A 'lil HooHaa

Messing with the blogging world since 2005

blog challenge

Secret Subject Swap: Favorite holiday

This post is for the Secret Subject Swap, a monthly blog challenge. Information about the swap can be viewed at the end of this post, as well as links to all others taking part. Have a peek at some of the other bloggers and see what they had to come up with. If you are a blogger, consider joining up for future months!

My theme is “What is your favorite holiday and how do you celebrate it?” and it was submitted by Wandering Web Designer.

It seems odd to be talking about certain holidays in April. 

Alas, such is the world when you are in a secret subject swap. 

I’m sure I share this with a lot of people, but my favorite holiday is Christmas. And it’s not just Christmas day, it’s everything surrounding it. The festive look and feel. The music. The smiles. 

Now, don’t get me wrong, I dislike the idea that stores start doing Christmas sales in like October or earlier now, but the overall feel is what I like. 

I love seeing the look on the faces of kids during that time, especially the innocence of what it is. 

To me, it’s the perfect time of year. 

Family time during that holiday season is usually pretty good. As I’ve grown older, I’ve tended to appreciate the whole season a lot more. It was always my father’s favorite holiday as well. And I think most of my family is usually in the spirit. 

Christmas candy and foods are always amazing as well. From my mother’s homemade caramels (family recipe) to cookies from friends and other things galore, you can’t go wrong with the season! 

I even enjoy a cup or two of store-bought eggnog each year. 

And though I know there are plenty of people who do not enjoy the Christmas holiday, it’s a season I find to be enjoyable and carefree. Innocence only goes so far these days, and I feel as though you can still capture it quite well during Christmas. 

And yes, I like snow during those holidays as well!

Five others have taken part in this challenge, so go check out the other posts and have some fun reading their secret subjects!

Enjoy blogging challenges? We have several that happen at A ‘lil HooHaa, and we’d love to have you join us! The Photo Blogging Challenge is one of our main ones and it runs monthly! We also have the Food Photo Challenge (current theme listed at end of post) and the Can of Corn Challenge. We’d love to see you!

Feel free to leave a comment, or e-mail P.J. at hoohaablog@gmail.com. Also, please “Like” A ‘lil HooHaa on Facebook! You can also follow me on Twitter @softball29!

Food Photo Challenge (March 2020): Lunch

So this month has been a whirlwind of everything. And I’m sure most of you are feeling it as well. That being said, despite being later in the day, the challenges go on and I hope that it somehow helps you with the current situation throughout the world. 

Mmmm food. 

The first month was breakfast. And this much is lunch. I’m sure you can see the direction we are heading. If you are new to the Food Photo Challenge, check out this post, which explains everything. Also, the linkup for this month’s theme will stay live for about a week. 

Food Photo Challenge logo

Simply put, though, each month there will be a theme (announced at the end of this post) and on the 28th of each month, come back and link up.

Onward we go!

I’m sticking with my quest for using my iPhone more and learning different things about it. This photo was done with my iPhone 11 pro. I also again used a light box, which I think really helped. 

Let’s check out this month. 

Theme: Lunch

I do love lunch. The thing is, though, I am pretty zoned in with lunch. By that I mean I truly love sandwiches and subs. I would eat them most of the time if I could, but .. bread. That being said, most lunches I do have them. 

So a sandwich is a part of this photo, and I knew I needed a little more to it. 

What accompanies a sandwich? Well, often chips of some sort. And a pickle!

This was a fantastic lunch. A mixed-meat sandwich on rye. Some regular potato chips (I had thought about Doritos for color, or even veggie straws, but I went the traditional route), and a small pickle. I took a few different angles and distances, but this I thought captured it well. 

And it was tasty!

That’s my submission for the month and I am looking forward to seeing who else is taking part in this challenge and what they have to offer!

If you took part in the challenge, please make sure to link up below. Also, make sure you visit everybody else’s posts (and do come back to see who may have linked up after you!)! 

Let’s, too, try and grow this challenge. Tell others and invite them. And, as always, one can check out the Facebook group for this challenge and others as well. You can access the group here. 

The linkup is below, but how about March?

The theme for April is: Dinner. Come back on April 28 to link up!

Food Photo Challenge: March 2020

Feel free to leave a comment, or e-mail P.J. at hoohaablog@gmail.com. Also, please “Like” A ‘lil HooHaa on Facebook! You can also follow me on Twitter @softball29!

Secret Subject Swap: Life as a musical

This post is for the Secret Subject Swap, a monthly blog challenge. Information about the swap can be viewed at the end of this post, as well as links to all others taking part. Have a peek at some of the other bloggers and see what they had to come up with. If you are a blogger, consider joining up for future months!

My theme is “If your life was a musical, what genre of music would it be and what songs would be featured on the soundtrack?” and it was submitted by Southern Belle Charm.

This is a tough one. 

First, allow me to say, I’m a fan of musicals. Alas, I’m not sure there’s any musical I am a fan of that would allow me to say “that’s my life.” 

I’m a fan of more classic musicals – ones such as Paint Your Wagon, My Fair Lady, and Damn Yankees. It’s not that I don’t like more modern ones – I just haven’t seen many. 

So trying to put me in a classical musical might be hard. 

The same goes for genre. 

Much like a human personality, it’s hard to stick to one set track. I couldn’t, for example, say I’m all rock. My musical tastes and likes are a wide range – anything from a little classical to rock to country to modern pop to 80s anything and then some. 

It’s just how I am when it comes to music. 

So to have a soundtrack would be a wide range as well, and one I’m not sure I could fully come up with. 

Instead, my soundtrack would vary quite a bit. Keeping that in mind, I’ve opted to find a soundtrack of songs that either might be part of my world as an explanation of who I am, or songs that might have been important during a time in my life.

I’m not going to go too deep into what the songs mean to me and such, rather I’m just going to link up some YouTube videos and let you all (if you want) listen to the songs that have been important to me at one point or another during my life – and yes, songs I would thing would find a way to be on the soundtrack of my personal musical. 

1. Pachelbel’s Canon 

2. Somewhere over the Rainbow/What a Wonderful World – Israel Kamakawiwo’ole 

3. Bittersweet – Big Head Todd and the Monsters (Live version)

4. Life is a Highway – Tom Cochrane 

This is just a short selection of songs that might be in a musical about my life. I’m sure I’ll think of more later in the day or this weekend and just be like “d’oh! That is one!” But this is a good clip on the start. 

A musical, of course, isn’t just about the music though. I’m not sure I’d want to attack the other parts of a musical if it was about my life – that would be a hard thing to make sense of!

Six others have taken part in this challenge, so go check out the other posts and have some fun reading their secret subjects!

Enjoy blogging challenges? We have several that happen at A ‘lil HooHaa, and we’d love to have you join us! The Photo Blogging Challenge is one of our main ones and it runs monthly! We also have the Food Photo Challenge (current theme listed at end of post) and the Can of Corn Challenge. We’d love to see you!

Feel free to leave a comment, or e-mail P.J. at hoohaablog@gmail.com. Also, please “Like” A ‘lil HooHaa on Facebook! You can also follow me on Twitter @softball29!

Food Photo Challenge (February 2020): Breakfast

Welcome everybody to the first linkup of the Food Photo Challenge. This monthly challenge is to work on doing some food photography photos with blogging.

If you are new to seeing this and it’s something that might interest you, the whole aspect is explained in this post. Also, the linkup will stay live for about a week, so if you post in the next couple of days, come on back and link up!

Food Photo Challenge logo

Simply put, though, each month there will be a theme (announced at the end of this post) and on the 28th of each month, come back and link up.

So, on with the show!

I’ve wanted to get better with my food photos. I enjoy it, but I also want to try new things and angles and all that. I always take snaps when out and about, but I want to learn about the editing and everything else. This month, I already learned a lot, which I will explain later. The best part of this is that each theme will be a new way to challenge yourself with food photography.

Further, I’m starting to really push toward using my iPhone for a lot of my photography. I invested in some Moment lenses and, so far, I really love them. For this month’s theme, I used the moment 58 lens, as well as the Moment app on my phone. I have a lot to learn with that app, but so far… love it.

On top of that, I opted to go with a mini light box, which, in the end, was probably good. However, I learned a bit about the light box and the lighting of it, and in the future, hopefully I can utilize this better. The light box is pretty small, so I might have to use a bigger one for this challenge.

For now, though, let’s get on with this month’s post.

Theme: Breakfast

I love breakfast. I mean, truly love it. I have certain things I always get when traveling, but when home, I’m quite consistent on the things I eat.

A lot of that is because of having diabetes and knowing what things do to me etc. I’ve had to cut back on a lot of things I love for breakfast, though I do still indulge in things on occasion. 

Still, a plate with eggs or something along those lines didn’t work for me with this one. Instead, I wanted to do cereal. Espcially being I had some fruit loops around.

Now, I don’t eat a lot of cereal anymore. With the carbs and the milk and everything else, it tends to be too much for me in the morning and my blood sugars go up a bit too high. 

But colors!

Looking back, I kind of wish I had used a different background color, or a different color bowl. The colors here are just a bit too powerful. But I do like the overall look and feel of this photo. 

And yes, for the record, I did eat this when done … 

That’s my submission for the month and I am looking forward to seeing who else is taking part in this challenge and what they have to offer!

If you took part in the challenge, please make sure to link up below. Also, make sure you visit everybody else’s posts (and do come back to see who may have linked up after you!)! 

Let’s, too, try and grow this challenge. Tell others and invite them. And, as always, one can check out the Facebook group for this challenge and others as well. You can access the group here. 

The linkup is below, but how about March?

The theme for March is: Lunch. Come back on March 28 to link up!

Food Photo Challenge: February 2020

Feel free to leave a comment, or e-mail P.J. at hoohaablog@gmail.com. Also, please “Like” A ‘lil HooHaa on Facebook! You can also follow me on Twitter @softball29!

Secret Subject Swap: The new position

The post is for the Secret Subject Swap, a monthly blog challenge. Information about the swap can be viewed at the end of this post, as well as links to all others taking part. Have a peek at some of the other bloggers and see what they had to come up with. If you are a blogger, consider joining up for future months!

My theme is “You get to bypass the job application process and start your new position with your favorite company, which is …” and it was submitted by Tamara over at https://thethreegerbers.blogspot.ch/.

This is my first time taking part in the Secret Subject Swap. It’s an interesting concept for blogging and it really can make you think outside the box. 

Of course, my first theme is by a blogger I know, so a bit more interesting. And the theme is a bit longer than my headline … it is “You get to bypass the job application process and start your new position with your favorite company, which is …” 

Interesting, right?

This can go so many ways. Think about when you were a kid. What did you want to be when you grew up? What did you want to do? 

Did you want to be a fireman or a policeman? Go to the moon? My imagination as a kid likely had me doing different things every day. I know I wanted to do all the things most kids wanted to do and I wanted to drive a school bus or a garbage truck; I wanted at one point to be a teacher or a baker; there were so many things. Heck, being a professional wrestler was high on my list, so much so that I looked into training schools for it when I was a junior and senior in high school!

But I always wanted to be a baseball player. 

Keeping score… this would be my type of job!

My skills, of course, never matched up with that one. I was average – at best – in high school and when I graduated, I didn’t want to attempt to be a bench guy on the local two-year college team because they practiced at 6 a.m. 

No thanks!

It’s almost ironic now that as I get older, I find myself up at 5 am most days to go for a walk that ranges from 1.5 to 2 miles … 

Anyway, I digress. 

When I was younger, I found my talent somewhat was in writing and photography. Maybe that’s the imagination thing again. I loved newspapers and the whole news thing. My first story, along with a photo I took, appeared in a newspaper for the first time when I was in seventh grade. 

I always dreamed of being in public relations. A sports information director at a college was the ultimate goal. Note – I never reached it. But it was one of those things I aimed for. Believe me, over the years, I applied for these positions but they never panned out. 

Now, I like where I landed. It’s in PR and there are massive amounts of benefits that go along with where I am. 

That being said, if I could skip the interview process and such … 

I’d be heading to the Philadelphia Phillies. Baseball is my sport. The Phillies are my team. And that would be the place I’d consider my favorite company. The position? Could be in public relations, or it could be some sort of in-game announcing. But I’d truly love it to be the scorekeeper. That, to me, would be where it was at. I love the nuances of scoring and have done it for years and years. 

Especially if I could skip the process and start right up. 

Alas, we know it’s a dream world. So, I’ll have to stick to my amateur scorekeeping and carry my book along with me when I go to games. The dream never dies!

Eight others have taken part in this challenge, so go check out the other posts and have some fun reading their secret subjects!

Enjoy blogging challenges? We have several that happen here, and we’d love to have you join us! The Photo Blogging Challenge is one of our main ones and it runs monthly! Starting up is the Food Photo Challenge and the Can of Corn Challenge. We’d love to see you!

Feel free to leave a comment, or e-mail P.J. at hoohaablog@gmail.com. Also, please “Like” A ‘lil HooHaa on Facebook! You can also follow me on Twitter @softball29!