Making it look like i remember it

As I become more experienced in photography, I want my photos to look like my mind remembers them at the time of the shot.  This is incredibly subjective, and, as I age, my rememberance is suspect :-).  But, nonetheless, I try!

Here's a before and after of flowers down by Diana's garden shed.  To my eye, the colors are so much more vivid than the initial camera capture shows.  So I worked to find the 'sweet spot' of hue, saturation, exposure, white balance, etc.  All of the work was done in Lightroom 2.6 and is really a trial and error process.  While I know what many of the sliders will probably do, in this case, trying the recovery slider (usually used to recover highlights that are blown out) resulted in a warmer background and one that I immediately liked.
I think we are all in competition with ourselves - expressing ourselves however that may be.