Welcome to our little home on the web.  As a former professional web designer, this is where I choose to celebrate my wonderful family and fantastic life with our family and friends.  I hope you enjoy visiting with us.

It took John and I awhile to find true marital bliss, but once we found each other we both knew this was it.  We're very similar people and are each other's best friend.  We enjoy everything about our relationship and we take great pleasure in our time together.  We're also blessed with a large blended family that is as happy as John and I are that we're all one big happy unit.  It's amazing how compatible we are and how much we enjoy life together.  We laugh constantly, and often at silly, corny jokes.  Life is just more fun to each of us with the other one in it.  We can even have a good time grocery shopping together!  We've been married for years now and we're still on our honeymoon.

John's four children are older than mine.  His daughter Jennifer is the oldest and we have two beautiful grandchildren by her and her husband, Robert.  One good thing about moving up to the farm is that we'll be living closer to them than we are now.  It's going to be great getting to see Jennifer and her family more often than we do now.  Jennifer has a education degree and a masters in counseling.  She has chosen to be a stay-at-home mom.  She and her husband own a motorcycle/ATV store.

Between John and I we have five sons, all but one are in college, and doing well, thankfully.  John's boys are triplets and are the next oldest in our brood.  John and the boy's mother, Leslie, were expecting twins.  John, Jr. was born first followed by Mike, then Bob, who was a shocking, but wonderful surprise.  They're wonderful men.  John, Jr has a degree in building construction management and is an estimator for a large industrial construction firm.  He's engaged to an absolute sweetheart of a girl named Laura.  Mike, who is in Optometry School, has been married to his best friend, the grammar goddess herself, Kari, since 2005.  Bob, who is in Medical School, is engaged to a wonderful girl, Jen, who is Veterinarian School.

My two sons, Adam and Ross bring up the rear, age wise.  Adam works a full time job and goes to school full time.  In June of 2007 Adam married our dear Sarah, the pastry chef at a five star restaurant.  Ross is currently working as my Assistant Location Manager in the film industry.  Adam and Ross and friends build a bonfire every December to burn on the levee with family and friends on Christmas Eve.  You can click here to see pictures of the most recent one and to learn a little more about this tradition.

Our families mean so much to us.  We enjoy our extended families, too.  John is one of only two children, and the only one to have a family.  I, on the other hand, am the baby of eight.  My dad is 89 years old and he's as healthy as can be.  He raised his huge family as a farmer and he's still in his garden, enjoying it every day.  All but one of my siblings has a family of his/her own and now most of my dad's grandchildren have families of their own, too.  His oldest great grandchild has already in college, so before we know it we'll have some great-great-grandchildren running around, too.

Both John and I were raised on working farms; he on a cotton farm and I on sugar cane farm.  It's amazing, but no matter where you live or what you do, farm life is always close to your heart.  We're both very happy to be returning to farm life.  Our family heritages are similar in other ways, too.  We both can trace our ancestry back to Scotland amongst other European countries.  The background for this web site is one of three Colquhoun tartans.  My Scottish roots are of the Kilburn clan.  I've got more Acadian blood running through my veins than anything else.  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's epic poem, Evangeline, A Tale of Acadie, tells the story of the Acadian as they were exiled from Nova Scotia and how some of them came to live in Louisiana.

Our home in North Louisiana is John's ancestral home, built in 1891 and 1892.  The property was originally bought by his great grandfather who traveled the state on horseback as an agronomist.  Part of his job was to test soil samples and to help educate farmers about better farming practices, including soil amenities.  Needing to know the needs of the soil, he ran these tests on samples taken from various locations on the farms to help the farmers learn and compensate for any deficiencies in their soil.  When he tested the soil on what is now our farm he noted that it was some of the best farm land in the state for growing cotton that he had ever seen.  Already looking for a farm to buy, he bought the property soon thereafter.  Cotton is still often grown on the farm, but other crops that are raised on it, too, from time to time.  Depending on the market and the weather, wheat, corn, soybean and milo are the primary crops.  Some of the land is in woodlands and a little in pasture, too.

John and I have become very health conscious.  Most of our food comes off of our farm where we eat more like American's did in the 1940s.  We no longer will eat foods with MSG, High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS), or regular corn syrup for that matter, artificial sweeteners, processed foods, hydrogenated fats or farm raised fish and soft drinks are a thing of our past.  We limit nitrates, also.  Wanting to avoid the hormones and antibiotics that are in most commercially supplied meats, we raise our own meat on the farm, all way down to our Christmas Turkey.  Deer hunting and fishing are good providing us with a healthy source of deer and fish.  We only buy rBGH-free milk and we free range our own fryers and egg layers.  We also try to eat only organically grown produce that has not been irradiated or waxed.  We use sea salt exclusively, walk daily, take dietary supplements and watch our weight.  We are fortunate to have well water instead of chlorinated and fluorinated water and we avoid products that are not free of propylene glycol, sodium laureth sulfate and mineral oil.   Our health is better than ever and we look forward to growing old together.

I've always been a shutter bug and I rarely leave the house without my camera in tow.  Earlier this year I had the opportunity to take some photographs of a crop duster fertilizing a large wheat field on the farm.  I enjoyed this chance to stop motion with my camera because of the fast speed of my subject.  There's a couple of rejects where I missed part of the plane.  It was challenging, but I'm very pleased with my camera's performance!  I also was able to ride on a cotton picker and take pictures and videos of the 2007 cotton harvest.

In 2007 year we grew a beautiful vegetable garden in Baton Rouge, in addition to the perennial herb garden that John excels in using when he cooks.  Actually, I should say, my brother Jerry grew the garden.  We just reaped the benefits of it.  We've thoroughly enjoyed watching it grow and we've enjoyed the bountiful harvest even more.  Honestly, we all enjoy eating fresh vegetables.  They taste better and we know how the produce was grown.

Going to our camp is something we really enjoy, too.  It's so peaceful there.  It's a great get away destination if we're looking for a little peace and quiet or to do some fishing.  It's on the Tensas River and the fishing is great!  The camp itself has quite a few years on it and is in need of some repair, but we're looking forward to being able to work on it, too.  Adam spent a long weekend with us out there this October and we had a good time.  We also have Turkey Creek Break just 15 minutes away from here, too.  It's beautiful!

We're animal lovers, too.  We have a couple of cats, J-Cat and Thomas, and Ross' dog, Spike, who likes to go fishing.  We also have three horses.  It's nice to be up at the farm where we enjoy all this feline, canine and equine companionship.  John and I love walking on the farm and it's nice to see Spike enjoy it with us.  He enjoys fishing, too.  He's too funny. 

A while back, Ross brought his girlfriend of that time to the farm for a short visit.  They had a good time shooting at the camp and riding on the farm.  Shooting is something this family does a good bit of.  Here's John on the skeet range teaching Adam more about it.  Ross was with them on this particular day.

Lately we've been enjoying 2008.  Here's some spring pictures from a shrimp boil at Adam's house.

John is a commercial pilot and a retired teacher and residential builder and I own AA Oakley - Lisa Locations doing Location Managing and Location Scouting in the film industry, but I also work occasionally as an actress.  John teams up with me when needed as a Location Scout and as an Assistant Location Manager.  Between jobs, though, we share being authors as our common occupation. 

We certainly live interesting lives, but it's family get-togethers that we enjoy most.  Here's a few pages of pictures from some of those gatherings: Christmas Eve, 2006; Christmas Day, 2006; New Year's Day, 2007; and Christmas 2007. 

It's always nice when Jennifer comes visit.  Here's some pictures and a couple of videos from a visit she and the grandkids made in January of 2007.  We went give the horses some peppermints.  I also have another group of pictures of the horses that were taken on a foggy October 2007 morning.

I ran into a stumbling block while writing and I needed to visit a commercial shrimp boat.  John and I took a little book research trip to St. Bernard Parish, Louisiana.  I have some of the pictures from that experience online.

The wild life is abundant on the farm and I enjoy spending the winter months there, watching the various creatures that live there along side us.  Combining my love of photography and the enjoyment bird watching brings me, I have a lot of web pages of bird pictures.  A few of my favorites are the Eastern Bluebirds, American Goldfinches, Northern Cardinals, Myrtle "Yellow-rumped" Warblers, American Robins, House Finches, White-Throated Sparrows and Yellow Bellied Flycratchers.  While I have a hard time getting close enough to the common American Robin to get good pictures, this one particular specimen lit in a tree on the farm and went about preening himself.  I was able to take quite a few pictures and I was pleased with the results.  I've got to thank John for helping me with these pictures because he parks his truck close to where I think the birds will be and then I can use it as a photographic blind.  A lot of these pictures are taken by a bundled up woman sitting in a parked pickup truck with the windows down.

I also have some other web pages that are special to me.  One of the more recent web pages in this group is of my trip to the 2006 American Paint Horse Association's World Show in Fort Worth, Texas with my girlfriends.  Another is about our 2007 St. Patrick's Day crawfish boil on the parade route.