rachel’s blog

Ah, the good ol’ days…

After at least six attempts at winning something (anything!) during the past four months, I succeeded today… allowing me to cross off one more thing from my list of “101 Things in 1001 Days.”

I didn’t have to buy raffle tickets, donate canned goods, participate in a competition, or fill out a survey. “All” I had to do was spend six hours helping some friends of mine move! Actually, anyone who helped for any length of time got their name entered into a drawing for a framed photo. My friend runs his own photography business on the side, and I’m now the happy owner of one of his works of art.

At lunch on Friday, I sat next to a young woman from Milwaukee at a software conference we were attending. After we had been talking and eating for quite a while, she suddenly turned to me and said, “Has anyone ever told you that you look exactly like Reese Witherspoon?”

I told her that yes, in fact, several people have mentioned that I resemble her. The woman went on to say that if I dyed my hair blonde, I’d be a dead ringer for Reese. That might be stretching it a bit… but I guess now I know what I’d look like as a blonde.

There’s an interesting website called MyHeritage where you can upload a photo and see which celebrities you resemble. The face recognition technology compares your face to more than 4000 celebrity faces in their database. This evening I uploaded a variety of photos from the past few years, and the results were surprisingly consistent.

Apparently even MyHeritage thinks I resemble Reese Witherspoon… as well as Christie Brinkley, Maria Sharapova, Patsy Cline, Oprah Winfrey, Bob Hope, and many others, depending on the picture.

It’s an excellent tool for procrastination…

When my new camera arrived a couple weeks ago, I suddenly decided to participate in the 26 Things photographic scavenger hunt for the month of May… even though it was already May 17th. A list of 26 things had been posted on the first of the month, and by the end of the month, I needed to upload 26 pictures representing each of the 26 things. In spite of my late start, I managed to have all of my pictures pulled together by May 29th!

It was a fun challenge — both deciding WHAT to photograph, and then also taking a good picture of it. I ended up using one photo that I had taken a couple years ago (the rules say it’s OK), but all of the others were taken in the last half of May. You can view my pictures HERE on Photobucket, or if you want to comment, you can view them HERE on Flickr. (Comments can also be made here on my blog, of course.) You can see everyone else’s pictures HERE.

I like most of my photos, but of course there’s plenty of room for improvement. Here are some of my favorites…

L-R: keys, dance, multicolored, a difference, telephone, the number 9.