After our afternoon of shooting tons of outfits for the Remixology post, Haley and I decided to do some just-for-fun photos. I had brought along this dress as a back-up, so I threw it on and we shot a few more photos before calling it a day. It's a lot of fun to do photos with someone else. I get stuck in a rut, doing the same poses, shooting the same angles (though it's more difficult to get variety in angles with a tripod), shooting in the same familiar locations. Plus, someone else can see me in a different way. I think we see ourselves a certain way, and it's always interesting to see how someone else chooses to photograph you. An outside perspective.
Last night Dan & I cooked a meal together, which we haven't really done much since moving. Well, unless you count making quesadillas, which we do almost on a daily basis. Our last kitchen was barely big enough to have two people in there comfortably, so cooking in this new kitchen is a dream. I'd love to make cooking together a weekly thing. Pick a recipe, get the ingredients and cook together. We made Skillet Italian Chicken (my grandmother's recipe) and deviled eggs last night and it was so good. Cooking together is such a nice excuse to spend time in the same space, enjoying each other's company.
I recently finished reading In Defense of Food, which was really wonderful, and one of the things he mentioned in there was the importance of sitting down together for meals. My family usually ate at least dinner together, since lunch was at school and breakfast was ... well I was sleeping through breakfast. But thinking about how fast food mentality has overtaken our culture, and how so much of culture revolves around food, I think it is important to try to eat meals together. I love how eating with people creates such a sense of community. We used to get together with a group of friends every week and it was a kind of potluck thing where everyone brought a dish and we'd catch up, standing around the table and enjoying the food everyone brought. Maybe now that we have a big enough house to host such an event we could start doing something similar.