe that Chris and I have been married for almost 2 years now!

This is what I woke up to sitting on the table :) Chris had some preschoolers and puffy paint help him out on this one- so sweet!

What a message too...<3

This year Chris and I decided to spice things up for Valentine's Day. We got tired of doing all the cliche things that couples do for Valentine's Day, such as go to the movies, eat really good food by candle light, and hold hands. We were just so over all that. This year we decided to do things that truly made us happy. For example, starting to cook dinner, but purposely burning everything so we HAD to eat Chic-Fil-A. Yum! I never feel like I can treat myself to Chik-Fil-A unless my smoke detector goes off, it's just one of those things that go hand in hand. Chris and I always split the Chicken Sam sandwich. It always makes us think of our friend Sam, who we actually nicknamed Chicken Sam Sam, after the sandwich of course.

After Chick-Fil-A, Chris and I played some scratch coin lottery. Chris always lets me scratch them myself, he's so sweet. He loves watching me get so excited about the prospect of winning money. I get really excited! I mean, who doesn't like getting money?! However, tonight, after 3 Kitty Cash cards, I got nothin.

THEN- Chris did the unthinkable! He took our car to the car wash together! What a sly guy...didn't know he had THAT up his sleeve.

We ended our night snuggling on the couch watching Fraggle Rock and cutting each other's finger nails. Can you imagine a more romantic night? Nope, me neither.

There's this really neat website called piknic.com. You can upload pictures of yourself and other people and edit it so that it can be in different colors or add you saying really neat stuff. It's so fun! I decided to take a picture from this past summer of Chris and I at the beach and spice it up a little. Take a look at what I created.

Pretty cute, right?! I think it turned out really well. Exactly the message I wanted to share. I ended up printing it out and slipping it into Chris's lunch pail he takes to work everydy. In a marriage, it's all about this little things you do to keep the love alive :)

Tell me about what you and YOUR sweetie did for Valentine's Day! What special things did you do to make them feel important in your life?

365 days= 1 year

Hello, readers!

You'll excuse me if I'm on a bit of a soapbox today. I want to talk today about a topic on which I know infinitely more than anyone who would possibly read this: photography. I've always felt that photography is the most superior of all the creative arts, simply because it's so tangible. The other arts- music, theatre, dance, painting- while pretty and all, and also a good outlet for crazy people, don't produce anything tangible in the end, anything you can see and feel. But you can see and feel a photo. You can smell a photo, you can taste a photo, and you can hear a photo. To quote Dean James Schnimmond, "I... photograph... as if time were moving backwards... I set the exposure for 2.3 mm antigrade and let the millimax filter the natural lighting exposure output product."

As MJ mentioned in her previous post, I've started a 365 project. In case you didn't know, a 365 project is when you take one photo every day for a year, then share it with all the people who are your friends on facebook. Then a bunch of other people say things like, "I HAVE to know what camera you're using!" and "I love the enigmatic lighting choices. Ambrosial focus dilution." I don't expect the average reader of this blog to grasp the meaning of these comments, or what a 365 project is, or who MJ is or what "previous" means. Try and stick with me, though. It might help to read each sentence twice.

I'd like to spend the rest of this post sharing some of my favorite photos from my 365 project. Here's a miraculous capture from the first week:

Day 5


Wow! I just happened to catch this shot from the passenger window of my car as I was driving home from getting groceries! Groceries really are amazing; without them it would be really hard to cook. I love buying groceries on a crisp fall day while on my way to the laundromat, singin' along with some John Mayer and watching the friendly exchanges of people on the sidewalk. My thoughts are poetry.

Day 14


I went to the Holland box-moving fair this past Saturday. Although I started with the simple aim of getting a picture of this guy moving boxes, I quickly realized that it was the simple yet poignant message of the boxes that really interested me. I also realized I didn't care about cutting off this guy's head. Aren't we, when it comes down to it, just like these boxes? Fragile? Handled with care? Arrows pointing upwards?

Day 23



"Dances with Wolves"

"Motion is... unchanneled thoughts." -J. Adram Yarmovsky

I think this photo shows how much I've grown during the course of my 365 project. I think I've channeled my raw talent into a compelling vision with a clear and strong manipulation of bokeh strobe settings. I took this picture using a 5.6 km refractory on my Nokia 5.1 mhz camera hybrid, with a 2.3576 exposure, my biggest ever!

If you want a copy, poster, doormat, couch, or picture frame with any of these photos printed on it, let me know. I'm thinking of opening a store and selling my pictures, and that would be a great way to get started! And now that you've read this post, you're pretty much qualified to start a 365 project yourself- next time you're driving, just whip out your cell phone, snap a picture, and that's day 1!