Random Thoughts

The Basement Redux

2012-01-24T21:44:00.000-08:00

This project was about 7 years in the making. From the day we moved into the house and determined the basement would be the "project messy room", I dreamed of having a wall of shelves. It wasn't in the budget - in terms of money or time - so instead I made do with what I had... which was a hodge podge collection of Rubbermaid-esque organizers and shelves. It grew over the years... a box here, a pile there... all placed with the most innocent of "I'll get to that later" intent. Until it became the Wall of Doom.

So I pulled everything off of that wall and stacked it on the other half of the room.

Then I felt much better about the Wall of Doom.

To answer a few questions...
This is how the house was when we moved in. I don't know why there is a big ugly patch job on the wall. The black cord is the cable - the basement was the original family room and this wall used to house the entertainment system. The beadboards? No idea... my theory is that the space behind it is foundation, but it runs along the length of all the other walls as well, so it might be hallow. I just haven't really had a desire to yank it apart and take a peek. Some day, when we "re-do" the basement, D will probably take a sledge hammer to it.

This project is more of a... "Dear Lord I need this room to be FUNCTIONAL again or I will go insane and take everybody with me!" emergency, lowest budget possible, throw some damn shelves on the wall already and be done with it - project.
After shopping around, I decided to go with ClosetMaid - easy to install (thanks to the wonderful top-rail) I didn't bother painting because I knew I'd just be covering the wall up anyway. And, you know, eventually we'll "re-do" the basement.
Maybe in another decade, but I digress...

In the installation process I discovered that the floor joist for the kitchen appears to run about mid-way down the wall. The middle screws of each vertical track were rather difficult to get into the joist (requiring the drill instead of my normal +2 Electric Screw Driver) but the tracks are incredibly sturdy.

The clearing and installation of the shelves was the relatively easy part. The sorting, reorganizing, and finding homes for all my supplies was difficult. I shopped for quite a while online, looking for "anything but clear rubbermaid" boxes that would not break the bank. My favorite were some larger sized fabric boxes with lids, however they ran an easy $25.00 each at the cheapest, and that was just too much. One night, as I read the description of one of these over-priced dust collectors, I thought to myself... "I'm not spending $25.00 on fabric and cardboard. I *have* fabric and cardboard! Wait a second... I *HAVE* fabric and cardboard! Why not just cover boxes with fabric from my stash?"

I still didn't have enough boxes, but Home Depot had banker's boxes for $1.88 a pair. Those, plus my fabric stash and a bit of hot glue, and I had much more appealing storage containers for a fraction of the price.

Then it was time to put everything back.

The Craft Wall of Goodness.

I still have a couple of boxes to eventually replace, and I need to get a hanger of some kind for my quilting grid rulers (which will help to cover the ugly patch on the wall) but my room is organized and clean and functional again, and I've already used my project table!

Just as I finished clearing the last of the old rubbermaid out of the basement, the further light fixture (the horribly ugly light that shines so bright in the photo with the piano) has decided to go on strike. I haven't decided if the basement is protesting the general upheaval, or if the ceiling is just saying "hey, LOOK AT ME! I'M UGLY AND NEED FIXING UP TOO!" In either case, I now need to get a floor lamp for G's project area until we can fully address the basement "re-do".

*sigh*

Holidays and resolutions... of sorts

2012-01-04T10:23:00.000-08:00

My holidays were a blur of simultaneously feeling way ahead of schedule and way behind. My calendars were done in September, but not mailed out until December because my card plan changed mid-way through the season. Gifts for the out-of-state friends and family were purchased almost all before Thanksgiving, but sat waiting to be wrapped for weeks. The house was fully decorated (inside and out!) by the end of Thanksgiving Weekend, the tree was up and decorated the following weekend, and I took photos of everything for a blog update that seems to have never happened. I hosted my friend Marsbarn for a weekend visit of craft store hopping and silk scarf painting workshop, which was wonderfully energizing and filled my head with ideas I may never have time to bring to life (and yet I hold onto *all* the supplies with hope that someday... someday...)

Overall the break was a great time. The house is cozy and warm with all the new wall colors and the shiny twinkly lights we put up.

The walls still look so bare without artwork, but the living room is so cozy and my favorite place to read.

No art work meant I could put my Christmas Quilt up over the mantel for the firs time. I made this back in 1995... looking at it makes me miss sewing.

Family came over for Christmas Eve, which was a feast of Polish offerings (pierogies - carefully researched by D and made from scratch to be entirely eggless) Christmas Day was a laid back affair. G woke us up for the first time ever (usually it is D making noises to rouse her in the wee hours of Christmas morning) It took us an hour to get out of bed, then we slowly worked our way into the gifts and calling family. Round Two: The Family Exchange came after lunch, then we had some game time, then dinner.

In that nebulous week between Christmas and New Years we had a mix of work time and play time. No school meant staying up, so we had several movie nights and an evening of family bowling. My big goal for the break was to attempt indoor rock climbing at the new local gym.

It was another experience in contrasts. As excited as I was to go, it turns out I love this even more than I initially thought I would - and yet I'm more afraid of the height of the bouldering walls than I thought I would be. (In these shots I look relaxed, but that is because you cannot see that I'm not even 4 feet off the ground, climbing under an overhang where I can easily step right down to the ground)

I suppose my December could be illustrated with a simple yin-yang symbol.

Now, as we ease back into the routine of school and work and schedules and appointments... I'm looking forward to the new year. I don't really have resolutions for the New Year, as I'm something of an OCD Planner who makes ongoing resolutions on a monthly basis... so my resolution (of sorts) for this month is to begin my attack on the basement reorganization. It is no small task, and nearly 8 years in the making. I am both excited to be finally making the time to attack it, and already overwhelmed with just how much sorting and reorganizing this project is going to take.

There is that yin-yang again.

Leaf Tray Project

2011-12-15T17:18:00.000-08:00

I did not realize what a relatively large commitment it would be to do a clay project as my first art docent project of the year. I thought... an hour in the classroom, a bit of time with the kiln when I could fit it in, done and done.

Then I went to meetings, and the full picture of what I'd gotten myself into came into sharp view.

First there was the training on how to work with clay (for those of us who hadn't done it in a while)
Next there was the writing of the lesson plan, because the docent program is so new that lessons for clay projects are not all written yet.
3rd - another meeting on how to use the kiln and clay roller at the school.
4: Reserve an afternoon to roll out the clay slabs
5: Teach the lesson (including goofing, stumbling over my notes, looking up at the class and saying 'Yes, I speak well in front of crowds' and giving a double thumb's up before continuing)
We pressed leaves into the clay slabs for texture, then cut the slabs to the shape of the styrofoam trays (unused - donated by the local grocery store's butcher section) press the clay into the tray for shape, round off the edges, cut out leaves from leftover clay and add them to the tray wherever you would like to... using texture tools to create pattern.

6:Make a couple of sample trays, so that we have an example and extra trays just in case something explodes in the kiln.
7: Wait 2 weeks for the clay to dry COMPLETELY
8: load the kiln for the bisque firing, and cross your fingers that you don't drop a student's project and nothing explodes in the kiln
9: Unload the kiln (potentially returning to the school several times to check and see if it has cooled enough to unload)

10: Glaze the projects with the class
11: Find a safe place to keep the trays and wait for the glaze to dry

12: glaze-fire the projects in the kiln, and cross your fingers that you don't drop a student's project, fuse projects to each other, the kiln walls, or the kiln shelves, and nothing in the kiln explodes.

13: Unload the kiln (this time stopping by the school to prop the lid open so it will cool faster)

14: Deliver projects back to the class in time for them to bring the trays home for Christmas

Done and Done.

What I found the most interesting was the variety of ways in which the kids added leaves to their platters. Some were extremely symmetrical in their layouts, others went abstract. The glazing was also a show of creative license where some covered the entire platter in one color while others chose to put color in very specific places. Every platter was entirely unique and lovely and the kids really enjoyed their art time, which was wonderful to see.

If you're wondering why I haven't blogged in a while, this is partially to blame. Well worth the effort I think, but lesson learned... next year the clay project will start in January when I'm not bombarded with all my Fall activities and holiday hoopla.

Allergies and Holidays

2011-11-22T23:52:00.000-08:00

Often times when I'm explaining my allergies to someone for the first time, I only mention my allergy to eggs. That's the big one, and it usually receives such a reaction... ("Wow! That's a weird one!" "Oh man that sucks, eggs are in everything...") that the conversation stalls on the wonder of it all. Adjacent to that, however, I'm also allergic to chicken stock. Well, technically you could say I'm allergic to poultry stock... it's just that chicken stock is so prevalent in the land of stocks that mentioning turkey stock, or Cornish game hen stock, gets to be long winded.

Turkey stock normally only comes into conversation around this time of year, as families across the country prepare to make their Norman Rockwell traditional Thanksgiving dinner. (If you want to go really traditional - all the way back to the roots - you'd be serving up venison and lobster. Which I would totally go for, personally.)

My allergy is a tricky one. I am allergic to the protein in the egg albumen, and the protein also exists in the bone marrow of poultry. Therefore, I can eat the meat depending upon how it's cooked. Baked, broiled, roasted... fine. Boiled? No... boiling releases too much of the protein from the bone marrow. So when it comes to Thanksgiving, I can eat the turkey that is baked so long as it is not brined or basted in chicken stock. I can have the gravy so long as it is only made from the drippings of the turkey, and not one of those spice packets that contains turkey broth or any boiled turkey bits. Dressing... the bread or crutons used could have eggs, and the dressing itself could contain chicken stock. Mashed potatoes are also oftentimes made with chicken stock. The soup used to make green bean casserole could have chicken stock (and the crispy onion topping could have eggs). Candied yams... marshmallows could have eggs. Dinner rolls... you get the picture.

This is a meal that is, by and large, not a friendly one to me.

For a very long time I felt very self conscious about my allergies. The few times I ate dinner at other people's houses, rather than explain my allergies I would simply only eat things I knew were safe. I actually had one friend in high school suggest that I might be anorexic because he never saw me eat (a massive laugh out loud moment, considering I could put down a large thin-crust pizza by myself without blinking at the time. Could probably still do it now, actually.) If prompted, I would explain... but then feel horribly guilty that I've put these people out by being so very difficult to feed (thank you Catholic parents!) Over time I learned that people are, for the most part, very understanding and accommodating. I have no problem now saying "yes, I'd love to come to your house for dinner... but let me explain my dietary restrictions because I'd like to avoid a trip to the hospital and/or a needle in my thigh."

However... I still struggle with the double checking.

I have had so many encounters over the last few years of situations where I didn't trust my gut instinct, and paid the price. I have had servers in restaurants give me bad information, I've seen manufacturers that I've relied on for years change their ingredients, I've discovered that some cheeses use eggs in their manufacturing processes (so just because it's "only a block of cheese" doesn't mean it's safe) Bottom line is... I'm tired of kneeling in front of the toilet, puking my guts out and cursing myself for not passing on unsure food. So now when I go to restaurants I declare my allergies as well as restrict myself to absolutely known foods. When I grocery shop I read all the ingredients, of everything, every time. Even vegan food.

And when I go to other people's houses, I need to double check the ingredients.

I am afraid this offends some people... it comes across as a lack of trust. This is nothing personal against anyone who hosts me... this is just a very basic necessity. My allergies are complicated, they sneak in where you wouldn't expect them to, and they are something that nobody else deals with on a daily basis except me. I don't expect anyone to remember every little detail of my allergies (and frankly I am amazed by anyone who does.) I know better than anyone else what I can and cannot eat... so I'm going to ask questions about how things were prepared, I'm going to read labels, I'm going to watch to see if someone cross-contaminates food with utensils, I'm going to be cautious. I have to be.

Someday, I hope that I won't feel so damned guilty about it.

Halloween Highlights and Holiday Hopes

2011-11-10T10:07:00.000-08:00

I have become so used to racing around to meetings or events or for work errands that I'm currently sitting at my desk, checking and re-checking my calendar, wondering why it is I'm here and not out there somewhere.

Clearly I'm forgetting a meeting or an important mail run or something.

My calendar disagrees... aside from the regular Thursday reminders, my day is simply a generic work day. (It says something when sitting with an accounting program in front of you feels like a relaxing day)

The big school fundraiser went over pretty well, aside from Mother Nature deciding to dump waterfalls on us during the only portion that was scheduled to be outside (and ONLY during the time we were supposed to be outside) Our photo booth ran steady from our early start time right up until the end - people seemed to really like the way we set it up. Here is G in her Vampire costume at school.

This was the first time I shot with my soft box attached to the flash - I'm happy with how nice and even the lighting ended up (far better than a generic flash-on-camera blast) though I still need to work out the best set-up for photographing wiggly kids, as I discovered that trailing curtain sync mode does *not* stop motion on kindergartners hopped up on sugar.

This Halloween was our quietest yet. Between the home improvement projects and the work I did for the fundraiser, it took a bit of juggling to find time to carve pumpkins. I finally just shoved the paint brushes aside, put on "It's the Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown" and got to work.

I went with a LOTR theme myself (is that any surprise?)

The EYE is always watching!

The carving was actually not difficult, and it ended up being very relaxing (though it took longer than one Halloween special to finish it) I used our wood block carving tools to outline the eye and the pupil, then just kept digging veins out, criss-crossing and making some deeper and more defined. Next I took the plastic pumpkin scraping spoon and raked it across the "white" of the eye to pop off what was left of the pumpkin skin, leaving the bits in the center so that it would be darker once it was lit up. I painted the pupil black with acrylic paint so that it would be absolutely black, then I scraped the inside of the pumpkin thinner to make it brighter when lit. This year I lit them with strands of battery operated white lights stuffed into a glass jar (no fire hazard that way, and more evenly lit) but those lights didn't even last the whole night so I don't recommend it.

This was the first year G wanted to try full face make-up for Halloween. Once she was all done I just had to set up the backdrop and get a good picture.

I *love* the effect of the mask.

I dressed as Meditrina, Roman Goddess of Wine... hence the wine glass.

I attempted to put my hair into ringlets the way I always see it done in movies, but it seems that 20 years of being away from a curling iron made my skills a little rusty.

My days are slowly winding down as the month goes on. The school fundraiser and all subsequent meetings are now done. The art contest at the school is nearly complete - just a couple more hours dedicated to that next week and I can mark that off my list. My only ongoing obligation to the school is to be the art docent for G's class. This will involve trainings here and there, and a once-a-month appearance in front of the kiddos where I'll have to talk out loud and sound like I know what I'm doing. (On top of the public speaking issue, we are also starting out with a clay project as our first lesson of the year. Ambitious, right? Perhaps stupidly ambitious?)

Next week is a big one for me - art lesson and family birthday dinner in the beginning of the week, turn in art contest entries in the middle of the week, host G's friend birthday party at the end of the week.

I am grateful for the 3 day weekend... perhaps with the extra non-work day I may be able to pull myself together for one more big hulabaloo before the holidays strike.

My weekend starts tonight with a trip to Glazer's for their closing ceremony of their Holga portrait contest. I have a lot of competition, so while my fingers are crossed... in reality I'm just looking forward to mingling with other photographers and picking up my copy of "Plastic Cameras: Toying with Creativity"

Faces in the trees

2011-10-13T23:05:00.000-07:00

Glazers annual Holga Contest has come around again.

This year they've changed things up a bit, narrowing down the contest to only one category, one entry per person. This worries me a bit... I hope that scaling back this year's 9th annual Holga contest doesn't mean we won't see a 10th next year. When I went to drop off my entry today, though, I noticed a massive display of various toy cameras (dianas, lomo, fuji, holgas... some with flashes, some with Polaroid backs) so I'm hoping their passion for film at the store will continue to fuel this fun contest.

So the category this year is "Portrait" - not really my forte in the realm of shooting with my Holga, (most of my people-pictures are full length from a distance) but I did have this one shot I'm particularly fond of... wood carvings which were set on display on a banana leaf tree on the beach in Jamaica.

"Faces of Jamaica"

I matted my print on a basic black mat and dropped it off this afternoon. I have no idea what kind of competition I'm up against this year, but my fingers are crossed.

Hatching a Mad (Party) Plan

2011-10-11T11:59:00.000-07:00

G is turning 10 this year, so she wants to have a slumber party. I agreed, but only if we cut the guest list down to no more than 6 friends (playing the game of balancing the headache - fewer kids, but for longer, should just about equal out. Right?) A slumber party pretty well begs for a movie night, so we decided to pick a movie and base the party theme on that. She picked the Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland.

Her requests for the party: she'd like to do a craft. She wants chocolate fondue as her dessert ( because she's "not really a cake person") and she wants to watch the movie.

This seed was planted in my head at dinner on Saturday night, and I've been stirring this pot whenever time has allowed since then. Here's what I've come up with so far.

The party will be on a Friday night, so the kids can come home with G on the bus. We'll head right into the Mad Hatter Hat Factory (in the living room). I'm going to make black fleece hats for all the girls, and I'll have an assortment of pre-cut felt flower shapes, and plenty of embroidery thread from my stash. The girls can make pins to decorate their hats. For those that don't like to sew, I'll have shrinky-dinks they can color and shrink up as charms/pins (I'll have my glue gun handy to glue the pins on the backs of their creations myself)
This project - being a no-paint-no-water project - will be relatively un-messy, and no drying time to concern ourselves with. Plus, being on the cusps of winter, the kids walk away with a nice warm hat they can use.

Next we'll prepare for dinner, where the kids can pick their toppings for individual mini-pizzas. The drink bottles will have little "Drink Me" labels on them. The dining room table will have a table cloth/table runner and we'll hang paper lanterns and such to make the room look like an outdoor tea party. (I am contemplating looking for tea cups/saucers at thrift stores to make a hodge podge set-up, but not sure if I will have the time so I'm not committing to it in my head)

Dessert will be the chocolate fondue. I figure I'll put her birthday candles on the platters of dipping foods, but I'm not entirely sure how this will be accomplished yet. Maybe use some stick tack or wax to hold a numbers 1 and 0 candle on the platter? Or stick candles in marshmallows? (the tray will probably be a lot of fruit, and *some* marshmallows, but not a lot of other sugar)

I'm thinking maybe here is where we can do gift opening? Get the kids scooted over to the TV area to prepare for the movie, open gifts, then put the movie on right away so they don't tear into things too quickly.

Then it can be movie time. We'll have blankets and pillows for the girls to flop on the floor in front of the TV to watch the movie. I plan on getting bags for popcorn and I'll stamp "Eat Me" on the bags (or hang tags from them... that might be cuter?)

Then bed time. We'll just... see how that goes. We'll pull the futon out of the guest room so they can all just flop their sleeping bags on the floor and crash out.

Saturday morning we'll have breakfast (probably waffles and granola, kids can pick their toppings) and just hang out until parents come to pick them up.

For party favors, besides the hats and pins that they make, I want to make some bookmarks. There's a place that has metal shepherds hook bookmarks which are tea-party themed... they look like a stack of tea-cups with a tea pot on the top that is tipped to pour out whatever gem you hang from the ring. I've found Alice themed Shrinky Dinks online that I can print on Shrinky Dink Inkjet Printing paper, cut them out and shrink them down, and use those as the charms on the book marks. Then I can get some paperback copies of "Alice in Wonderland", one for each girl, and place the bookmark inside. For gift bags, I'm thinking of looking in my stash of small tote bags that I made a decade ago for the craft fairs that didn't sell. If I have enough I might use those as book bags for the girls - otherwise I'll end up with gift bags from Michael's or some such place.

I mentioned the idea of a hat factory to G to see what she thought, but the books/bookmarks idea is a surprise. It seems like most parties G goes to, she ends up walking out with a bag of candy... but with her birthday being so soon after Halloween I just *hate* the thought of dumping more sugar on kids.

G asked me if I would dress up like the Mad Hatter for the party. I don't think that's the right character for me... I'm tied between the March Hare and the White Rabbit. I suppose it depends on my mood.

No buts about it... A quick guide to apologies

2011-10-09T17:01:00.000-07:00

Last week I was following along as an epic PR fail unfolded over at the blog of The Bloggess. (A fabulous blog to read, I highly recommend it) For a full account of what happened, please head over there to read, then come on back when you're done. (If you don't want to head over, I'll tell you in short: a guy was a jerk and did a piss-poor job of apologizing, which only made matters worse)

The whole episode got me thinking about apologies. One of my goals as a parent is to teach G accountability. People make mistakes, it happens all the time, but when you've wronged someone you really do need to own up to it with a full and proper apology. As parents, though, we have found that simply saying "you need to own up to it" doesn't exactly translate to kids. This epic PR fail has shone the light on how this message often doesn't translate to adults either.

Frankly speaking, I don't know anybody (myself included) who wouldn't benefit from a refresher course in how to apologize.

So it got me thinking - perhaps if there were a quick and easy rule to remember... something to demonstrate and define what "own up to it" actually means... something that can penetrate the short attention span of kids and adults alike. Something akin to Wil Wheaton's law: "Don't be a Dick"; concise, universally applicable, easy to recall. I thought about apologies I've seen and heard. I categorized them into "Good" and "Needs Improvement" and then considered each one, what made it good or not, and why? After narrowing down what I felt worked and didn't for sincerity and "owning it", I came up with the following:

Apologies should have no "buts".

A clear example of this is in Jose's poor excuse for an apology.

I get it and I was out of line by saying that however you put way too much effort
into your approach.

and

Again, I should’ve been less harsh – but I also feel like your email
was rude and unprofessional as well.

Think about how you would feel if someone apologized to you in this manner. The words are there... "I was out of line" and "I should've been less harsh"... and yet I do not get even the slightest hint that he is sorry for anything that he did.

"I'm sorry BUT you also did this" translates to "I am entitled to wronging you, because you did something I didn't like." There is no apology here, no sense of remorse for being a dick, just a lame excuse.

If you call someone a fucking bitch, and you want to apologize for it appropriately, you say something along the lines of, "I'm sorry for calling you a fucking bitch, it was entirely out of line and I should not have done it." Regardless of what they may or may not have done (in your opinion) to provoke it... an apology is about what YOU did, not what THEY did.
(Side note: if the other party did do something wrong, that is a discussion to have separate from your apology, not in conjunction with it.)

Let's take a look at some other examples of BUT apologies...

1) "I'm sorry, BUT I'm having a bad day/have PMS/some jerk cut me off in traffic/[insert any other excuse that has nothing to do with you]..."
Translation: I feel like crap, crap rolls downhill, you'll just have to deal with it. Now lets talk about my crappy day.

2) "I'm sorry, BUT that's just me/you know me/that's just how I am."
Translation: I don't hold myself accountable because I treat people like crap so frequently that everyone should just expect it.

3) "I'm sorry, BUT at least it's not as bad as what [insert name] did, he/she [insert worse deed, probably unrelated to you entirely]"
Translation: I'm not as bad as that guy, so I don't need to really be sorry for what I did... I only need to be a little bit sorry. Now let's talk about something else.

Not one of these BUT apologies addresses the hurt feelings of the wronged party. They gloss over the required "I'm Sorry" phrase and shift quickly, either back to the offender or off on some other unrelated tangent.

In thinking of potential situations where the above apologies might have occurred, here are some examples of what I think are good apologies.

1) "I'm sorry for hurting your feelings. I thought about it, and I realize that I'm letting my bad day/PMS/jerk who cut me off/[insert excuse unrelated to you] affect how I'm treating others, and I shouldn't do that. Can I make it up to you somehow?"

2) "I did this to you again, and I feel terrible about it. I am truly sorry, and I hope you can forgive me."

3) "I made a mistake and I feel horrible about it. I'm so sorry! What can I do to make this better?"

If people could just follow Wil Wheaton's rule of "Don't be a Dick", I think the world - by and large - would be a better place. People make mistakes, though... shit happens. When you find yourself being the dealer of shit, the next rule to follow will be what we learned in kindergarten: "When you've hurt somebody, say you're sorry - and mean it."

I think one way to show that you really mean it, is to remember that "Apologies should have no buts".

Trailing...

2011-10-03T13:27:00.000-07:00

Washington Trails Association is having their annual photography contest, and while I did not get up to the Olympics to hike this season (where I'd intended to attempt some spectacular landscapes for just such a contest occasion) our camping trips to Blake Island offered me some opportunities to haul out some limited gear and see what I could do.

The rules of the WTA contest are pretty strict - only one photo per category, must be shot on a Washington Trail - so my entry this year is limited to two shots.

Under the category "Flora/Fauna" I have the Fawn:

This baby deer could be found in the field adjacent to the hiking trail pretty much every morning. Mom would drop him/her off and meander around near the campground while the little bugger munched away, largely ignoring the hikers passing not 30 feet away. This was one in a series of shots I took using my "approach wildlife slowly" technique. Once I spot a creature, I zoom in and do the best framing I can from where I'm at, meter the scene and get a few shots. From there, I approach slowly, one step at a time, to try to improve the framing/cropping/angle as best I can without disturbing the animal - both to not bother the animal, and to not scare it away and ruin the shot for the people behind me. This fawn was remarkably unconcerned with just about anything I did, and I was able to sit on the ground and scoot a few feet at a time, coming within 10 feet of it before I decided I might be pushing my luck.

(Side note: when I sat with my camera in my lap, watching the fawn eat, I noticed quite a few hikers breezed right past me. Any time I had my camera up to my face, however, they would pause to see what I was shooting, and only then notice the brave fawn standing in the middle of a wide open field. You can miss some pretty amazing things if all you're doing is looking at the ground directly in front of your feet.)

Under the category "whimsical" I have entered this:

G on the Trail. All in all I was generally unhappy with my inner-forest trail shots (they all looked so flat and lifeless) but this, at the entrance to the interpretive trail by Tillicum Village, was nicely lit. G ran over to the informative post and said "Look! I'm the little trail guy!" so we took a few minutes to try to pose her just like the sign. Someone stuck a blue hat sticker and mustache on the little dude in the sign, and while we couldn't find a hat for G, at least the color happened to match her skirt.

I have little idea of my chances of being published with these for this contest, but they were fun to shoot and you never know unless you try.

Nicknames

2011-09-29T23:33:00.000-07:00

I don't know when it started... maybe a long time ago because I'm not good at remembering names in general... but I tend to attach nicknames to strangers. Store clerks, people at work (when I worked in an office with people)... when I recognize someone more than a few times my brain just tags them.

Perhaps it's that OCD "need to organize everything" part of my brain, it wants to categorize.

My nicknaming seems to be most prolific at the gym lately. As people tend to run on routines, I often see the same people over and over again.

The guy who looks like a cross between my dad and Tom Bosley: Mr. C.

The guy who always wears a wide blue bandana on his forehead to the point where his eyes are obscured: Cyclops

The woman who lays 6 gym towels over every piece of equipment before using it: Overkill

The woman with the short blond hair who wears doubled up tank tops: Starbuck

The two incredibly hugely built cops who come in and always work out together: Thing 1 and Thing 2

The really tall woman that walks through the gym on her way to the basketball court: High Tower

The guy who looks like John Locke from the TV show Lost: Locke. (Not imaginative, I know... but seriously. It's Locke.)

The two women who come in together, hang on the machines but never seem to actually exercise much: Coffee Talk

The exceedingly well built woman who works out wearing only a sports bra and shorts: Shakira

The pale guy who wears gray biking shorts and a thin grey skin-tight shirt: cyborg

I wonder sometimes if other people do the same thing... and if so, what would my nickname be?

Munchkin?

Hobbit?

To paint, or not to paint. That is the question.

2011-09-25T11:06:00.000-07:00

We have decided to do something of an overhaul to our main living level. It has been a long time coming... the piles in the far corners have become unbearable, the stand that the TV is on is woefully small, the book shelves are overrun with outdated periodicals, and I have a pile of artwork hiding in the basement while my walls are covered with things I'm just tired of looking at.

While discussing the process of what to do and when, the idea of painting the interior came up. At first it was a casual "hey... since we're taking all the artwork down anyway, it would be a good time to paint!" Then came picking up swatches and discussing options, likes and dislikes. We settled on a couple of potential colors, then began the negotiating of which color to put on what wall.

This is where we've run into something of an uphill battle.

For anyone who has seen the interior of my house, it's a bit convoluted. The previous owners took what was a distinct kitchen/living room/dining room layout, blew out a wall, and created an additional family room and larger dining area under a vaulted ceiling. It is wide open... walking in the front door you can look through to the back corner of the family room, the kitchen is it's own area but stretches on one side into the family room around a door, and the ceiling has various heights and angles depending upon which room you are in and where you are facing. The walls are broken up by massive, deep windows - which lets in a great amount of outdoor view (and was the selling point for me on the house)

All of these things makes the decision on where to stop and start color a challenge.

Due to various schedules, we set a deadline of wanting painting to be done by October 10th. We have already moved a good amount of furniture, and yesterday I set to work clearing shelves and storing things out of the way in the basement. About mid-afternoon I called D and left him a message: "We aren't going to get the painting done by the 10th." I did the math, working backwards... realizing we would need to rent scaffolding to reach the vaults, how long it takes paint to dry, how long it would take to do the prep work... it *could* be done - in theory - by the 10th, but only if we made a final decision on color immediately and bought the paint today.

So last night we stayed up talking, walking from room to room pointing to walls, looking at the angles, trying to decide which color should go where. We came to an impass when we reached where the living room meets the entryway. There is a section of wall, where we step up to the landing, that is set in about 2 inches. Where to we stop color? I felt we could leave that section unpainted... the eye would blend it in with the entryway (sort of an optical illusion). He felt we should paint it, but then we'd have to paint where it's inset, which means we'd have to paint one wall of the entryway... and then where do we stop? Because that wall wraps around to the stairs. We discussed putting trim around that edge so that it was distinctly different and therefore wouldn't need to be painted - but what kind of trim? And why there and nowhere else in the rest of the house?

Then... sitting in the rocking chair and contemplating for a while... I said...

"..or we could just not paint."

There was a long pause.

"Well," D said, "when you say it that way, it sounds like we don't *have* to paint."

"Well... we actually don't," I replied. "It is our house, and it is our decision. We can take all the artwork down, dust it off, set it aside. Get the furniture where we want it, pull up all the new artwork and hang it. There's no reason to paint the walls.... I don't think we're ever going to have a good idea of where to stop and start color in this place. The angles are just too crazy. If you want to add color, I think I know where I can get some pretty pictures."

And just like that... *poof* went the stress... and pulling absolutely everything off the shelves, dusting, sorting, and resetting everything seems like an easy going vacation in comparison.

Balancing Act

2011-09-19T23:18:00.000-07:00

It is *how* far into September now?
Oy.
The beginning of the school year has been a whirlwind for us... coming back from camping and slamming right into activities the very next day, we have hit the ground running.
Which I was looking forward to, except instead of hitting the ground, I seem to have landed on a treadmill that was already going at top speed, and am scrambling to not go flying off the back end.

Work is still work... sometimes unexpectedly popping up on weekends... but I'm managing with that well enough.

Projects - photography contests, photo projects, and gift ideas - are piling up on my back burner.

The routine of school started smoothly enough, but my plan to spread out my school volunteer work has not really panned out as I'd imagined it would. On paper, I was running the art contest for the fall, showing up to the big school fundraiser in October, and helping with art lessons in G's classroom throughout the year. In reality, all three events overlap immediately, because all 3 require meetings that I had not anticipated.

Time to find balance.

Decisions to lighten the load have been made.

For one thing, I'm not sewing costumes this year. G changed her mind from Ewok to Vampire, which saves me money on fur and oodles of time sewing.

For another, we are not hosting a Halloween party this year. It was a tough decision for me to make, but realistically... the art contest activities will book me for the last week of October, the school fundraiser (where I'll be running a photo booth all night) is October 28th, and G's birthday is 2 weeks after that. It will be quite chaotic enough without decorating the whole house for Halloween and then ripping it all down before her birthday.

Somehow, though, I still have it in my head that I can hand make my Christmas cards this year. They are designed, but whether or not they see the light of day remains to be seen... my delusions of grandeur are helped along by having found out that we're not hosting Thanksgiving this year. With no pressure for housework or cooking (beyond baking one pumpkin pie) I just saw my whole Thanksgiving weekend open up as a craft bonanza opportunity.

I just have to be careful about how much I weigh it down, so as not to tip the scale.

Camping Critters

2011-08-26T11:47:00.000-07:00

We knew, going into our second weekend in a row of camping, that the raccoons on Blake Island are quite bold.
Or stupid.
Perhaps a combination of both.

The night I left a bag of leftovers on the table (only to let them cool before putting them in the cooler, because I didn't want the ice to melt) I turned my back on the table for not more than a minute, and a raccoon was there... chewing on the bag... licking my cell phone and leaving little tomato sauce raccoon prints all over my camping table cloth. We chased him off the table, but the silly critter didn't *leave*. As I went about making sure he didn't use my cell to call his cousins in China to talk about the great food score he just made, the fuzzy thief stayed under our table - not more than a foot from me - licking the last bits of sauce off his dirty little paws.

On our second trip, I thought I was prepared. All gear was sealed up, zipped up, bagged up and covered up. We floated in amongst the empty mooring buoys, tied up, and began to ferry gear to shore on the dingy. I loaded the dingy, D rowed to shore, G carried what she could up to the campsite. The items she could carry turned out to be our clothing bags, some chairs, and the sleeping bags.

Upon finishing up the last dingy run, I came ashore with D and we began hauling the heavy stuff up the beach to the site - that's when we noticed how tossed about our gear seemed to be. D's bag had slid off the bench and was on the ground... OK, probably gravity. G's bag on top of the table had been opened and one of her toys was pulled out - she was probably playing while we were moving things. The pack that serves as my camping purse had been opened and overturned, the contents of the main compartment all over the dirt.

Not OK.

Did someone search our stuff? The campground and all it's 30-some spaces appeared to be mostly empty.

I opened my wallet to find all the cash perfectly safe, no cards stolen... as I noticed that my cell phone was a good 2 feet from my bag, I heard D ask how the bag of charcoal managed to be ripped apart.

I remember our bag of charcoal from the first camping adventure had been chewed on by raccoons.

Conclusion: Raccoons can open zippers.
(thankfully it appears they can not work velcro closures on cell phone cases, otherwise I'm certain he would have completed that call to his cousins in China that he was unable to make the previous week)

We checked over our gear - my items (though strewn) appeared to be accounted for, D's bag had been knocked over but unopened... then I moved to G's toy.

My heart sank.

Though it wasn't missing, one of her favorite toys - a little purple monkey - had been the object of some little critter's curiosity... the face was muddied and the eyes were scratched, clearly chewed on with sharp little teeth.

Many tears were shed as I cleaned it's face. I cleared a good portion of the dirt, but the eyes were deeply scratched. I promised I would fix it... if nothing else we'd be able to polish the eyes once we got home. We had a long talk about bringing things camping, and how they can get dirty and damaged while bouncing around the great outdoors. I also pointed out that hey, at least it wasn't swiped never to be seen again? She understood, but was still sad... she takes such care of her toys that - for the most part - almost everything she's ever owned looks practically unused. Eventually she shoved the monkey deep into her bag to try and forget about it the rest of the trip.

Later we noticed a momma raccoon with 3 young ones patrolling the edges of our site. Something told me those were the culprits of the monkey's demise.

On our way home from camping, I stopped at the store where we'd first found the monkey. They didn't have any more. After dropping gear at the house, I stopped at a sister store on my way for groceries - they had the brown monkey, but not the purple one. I came home and prepared to research "how to polish scratches out of resin" when I decided to look up the name of the monkey to see if they might be sold elsewhere.

Why hello Amazon, thank you for providing me a $5.00 solution to my daughter's deep unhappiness.

The New and Improved Blueberry Beanie Boo arrived in the mail today - to many squeals of joy and super-strong hugs from G. She's happy, I'm happy... maybe I'll send the scratched monkey to the raccoon's cousins in China.

Camping Blake

2011-08-16T00:02:00.000-07:00

Things that I learned while boat camping on Blake Island last weekend...

Herons enjoy hanging out in marinas, and are somewhat not bothered by people walking by.

It is a chore to ferry the camping gear to shore, but you can't beat the view.

Our gear can fit in smaller campsites if we turn the tent backwards and leave the screened-in space folded down.

If you are going to camp in full sun, don't forget sunscreen.

Camping by the open water means there are little to no mosquitoes... but no matter how warm the day is, everything becomes damp overnight.

The lack of mosquitoes is entirely worth the dampness.

If you're camping in the summer sun, pack a buff or baseball hat, soak it in cold water and stick it on your head for instant air conditioning.

Morning fog makes coffee taste better.

Contrary to my phobia of water, I seriously enjoy rowing a small boat over calm surfaces.

Camping on a small island means no cars, but that does not necessarily equate to a peaceful campground on a Saturday night.

If a guy is wearing a lobster hat on his head and drinking his 5th beer in a half hour, just ignore him. It's not your fault his attempt at joking no longer makes sense.

I can actually sleep even when my tent butts up against the next door neighbors as long as I have earplugs.

Foam earplugs are worth ten thousand times their weight in gold.

Camping on a small island means no bears, so you don't have to worry about your gear being torn apart.

Camping in a state park filled with raccoons means you do need to invest in good rubbermaid and bungee cords.

If you turn your back on the picnic table after sundown - even for a second - your leftovers will be stolen.

Raccoons apparently do not enjoy the taste of cell phones sitting on the picnic table next to the leftovers.

Bring bleach cleaner or handi-wipes... even if you pack the food away, you'll still wake up to little raccoon paw prints on your table.

Starfish like the same kind of bait that crabs do.

Crab tastes best when it is immediately fresh.

If you leave a bottle of red wine in a rubbermaid container in the sun, it will warm to the point where wine seeps out around the cork.

Drinking too much of the non-ruined red wine will make you feel dehydrated in the middle of the night, which really sucks when the nearest water involves a walk through raccoon infested campgrounds with a flashlight that burns out halfway there.

My daughter is gaining on me in height.

Take your food out of it's original packaging, put it all in ziploc bags, and pack it that way (double bag for meat in the cooler) - it reduces the amount of space it takes up in your containers, and reduces the amount of trash you have at the campsite.

If you decide to use coin operated showers, bring something to pad your feet... the mats in the showers are exceedingly painful to stand on after 3 minutes.

Don't forget a thermos travel mug for coffee, because a regular cup cools too quickly and doesn't fit in the camp chair cup holders.

If I don't have a mirror, I have no idea how badly I'm sunburned, so I go ahead and allow pictures to be taken of me.

Yes, as a matter of fact it is entirely worth it to haul 20+ pounds of camera gear on the boat.

Seagulls apparently do not like bald eagles. Bald eagles apparently don't give a shit.

If you go to the bathroom, bring your camera... you never know who you'll come across on your journey.

Keep your camera set to the current lighting conditions, on the off chance that you catch a native fishing.

When you hear a lot of bird calls, look up... there is a reason for the noise.

Seeing large birds of prey flying still makes my heart skip a beat.

If a dream wakes you in the middle of the night on a full moon, get up and look outside - you might just see something that takes your breath away.

Of trails and dancers...

2011-08-10T00:55:00.000-07:00

Last week we had an incredibly lovely sunny day, probably the warmest we've had all year (read: we broke 80 degrees) so we decided to take advantage and explore one of the local islands. Blake Island is a small spit of land just south of Seattle, and the entire island is a state park. It is also only accessed by boat, and the only vehicle on it is a small ATV from the ranger station. The normal tourist trip is 4 hours, including the passenger ferry to and from the island, a salmon roast lunch/dinner with dancing entertainment, and about a half hour to meander the immediate grounds of the park. We opted to extend our day by taking the morning ferry, and arranging to take the late dinner ferry home, so we had a good 6 hours to explore the entire island prior to our scheduled dinner.

G had been off training wheels about 3 weeks, and in that time had already outgrown her "training" bike, so we upgraded her to a bike with 24 inch wheels, 11 inch post, and 7 gears. (My bike is 26 inch wheels, 13 inch post. That girl is growing.) She went from careful trepidation on flat streets to screaming around the block within hours of getting her new bike home. This day on Blake was her first time on dirt trails, with steep inclines and bumpy tree roots.

She took to it like a champ.

Our adventure took us around the edge of the island, all told about 5 miles of trails. We began at the harbor and took the long way around, south to the south end campgrounds and around up to the west end camp grounds where we stopped for a lengthy lunch break. There were hills so steep I'd have to hop off the bike and hike it... then return to the bottom to help G with her bike (so I probably did quite a bit more than 5 miles myself)

The ride back around the north end of the island was less rough and tumble, and we were all able to take it without having to stop and hike.

Biking without saddle bags means I had to travel light with the camera gear, taking only the point-and-shoot and a couple of lightweight toy cameras (photos from those are forthcoming, once I'm home long enough to develop the film) I did take a few snapshots while we rested at the park waiting for our dinner time.

G's idea of "resting" was to hit the park's playground.

There were signs all over the main field instructing us to not approach the wildlife. I swear I did not approach them, these deer just walked right up to us and started munching.

The village consists of a main house with a long house attached to one side (where they host the buffet dinners and put on their show) The exterior has a lot of totems among the crushed clam-shell pathways.

I'm particularly fond of the totems with eagles.

Inside the main doors is where they have the fire pits for roasting the salmon. Even if you aren't a seafood fan, you have to admit the set-up is pretty impressive

During dinner the tribe puts on a show, telling stories and sharing traditional dances. Three of the dances come out in massive masks made of carved cedar, and after dinner they stand in the lobby for a photo op. This is me, looking like a dork because I don't know what to do with myself while standing between these two dancers with a lobby full of tourists staring at me.

We were able to load our bikes onto the ferry early, and relaxed for the quiet ride back across the sound to Seattle. G's first mountain biking adventure day included over 5 miles of rough hills, a couple hours of random riding through a field, climbing on a playground, trying to avoid a family of deer, a huge salmon roast dinner with a show, and a ferry ride back to the mainland. We had left the city at 11:30 a.m. and returned about 10:45 p.m... G was asleep in the back seat by 10:50.

I am so incredibly proud of how G embraces the challenges we keep throwing at her.

July High (and low) lights

2011-07-29T14:42:00.000-07:00

With the excitement of D's Party settling down, and returning to the reality of not having a Big Event on the Horizon, I look at my calendar and realize July has pretty well evaporated.

What the hell have I been up to for a month to just... *poof*... dissolve like that?

Work is... work. I'll not be blogging about it except to say that it has been exceptionally oppressive since my return from vacation, and that it had a large hand in why I haven't been blogging.

I have been shooting quite a bit, where and when I can. There are now multiple folders of backyard bird photos, butterflies, and several rolls of film I need to someday develop.

I put together a photography book about Jamaica, entitled "Jamaica: A Photographer's Journey" Which can be fully previewed online :) This project was mainly created to be my birthday gift to D (in addition to the party, and also that's why I couldn't blog about it earlier) but D's birthday coincided with Blurb.com's photography book contest, so it is also entered in their "Travel" category. I have no idea my chances for winning or even placing anywhere near the top, but I'm very proud of the book. It is longer than my other two books combined, and I believe is far more comprehensive of a story than anything else I've done.

I had an exciting trip to the emergency room, followed up by a week of deep concern. To start the story at the end: I'm fine, no need to worry about anything. On the night of D's party I began getting nauseous as he opened his gifts. I turned pale, blood pressure dropped, and I started getting sick. I tried to ignore it figuring it might be food poisoning. After I nearly passed out my MIL yelled for D, and we took a trip to the ER. Long story short... my 4 hour journey included being given pain meds, nausea meds, an ultrasound and a CT scan, and it was determined that I probably passed a gallstone (ultrasound showed an empty gallbladder, but one exiting duct was enlarged) However I also had an alarmingly high white blood cell count - the doc attributed that to the inflammation of the gallbladder duct, but still had me double check it with a blood test a few days later. So I had a good 4 or 5 days where the word "cancer" floated around in the back of my mind as a possibility, until my second WBC count came back entirely normal.

It both sucked that it was the night of his party (though thankfully most guests had left by then) and was also highly ironic since I'd been beating into Steve's head for weeks that they were NOT to crash their mountain bikes and end up in the ER on the day of the party.

On the night of D's actual birthday, we had a quiet family dinner out at Serafina (the caterer's for the party) We were greeted with hugs by the catering manager, our waitress told us how she'd heard a lot about our party, the general manager came out to visit us, and the chef came out of the kitchen to chat. He and D had talked about cheese at the party, so he wanted to bring out his favorite cheese for us to try. He later came out to check and see how we liked our food, and also send D the recipe for one of our favorite dishes. It was like being brought into a secret inner circle.

I finally talked G into taking the training wheels off her bike, and have not been able to keep her indoors on non-rainy days since. I have mixed feelings about this - I'm so incredibly proud of her and very excited at her enthusiasm for biking, but her love of speed freaks me the hell out. She also experienced a growth spurt, and outgrew her old bike within weeks of removing the training wheels. Last weekend we bought her a new bike. 7 speeds, hand brakes. It's only one size smaller than my bike.

Oy.

I have been reading. A lot. My kindle goes everywhere with me, and I find myself sneaking in a few pages here and there while standing in line at the grocery store or waiting for my coffee water to boil. In the last month I've read through "Kitchen Confidential" and "Blood, Bones and Butter" - both of which have given me a much deeper understanding of the life of a chef. I read "The Psychopath Test" - which I found fascinating. I returned to fiction with "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo", quickly followed by "The Girl who Played With Fire" and am currently on "The Girl who Kicked the Hornet's Nest" (the trilogy can be found here) I have returned to the days of staying up reading until 1 am without realizing it.

I had a nasty sinus infection - which in the grand scheme of things is not a difficult thing to remedy, but it put me out of commission for a few days.

I spent some time in Port Townsend, where we were able to experience the Art of Doing Nothing. We rode bikes around the fort, hiked around town taking photos, poked around the cute little shops, and sat with our feet up (in my case, reading. A lot.)

I managed to get "The Silmarillion" in audiobook form, even though it's not supposed to be available in the U.S. (I didn't set out to circumvent the system, there was just a glitch where it told me it would empty my cart, but then it didn't empty the cart.) I'm not usually one for audio books, but this one reads like a history book weighs 60 pounds - realistically I'm just not going to lug it around. I have listened through the whole thing once, and it has already greatly enhanced my experience in watching LOTR by having a deeper understanding of the history of Middle Earth.

I went out to dinner with a friend I've known for 12 years, but hadn't met in person until this week. Out of the blue she started a new job and had a quick business trip up to Seattle and I happened to be free. It was all very last minute, and yet 12 years in the making at the same time. It felt both entirely natural and surreal.

And now we reach the last weekend of July, which promises to be filled with sunshine and time on the water. I look forward to August with loose plans in my head... camping maybe? Hiking at some point? Probably a good deal of biking. My indoor projects - long as the list may be - are on the back burner of my brain while the weather is nice. Maybe sometime in September I'll clean the garage.

Or maybe not, if there's a good book to read.

Long time gone... a big update

2011-07-26T16:50:00.000-07:00

I've continually had this update idea in the back of my mind, and continually failed to get around to it for one or another reason.

Some of you know this (but for obvious reasons I couldn't post this to the general public until now...) but this July my husband turned 40, and I decided I wanted to throw him a big surprise party. I actually started planning things back in February, with a general outline of who might be invited, where it might be held, and how I might pull it all off. Seems like a long time to be planning, I know... I probably spent less time planning my own wedding than I did this party... but anyone who knows D should know how incredibly difficult it is to surprise him... both because he is so intuitive, and also because he's so damned spontaneous.

So I started planning way in advance. I planned... who would be invited (close friends and family) where it would be held (my house) where we'd get the food (D's favorite restaurant caters, yay!) how many people would be visiting from out of town (at least one, possibly five), where potential out of towners would sleep, timeline for yard work (spread out over the course of 6 weeks so that it wouldn't look like I was suddenly preparing the house for a party) timeline for house work (spread out over 8 weeks for the same reason), how much I could set up guest sleeping quarters without making it look like I was setting up guest sleeping quarters, duration of distraction (min. three hours, 5 would be great), timing of laundry (so he could have his pick of what he wanted to wear once he realized there was a party going on) guest parking locations (neighbors offered their hidden driveway) and party rental supply delivery location (neighbors across the street offered to help so that D wouldn't see the extra tables and dishes) We had our anniversary dinner at the restaurant because they changed their menu for the summer, and I wanted to see which dishes D was most interested in. I'd sit for long periods of time, staring out the kitchen window trying to Tetris-out where everything would go for the party, but unable to move anything ahead of time to see where things might fit. I paid attention to the music D played when we drove places, made notes of the songs, and created a playlist on my iPod based on what seemed to be his favorites. I took the decorations off the boat from the surprise birthday date-night he'd done for me, and set them aside to use in the back yard for his surprise party. A month before the party, I spent a weekend rearranging the entire kitchen counter set-up so that there would be more workspace for the caterers.

I had meetings, phone calls, and emails back and forth with the caterers over the course of 2 months to plan the menu. We had to arrange then rearrange the time to ensure the executive chef would be available at the party. Once the food selections were settled (based on D's favorite dishes, a few things that kids would be sure to like, and side dishes selected from what was fresh for the season) I went to work on the beverages. I spent a few weeks gathering up drink options - cases from Costco of drinks, D's favorite wines and beers from the liquor store - and hid the inventory in G's playhouse in the basement (the only place in the house I could stack things that I was 95% sure D would never bother to look) I picked up a couple of new folding tables and had my MIL hold onto those at her place so that he wouldn't notice them in the garage. I pulled the coolers out of the garage, cleaned them, then put them all back in their original places so as to avoid suspicion.

D's best friend, Steve, offered to be the distraction for the day, and he not only plotted exactly the right kind of distraction (day of mountain biking at a park with enough distance from the house that they had to drive there, giving me a buffer of time when they would call to say they were coming back) but also backed it up with a bike ride the weekend prior, so that the Party Day Ride wouldn't be quite so out-of-the-blue.

In general things came together... but along the way things also threatened to fall apart. Dates were changed to accommodate vacation plans. Phone tag was played when one friend from Portland had last-minute car trouble. I had continual and persistent nightmares... dreams that the caterers forgot to show up, dreams that it poured down rain, dreams that he crashed his bike and didn't make it to the party (the latter of which was not entirely unrealistic) As clusterfucks threatened, I'd beat them each down and press on.

The day of the party I woke early and tried to pretend to not be in a hurry as I showered and dried my hair. D got up and prepped his bike while I meandered around the house, trying to pick things up without looking like I was obviously picking things up. To my great surprise (and relief!) D's friend showed up early, and gave me a whole extra hour to go into Overdrive Mode.

As soon as they left I began shifting things around... I moved our table and chairs out back, cleared off all the extra seating and placed chairs around the yard. I pulled the coolers out of the garage, placed them in the designated area, then went back to try to move the bar. That proved to be a bit too awkward for me to handle, so I left it sit for the time being. I set up (mostly) the guest room, then it was time to race down to the train station to pick up our out of town guest.

Our guest was one of the biggest surprises of the plan... Mike is a friend of D's from high school days, and they marched drum corp. together. Mike now lives in Portland, and we managed to squash the car-trouble issues by arranging for him to take the train so he could be here.

Thankfully, Mike coming early gave me an extra set of hands to help set up. He and I carried all the heavy stuff over from the neighbor's house and moved the bar around to the back. My inlaws soon arrived with my tables and the ice, and I set to work getting the drinks chilled, glasses set out, and bar decorated. The caterers showed a half hour earlier than expected and set right to work prepping the kitchen and setting out the chafing dishes.

Guests were due to start arriving by 4. By some miracle (or maybe it was my OCD level of organization) the back yard was set and ready to go by 3:30.

(Mike and I resting for a moment... this is the lower patio - which used to house the firepit. We recently demolished the pit in favor of a metal one that now resides up in the yard. This made our pit area the perfect place to set up the bar and drink tables)

It was all, absolutely, entirely worth it.

Guests arrived between 4 and 4:20. The ones that drove in hid their cars around the corners or up in the neighbor's driveway. The kids went to work playing in the yard, rolling down the hills, adults gathered on the deck and helped themselves to drinks. Phone calls started up, between Steve and his daughter (a guest at the party) and me and D... I kept racing up the stairs with the house phone so he wouldn't hear the noise of people in the background. They were running late, so the caterers brought out a few snacks for us to munch on, then I put the kids on the job of sitting in G's room - overlooking the driveway - to keep an eye out for when D came home.

Shortly after 5 the kids came screaming down the stairs yelling "THEY'RE HERE! THEY'RE HERE!" while all the adults said "SHHHHH! That's the opposite of SHHHHHHH!" The kids ran up the steps to the grass, then stood with their hands over their mouths to keep themselves quiet.

I wanted the reveal to be big. I didn't want to be in the front yard yelling surprise, I didn't want to even be in the living room... I wanted the point of reveal to be a big giant WHAMMO! for D... smack dab in the middle of the party and the decorations and the people and everything... and I knew he'd figure something was up by the smells that were coming out of the house anyway.

So... for my birthday D had taken me on a surprise date night where he'd blindfolded me and drove me around until I was unable to figure out where we were. I took the same blindfold from our date night and put it on the front doorknob, and had instructed Steve to blindfold D and lead him through the house to the back deck, telling him I had a special dinner planned.

As Steve guided D through the house, the caterers stood absolutely still, hands folded, off to the side.

On the count of three, we all yelled SURPRISE as he took off the blindfold.

He was stunned. Then he saw Mike.

Then I showed him the menu for the party

He didn't even read the menu, he just stared at the name "Serafina"... looking confused. He thought I had purchased party platters or something from Serafina, he was trying to figure out how I'd managed to pick up food from a restaurant in Seattle and have it all reheated.

Then I explained... No, the food is being cooked here.

D stared at me, blinking, still not comprehending.

So I walked him into the kitchen, and introduced him to the executive chef, head of catering, and another chef from Serafina... who were currently hard at work making some of D's favorite dishes of all time.

D is a musician. I've seen him meet other musicians. I've seen him meet very famous, very accomplished, and extremely talented musicians. D walked away from those encounters saying "yeah, that was pretty cool".

When D shook the hand of Dylan the Chef... he was damned near giddy.

The food was, quite frankly, amazing.

Once D had showered up and returned to the party, all my stress and planning and plotting washed away and I sat back and just enjoyed the night. The kids raced around, the adults hung out and ate and visited, music played in the background, the food kept coming.

Max, the catering director, brings out the cake while we all sing Happy Birthday

After the food was all taken care of, while the caterers were packing up... D had a chance to hang out with the chefs and chat about foods for a while. It was fun to watch them talk food stuffs, and D shared some of his infused rum with the guys.

It was a lot of work... a lot of planning and plotting and organizing and circumvention and coordinating... but the look on D's face - when he first saw the surprise, when he saw Mike made it up, when he met the chef - was so incredibly worth it...

...the party was weeks ago, and he still every so often will just randomly say it was the best birthday he's ever had.

A Pair of Pileated Peckers

2011-06-24T12:26:00.000-07:00

Woodpeckers. Get your mind out of the gutter.
Geesh.

We've lived in our house for over 7 years. I remember within days of moving in I began hearing what would soon become the familiar calls of the Pileated woodpeckers. These are the big guys... about the size of a crow, with the bright red mohawks that the character Woody Woodpecker was fashioned after. They are generally reclusive birds... we hear their calls echo through the neighborhood, and recognize their signature "WHAP! WHAP! WHAP!" pecking on dead wood.

Contrary to what the cartoon shows, they do not sound like the rapidfire "rat-tat-tat-tat-tat"... around here that's the sound of a sapsucker announcing his territory. The Pileateds are deliberate in their hunt for food, sounding more like a craftsman thudding his hammer with careful aim. On rare occasions I've managed to sneak up and see them at work on a dead log. They tip their head to the side, examining the wood... then they pull their head back as far as it will go and throw it forward with all their might, as if their beak were a sledgehammer. Every time I see it, I expect them to pull their heads back and shake them, I cannot imagine how they do this without seeming to feel the least bit of pain or dizziness. They appear entirely unaffected by the blow, and they line themselves up to do it again.

Their call is very similar to the cartoon (not the beginning laughing part, but the way Woody sings that last note over and over... ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha) though in the wild their pitch sounds more similar to a laughing hyena than the cartoon bird... "kak-kak-kak-kak-kak-kak-kak-kak!"

For 7 years they have been my backyard nemesis... the elusive Bird I Could Not Photograph. They are the grand pooh-ba in neighborhood bird watching (at least, between my next-door-neighbor and I, who seem to be equal in our enthusiasm for the feathered critters) Most of the times I've seen them I was unable to get my camera fast enough. One time I saw one on a neighbor's log and I had my cell phone, but in that instance the phone would not focus (though it focused fine 2 minutes later, after the bird took flight) Once I saw one sleeping in the tree in my front yard. I did not want to run the risk of losing the opportunity, so I did not bother to change out of my pink pajamas... but nabbed my camera and tripod and dashed out front. I had pictures, but as the bird was asleep in the tree, the photos only show an unrecognizable black blob on the tree bark.

Last Christmas D bought me a few bird houses for the yard, with the intent to put them up on posts this spring. In the midst of researching the best way to put them out in the yard (to prevent marauders from gaining access) D began brainstorming squirrel baffles. In order to test his designs, he devised a plan to put in a temporary post in the yard and hang a collection of bird feeders from it - if the squirrels cannot get up to the food that they clearly want, then the baffles will work for the birdhouses (which they should be less interested in anyway) So he placed a bit wooden post in a corner near our patio, collected a bunch of my feeders from around the yard, and set up what is now a substantial feeding station.

The experiment has created an unexpected turn of events. The tall wooden post, combined with a long narrow suet feeder filled with peanut-based suet, appears to be the ideal combination for pileated woodpeckers. Within days of setting up the feeders we began noticing pileateds hanging around the yard. I've dashed out of the house a few times to get pictures... some of them were fuzzy (low light + fast bird) and many times I've scared the birds away. But... they keep coming back. Daily. They seem to have grown so accustom to us that I can approach the feeders to about 10 feet before they fly away.

They other day I noticed the feeder was almost empty, so I walked out to fill it and didn't even notice the female was on the backside of the post. She didn't see me either, and I was 5 feet away before she took flight, landing on the side of the tree behind me. She watched me fill the feeder, then flew immediately back to it as soon as I'd turned and walked a few steps away.

As they have come back with such frequency, I'm now referring to them as our Resident Pileateds. I have several shots of both of them at the feeders, but I'm also trying to capture them with more of their own habitat as the surroundings.

These photos are 7 years in the making (cropped down to show both birds in one frame) The Grand Pooh-bas of Backyard Birding:

I'm thinking the male (on the left) should be named Woody, I haven't decided what to call the female yet.

Science Experiment

2011-06-20T21:59:00.000-07:00

Tonight, before dinner, D found a couple bottles of IBC diet root beer we'd left in the cooler. They were room temperature, so he thought we should pluck them in the freezer until dinner time, just to chill them.

My response: "Alright, I'll put them in the freezer, but don't forget about them or they will explode."

There was also a cold root beer in the fridge already.

I saw him drink a root beer at dinner and thought nothing of it.

Approximately two hours later... dinner done, dishes away, I was just sitting down in the office looking to research whether the pileated woodpecker frequenting our yard is a male or female. Then I hear from up the stairs a sort of muffled but clear....

KABOOM!

"What was that noise?" I call from below.

Before I reach the landing I hear D... "Oh... oh sshhhhh... I'm so sorry. The root beer..."

I hit the kitchen entrance and see the brown drips coming from the freezer door.

So - our science experiment for the evening. If you put two room temperature IBC diet root beers in the freezer and forget about them, the will explode. Simultaneously. In roughly two hours. They do not freeze completely, leaving behind some chunks of frozen root beer among a puddle of sticky brown goo.

I put on my gloves and picked the broken glass chunks out of the freezer while Dan rinsed off the freezer contents and trays.

On the plus side, I never quite got around to bringing up our normal freezer contents from the garage freezer (from back when the fridge konked out on us in April) so there was hardly anything in the freezer to clean. \

Plus, my freezer is perfectly clean and scrubbed out.

For the second time in 2 months.

I may never put anything in it again.

Oh, and the pileated in the yard is a female.

Happy Publishing Day!

2011-06-10T11:47:00.000-07:00

Today Issue #2 of Films & Grains Magazine comes out - available online via a print-on-demand type service.

You can glance through the magazine here by clicking the "show preview" link...

Flip through to pages 40-41 and you'll see two of my shots, under the topic of Nature's Graffiti... and also this time the editor remembered to put my website URL on the page.

:)

Here are the two pics... in case you don't have the time to flip through...
Driftwood

And Fringe

If you feel so inclined, or are interested in the nostalgia of analog photography, you can follow the link above to purchase a hard copy of Films & Grains!

Happy Friday - I hope everyone enjoys their weekends!

Honestly, people suck.

2011-06-09T12:31:00.000-07:00

I cannot say with certainty that there is good in everyone.

I can say, with a good amount of certainty, that no matter how wonderful, nice and fluffy someone might be... everyone does have at least some portion of their personality that someone else is going to think absolutely sucks.

You can't stop it, you can't change it. There are people out there that you think suck... there are people out there that think you suck.

I do not believe that suckage is an everlasting trait. Over time, people may change... you may change... for better or for worse. There may be a life altering experience, or maybe even some small show of kindness from a stranger, that changes a person's outlook and they become less sucky. Alternately, someone might start out with all the optimism in humanity in the world, and end up being beaten down so much that they determine everyone sucks.

So what is a person to do? My advice... don't give up in humanity, and don't let it get you down. Realize that all people suck to some degree, and the best thing you can do is determine your own balance of how much suckage from people you can handle... then try to surround yourself with people that hit that balance point. Realize that people will - intentionally or not - on occasion tip the scales. When that happens, take a step back... however far you need for however long you need... and come back if/when you feel things are balanced. As this is an exercise of balance... it's also important to realize that you are part of that balance too... so don't forget to take a look at yourself and try to keep your own suckage under control.

Timing is everything

2011-06-02T19:42:00.000-07:00

About 18 years ago, when I kept having these episodes of passing out for absolutely no apparent reason... I was diagnosed as "hypoglycemic". At the time I was told to eat a lot of carbohydrates, daily. I doubted their conclusion, because it didn't happen *all the time*... I pointed out it was always just before my cycle and asked if that might have something to do with it? No, they said... you're hypoglycemic... just eat a lot of carbs daily.
They seemed to just want to stick a label on me and wash their hands of it... "you have a tag on you, case closed." I'm glad I left the care of that HMO before the tag ended up being on my toe.

I am not, as it turns out, hypoglycemic. At least, it's not a chronic thing... but I do tend to have blood sugar issues just before my cycle. It is something about hormones affecting the way the body reacts to insulin. Usually my body handles it pretty well - I tend to just eat more when I crave it, and I might have headaches or get a bit jittery now and then, but I haven't had a full on 3-alarm situation in a number of years. So it's possible that I maybe kind of somewhat... not forgot about it entirely, just haven't considered it to be a "condition" to "manage".

This morning I was hungrier than usual, but I didn't think too much of it. I cruised through my work and had a bunch of stuff put together for the post office and bank by 11, so I figured I'd combine my errands with lunch. I made the stops I needed to make, and as I debated about where to go for food I started feeling jittery.
"Hm... I had too much coffee this morning," I thought.
About that time I started thinking that a giant sandwich on thick bread sounded better than thin little tacos, so I headed towards Panera. Once I parked and started walking I began to feel a little woozy. Inside the door I stepped into line, and a wave hit me... like an electric current from my head to my toes.
"Uh oh..." I looked at the length of the line and started digging in my pockets. No snacks.
A second wave hit me, stronger... my head went light, the room spun a bit...
"Oh FUCK I am going to pass out."
I crouched right there, bending forward to get more blood to my head, and dug through my purse. No snacks.
"Not in public, not in public, not in public..."
The line wasn't moving... I'm standing there surrounded by the smells of sweet breads and pastries just on the other side of the glass - none of which I could eat due to my allergies - and I'm trying to aim my body so that if I do pass out my head hits the carpet instead of the tile while simultaneously texting D so he knows where I am in case they call 911 on me. I actually broke into a sweat, and by this time was visibly shaking.
Then I noticed the display of juice by the registers... so I abruptly stepped out of line and nabbed one, opened it, and started chugging.

Yeah... people stared.

I leaned over the counter. "I'm sorry, I will pay for this when it's my turn, but my blood sugar is tanking... fast."
Bless the staff at Panera, her response was "No problem - do you need anything else? Do you need to lay down?"
"I don't know yet, I think I'll be OK," I said... figuring if I needed to lay down, my body would take care of that soon enough.
I sheepishly stepped back into line, and at my turn ordered my sandwich, which was thankfully made very swiftly. I ended up taking a whole booth instead of a little table - though I was by myself, I was still thinking of soft places to land.

Crisis averted, by the time I finished my sandwich I was no longer sweating, and not shaking nearly as badly. The girl behind the counter even came around to check on me. But from now on I need to mark on the calendar the days that I should carry a juice box in my purse.

A slow return

2011-05-20T23:14:00.000-07:00

Every time I go to Jamaica, it stays with me a little longer.

This trip was the longest for us thus far... 17 days... and though we only had one day to recover before leaping back into school and work and daily routine, there are parts that linger.

My appetite is still on Jamaica time - I want breakfast at 5, lunch at 10 and dinner at 5:30. I'm thankfully now sleeping past 5 all the way to 7, but my stomach protests this greatly. My appetite is still on Jamaican food too - I want nothing processed, nothing out of a box or freezer - I linger in the produce aisle of the store inspired by the fresh ingredients and contemplating how I can dress up a spaghetti squash or wondering which peppers might be too hot for a dish. I miss the warm water snapper, and the rundown sauce... and the people walking down the beach selling fresh fruit. The pineapples and bananas we get here in the NW part of the states are different... they aren't as sweet. I've searched over four different grocery stores and can't find honey bananas.

We have salmon here, and it's wonderful... but I want to figure out how to cook something else.

It took me until yesterday to figure out why my schedule was so jumbled feeling this week - why wasn't I getting to developing my film or editing my photos - and it's the food. Since our fridge broke immediately before our trip we returned to a kitchen in need of stock - a clean slate to work with. So I shop one meal at a time and need to buy all those things I would normally have on hand - lemons, green onions, red bell pepper - and I cook from scratch. I'm not using recipes, I'm thinking about what the chefs in Jamaica had talked about, thinking about the food that I ate, and I'm blending flavors and spices on my own. My lunch the next day is the leftover from the dinner before, because I don't want to grab a "quick frozen thing" even if it is all 100% natural organic. I didn't even realize I was putting so much thought into dinner until G asked me why we weren't stopping at Chipotle on the way home from the gym.

The thought of going to a restaurant here hadn't occurred to me, because I can't think of a place that I know uses all local fresh ingredients that are in season.

So by the end of the night my dishes are going largely undone, and I'm exhausted earlier than normal... but the food has been a few steps up from what it was before the vacation.

(PS, I'm adding a link to my travel journal from the trip - hopefully later tonight I'll get some videos of ziplining up to share)

The rollercoaster called Stress

2011-04-26T23:36:00.000-07:00

Last week was a week of hurdles... small battles between myself and Stress, which Stress seemed determined to escalate at every turn. It was a point/counter point sort of thing.

Stress says "you are buried with work, but your husband has a potential emergency which will stop you from working, ha!" I respond with "I can rearrange my work, run my errands conveniently on my way home from what is now a non-emergency. Ha!"

Stress says "Do you hear that? There's a noise coming from somewhere... it's an annoying buzzing emanating from the refrigerator. Have you noticed lately that the berries in the freezer are not quite as... FROZEN... as they should be?" I respond with "OK, we burned out the compressor. We can stick all the frozen stuff in the garage freezer for now, and we needed to clean out the fridge anyway. And hey look, now I don't have to cook!"

Stress says "Oh yeah, well how about we have a few work issues tossed in your way... a day of problems, endless phone calls, digging through contracts...what do you think of that?" I respond with "Oh yeah? Well I'll just work a little late, and then *I'm* going to have a surprise date night with D!"

Stress says: "Oops, you had to work too late, the person you were waiting for ran late, and now you can't get a decent dinner before your movie time." We counter with: "No sweat... we'll get tickets to a later show and have plenty of time to wander around looking for dinner."

Dinner... by the way... consisted of the absolute worst tacos I can recollect having. We ended up in a clean and healthy looking taqueria in Seattle, as it turns out about 10 minutes before closing... so we had the last of the last dried out taco filling in our food. Then we wandered, looking for a store that D was sure was just another block this way... maybe a block that way... walking past about a million better choices for dinner as we went. By the time we got to the movies we were just laughing our asses off at the great date night he was taking me out for. It was tremendous fun :)

Saturday I woke feeling great. Through all the ups and downs of the week I felt like I'd made it through, no freaking out, no tension - I took every pitch Stress had to offer me and maybe I didn't knock them out of the park, but I answered every one of them to some degree at least. Chipped windshield? Fixable the next day. Leaky toilet? A little bit of work, a couple of attempts, the leak tamed enough to manage until the toilet is replaced. Prescriptions need refilling early? Just a few phone calls and I've got it all sorted out.

Stress didn't like this. Stress got nasty on Saturday.

I had my day planned - chores that NEEDED to be done - then a light came on in the truck and D could luckily get it in to be serviced that day. So, scratch the chores, we'll do our errands instead and grab lunch out. We find a cute little Mediterranean grill and after much conversation with the staff about ingredients, we are served our food. One part of our order was drowned in a white sauce that looked suspiciously like mayo. They insisted there were no eggs in any of my food, and D went so far as to look up Lebanese garlic sauce on his iPhone - which showed that it is made from oil and garlic, not necessarily with yogurt or mayo (though some people do) I did end up reacting though, and upon asking again were told that there's no egg, no dairy on the plate. I looked down at the feta cheese which was also sprinkled on the plate, and began to wonder if they were just saying the canned "don't worry vegan, you can eat it" answer (as they also kept insisting the garlic sauce was only made with garlic and spices... but could not answer what, exactly, were the garlic and spices added to?) In any case, I didn't let the food stay in my system long enough to find out.

Two sucky meals in a row, but did I let Stress beat me? No! Two doors down was Starbucks, which is home to the most perfect snack plate of apple slices, cheese, crackers and nuts - exactly what I needed for my unsteady stomach and readily available.

Ha ha Stress... you will not let me starve!

We muscled our way through the rest of the errands, and I dropped D off early to get his truck so that I could go home and enjoy the yard. It has been such a rainy season, and we're so pressed for time, that we hired a company to come out and do the massive spring cleanup for us. They were not yet completely finished, but were done for the day and had been pulling out of the driveway as I pulled in. The house empty, the crew gone, and the first brilliantly warm and sunshine day since... probably last August...I ignored my torn apart kitchen, out the back door, and meandered the beauty of the back yard. I could now see flowers peeking out, shoots of plants breaking ground, my herb garden was trimmed up and tidy as could be. I wandered down the big hill to where I noticed a large patch of grass had been left unmowed. As I approached, a junco buzzed out from the fallen branch in the center, skimming over my head, and landing on a nearby tree. The landscapers had found a nest under a fallen branch in the lawn, and they left a safe 5 ft. radius of long grass around it.

How sweet is that? So I took a couple shots with my cell phone, posted the picture to share, and sat partway down the hill to see if the parent bird would return.

Then Stress... evil evil Stress... tapped lightly on my shoulder with the faint "ping"... "ping"... sound. I looked around, it sounded like a bee tapping against a window pane. I wondered if there might be a nest developing somewhere and walked toward the house to investigate. My thoughts...

"I don't see a wasp nest under the eaves... there it is again... I'm not seeing any big bugs or anything.. it's not water dripping... I don't recall our sliding glass door having any sort of texture on it... what. the....?!?"

I listened as the spiderwebbing of broken glass spread and popped, the door imploding in slow motion before me. Between my call to D, texting him a photo, and beginning to search for an all-hours glass place, the door went from solid-with-cracks to buckling-in. By the time I reached a glass place, the first small fragment had officially fallen to the floor. When D arrived home, calling to the landscapers to see what they knew about this, a head-sized hole had formed in the middle. An hour later the glass repairman arrived and the door was half gone.

I did break down for a few minutes, silent tears running down my face as I wondered what else would fall apart around me. The landscapers had kicked up a rock at some point, the impact was about 2 inches from the base of the door, and the breakage had spread from there. They didn't notice - which I don't doubt. Due to the glare of the unusually sunshine day and the white curtain behind it, *I* didn't notice the entire door was shattered until I stood 2 feet from it, and I imagine the spiderwebbing hadn't spread very far while they'd been working. They immediately offered to take the cost of repair out of what we owed them (we didn't take it all out though, because after all, they saved a bird's nest that I surely would have mowed over).

Stress thought he had me beat though, when those tears broke out. However the door was fixed in a jiffy, and I took my pent up hostility and put it to good use - taking advantage of the room temperature fridge, I pulled out every shelf and scrubbed it to a practically-brand-new level of clean.

It's clear that Stress will forever continue to dish shit out... so I'm finding the best thing to do is get bigger, stronger... become something like Riddick. Hit it, hit it hard... and when you stand over Stress, watching it writhe on the floor in pain... with all the love in your heart and soul you say...

Stay down, Bitch.

Which came first, the anger or the music?

2011-04-15T11:02:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was an off day for me. My hands and feet felt ice cold most of the day, my head throbbed with sinus pressure, my energy level barely eeked out enough for me to sit at my desk. Twice throughout the day my eyes argued with being open, and I found myself huddled on the couch under my favorite nap quilt, shivering as I drifted off to sleep. I'm not sure if it is the general stress of the pre-vacation to-do list, or D's nasty cold bug trying to find a new home, but my body was simply not up to the challenge.

Only problem was, it was gym day... and as I wasn't hacking up a lung nor did I feel particularly achey, when the time came at the end of the day I forced myself into my workout clothes and packed myself into the car.

It's not that I didn't want to go, I just felt apathetic. The days have been dark and gray and unseasonably cold, and even though I'm "Miss Indoor Hobby, the PNW weather doesn't bother me", I can't deny that this winter and spring have been particularly dreary, and some days I just want to hibernate. I hoped that getting into the gym and getting my circulation moving would - if nothing else - warm up my poor icey feet.

So obstacle one hurdled (getting myself into the car) I faced obstacle two... how to manufacture energy to make the workout effective. I know myself... regardless of whether or not I feel apathetic going in, if I go through the time and effort to get into the gym I'll be pissed at myself if I don't make the most of it. Just this week I created some workout play lists for my iPod, one of them labeled "boxing" - it's full of angry and higher speed songs, beats you can beat things up to, or lyrics that dig into your adrenal glands and make you want to pummel someone. I put that playlist on for my drive, and by the time I got to the gym it seemed as though boxing would be a great idea.

It was my first time doing boxing as my entire workout, and I honestly walked into the gym not knowing what the hell I was going to do with my time. The heavy bag hangs in the corner of the GGX studio at the gym (I don't know what GGX stands for, but that's the mirrored room with a stage where they hold all the aerobic group classes - picture a dance studio without the ballet bars and that highly waxed gym floor that you really don't want to ever skid your skin across) When I arrived the studio was empty, lights off, but the door was unlocked. I slipped into the gym with a bosu, plugged into my iPod, and donned my fabulous pink boxing gloves.
Alright side note - buying the gloves turned into a frustrating affair. My previous trainer had recommended a pair to me, and I ordered the smallest size available in a lovely menacing black, however they were still comically too big for me. I have wee little girly hands, so I'm forced to shop in the women's section - which all in all had some nice selections in various colors. Unfortunately I'm also spoiled with having used gel filled gloves (instead of just foam, so much easier on the hands) and the only gel-filled women's boxing gloves that I could find come in a dainty pastel pink. It feels ironic to wear them and hit things, but I got what I could get.
As I cinched up my gloves and began warming up, I stopped thinking about work and house things and to-do lists and how cold my feet were, and just gave myself over to the music. Evanescence "Going Under" played... not a fast song, but grinding and angry and I warmed up with squats on the overturned bosu. With my iPod on shuffle, the next song jumped down to Skindread's "Trouble" - fast, energetic reggae.

I continued on that way, alternating punching combinations with squat/holds on the bosu depending on what song was playing and how dead my arms felt. I sang lyrics under my breath while I punched and kicked, thinking only about form, landing in the right spot, and which combination was next (1,2... 1,2... 1,2,3... 1,2,3,2,kick...) I noticed the door open and close now and then, trainers came in with clients to use the mirrors, someone was hanging around the stage area, but I only partially saw what was going on outside my head. A few songs into it "Rebel Yell" came on and I was actually bouncing around a bit, chasing the bag when it swung so I could connect in the right spot. When I paused for breath and stepped back to look at the clock, sweat dripping down my face, 40 minutes had already passed... no wonder my arms felt like jelly.

I flipped the bosu over and pulled the gloves off, doing a few sets of ab work before heading upstairs for my obligatory round of cardio. I left the boxing playlist going, which pushed me to get a full 3 miles in on the elliptical. Then it was time to switch gears, slow down and stretch, so I switched my iPod over to the "yoga" playlist, where a soothing Enya helped bring my heart rate down.

As I stretched I thought about how the music helped to affect my energy level. The beat is part of it - all those years of drumming make me fall into the rhythm of the music with my actions. The lyrics fuel something else though... songs about anger, defiance...

"I'm not that easy,
I am not your horse to water.
I hold my breath I come around, round, round."

"In the high school halls
In the shopping malls
Conform or be cast out"

"Cause I'm just a girl, little 'ol me
Don't let me out of your sight
I'm just a girl, all pretty and petite
So don't let me have any rights"

"look here she comes now
bow down and stare in wonder
oh how we love you
no flaws when you're pretending
but now i know she
never was and never will be
you don't know how you've betrayed me
and somehow you've got everybody fooled"

It made me think... looking back on all my angry teenage years when I gravitated towards heavy metal and/or angry rap... was I so energetically angry because of the music I listened to, or did I listen to the music because it matched my mood? It's possible they pursued each other in some kind of vicious circle... amplified by the level of anxiety I lived with on a day-to-day basis. The music both fueled me and gave me a release... the ultimate experience of complete satisfaction being found in the mosh pits of shows, where I could beat the shit out of myself and leave all the anger and anxiety behind on the floor of the venue.

Yesterday I was clearly not in the mood to hit a damned thing until I put the music on... but then succumbing to the lyrics and the rhythm helped dig into that back-up supply of energy, opened the anger file cabinet as it were. I found I could effectively pull out the stress and tension and use it to fuel the workout... beat the shit out of myself and leave all the anger and anxiety behind on the floor of the gym.

Eggless Easter

2011-04-03T00:23:00.000-07:00

Decorating Easter eggs has always been a giant exercise in patience and paranoia for me. As a kid, my mom would have one of the neighbors boil eggs in their house - so as to avoid the high potential for an asthma attack for me. Once the eggs were safely boiled and cooled, they were returned to our dining room table... where we would line up the identical set of coffee mugs (which I swear we only used for this purpose) filled the appropriate amount of vinegar, plopped the little sweet-tart looking discs in, and went to work transforming the evil little ovals of death into brightly colored holiday decorations.

My efforts were generally hindered by wearing my mother's rubber dish washing gloves and attempting to balance these fragile beasts on the end of the flimsy bent wire "egg holder" that came with the decorating kit. More often than not, I simply gave up trying to handle them myself and directed my dad to plunk them into the various colors. I participated for the traditional family gathering aspect of it, I wasn't going to have anything more to do with them anyway... the eggs were turned into snacks and egg salad for the rest of the family, and come Easter morning, the kid's egg hunt was for the plastic sort that had prizes and candy hidden inside.

I'm not sure if I've grown even more paranoid as the years go on, or if I've just decided that life is to frackin' short to be actively adding potential health hazards to it, but either way I believe I have entirely given up on the traditional real-egg-dying baloney. I've tried to stick with it out of some sense of loyalty to the past, some years combining the precarious-egg-dying with the far more enjoyable wooden-egg-painting... but really, when it comes down to it, what's the point?

I don't want hard boiled eggs in my house. The smell makes my stomach turn over, the sight of them in my fridge makes my hand instinctively recoil as I reach for my coffee creamer, and as incredibly careful and cautious as both D and G are when handling the little devils... I spend my days feverishly scrubbing down counters to avoid breaking out in hives and secretly plotting out ways I can "accidentally" throw out what's left and just be done with the whole stinkin' holiday. (Now take that paranoia and multiply it a thousand times over when someone who is not as careful as D comes over and starts cracking one open on my kitchen counter. *shudder*)

My alternative tradition is to decorate fake eggs.

Last year I picked up several bags of paper mache eggs, and G and I had a lovely time sitting and painting the little guys. She found it far more interesting to be able to paint designs rather than plunk them in a cup and just... watch. Also, she enjoys not having to be afraid of dropping them. This makes me feel satisfied that my allergy is not depriving my child of our own holiday family tradition.

This year I saw an article in Family Circle magazine about ways to decorate plastic eggs. When I took a trip to Michael's last week I picked up some of their new, brightly colored paper mache eggs, a few packs of origami paper, and tonight G and I sat down and experimented with a few designs (as well as breaking out the pastel paints for the leftover paper mache eggs from last year)

The result of tonight's efforts:

What I also love about this project - besides being able to save them as decorations for future Easters, is that it can be an ongoing project all the way up to Easter, which gives us more than just an afternoon of sitting around smelling vinegar.

Edit on Sunday: Today's Egg Adventures

A heart like yours, it never dies

2011-03-25T10:56:00.000-07:00

Some years ago, after Owsley released his second record, he approached me and asked if I could help be his webmaster. It didn't involve any site building - the indie label he had signed to had already taken care of that - but the indie label was out of money and closing it's doors, and he needed someone to just help update the existing site. I was already moderating the discussion group, so it was an easy extension to that job and I happily said yes. Every few months we touched base and I would update the site with any news or photos from the road he wanted to share... then over time the updates became fewer and further between. Then, about 4 months after our last conversation, we lost him. After dealing with the penetrating shock of the news of his death, I immediately tried to log into his site... but found that the password was no longer valid. The domain name had been under his account, and he either didn't see or didn't respond to the reminders to renew the site... during that 4 month lapse in communication the domain expired, and some unknown entity had picked it up. I thankfully had both versions of the old site backed up in my external hard drive - so the original content was safe - but the domain pointed to someone else's server.

It has taken nearly a year of investigation, conversation and reminders... but the codes to transfer the domain were finally sent to me a couple weeks ago. As a favor to Owsley's brother Bud, I offered to take the reigns and rebuild the site... a task that turned out to be far more difficult than I had originally anticipated. The mechanics of the site building itself was relatively easy - these days site hosts have such easy interfaces with templates that I didn't need to map anything out or build a single page from scratch. I spent some time browsing, picked a template, and adjusted a few things to make it work for what I wanted it to be.

The difficult part was the content.

I open the site page, typed the words "Will was," and then sat... staring at the blinking cursor, tears streaming down my face.
Even now, as I type this blog entry, I can't stop myself from crying.

I'm a member of several groups dedicated to Will, I still moderate his discussion group... but aside from my two blog posts - about his passing and about his memorial service - I have largely been a silent observer. It has been impossible for me to find words. His music... sometimes it makes me smile because it brings back memories of seeing him play, or hanging out with him, or the conversations we'd had... sometimes one of his songs comes on and I just cry. Doesn't matter where I am or who is potentially watching... the tears silently pour. That is what I experienced while trying to come up with the words for his site. It took me three days of walking away and coming back and walking away again, just to piece together a two line introduction to the site - and that would not have been anywhere near presentable if PPG hadn't helped edit me. (THANK YOU!)

I stalled out again on the biography, typing a few words at a time and then walking away again and again. After a few starting attempts I managed to lose myself in the act of piecing together the puzzle pieces... some parts from his old biographies, some information from the record labels, a few quotes from some interviews he gave to magazines. Remembering his shows, his enthusiasm on stage, helped me through the writing.

Last week I uploaded the new files and now (finally!) Owsleymusic.com is back up and running. For the moment it contains his biography, discography, links to his music online, and some photos... our hope is for it to continue to grow.
I am most happy that both Will's brother and sister are pleased with what I put together. I want to do everything I can to help them, and I'm so indescribably glad that they like what I did.

February's Photography Successes and lessons

2011-03-19T00:34:00.000-07:00

Over the last few weeks I've slowly made my way through the backlog of images I shot on my vacation. I think the focusing trick I learned from the seminar I attended last April has really paid off, as I came away from this trip with gigabytes of sharp wildlife images. I wouldn't have captured nearly the amount had I been using my previous focusing method... which consisted of fumbling around with the shutter button, giving up and focusing by hand, then throwing most of the shots out of focus by trying to then take the photo.
Taking the auto-focus function off the shutter release is quite possibly the best photographic decision I made this year.
I compiled so many images that my portfolio update tonight had to be broken down into 7 new galleries...

I loaded them up and placed them under the "Featured Galleries" on my main page - just go to My Site and scroll down to the bottom of the page if you want to take a peek, or here is a list of direct links to each gallery

Snow Scenes - Images taken during the great big snow storm we had in the middle of our vacation. Many of these were shot from inside the truck as we wove our way down Whidby Island.
Metal, Wood, Water and Stone - kind of a mixture of scenic stuff from around Orcas Island, and experimenting with longer shutter speeds on wave shots.
Birds of Port Townsend - didn't have enough of any individual bird to do their own album, so the house sparrow, crow and double-crested cormorants ended up here.
Great Blue Heron - it's clear I loved shooting this guy.
Belted Kingfisher - he was more difficult to capture, since he's such a relatively small bird and very, very shy. I consider myself lucky to have even spotted him
Bald Eagle - an immature bald eagle... I noticed him swoop down just as I was getting into the car to wait for the ferry, and I bolted right back out to follow him. This guy was being totally harassed by seagulls, who made a racket and dive-bombed him, but never got close enough for me to get them in the shot with him. The eagle ended up leaving the scene because the heron came back. It seems in the world of birds, size matters more than talons?
Port Townsend Fountain in the Snow - This is the fountain in Port Townsend which sits at the base of the stairs that connect Uptown to Downtown (they are literal in PT) We arrived in PT under gray skies, and the snow began to fall just as we brought our bags into the condo. This is a series of shots taken over the course of our 3 day stay, with varying degrees of coverage and meltage.

This trip was a lesson to me in what it's like to shoot in bitterly cold weather. I wore fingerless gloves to keep my hands as warm as I could, but I think I may need to invest in some hunting gloves (the kind where you can remove the index finger only) if I'm going to shoot in winter conditions for any length of time. Also, bright snow, bright sunshine, and transition lenses to not make for a good shooting set-up. It took me a few outings to realize that the reflection of the sun off the snow made my glasses pitch-black dark - great for driving but terrible for viewing anything through the eyepiece or on the LCD screen. I started shoving my glasses in my pocket while I shot, but nearly dropped them several times so I really do need to carry my glasses case with me next time.

Driving in a winter wonderland

2011-03-15T10:02:00.000-07:00

(I originally started this post a couple weeks ago, then failed to finish and publish... so the story is a little late. And I'm failing at my "at least once a week posting", so I'm going to get my ass moving on that. I promise)

That bird-watching opportunity that I mentioned in my last post came about because the school district up here has a mid-winter break. It's not a vacation that either D or I grew up with, but it's something that is in the teacher's contract, so we decided to take advantage of it and spend a week getting away from it all. We had no idea that "getting away from it all" would involve driving straight into a bizarre patch of heavy winter weather. We drove north, took a ferry, and stayed a couple of days on Orcas Island... where we were hit with a relatively massive amount of snow. Granted, the man who owned the coffee shop in town (originally from Switzerland) thought it was nothing more than a dusting... we considered 3-4 inches dropping in a few hours to be decently significant. However, with D's big heavy truck and my white-knuckled grip on the rather un-detailed map of the island*, we navigated the snowy roads down to the ferry dock.
*(Side note: those who might plan a visit to Orcas... know that your nav system may not be updated with any road information for the island. It's not so big that you can really get lost anyway, but if you want to know where you are for certain - say for example, in the snow where you can't really see where the road is... bring a map)
After loading onto the ferry, we had snowy and freezing couple hours ride over to Anacortes, where the snow had blanketed the town in a good 6 inches, and was still falling.

Usually in these kind of driving conditions I turn into... well... I get paranoid.
Hard to imagine me paranoid, right?
However, on this day I managed to distract myself enough with the beautiful scenery that I let go of my anxiety and just put my faith in D's driving skills. I knew I wasn't going to convince anyone in our party to stop at viewpoint for me to get out and shoot, but I did take advantage of the slow crawls to stick my lens out the window and capture some lovely snowy landscapes.

As we drove down the length of Whidby, we were treated to these kinds of peaceful scenes... rolling hills of farm land covered in a blanket of white, snow capped trees, and off in the distance just the slightest hint of a break in the clouds... just enough to light the scene without washing everything out.

We considered stopping at the viewpoint across Deception Pass, but I wasn't on top of it enough to remind D that the turn off is IMMEDIATELY after the bridge, so we missed the opportunity to stop. I did manage a shot of the pass below the bridge as we drove over though.

Down the remainder of the island, on our way to the ferry dock that would take us to Port Townsend, the snow thinned. By the time we reached the dock there was little more than a hint of dusting on a few pieces of driftwood. Strange what a difference 2 miles makes in the weather up here.

Due to low tide, we had an hour and a half wait for that ferry - which is where my bird watching opportunity came about. It was lovely timing, as the family had to sit and wait for the ferry anyway, so my shooting adventure didn't take up anyone's time. We crossed the water and pulled into town, an easy 8 or so blocks from the ferry dock to the condo we rent. As we unloaded our cars the snow began to fall, and by dinner time the town was covered in a good 4 inches of snow. Thankfully, Port Townsend is the kind of place that you can park your car and not need to touch it again until you leave town... so all we needed to do was settle in.

The timing was incredible.

A bird in the hand...

2011-02-25T14:44:00.000-08:00

This has been a big week of birding opportunities for me, and all by luck and happenstance.

While waiting for a ferry, I looked out the truck window and noticed a belted kingfisher sitting on a rope at the dock. I stepped out to zoom in and get a shot, and he flew down onto a rock near the water's edge.

As I focused on this little gem, I heard D next to me clear his throat and say "did you notice what is standing next to him?" Not 5 feet from the kingfisher was a great blue heron.

After snapping happily away for a good 15 minutes, the great bird flew off. I wandered back toward the truck then looked up and noticed a massive wingspan in the air, so I high tailed it back down towards the water, where I found the seagulls harassing a young bald eagle.

This is the closest I've managed to get to a baldy in the wild. He stayed for maybe 5 or so minutes, dodging gulls with a sort of shrugging-off attitude... then I heard the heron call, and that was enough to send Mr. Eagle back to his perch high in the trees. The heron came and replaced the eagle on the pillar for a few minutes, before gliding back down to *his* spot in the water.

All in all I shot about 150 images of just these three birds. This 30 or so minute experience makes up for the months of winter dry spell for me.

Playlist: Don't Jump

2011-02-19T12:17:00.000-08:00

I think I've blogged about this before, but if I did it was 2 iPods and many songs ago (which makes the old blog post obsolete, right?) I'm bringing it up again because in the past week I've had >1 friends talk about how crappy they've been feeling for the whole of the month of February. Maybe it's the winter doldrums, maybe there's something in the moon phase fucking with us. Maybe we're all hormonal at the same time. (My apologies to our male counterparts and friends)
Generally speaking, the quickest way for me to help myself to feel better when I'm low is to listen to a particular set of music. The best way I could describe the songs is to say they are "supportive", though they are supportive each in their own unique and individual way... (some being along the lines of "I feel your pain" while others are more "let me show you the light at the end of the tunnel") So I thought I would share my list in case the songs might help you too, and also to see if anyone has ideas to add to it.

Granted, titling the play list "Don't Jump" is bit dramatic, but the bluntness of the name tends to make me roll my eyes at myself, then smile. And that's sort of the point of it, right?

(The songs are mostly alphabetical by artist, I tend to listen to them on shuffle mode.)

Just Breathe - Pearl Jam
You Learn - Alanis Morissette
Hush - Angie Aparo
Pretty Angry - Blues Traveler
Look Around - Blues Traveler
Just Wait - Blues Traveler (do you get the feeling John Popper has been through a few difficult times?)
Halcyon Days - Bruce Hornsby
Fix You - Coldplay
Everything's Not Lost - Coldplay
Only If - Enya
Superman (It's Not Easy) - Five for Fighting
And the World Turned - The Gabe Dixon Band
God's Top Ten - INXS
Great Indoors - John Mayer
I Know - Jude
Trying - Lifehouse
Run To the Water - Live
Rise - Owsley (this one has been harder for me to listen to, but it means a lot to me, so I keep it on the list)
Solsubry Hill - Peter Gabriel
Silent Lucidity - Queensryche (this is particularly good if suffering from nightmares)
Everybody Hurts - R.E.M.
Your Guardian Angel - The Red Jumpsuit Apparatus
White Daisy Passing - Rocky Votolato
Don't Cry - Seal
Chasing Cars - Snow Patrol
Fragile - Sting

Happy Valentine's Day

2011-02-13T22:26:00.000-08:00

Had some fun with my Lensbaby Composer and macro filters (+4 and +10)

Happy Big Card and Candy Day!

Following Up...

2011-02-07T22:19:00.000-08:00

Following up on this post about running from eggs...

We went back to the neighborhood pub for lunch today, and after sitting and placing our order the owner came out from behind the bar with a stack of printouts. No egg in the hamburger buns after all (yay for me, boo for my cholesterol) and the bakery pretty well confirmed what I'd thought. They don't actually have to label anything in commercial sale, but they do need to provide the ingredient information (if asked)

He also thanked me for bringing it to his attention, now that he has the ingredients he is going to put the pages in sheet protectors and have them available for the wait staff for future customers who ask for information.

Look at me, I'm helpful :)

Beyond his quick action, I was pretty impressed that the owner recognized me and brought the info to me - I didn't have to approach them or bring it up again at all.

Being accepted feels good, though I'm hesitant to believe it.

2011-02-04T16:28:00.000-08:00

Last Fall I heard through the photography grapevine that a new magazine devoted to film/toy camera photography was in development (pun intended) and they had an open call for submissions. The theme was "the beginning" (fitting, for the first issue of a new magazine) so I submitted my shot titled "First Steps"

I've always loved this shot for sentimental reasons... this is G one of the first times she walked on the wet sand of Santa Cruz all by herself (wearing a dress that I made for her, as a matter of fact)

A short while after I sent in the submission, I received an email saying my image has been chosen for publication in the first issue of Films & Grains magazine!

I was excited to know it seemed to be chosen but didn't really make any big announcement, because I am perpetually brimming with self doubt. What if they originally picked my image, then somewhere down the line opted for a later submission instead? What if they sent me that email on accident? It's a brand new publication, what if the magazine didn't make it to press? My years of battling Murphy's Law told me to hold off saying anything until it seemed really for real.

Last night I received the official word that the first edition of Films & Grains magazine is now available for purchase online!
I have ordered my copy and anxiously await the Big Reveal of my first time being included in someone else's publication.

...presuming they didn't send me the acceptance letter on accident, of course.

A step forward on my pursuit of egglessness

2011-02-02T14:35:00.000-08:00

A little over a week ago we had lunch with D's family over at our local pub. It's a fun, family owned establishment... where the wait staff never turns over, and by about the third visit they know you by name. I love the place for it's hard cider and atmosphere, but it's one of those places that I never could get a clear answer on about their bread. The sandwich bread has ingredients... and for the first few years I lived here, I made do with burgers served on toasted rye instead of hamburger buns (until I discovered their carne asada tacos, which are lighter on my tummy than a big ol' burger anyway) Their bakery breads, however, come in unlabeled clear wrappers.

Having just recently spoken with the Department of Agriculture and Department of Health, I thought I would try my luck on talking with the management about their lack of ingredient information. I had never realized this, but it turns out that the super friendly guy who always wears a baseball hat and scurries around behind the bar fulfilling orders is actually the owner... so my inquiry went straight to the top, and I received more information than I had anticipated I might.

The owner was incredibly nice and receptive to my questions. I talked to him about my allergies and the roadblocks I come across in restaurants (not just his... but a majority of places in the area) He had already started to make a note to himself to get ingredient information for future reference, but also pondered why the bakery wasn't giving it out to begin with. Maybe because it is commercial sales instead of retail? I'd had the same question in the past, but according to the DoA, the ingredient information has to be labeled or supplied regardless of who the food is being sold to, and in what manner. I thought perhaps the ingredients were on the boxes of bread, as opposed to being individually labeled, and perhaps the boxes were always tossed once the supplies were stocked in the kitchen. That had always been my biggest question - and I finally received an answer.

The bakery delivers bread on flats - not in boxes. The truck pulls up and there are pallets of bread, packaged in clear wrappers... the pallets go straight off the truck into the kitchen. No boxes, no place to stamp ingredients. His guess is that the bakery probably wants to save on costs by not labeling the bags they sell the bread in.

Technically it's not a requirement to label every bag, so it's not specifically illegal to package it that way. However, the bakery needs to provide the ingredient information in some manner. As this is a regulation that appears to be unenforced, it appears that this is probably something the bakery doesn't bother to follow through with unless asked.

So it comes down to doing this one restaurant at a time.

As low-tech as you can get

2011-01-21T14:19:00.000-08:00

With all the photo contests, magazines, and projects that have my internal wheels spinning... I probably did not need another photography toy to further blur my focus.

(pun totally intended)

However, when I came across the P-Sharan pinhole camera kit in a kitchy little shop in Port Townsend I just couldn't resist the draw. I've always been intrigued by pinhole photography - to think that you can still put together an example of the most basic, earliest form of camera, and have it be fully functional is just entirely fascinating to me. Strip away all the buttons and gears and glass and f-stops and you can return to the bottom line definition of photography...

...painting with light.

This kit goes a few steps beyond the basic "poke a hole in a shoebox and stick some film inside". There is a great deal of convenience in being able to roll film through it (rather than learn how to load and develop individual sheet film, which I doubt I have the patience to attempt) But beyond that modern convenience, it is a cardboard box with a pin hole for a "lens".

The kit turned out to be slightly more involved than I thought it would be. It is conveniently laid out - pre-punched and pieces together with tape (no messy glue necessary) and the instructions read like a model car, which I have plenty of experience in buiding. There were a surprising amount of layers involved in the interior of the structure, but when all pieced together it is extremely precise in it's spacing.

There was the film holder section and the front of the camera, which fit nicely together (on the left) The camera back is on the right. That square of cardboard is to be used for shooting.
Opening the shutter causes the camera to move, so you first block the front of the camera with the cardboard to open the shutter, then pull the cardboard away while you expose the film, put the cardboard in front again, then close the shutter. Alternately you could use your hand, but the non-reflective black cardboard would be a better light block.

Here is the completed front of the camera, shutter closed. The black rubberbands hold the back onto the front (though it fits so snug it hardly seems necessary, it is a good precaution)

Here it is with the shutter open.

Given our weather, and my further adventures of making up for lost time at work due to being sick last week, I have not managed to load film yet. I am hoping our rain will let up enough over the weekend for me to explore this piece of low-tech fun.

In the mean time... I do have a new Holga album I recently uploaded to my site: Holga Fall/Winter 2010

I'm up to 6 pots a day...

2011-01-19T12:55:00.001-08:00

I managed to make it to just about 2 years without catching a cold. For two years I dodged the bugs G brought home from school and D brought home from business meetings. I protected myself with a 2 foot radius invisible "don't come this close" bubble, enhanced with gallons of hand sanitizer and the aid of a guest room to sequester myself to at night. Then, just before New Years D picked up a particularly nasty kind of lingering cold, and though I took all the necessary precautions, the damned bug just lingered so long that it finally broke through my defenses.

I started out with a throat so sore I thought I had strep, so I ran immediately to the doctor. Nope, it's not strep... but as she looked up my nose with that pokey little flashlight thing her face fell a little and she said "... Oooohhhh... I'm afraid you're going to get worse before you get better."

Her advice? Push fluids, take ibuprofen for the swelling, and use a neti-pot twice a day, a full pot of water per nostril.

I cannot sugar-coat the experience... neti-pots are totally uncomfortable and really, really gross to use. I have one for when my allergies kicked my ass into sinus infections (though I avoided bugs, I have had my share of allergy issues the last couple years)

However... neti-pots WORK.

This past week's experience was the first time I ever used a neti-pot for a cold. I always thought of mine as a sinus-infection tool, so it didn't occur to me to use it for generic cold relief. But I did what the doctor suggested, using the neti-pot first thing in the morning, then just before bed. This has been a nasty, energy-zapping cold, but I made it through without once having that perpetual runny-nose day that usually accompanies a bug like this. Throughout the entire cold I've been for the most part breathing freely, and when I start to feel stuffy I hit the pot again about mid-day. It immediately relieved congestion, cleared out post-nasal drip, and seemed to significantly improve my sore throat. I attacked the sinus swelling with a basic dose of Motrin, and took some Mucinex as an added boost to help things along.

I can't say for sure that this was the determining factor in how much faster I've recovered than D, but it seems he still has residual congestion (nearly 3 weeks into his cold) and I'm at about the same spot with my suffering tally at day 8. I also slept a great deal more than he has, and I think that's a major factor as well.

But as far as suffering through congestion is concerned... I've learned to love the Neti-pot for the relief it can bring, even if it feels a little like waterboarding.

The proper answer is...

2011-01-09T10:12:00.000-08:00

Let's say you work in, own, or manage a food service establishment, and a customer asks you about the ingredients of an item... if you do not make that item in-house, or have the ingredients list from the manufacturer, the answer you give is "I don't know for sure".

You do *not* answer "no, there are no eggs", even if you used to make the item in-house and when you made it, it was eggless. Even if you asked the manufacturer when you started buying the item from them and they verbally told you that they don't use eggs.

People make mistakes. People don't think.

If you do not have the ingredient list at your disposal... YOU DON'T KNOW FOR SURE.

Gelato - in case anyone was wondering - is generally an eggless dessert, unless it is a custard based flavor. In that case, it's 99.9% likely to have eggs. Both the waitress and general manager of the restaurant we went to last night learned that lesson.

What is most frustrating to me is that I'm running into these issues a lot lately, and every time I trust the establishments less and less, and I become more and more paranoid about food. I really want to be able to go out to dinner and have a nice time and not be in a perpetual state of hypersensitive worry.

When I double check with waiters, a lot of times they seem annoyed (as if I'm a bother) or they seem offended that I don't trust their first answer. At this point, after countless trips to their public restrooms to puke up all the contents of my stomach in order to prevent a trip to the E.R. - sorry folks, but my trust runs thin.

Another frustration - and one I'm going to do something about - is this lack of ingredient information to begin with.

FDA regulations state that processed food - anything with more than one ingredient - has to have the ingredients listed on the packaging. That should include bread that is baked at a bakery down the street then transported to a restaurant. I have lost count of how many times and in how many restaurants I've asked about bread ingredients only to have the answer be "We don't know... we get it from a bakery and the bags are just plain."

Beyond the fact that bakeries should have the ingredients listed on all their items, how irresponsible of a restaurant to serve food without knowing what they are serving to their customers! I am not the only person in this country with a food allergy or sensitivity - I cannot be the only person running into this problem.

Last night's fiasco was astoundingly upsetting for a number of reasons. D was taking me out so I could relax after having spent the entire day taking down Christmas decorations while he slept off his bronchitis. I mean, our whole week was rather crummy due to restless nights and my attempts to sleep on the futon to avoid his germs, so he was trying to wash that all away. It was a nice restaurant - renown for their food - our waitress was incredibly knowledgeable about the menu, they have strict policies about cross-contamination in the kitchen, and above and beyond that, partway through the meal she told me she herself has an egg allergy. You can't get better than that for me, right?

The gelato though... the story is hard to piece together, I don't know where the fault of misinformation ultimately lies... but apparently they used to make it in-house and it was eggless, and the just recently started buying it from some place but did not have the list of ingredients on-hand. The waitress, though, was confident it did not have eggs and went so far as to ask the pastry chef. Whether the pastry chef made an assumption, or the place that makes it really did give them false information, I can't tell. I just knew, after two bites of dessert, that at least in that flavor of gelato contains eggs.

At least their bathrooms are individual private cubbies, so I could throw up in relative comfort.

In the end, the general manager talked to me at the table for a while, apologizing... cut our dinner bill nearly in half, and gave me her card asking if I would please call her to let her know how I am after I get home (or if I ended up in the hospital). The waitress also stopped by to apologize profusely.

I believe the waitress was given wrong information, and I think they handled it well enough. I did call when I got home to let her know that I didn't end up needing the hospital, and to further discuss this whole "don't have the ingredients on hand" issue. She was terribly embarrassed by the whole thing (and appreciative that I was "so gracious" about it - I'm not sure if she meant that I didn't cause a scene or threaten to sue?) and they are going to remedy the issue for the future by getting a list of ingredients for the gelato.

My question is... what can I - as a customer - do the next time I go to a restaurant and they don't have the ingredients to one of their foods? That's the question I'll have for the Washington State Department of Health when they open tomorrow.

A Christmas morning to remember

2011-01-01T22:55:00.000-08:00

In the days leading up to Christmas, G could hardly talk about anything other than trying to catch Santa. It started with an elaborate plan involving trip wires and fishing nets and expanded to begging us for motion sensors hooked up to security cameras. In the end, she settled for setting up a mattress on the floor by her bedroom window, where she had a view of the lower roof line and chimney.

Christmas Eve was a late night, after tucking G in we still had some straightening up to do, a few presents to wrap, and some setting up of breakfast goodies and Christmas surprises. Our general hope was to sleep in, relatively speaking. In years past we have been woken up somewhere in the realm of 4 - 5 a.m. Christmas morning - also known as "stupid-thirty". My feeling is that if you are waking me up at that hour, you should be either handing me a fishing rod or telling me there is some mortal peril and we must leave. Otherwise... just let me sleep. Knowing realistically that Christmas morning will still come early, we had determined amongst ourselves that 7:30 a.m. was plenty early enough.

Shortly after midnight we checked in on G, who was sound asleep still facing her view of the chimney, and then tucked ourselves in. It was a light sleep at best, then right at 3:48 a.m. I thought I heard a noise. It was a light *click* sound, which could have easily been the furnace clicking on or an ornament dropping from the tree. I kept my eyes closed and hoped I could get a few more hours of rest... then came the thunder.

*BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM* "WAKE UP! SANTA WAS HERE!"

G had tiptoed downstairs and came running back up to get us after realizing there were piles of presents and full stockings to attend to.

Groggy, I rolled over and half-opened my eyes. "It's too early," I said.

D looked over and said "Are you *sure* Santa was here?"

"YES!" exclaimed G. "There's a big pile of presents and this was on top!" She proudly held a small Monchichi.

"Go put that back! We can't play with toys that Santa left yet, it's too early!" said D.

With a dramatically heavy sigh, G turned and walked back down the stairs. As we heard her footsteps hit the main level, off in the distance came a low "Ho ho ho ho!"

Pause. Absolute silence. Then...

"Hello?" came G's small voice. "Santa, is that you?"

I got up and followed her downstairs, asking "who are you talking to?"

She put her finger to her lips to shush me, and whispered "I think Santa is still here... I heard him around the corner, come on!"

I quietly followed her around the presents and into the dining room.. there was nobody there. We circled around the table, and back again through the kitchen, around to the living room where we found the plate of Santa cookies empty.

"I think Santa must have been in the dining room looking at the rest of the cookies I decorated. I bet he snuck out while we were walking around the kitchen!"

I love her logic.

"Well," I said, "I guess we missed him, but he was clearly here. It is a little too early to be up though, don't you think?"

"Yeah," said G. She put the Monchichi back on the pile of gifts, right where she had found it.

"You know, I think it's OK for you to take that back to bed with you if you want to," I said to her, smiling.

She grinned and picked it back up again, gave it a hug, and walked herself up the stairs, opting to curl up in her bed as there was no reason to keep an eye out any further.

She slept soundly until just past 7:30, which is when D woke up for the day and decided we could start Christmas. He woke G, then called over to the family to let them know we were up, and I went to work making coffee and getting some breakfast food set up. While waiting for the family to show up, D and G went for a walk around the block, looking at the Christmas lights and enjoying the mild morning.

It took about an hour for everyone to come over, all the while G waited patiently... helping to set up for breakfast and watching out the window for cars. As the family arrived she ushered them in, handing them plates and showing them to the breakfast spread. Once everyone had eaten and were settled with their coffee, G stepped past the pile of gifts for her from Santa, and began digging for the special presents she had made for everyone else... declaring "I get to hand out the first presents of Christmas!" I tried to hand her one of hers, but she waved it away... she wanted to watch everyone open their gifts from her first.

I've never been more proud of her than I was at that moment. It amazed me not only how patient she was in waiting for the family, but how her focus was not on receiving gifts, but on giving them...

...and of course, trying to catch Santa.

'Tis the season to be jolly

2010-12-22T13:01:00.000-08:00

Oh, the holiday season. What a joy.

I'm not sure if it was the combination of the full moon/lunar eclipse approaching, or just that the holiday season brings out more people... and therefore more crazy people... but it seems like we encountered a higher than normal ratio of weirdness to normalcy last weekend.

Though for the most part, I'm impressed with people.

We went to the mall Saturday (2 hours after they opened) and managed to drive into the covered lot, find parking, walk into the mall, visit Santa, and have pictures in hand all within 20 minutes.

The Saturday before Christmas.

I'm still stunned even as I write this.

Yesterday while waiting for a parking space to clear in front of a big major store, a woman drove in from the other side and paused... as the car in front of me pulled out of the spot the woman in the minivan looked up at me, pointed to the spot, nodded, and kept driving. (I took the miming to mean "I see that you are waiting, I'm not taking the spot")

It was wonderful timing, as my energy level was rapidly crashing. I wanted to find her and ask her why more people can't be like her.

I've been up, steadily working on getting gifts wrapped and stashed... my office looks like a side room from the North Pole workshop and it is leaking into the basement. Through all the shopping and preparations I've still managed to throw together some cookie dough and have a short list of new bread recipes that I *really* want to try. But then I also took G to Michael's on Sunday, where we had a grand time pulling a little of everything holiday (60% off!) off the shelves and into our basket, and I have about a dozen half-done ornament ideas in my work space, waiting to be finished.

I cannot tell if I am ahead, behind, or somewhere in between... so I've given up trying to measure and I'm just going to play.

It took a few extra days of assembly this year, but D wired up the big train set (adding to it a large train station and more people) We didn't pull it out of the boxes last year, so this is the first year G has really been old enough to play with it with minimal supervision.

She loves this thing (it blows smoke when it goes full speed, and you can make the brakes squeal by throttling back quick, and in neutral there's a lot of conductor chatter that you can play... can you tell I like it too?)

Deck the halls...

2010-12-17T22:44:00.000-08:00

Holiday Cheer!
The rain let up long enough for me to head out and take a few pictures of the lights out front, and I also got a few shots of the indoor fun. This is the first year we've had the tree in the living room... which meant a shorter tree, but I really like being able to see it from the front window.

Our living room from the front entry

Our fireplace mantel (The palm tree is a carving we had done on vacation last spring)

Our house from the street

Partway up the driveway

This is a panoramic - my first attempt at using Photomerge in Photoshop :) (If you enlarge the shot you can see the giant ornaments hanging from the eves just under the red and white lights)

Here's a closer shot of the living room and dining room windows

Where does the time go?

2010-12-15T12:36:00.000-08:00

I realized the other day that I just haven't been blogging much this season... and I'm trying to remember where my time has gone - then I look at the piles of work, the box of completed projects, and the slew of "yet to do's" and I remember.

Tis the season, ho ho ho :)

Between the expected and unexpected days off of school, and the jostling of plans... it seems like as much as I had prepared last fall... my "holiday season" feels like it's about a week off. I had to practice the art of practicality and take a cold hard look at my grand plans... and that logical "this is how many hours of the day exist" part of the brain had a discussion with the "but I can get it all done! Just watch me!" part of my brain. The result being... I could not solder any ornaments this year.

*sigh*

It is disappointing mainly in that it was a project a year in the making thus far - (last year I specifically took Christmas photos to be used as ornaments for this year, some of which would have been in my Etsy shop) - and now it will be another year out.

However, in the list of priorities it just slid down too many notches.

With that decision made, I was able to focus my energies on the here and now - and in the last two weeks we have managed to decorate the interior and exterior of the house (photos to follow, now that the rain has let up) purchase, wrap, pack and ship all out of town gifts... address and mail out all cards/calendars... help run a 2 day art lesson at the school... finish very nearly all of my in-town Christmas shopping... complete a photo shoot of my new baby niece (shot, edited, and delivered, 36 hour turnaround!) and even keep up with my work.

However my brain is in this perpetual paradox... I think about how much I have left to do before Christmas, and sometimes it seems like I have plenty of time... other times I do the math and think "Holy crap! Only ten more days!"

Snow Days

2010-11-24T23:04:00.000-08:00

It's been a bit crazy lately, with a big "Arctic Blast" storm hitting us, effectively making our Thanksgiving break 6 days long. I was somewhat prepared for it (anticipating the weather, I ran out to the store and stocked us up good) and averted a potential massive fuck up with only relatively minor inconvenience...learning that the fastest way to wake me up at 6 a.m. is to say "the pipes are frozen". (I left the outer garage door open on our coldest night... a section of pipe froze up a bit, but I was able to thaw it with the hair dryer in about an hour and have yet to see breakage or leaks)

We don't get snow often anyway... and pre-Thanksgiving is pretty rare. Between the weather and having a big family turkey dinner for G's birthday, my internal holiday clock is terribly confused.

I've also learned that my daughter is something of a snow bunny... if there's snow on the ground I'm hard pressed to keep her indoors. It was announced Monday night that there was to be no school Tuesday, so I told her to turn her alarm off and sleep in.

Tuesday she was up, dressed in her snow gear, and standing over my bed at 7:20 a.m. begging to go outside and sled.

Luckily she is highly skilled at entertaining herself for great lengths of time... but there is the inevitable few times a day where I'm out with her until our toes go numb, sledding down the street or back yard hill with the neighbors.

But really, the live action says so much more.

The first video is blue - that's because we had bright sunshine and deep shade from the trees, which screwed with the sensor in the camera. But anyway, here's a taste of what I've been doing the last couple days.

Face first down the street in the long sled

Sledding behind G down the street

Sharing a sled with G

The brave girl takes the backyard hill face first on the boogie board

And the back yard hill, sitting upright (this one picks up speed about halfway down)

Happy Thanksgiving!

back in the saddle again

2010-11-08T14:20:00.000-08:00

My agenda has been packed lately. It's not yet overwhelming (or so I keep telling myself) but between Halloween, the school art contest, and G's birthday party planning... my brain is perpetually in overdrive.

Ironic that I now have so many fun things to blog about, but hardly any time to blog.

Within the last couple weeks I had the opportunity to get back in the saddle of human photography (as opposed to the landscape and wildlife I've been concentrating on for so many years.) One shoot was running a photo booth at the school's annual fundraiser, and the other was a sitting of maternity photos of my sister-in-law. While in the process of shooting my sister-in-law, she asked me if I missed my days in the studio.

Interesting question... and the answer is yes and no.

Most of the things I disliked about the studio had to do with the retail aspect of it. I was not fond of working weekends, I was not fond of the longer hours during the holiday season, and the main reason I quit was because I'd been scheduled to work on Christmas Eve for the 4th year in a row (after having been promised it off for two years) and I'd had enough of that. Plus, being an employee of someone else, I didn't get to pick my clients... I shot what walked in, and there were some doozies that came through our door.

I do not miss any of that.

What I miss is the access to the lighting and backdrops, the interaction with the nicer clients, and the feeling that I knew what I was doing. Day in and day out I was posing, cropping, shooting, adjusting - the basics became so automatic that I could trust my instinct with those, and concentrate my thinking on coming up with new and creative poses and vignettes.

Running the photo booth was very similar to the studio experience, except the lights were steady, not strobes, and the camera was hand-held. We kept blowing the circuit with the lights and I'd have to adjust my flash to compensate, and that made me nervous about the outcome. But after one or two kids came through, I noticed those old studio instincts emerged from the dusty file cabinets in the back of my mind.
Sit up straight, point your knees this way, I need to see both hands, chin up, chin down, look in the lens, smile! (if they weren't wearing a mask)
I posed groups without head stacking.
I pulled binkies out of the shot as needed.
I adjusted costumes and props like I knew what I was doing.

That part of it was fun... I just wish I had better lighting knowledge (and control)

For my sister-in-law's sitting, I went out and rented backdrops and studied up on using available light through north-facing windows. Unfortunately the clouds rolled in so thick on our shooting day that I ended up with the flash, but I learned that my basement ceiling is excellent for bouncing the flash off to evenly light the scene. The sitting was more what I recall of general studio work - setting up various poses, changing the backdrops, getting full lengths and close-ups. It was different in that I held my light source, and had to consider where my lights were aiming every time I moved.

I have dabbled a bit in the last few years with doing people sittings again, and though my steps in that direction are slow and cautious it has been on my mind a lot more lately. Even before my sister-in-law approached me for maternity photos I'd already signed up for a Photoshop seminar specifically designed to talk about editing for portraits. In the few sittings that I've done I have discovered that I need to get a better handle on my flash, or get myself a strobe light set-up, so that I can concentrate less on technical lighting aspects and more on creative posing. In the sittings I've done, we've managed quite a few nice poses (if I do say so myself) but in my mind I know I could do so much more if I were not so nervous about flashes and f-stops.

My hope is that it will come with practice.

Woo went the wind, and out went the lights...

2010-10-28T23:38:00.000-07:00

When I was a kid, the people behind us had a daughter a couple years younger, and a son who seemed to be in his early 20's... (but was probably more like 16 and just really tall) They lived there until I was about 8 or 9, so my memories of the family are a little foggy. There is one clear memory, though, that comes up every October.

For some reason, we were carving pumpkins together at their house. I had to ask for help with cutting the top off my pumpkin, so my friend's older brother came over to give me a hand. He took the sharp knife and cut around the stem, then turned the knife and cut a notch in the lid and pumpkin. I asked him why he did that.

"So you know how to put the lid back on," he said, as if I should have known.

I stared at him blankly. "Don't you just... put the lid back on top?"

He smiled. "No, I mean look..." he demonstrated by turning the lid the wrong way rapidly, right left right left right left... "Normally this is what you do to get the lid on, you have to spin it around and around to get it right. But with the notch, you just have to line it up..." he points obviously to the notch on the lid, and finds the notch on the pumpkin... "and it's on straight without wasting time!"

I thought it was a brilliant idea, and every year since then, that is how I have cut out the lid to my jack-o-lantern.

(Lyrical title: 5 Little Pumpkins)

As Halloween approaches...

2010-10-24T22:41:00.000-07:00

This week, and weekend, have been a busy flurry of events.

I was on track for my "schedule" (such as it was) sewing merrily away at G's Halloween costume, when I suddenly had this deep dark churning in the pit of my stomach. I'd finished the top of the dress, flipped it right side out, and thought "oh... this looks a little small."

This is what happens when you measure around your subject, but not up and down. The dress fit her around her waist, but was clearly going to be about 3 sizes too short in the sleeves and overall length.

I was thankfully able to remedy the situation with some time, another trip to the fabric store, and the added bonus of finding a pattern that better suited the look she was going for, and this one is the right size. But it cost me some time.

Then, to my surprise and delight, my sister-in-law asked me about doing maternity photos for her during the week. We talked back and forth about timing, and today was the best day for both of us, so I scooted some things around and set to work. In the process I got to know my new flash a little better, rented a real photo backdrop from Glazer's for the first time, and learned that I absolutely should own one (or four) of my very own, because my basement is actually a great space to shoot in. I'm happy with the preliminary preview of the shots, but editing/displaying will take time (and approval from the subject)

But, while I had the backdrop, and as I just completed the last piece of my costume (thanks to the wonderful suggestion from PPG!) I decided to do a couple cheesy movie poster type poses.

Does anybody have a tomb that needs raiding?

A Balancing Act

2010-10-17T10:01:00.000-07:00

This fall I have been attempting to learn the art of slowing down and breathing.

I'm told that by all outward appearances, I haven't been *entirely* successful - but you'd have to see the rapid firing of thought trains in my brain to see how much I slow down in comparison.

For example... G's upcoming birthday party. Last night a google search for Star Wars cake ideas sent my brain into overload mode, contemplating options and attempting to plot out how I could accomplish them without eggs. (Read: can't do fondant, as much fun as it looks) For about a half hour I was temporarily stalled on the vision of creating a massive battle scene on a sheet cake, using micro-machines as cake toppers and drawing the laser blasts with frosting. Cool right? But beyond the expense (trying to get the *right* ships means buying several sets of micro-machines), and the potential disappointment for the kids ("go ahead an look at the cake, but no, you don't actually get to keep the decorations) and the realization that G would not likely play with the toys after they'd been used as a cake decoration - I talked myself down.

How about red and green licorice laces, dipped in chocolate for handles and criss-crossed on top of cupcakes? Edible, fun, and clearly Star Wars.

See how good I'm doing?

My issue this morning is my contemplation of my herb garden. It simply needs to be chopped down - I have lavender in bloom all over my yard, and another massive amount of oregano begging for my attention. But looking at my counter top, with the 4 quart jars and 1 pint filled with dried oregano, the thought of chopping, washing, bundling, and hanging another 4 quart jars worth kind of makes a knot appear in my stomach. I'll admit I was fixated on the process until a friend of mine pointed out last week...

..."You know, just because the plant *can* be eaten, doesn't mean you *have* to eat it! Just put it in the compost!" (along with "Please don't send me any more oregano this Christmas, I still haven't used what you sent me last year!")

Those words have been battling the fixation in my mind, and this morning as I sip my coffee I've been digging around a little online. Perhaps there is something else I can do with the herbs? It seems a shame to waste it all.

I thought about infused oils/salad dressings (would make great gifts!) but from what I read online, home-made oils don't last long outside of a fridge, and even inside it's not much longer. I could freeze some so it could be used fresh later - but I fail to see the point of that when I have 4 QUART JARS FULL OF DRIED (plus the plants will bounce back so quick, I can just hop outside when I need more fresh)

In my browsing I came across a craft page talking about - among other things - pressing flowers.

Then I remembered that D made a flower press for me back when we lived in Oregon. (It is wonderful, massive, and several layers thick so I can press a LOT of flowers at once) We've hauled that thing across several moves because I was convinced I would use it again.

And Hooray! Today is the day!

I feel I've found a nice balance in this idea. I can prune back my plants with reckless abandon (since I don't need to carefully bunch them for drying) use at least some of the plants in the flower press, and toss the rest into the compost without feeling too terribly guilty about wasting the precious greenery.

Of course... the ideas of what to do with the pressed dried flowers are already formulating in the back burner of my brain. But that's not so time-sensitive, so I can let that one simmer.

Going out for a look and see

2010-10-08T09:46:00.001-07:00

Last night I dared to venture out from behind the camera, all the way to Seattle, to show my face at the art opening for the Holga contest winners/runners up.

I had a great time viewing all the wonderful finalist entries and talking shop with other photographers. Everyone was very friendly and congratulatory and it was very easy to set my nerves aside and just enjoy the evening.

They announce the winners by way of putting all the images on display along the long wall, labeling them with image title and artist, and then adding a "winner of..." label to the winners. So the suspense is over the minute you walk in the door and view the gallery.

My images did not win top prize in either of their categories, but they are on display along with the other finalists for the next month.

Here is an ironically poor quality photo of the display, taken with my cell phone :)

This really is the ultimate prize for me - to have my work accepted and presented.

For a while I stood quietly, and watched people as they made their way down the wall commenting on the artwork. I overheard a few people talking about the range of grays in the clouds for the Baker Lake storm, but mostly there was a lot of "I really like the crow!"

In conversation, I found out that there was a debate going on about how close I must have gotten to the crow to be able to get that shot.

To answer in case anyone else was wondering... I was less than 5 feet from him. This was actually the first shot I took with my new Holga. We had parked in the spaces overlooking the beach at Fort Worden and the crow was sitting there on the fence, hopping back and forth. I asked D and G to stay in the car (it possibly came out as "don't open the door, there's a crow! I need to get this shot!") Amazingly, the crow stayed put as I loaded film in the Holga, stepped out from behind the car door, and got my shot. He even hopped closer to me, but when he realized I wasn't dropping food he took off.

I had an interesting discussion with one guy about why it is that shot seems to be so appealing to people. You can look at it technically, the composition is nice (not too busy, eyes are drawn directly to the subject) you can look at it from a "Holga" perspective (good vignette, focus fuzzes just right, light leak from the right of the frame) or maybe it's just because people are intrigued by crows?

I ended up staying for the entire opening. I kept walking towards the door, then getting into another conversation. All in all, a great success for this natural introvert. :)

I've always found the people at Glazers to be the most helpful of any camera store around, but last night's experience has sealed the deal that it's worth the drive to Seattle to buy everything I need from them.

(Lyrical title: Night on the Town - Bruce Hornsby)

FINALIST! (eek!)

2010-10-06T11:48:00.001-07:00

Last night, just before I shut down for bed time, I checked a couple of photo contest sites to see where they were in the realm of decision making.

I logged in over at Holgapalooza, read through the list if winners, and found my name was not on the list. (But on the bright side, they haven't listed their runner's up yet, so I've still got my fingers crossed for that)

Then I checked my email for a yay or nay from Glazers. The decisions were supposed to have been made by Monday, and I thought they'd at least inform me if I hadn't won, so I could go pick up my prints. The contest page had changed - the winners of the 4 categories have not yet been picked, but they have narrowed it down to 10 finalists for each category. I scrolled down the page and was shocked to find my name on the list.

Twice.

In the category of Landscape: Baker Lake Storm

In the category of Inspiration: Crow on a Fence

They're holding an art opening tomorrow night where they will announce the winners of the 4 categories and award the prizes.

I'm still a little stunned that I'm on the list (I've double checked it about a dozen times now... yes, that is my name), nervous to go to the opening (I'll not only have to talk to strangers, but also come out from behind the camera and watch people judge my work right in front of my face), and mildly confused that they didn't contact me directly to let me know the results (I've checked junk and spam mail folders, maybe my handwriting wasn't clear on the forms?)

But mostly, I'm just excited. I really, really love both of these prints and I'm excited other people in the community find something in it that they like too.

"Jedi knight you will become."

2010-09-29T12:26:00.000-07:00

I can't seem to settle my mind on one train of thought for very long lately... projects for work and school and home circle about my brain like those little cartoon birds that appear when someone drops an Acme anvil on your head.

But instead of trying to focus on one... I'm glancing up, categorizing each bird, documenting the species, color and flight time, and moving on.

Somehow the rapid fire multitasking doesn't seem so daunting when it's all written down on a wipe board - color coded by level of importance of course.

One of those little birdies bopping back and forth is G's upcoming birthday party celebration. She has opted for a Star Wars theme this year - and it's difficult to tell which one of us is more excited about it. So every so often, during breaks from work or while web surfing in the evenings, I seek out new party adventure ideas for the upcoming shindig.

Keeping in mind the party will likely have to be an indoor event - in my house - and we generally have 8-12 kids at these things, I've thus far come up with:

Craft idea: Make your own light saber. I'll get those foam insulation tubes (the kind used for wrapping pipes) and some colored duct tape - prior to the party I wrap some silver around the base for a handle, and then at the party let the kids pick their color and wrap the rest of their light saber.

Party Gift: Jedi Robes. Oversized t-shirts, with rope for a belt - just like the padawans wear (we could go white for the girls, and maybe a brown for the boys? The padawans mostly seem to wear earth tones)

Games thus far:
Some kind of Jedi training. This depends on weather - but if we're outside I can make them run a course. If we're stuck inside... they could use the force to balance a balloon on the end of their light saber while they weave through orange cones. I'm also contemplating a "cave" they must go through to face their worst fears (crawl through a big box that has pictures of the Star Wars bad guys dangling from the roof) but I'm not sure where I would put it.

Another game - pin the light saber on Darth Vader. I'll put up a poster of Vader, and make light sabers out of construction paper - probably use a Yoda mask with the eyes blocked out as the blindfold.

After that we can open gifts, have cake and ice cream, and if there's time left I'll just throw one of the movies on the TV. I'll also probably have a corner with a crate of crayons and some Star Wars coloring sheets, for kids who feel like having quiet time.

Cake design is up in the air, but if they don't have one in the stores that we like, I could do cupcakes and frost them and line them up to look like a light saber on the tray. G has yet to weigh in on that subject.

She has asked me to dress up like Princess Leia... the jury is still out on that.

Any thoughts, feedback, ideas from anyone would be greatly appreciated. I'm trying to figure out how to incorporate glow stick bracelets, because I feel like something needs to be glowing. Maybe as the prizes for playing the light saber game...

and we sit and drink our coffee

2010-09-21T22:04:00.000-07:00

This morning I started my day with a meeting at a coffee shop, where myself and several PTA members sat and discussed our group effort to put together the district level reception for the school art contest. (This would be the next level of the art contest that I'm in charge of at my daughter's school level)

In the afternoon I began receiving emails regarding the PTA's biggest annual fund raiser, which I've signed up to help with. (Being a new school, we're starting a new tradition. No walk-a-thon... this year it's a massive Halloween party. Who could pass up helping with a school-wide Halloween party?)

After school I had a discussion with G about her Halloween costume - which it turns out I will be making, because we couldn't find exactly the right dress online.

This evening I received an email from my Mother-in-law about the baby shower that I'm hosting at my house for my Sister-in-law in October.

Tonight, before her bed time, I sat with G and worked with her on the book she's making as a gift for the grandparents (she wrote the story, drew the pictures, and is just cleaning up the artwork so I can scan it and have it printed through blurb or lulu or some such online)

As I tucked G in, she said "by the way, for my birthday party I was thinking..."

The air left the room for a moment, but somewhere in the back of my mind I'm still convinced I can do it all.

Hello Coffee, my good friend... we are going to spend a lot of time together.

(Lyrical title: Dangling Conversations - Paul Simon)

Living in a [plastic] lens

2010-09-13T16:21:00.001-07:00

In the past 6 months, my focus has been more strongly geared toward photography than I can ever remember it being.
No pun intended, really :)

I think that seminar I went to last April really lit a spark under me - the excitement of better understanding my DSLR inspired me to play, and the replacement of my broken Holga pushed me to explore the nuances of the new piece of plastic.

Oh, and the contests have set deadlines and goals for me to reach.

Besides the book contest, I've also recently entered a couple of toy camera contests...

Holgapalooza - (brought to you by Light Leaks Magazine, which I highly recommend)

Holgapalooza had three categories... Creatures, Roadside Attractions and Nudes. As I have yet to find a willing nude model, I opted to enter the Creatures and Roadside Attractions categories. And, as there were no limits to how many you could enter, I went with three for each.

Space Needle (Roadside Attraction)

EMP (Roadside Attraction)

Souvenir Stand (Roadside Attraction)

This souvenir stand shot was taken in Jamaica, just outside of the first waterfall we visited - it housed mostly wood carvings. It's a pretty typical site in Jamaica at any tourist attraction, alongside the road, and at craft markets. When I look at it, I immediately know what it is. A friend saw this shot and said "I would not have known this was a souvenir stand if you hadn't titled it."
So now I'm curious, what does it look like to other people?

Starfish - creatures

Peacock - creatures

Crow on Fence - creatures

For the local Glazer's Holga competition, I entered the categories of Inspiration (with the crow shot above)

Landscape with Baker Lake Storm

and self portrait with... Self Portrait.

This was an experiment using a cable release on the Holga, and using up the last of a roll of film.

Coming up in the realm of color photography is the Color Magazine's single image competition, the Washington Trails Association photo contest (depicting hiking trails in the state of Washington) and I've recently been told about a competition that Costco is holding (Theme- "Your best shot" - which is vague, but I think I have a good entry for it)

In the midst of working with developing and printing for the Holga contests, I also put together my 2011 calendar. Feel free to take a sneak peek if you like (but don't order one if you're on my Christmas card list)

And while the holidays approach, and the project list is being sorted and agenda-ed, there's a little voice in the back of my mind perpetually wondering... when can we go out and find some fall color to shoot?

Lyrical title: Rush - Limelight (slight variation, my apologies to Rush)

"Ready are you? What know you of ready?"

2010-09-09T17:08:00.000-07:00

Adjustment to the new school year schedule has been a bit tougher than I originally anticipated.

The first day of school I woke super early, with enough time to make Star Wars pancakes for G.

(I ate the slightly toasty first batch, and G had the golden brown second batch... for the record, the stormtrooper helmet is the most difficult to work with, but Yoda was consistently more cooperative.)

At first I felt organized... however the school day is offset by roughly an hour from what we've had the last two years, so I'm perpetually second guessing the clock. I jump at the sound of cars (thinking they are school buses, and I'm late! No I'm not... *roll eyes*) so though I have the time and I have yet to be late, I still have an underlying jumpiness about it.

Perhaps if the alarm on my phone were more of a relaxing "ahem... it's time to get the bus" instead of the red alert BUZZ that screams at me now, I might be a little less jumpy?

With the new school year comes, for me, time to set my holiday season deadlines. (For some people, the holiday season starts just after Halloween, maybe even as late as Thanksgiving. For crafters, it never really ends, it just has slightly lower key creative times, followed by "holy crap the deadline is coming!" ramped up times. Labor Day = Holy Crap) This is the time of year I take all of my Big Plans and Creative Brainstorms, set them down on paper, and then allow my logical self to analyze, cut and paste, and decide if I can squish it all into the next 16 or so weeks.

Time to put on another pot of coffee.

(Movie quote: Yoda - Empire Strikes Back)

peel back the mountains, peel back the sky

2010-09-02T15:38:00.000-07:00

There's a Holga contest coming up at a local camera store, and they have 4 categories this year
Landscape
Portrait/Self Portrait
Instant
Inspiration

I don't have an instant camera, so I'm out of that category, but I figured I could enter Inspiration, and possibly Landscape.

For Inspiration, my mind immediately went to this shot.

I've gone through my library, but this one keeps standing out to me... because it makes me think of Poe's The Raven. (Though I know this is a crow, not a raven... and also it's an obscure connection to the theme of inspiration... but it inspires me, and I think that's part of the point of this theme - or at least that's how I see it)

Landscapes were hard for me to decide... I do so much close up that my landscape pool is relatively light. Add to that, the longer I look at my own work, the less exciting it becomes... and my response to the image is tainted with a mild layer of "eh... I've seen that before". I feel this initial response blocks me from looking at my own older images with the fresh eyes the judges will view them with - and thus, makes it harder for them to jump out.

As I edited my Baker Lake color shots, I came across this one

...and I thought "Man, if only I had shot that with my Holga."

Then as I waded through the people shots done by D with our little Canon, I found a shot of me standing on the edge of the lake (where I stood to take the above shot) but I'm looking through my Holga.

Then I realized... I *did* shoot this scene with both cameras, the film was just not developed yet.

(Woo!)

So I quick ran through the last 4 frames and whipped the film into the developing tank. And I give you...

Landscape Holga entry.

(Lyrical title: Feeling Gravity's Pull - R.E.M.)

The stars are the greatest thing you've ever seen

2010-08-25T08:49:00.001-07:00

Things I learned while camping last week:

Camping for 5 days feels like a two week vacation.

Our new tent is huge, and comfortable, and makes camping for 5 days possible.

Having your friend's dog in the campsite helps to lighten the worry of potential bears, and also works as perpetual kid entertainment.

Horseshoe Cove Campground is severely lacking in song bird population (one or two Steller's Jays made noise, that was it).

I don't mind dirt as much as I thought I would, but I need to remember to use lotion on my hands anyway to keep my fingertips from drying out completely.

Having a large pot on the fire to provide perpetual hot water makes cleaning dishes 1,000 times easier.

When I wear my camera gear, I really do look like a turtle standing on it's hind legs.

We brought a sketch book to help keep G entertained, in case she got bored. It was untouched. 5 days of camping, not once did I hear her say "I'm bored" or "I don't know what to do". Whether it was slugs to play with or balancing on tree roots, the camp site was non-stop entertainment for her.

Burt's Bees Rosemary Mint Shampoo bar + a jump in the lake = REFRESHING.

Foamy ear plugs work well for blocking out the sound of other camp sites when you really need to get some sleep.

Though I honestly think they are quite ugly, Crocs make for perfect campsite shoes... soft under the feet, they slide on easy while stepping out of the tent, and you can hose them down or wear them into the lake to knock the dirt off of them.

The big camp stove on the right is heavy, and needs propane... but it packs down and the extreme and reliable power makes camp cooking oh so much easier.
The "tailgating" table in the middle worked decently, but I think we'll need another flat surface to keep the picnic table cleared off better next time.

Stacking Rubbermaid containers for dry food are worth their weight in gold, and then some.

Our friends make picture taking interesting.

G appears to not be allergic to bees, however she really, really, really doesn't like being stung.

Food cooked in cast iron tastes better than anything you could imagine. It's worth the effort to haul the heavy stuff out - and create a separate baking area for the dutch oven. D made beef stew, apple crisp, and baked biscuits for biscuits and gravy in the oven over the course of the trip.

Our boat doesn't look like a fishing boat, but it is... and it's comfortable too.

Getting up at 5 every morning for fishing was worth it just for the view.

Our friends make picture taking interesting.

G likes to go fishing, but does not like to touch the fish she caught, even for a picture. (That's a kokanee, in case you were wondering. Baker Lake has kokanee and sockeye)

Campfire smoke does a decent job of keeping mosquitoes out of the camp site, but 3 shampoos after the trip, my hair still has a faint campfire smoke smell.

You haven't camped in the Northwest until it rains on you... but you can't have a rainbow without a little rain.

Our friends make picture taking interesting

Hauling the tripod out along with all my camera gear.... totally worth it.

(Lyrical title: You Are Everything - R.E.M.)

I've got my own spirit level for balance

2010-08-09T08:16:00.000-07:00

In an attempt to find a good mental place, where I have equal parts feeling of accomplishment and still finding time to have fun, I approached my weekend with a light plan. A reasonable plan. Three absolutely Must Do tasks:

weed whack around the garden
clean up the pumpkin patch
organize the beverage area

There are plenty more projects to do and tasks to accomplish, but I thought if I narrowed it down to the spots that were relentlessly driving me crazy, I could have a reasonable chance of accomplishing the whole list, leaving plenty of open space for unforeseen circumstances. Anything beyond this list - be it housework or (weather permitting) yard work - would be considered gravy. My light plan also left room for plenty of fun time.

Friday we spent the day on the boat, watching the air show from the middle of Lake Washington.

Late Friday afternoon I worked on cleaning - putting away all the boat-day stuff, straightening up the gear, and gathering items that needed washing. Friday night it was time for fun again, so I updated my website with my gallery of EMP photos

Saturday I woke up, had a bit of coffee, then I...

Weed whacked around my garden beds

weed whacked the massive weedy area behind the garage - raked it up, dumped it in the bin

cleaned up the pumpkin patch of weeds and redirected the vines

Then it started raining really decently (by this time my back was soaked through with rain) so I went back in the house - skipping the watering that needed to be done outside. Inside the house I...

cleaned up the bar/beverage area (for every picnic, outing with the boat, dinner with friends we buy a lot of waters and iced teas and such... and they've been piled in reusable grocery bags. I now have them organized in crates under the bar, and have reclaimed 4 reusable grocery bags)

Straightened and organized all the camping gear. Sleeping bags/thermarests/tent gear in one area... camp kitchen items are cleaned and packed away... new gear is combined with old stuff... new food containers are cleaned and ready for use.

Then it was time for fun... I went out with D and his brother to see Rush in concert Saturday night.

(photo courtesy of my brother-in-law, who brought a little camera in whereas I relied on my cell phone, which (it turns out) doesn't focus well in low light)
The concert was AMAZING - heart pounding - stunning musicianship. Stage production was incredible... all Steampunked out, to match the tour theme of "Time Machine". Oh, and Neil Peart... *sigh*

G had a sleepover with Grandma on concert night, so Sunday morning I headed out to pick her up. Since Grandma lives close to the outlet center, I took G clothes shopping on our way home.

Sunday then became all about clothing. Since I'd finished my Must Do Tasks, I spent most of Sunday afternoon combining To Do's with pleasure... I caught up on the entire season of "Warehouse 13" while catching up on a backlog of ironing.

15 shirts

3 pairs of pants

3 skirts

3 pairs of shorts

And in the process, I managed to find a pair of shorts that had been MIA since Jamaica. Turns out they were tangled with a shirt at the bottom of the ironing basket.

When all that was done, and the laundry was rolling along, and the ironing put away... I scrubbed down the kitchen.

Then I sat on my ass and enjoyed a glass of wine and a piece of my favorite chocolate.

(Lyrical title: Faithless - Rush)

Pilgrim, how you journey On the road you chose

2010-08-05T09:19:00.000-07:00

Last week we started discussing the idea of camping... but were reluctant to pack up and head out into uncharted territory. So we thought about picking a spot and taking a day trip - drive out, scout out a few places, take the info home with us and plan a real camping trip.

In famous D tradition, our "day of scouting" trip manifested itself into "two days of nearly impromptu camping".

So we brushed off the garage dust from the tent, loaded the coolers with food, and headed out in to the wilds of northern Washington.

This was G's first ever camping trip, and though it was tight quarters in our old tent, and we had no real deterrent for mosquitoes, she seemed to love every minute of the adventure. We even strapped the little point and shoot camera to her wrist, so she could go exploring photo ops with me.

I love being able to see what she sees. Like her shadow

and the "super cool way" the lantern is hung on the tree.

On the advice of a friend, we stayed at Horseshoe Cove Campground on Baker Lake. The grounds have several reservation only sites, and a few first-come sites mixed in. The day use area includes a long swim beach with several picnic tables, and a log boom to block boats from the area. There is a gravel bar sticking out into the lake (also known as the "boat launch")

Standing on the launch looking north:

And standing on the launch looking south:

During our stay, we did take an afternoon to drive a good distance up the lake - which served as a scouting adventure as well as an easy escape from the bugs. We found the other campgrounds to be just as clean and nicely kept, but one was off the lake, and another was overall smaller, so we were happy with our choice.

Driving by Boulder Creek, there is a spot to pull over and walk to a sidewalk behind a guard rail... here is an incredible view of Mt. Baker.

There are little trails carved out in the moss connecting the camp sites and leading off up the hills and into the woods. I took some time to experiment with my Lensbaby lens... which I think has an effect that works well in this setting.

After our brief adventures in the great outdoors, we returned home refreshed... and with a list of "this will make camping better" items to bring with us on a road trip to Cabella's.

(Lyrical title: Pilgrim - Enya)

I'm walking into spiderwebs, so leave a message and I'll call you back

2010-07-26T12:16:00.000-07:00

I've been focusing lately on how many projects are just waiting to be attacked around my house. When I begin to plan out one project, it inevitably runs into another, and brushes against a third. I try to break down larger projects into smaller components, but even something that sounds as simple as "fix coat closet door" has layers - and similar to an onion, you can't be sure of how many until you cut into it.

Fix Coat Closet Door becomes...
pull out bags of stuff so door will close properly once it's fixed
the bags largely contain party supplies...
sort and organize the party supplies (combining them with the supplies stashed in the other closets and under the bar)
beyond the bags are items stuffed into the base of the closet...
gather/donate old items
reorganize cleaning supplies (which go in another closet that also needs to be cleaned out first before I can add these supplies to that one)
Collect baby gear and organize - set aside for sister-in-law
Fix the door
Close the door

And similar to an onion, it kinda makes me cry.

Once I touch one string of the web, I see all the others that the motion affects, and my gut instinct is to steady them all at once. Given a full day dedicated to this, I might manage it... but then I let so many other daily things go that I end up feeling unbalanced. So I broke it down to a tiny, tiny component.

Sort party supplies.

I went to the store, picked up a couple large rubbermaids, gathered the bags of supplies from their 3 locations... and then sat on the floor and sorted it all out. It took maybe an hour (including drive time for the containers) I positively affected three distinct areas of my house with one short task, and didn't let my other "have to do's" slide in the process.

I think if I can do a little project like this every day, it'll go a long way to making me feel less overwhelmed on a daily basis. I just have to keep myself focused on one layer at a time.

(Lyrical title: Spiderwebs - No Doubt)

In every walk with nature one receives far more than he seeks. - John Muir

2010-07-21T10:19:00.000-07:00

I started thinking about camping yesterday.

When we lived in Oregon we would head out to camp a couple times a year.

To specify what I mean by "camping" - we car camp, preferably in tent-only camp sites. We have no interest in being in RV parking lots... and though we enjoy hiking, we prefer to set up a base camp for our gear and do day hikes from there. (This is partially because I haul my camera gear, and have no room for things like tents and food... and partially because we like big comfortable tents and thick warm sleeping bags - and that's just not going to happen with a hike-in)

I remember we started out with just the one little Ford Escort between the two of us, and my Tetris skills would come into play trying to fit all our gear into the trunk and back seat of the car. On our very first trip we had planned on cooking exclusively over the camp fire, so we didn't shell out the cash for a camp stove. We arrived at the camp ground at dusk, fumbled with setting up our tent for the first time in the dark, and huddled in the tent eating Pringles for dinner... because it was raining too hard to start a camp fire. My morning alarm clock was the bird that tried to land at the apex of the tent, and slid down the outside of the rainfly, chirping and flapping the whole way. I stepped out of the tent and found that the loaf of bread I'd accidentally left on the bench was gone. The wrapper was still there, sitting perfectly puffed as if the bread were still inside... but all the contents had vanished out a small chewed hole in the lower corner of the bag.

Over the course of the next few trips we beefed up our gear, and developed a pretty good system for camping (which included locking the food in the car or cooler at night) Once we had the truck it was wonderful... all our gear was in a giant Rubbermaid container. Throw it in the back, grab some food, and we were on our way.

Our last camping trip was back in June of 2001, when we were invited to a group camping experience in Yosemite National Park. I was about 5 months pregnant at the time, but decided I was up for the challenge of camping if it meant being in Ansel Adam's old stomping ground. We set up our tent on the far edge of the group's reserved sites, overlooking the Merced River and on top of a series of tunnels inhabited by squirrels.

The variety of camping styles from the groups we were with were interesting to see. Out of 28 people, we were the only couple who brought a camp stove. There were, however, 4 or 5 battery operated blenders on hand for making margaritas. We had our tent and big thick sleeping bags rated to 10 degrees below zero laid out over our Thermarests... some people set up taller tents with cots... one man laid his sleeping bag directly on the ground, his head wrapped in a towel to prevent dew from forming in his hair overnight. During the day we went on hikes and explored the nearby woods, at night we gathered around a central camp fire to play music and chat. One guy appointed himself the task of making sm'ores for everyone, and he spent the entire night roasting marshmallows to perfection and handing out the gooey sandwiches to all who wanted one.

That was our last camping experience. After G was born we busied ourselves with infant and toddler years, then moved up to our current house in Washington... where our wooded private yard and permanent fire ring render most drive-in camp grounds moot. The tent has come in handy during heat waves when the house is too warm to sleep in at night, and the camp stove helped me make my coffee when the power was out in the winter... but I'm now itching to do some actual camping again, and I'm craving to be near water.

And I shall call him, mini-lens

2010-07-16T22:13:00.001-07:00

I remember living in Santa Cruz, reading about Lens Baby lenses, and craving one. Unfortunately it just wasn't in the budget at the time, so I fueled my creative engine with a far less expensive (but amazingly fun) Holga instead.

As much as I photograph, I'm really not one to keep on the up-and-up with the tech side of photography. I tend to stay myopically focused (no pun intended) on my current kit - forgetting sometimes the stuff that is not right in front of me in my big bag (and even sometimes stuff within my bag. How many times have I slapped my forehead for not using my polarizing filter on water shots? I should have a permanent lump on my head by now. I think my lesson here is to slow down and really make sure I've explored all options in a scene before moving on... but that's another blog post) Then, one day I read an article or see an example online of a shot I love, and I go on a research spree... finding new and exciting paths to explore. It was the seminar I went to last spring that sparked my interest in looking at some new equipment, and the search for a k-mount tilt/shift lens that found me on the Lens Baby website again.

The Lens Baby company has expanded far beyond anything I recall. First, they now have three different lenses to choose from (each having more control on composing than the last) Then they have additional "optics" - you can pull the glass out of the lens and drop in another type of glass (single glass, double glass, pinhole, soft focus...) *Then* there are accessories - (wide angle, telephoto, etc..) that mount on the front of the lens. I was just excited to finally buy a Lens Baby... I had no idea I was entering into a world of infinite possibilities.

For my lens, I chose the Composer:

It mounts to the front of the camera like any other lens, but the front of it is on a ball and socket, so you can focus on your "sweet spot" and tilt the lens to create your desired level of diffusion on the perimeter of the shot.

Why is this cool?

With a traditional non-tilting lens, your focal plane is fixed... the glass of the lens runs exactly parallel to the film (or sensor, in digital) This means, if you have a subject (for example - a long row of tulips at a tulip farm) and you want all the tulips from the front all the way to the horizon to be in focus... with a standard lens, you'd have to stand over the field and look straight down at it. With a tilt/shift lens, however, you can tilt the glass on the front to have it be parallel to the row of tulips while keeping your camera body horizontal to yourself. This is handy, particularly if you don't know how to levitate yet.

Having said all of that... the Lens Baby is a slightly different animal. Though it is a tilt lens, the nature of the glass they use seems to throw the perimeter of the frame out of focus, so you have a "sweet spot" of sharp focus (which you can shift to any point within the frame) and a sort of vignette effect with the rest of the focus.

I haven't played with it a ton yet, but here are a few "normal" vs "Lens Baby" shots to discuss.

This was my first adventure with the lens. Here is a shot with my regular 14-45mm zoom

Here is about the same shot with the Lens Baby.

I noticed the color is different. I'm not 100% sure why, but I suspect it has to do with the fact that the Lens Baby doesn't communicate with the camera... it's all manual, and that may throw off the auto white balance setting on the camera. (Fixable in Photoshop, but I'm keeping the difference so I can compare with other shooting adventures)

I chose to focus on the center of the foxglove flowers, but I think the effect would have worked better had I put the sweet spot on the top, to draw the direction of the focal flare down along the length of the blossoms. (Or I could crop the top inch off the shot)

Here is more of an example of shifting the focal plane. I found this mushroom in the back of my property while mowing the lawn. By the time I got out to shoot it, it had already been munched on by unseen rodents. (Glad I got out to shoot it though, the next day it looked like it exploded)

With this shot on my standard lens, the focal plane is parallel to my camera's sensor... which puts the front point of the mushroom head in focus, and the rest fades out.

I shot with the Lens Baby from just a slightly higher stance, but still... I was able to keep myself upright while tilting the lens glass forward, so that the mushroom cap was all on the same focal plane.

One of the reasons I'm glad I didn't have a Lens Baby until now is that I cannot imagine shooting this with any great degree of success on film. The lens is all manual... to the point where the f-stops are literally a set of magnetic discs that you drop into the lens. The lens doesn't communicate with the camera, which makes metering a challenge thus far. Thankfully, shooting digital means you can see your mistake immediately... correct it, and get the shot. I would have been pulling my hair out if I'd shot rolls of film that had to be tossed for massive under exposure.

I look forward to finding more applications for this fun little toy... and someday, when I get a handle on it's double glass optic, I might move on to adding accessories. Oh the possibilities!

(Movie quote title: parody on a line of Dr. Evil's in Austin Powers)

I could talk a mile a minute on this caffeine buzz I was on

2010-07-14T13:06:00.000-07:00

It seems that as life gets busy with so many wonderful things to write about, I no longer have the time to write about them.

Hence the long pauses in blog entries as of late.

I find myself in the midst of the summer madness that comes with the lack of set schedule. Within this fluid time, we have managed to host two large BBQ's, one on Father's Day, the other on the 4th of July... including one trip to the ER (D took a hit when he landed a jump on his mountain bike poorly, with stitches to the knee) and one rain adventure (first 4th of July I can remember for a long time that included ducking under umbrellas while bundled in fleece. But it was all red, white and blue fleece.) G has completed a week of sculpture and drawing camp, and is signed up for painting art camp next. We jumped from record low temperatures to record high within a 24 hour window... making me confused as I sweated in front of a fan while folding the fleece tops from the 4th of July's laundry.

I met, for the first time, one of my best friends in person, and had a grand adventure being a tourist in the town where I grew up, then a tourist in the city in which I now reside. We had great visits with good friends, toured the cities (sometimes by accident... thanks to one way streets and boulevards you can't turn left off of) and sampled pastries and coffees to our heart's content. (Hooray vegan bakers!) We also indulged our trigger fingers with photographic adventures, which has left me with gigabytes of data just waiting for me to dig into.

I have a new lens to talk about, new projects to dive into, and new (and rather ugly, but fascinating) shoes. And we are barely halfway through July.

Yet at the same time it feels like time is flying... time to get my head on straight and get back to work.

(Lyrical title: Deadbeat Club - B-52's)

We can appreciate the beauty of gray

2010-07-06T12:19:00.000-07:00

I saw the announcement for the Blurb.com photography book contest some time ago, and decided to enter because it has been my goal to put together a photography book... and I figured what better way to get off my duff and do it than to have a contest deadline to meet? I didn't even bother to look at the potential pay off in prizes, I just wanted to do it for the process.

When I saw the email reminder today that the deadline was looming, I clicked on the link and checked out the details of the contest to see the prize list.

Holy crow, first prize is $25,000.

I doubt my work is anywhere near grand prize level, but even the runner up prizes (cameras, workshops, gifts certs to fantastic camera stores) would be amazing things to win. There are only 1009 entries so far. Though the deadline isn't until next week, for an international contest it seems like a low number to me. Then again, it looks like there are maybe 7-8 prizes awarded, which means that over 1000 entries will not win. So all in all, I'm trying to erase the knowledge of the potential prizes from my mind, and just be happy with what I did on my own.

Which brings me to my next announcement.

I finished my first Holga book last week, and uploaded it. Here's the front cover...

Overall I like this book quite a bit more than my color book. The theme of the book lends itself to be more inclusive of a variety of subjects, which made it the layout come together in a much more fluid manner for me. Also, I have the opportunity to include never-before-shown Holga images from a set of negatives that could only be saved via good scanning and Photoshop repair. The title of the book has a double meaning, as the images are black and white, and also relate to each other on the facing pages (that's the part I'm the most excited about)

If you'd like to take a peek, you can view the entire book at My Blurb bookstore.

I've ordered myself a hard copy, it is currently in production and should hopefully arrive next week. In the mean time, I took a deep breath this morning and officially entered both books in the Blurb book contest.

...and now at least a portion of my brain is dedicated to thinking about the next book's topic and potential layout.

(Lyrical title: Beauty of Gray - Live)

waited on a line of greens and blues

2010-06-24T16:21:00.001-07:00

This has been a goal of mine for a very, very long time.

Today I received my very first copy of my very first printing of my very first attempt at putting together a book of photography.

It is very, very strange to see my name in print.

Stranger still to see my photo in the jacket's back flap.

(also a little weird to take the photo with my cell phone, because my phone's wallpaper is a photo of the same peacock...)

I'm loving the quality of the print job Blurb has done, and I'm super happy that my images are as sharp in print as they appear to be on my screen.

It makes me want to blow them all up to 16x20 and plaster my office walls with them.

(Now that I think about it... I should have a massive print of a beach scene right there... right above my laptop on the wall... don't you think?)

Many many many thanks to PPG, who allowed me to distract her from her work so that she could help me with the sequence of the images... she got me over my visual block and helped me arrange a book I'm pretty darned proud of. :)

If you want to see the book in it's entirety online, here's the link to my bookstore.

:)

(Lyrical title - To Be With You - Mr. Big)

Express yourself

2010-06-19T09:53:00.000-07:00

I originally signed G up for dance when she was 3, and so shy she wouldn't ever let go of my leg in public. We were doing "Mommy and Me" art classes at the time, but she would freak out if I attempted to leave the room. Dance was a way for her to be in a room with a teacher, but I'd be within eyesight the entire time... sort of like teacher training wheels. One summer of dance and she was ready for me to leave her at preschool with no tears. Every year as school approached I would ask her "Do you want to keep dancing?" and she would say "Yes!" so we kept signing up.

Last December she started re-evaluating her interest. She enjoys it to a degree, but wasn't passionate about it... she went to be with her friends but as the year wore on, she'd complain more and more that she preferred camp instead of class. At camp, you ate lunch with your friends and did art work, you didn't "just dance". At the same time the studio teachers were eyeballing her... suggesting we add jazz class to prepare her for possibly being on a team. I sat with G and explained to her what was involved with being on a team. In short... more dancing. 3 classes a week, plus team practices... then there are competitions and recitals. She shrugged and said "I really just like the camps now." Then I took my trip to Nashville, and D had a taste of a dress rehearsal... moms racing around to put kid's hair up, girls around 11 years old wearing stage makeup, kids cramming homework and dinner in between dance rehearsals in the hallways. He talked to her about what she liked and didn't like about classes, and as she indicated she might not want to continue dance, he suggested "what about art classes?" and G lit up.

Dance camps don't start for a while, and we may yet do them... but I'm fairly certain her studio dance class days are over.

As for art... she's always had an interest in painting, coloring, drawing... and has had a remarkable ability to sit and keep herself entertained for hours on end with projects. Two years in a row she entered the art contest in school, and both years won honorable mention. Her attention to detail has always been impressive to me, but this year she seems to have exploded with her ability to take what she sees in other artwork and apply it to her own projects.

Here are a few pieces she's brought home from school.

(notice the little bunny sticking it's head out from behind the cactus?)

(My favorite part of this one is the jellyfish in the lake)

This is a self portrait of G playing baseball, with goblins and fairies in the audience.

This last painting was finished a couple days ago. I've signed G up for an art camp which starts next week, and since she'll have a new teacher, she wanted to do a painting for her.

Because it's so important to have that special somebody

2010-06-14T23:55:00.000-07:00

The nature of shooting with a Holga is that you never really know what you're going to get.

Though mass produced, these cheap plastic toy cameras each have their own personality, their own quirks... unpredictable light leaks, flare from sun on the plastic lens, uncontrollable focus. It's all part of the charm and style of shooting with this gem.

My first Holga had to be rigged to get square format negatives. The insert that held the batteries for the flash made the negs rectangular... to get square shots I simply removed it, then smoothed the plastic insides down with some fabric and double stick tape, so that my negs would be less likely to receive scratches. That camera lasted a good long time, but after many journeys and shooting over the years, the make-shift film protection began to fail and stick to the negs... so it was time to "upgrade" (by downgrading models) and replace her with a new but flashless Holga. The new girl came with an insert specifically for square negs, so I would no longer have as much concern about scratches of bits of fabric coming loose inside the camera body.

If they had personalities, my second Holga was schizophrenic. Perhaps it was the humidity in Jamaica, maybe the abuse of travel... it's possible that breaking the little plastic pin that holds the roll of film made it too unstable (even though I rigged it so the roll would fit inside all snug-like) But it appears that either the shutter was sticking, or firing twice, or the film itself moved when I shot. Most of my images have the "dream like" Holga look, but amplified by camera shake and over exposure.

But it only happened sometimes.

This is a shot of the yoga platform I would go to in the mornings.

Now the three shots leading up to this image looked more like this one:

Then I had my focused shot above, then it went back to sticking/refiring/whateverthefuck it was doing.
(you might not be able to tell, because Photoshop rocks so hard, but this fuzzy shot was horribly over exposed compared to the one above... I was able to fix it with a good scan and some curves adjustments in the software)

Of course I was completely unaware that this was going on. The nature of shooting with film is that you have to wait to see your results... so I burned a whole lot of film, completely oblivious to the extra light and exposures most of my frames were receiving.

The effect is not necessarily bad, but it was incredibly unexpected - I'd had a decent grasp on what I'd be creating with this little lady, and here she was pulling a fast one on me.

Or in this case, a slow one? Or a multiple exposure one?

Perhaps my camera got high from all the ganga being smoked around us?

Here's a shot of one of the vendor tables (you see what second hand smoke can do to you, kiddos?)

For the record, this image makes me smile... I like the pattern of the conch shells, but I also have my memories of the many times we spoke to Ozzie, the vendor, and this is the only image I shot of his table - so it may be just a sentimental attachment I have to this photo.

Alas, this dreamy Holga decided to take a nearly complete dirt nap towards the end of my trip. I think we had 2 days left when I was shooting at an outdoor cafe and I felt my film stick... I could not roll it forward. I twisted and twisted the dial and it finally gave way, rolling through an extra frame. When I pulled the film out at the end I realized that the foam sponge piece that resides inside (as a sort of buffer for the rolls of film to sit against, to keep tension on the film) had come loose from the camera body and attached itself to the roll of film. I ended up winding it into the film itself. The camera still functioned... in fact, my last roll of film is all in perfect focus and exposure - too bad it was the last day of the trip, and I thought I had already covered my subjects well enough, so I didn't shoot much more than the last roll.

I may never know exactly what was wrong with that little baby. With the missing pin, the botched sponge, and what appears to be faulty shutter I decided this girl was too bitchy to work with. I picked up a new Holga at my local camera store (to save on shipping from Amazon) All they had in stock were Holgawood cameras... same great plastic, but painted bright and annoying colors.
I had a choice between the gold "Oscar" and the one labeled "Blooze Brothers"
I went with Bloo.

I guess we shall see what kind of trouble we can get into.

Oh and if you're interested, I've posted my Jamaica 2010 Holga shots in my Zenfolio Gallery

I'm always up for feedback if you feel so inclined.

(Lyrical title: Blues Brothers... Everybody Needs Somebody)

tryin' to fit the world inside a picture frame

2010-06-08T08:45:00.000-07:00

I've set myself some photography goals this year, and am actually working towards them at a reasonable pace, even as I allow myself to get mildly side tracked by smaller, unplanned projects.

One planned project was to self-publish a photography book this year. My original deadline was late fall/early winter, however Blurb Books is having a photography book contest, so I've bumped up my self-imposed deadline to see if I can make it in. This required me to bump up my self-imposed deadline of getting my Jamaican vacation photos edited and uploaded by the end of May. The reveal is about a week later than I'd anticipated, but only because I squeaked in a couple of unplanned side projects.

The first unplanned project was to rearrange the layout of my Zenfolio site, to give it a little more zing (for lack of a better term) If you'd like to see how it turned out... Here it is - complete with my 5 recently added galleries. I'm still probably going to play with it a bit, but I like having the impact of the slide show up top, and I'm hoping people will scroll down to see the featured galleries. If you have any feedback that you'd like to share, please let me know!

The new galleries are mostly shots from my recent trip to Jamaica, but also some post-seminar shooting I've done in the yard. I really wish the seminar had happened just *before* my vacation, because I would have had much better exposure and focus, and more shots, but as it stands I walked away from that trip with a fair amount of images to work with.

The second unplanned project was to order new Moo mini cards. I ordered my first set last year and was extremely happy with them. Unfortunately a few short months after they arrived, the email address I'd printed on them became overrun with spam, which made it a difficult email to use for business purposes. I wanted to use up the old cards, but hand-writing the valid email address became a pain in the ass, so I finally gave up and - with a new set of photos - I placed a new order.

But what to do with the old ones? Moo mosaic frames!

I suppose this makes for a third unplanned project?

I now have two frames filled with my "expired" mini-Moo cards. I'm sure I'll find some sort of art project to use the others on (or perhaps G will, if I hand them over to her) but I'm excited to be able to show off my photos in mini-form in the house.

(lyrical title: 3x5 - John Mayer)

I'll give you a coloring book, you can draw outside the lines

2010-06-03T11:40:00.000-07:00

The last couple days I've had an experience of the most surreal kind.

I've had this friend, Alice, since the 4th grade. She spent our junior year in high school on a foreign exchange trip to France, and that year we wrote back and forth quite a bit. In fact, I still have all of the letters she sent me, and the Spanish deck of cards she bought me while she was abroad. Apparently, on March 4th, 1992 I put a blank tape in my little white mini-boom box, hit record, and started talking. On March 5th I brought the tape to school to have people in the halls talk. I boxed it up, mailed to her in France, and forgot about it...

Until it arrived in the mail yesterday afternoon.

This tape immediately makes me think of "This American Life" stories, where interviewees are re-watching videos of themselves, or re-listening to old tapes, and reacting with "It's so funny, was I really like that?" and "Oh yeah! I remember that!" and they laugh that nervous laugh that says they're happy to have memories flooding back, but embarrassed that others are hearing it too. It's almost like a podcast in it's layout... I start with my local news, move on to "students in the hallways" interviews, and end with a collection of songs that are must-share... only it's done on a shoddy recording device, and my interview skills are nothing more than shoving said shoddy recording device in people's faces and saying "Talk! I'm sending this to France!"

When listening to the whole thing (which nobody else on the planet gets to do, except for myself and Alice), one could make a wicked drinking game out of my repetition of the phrases "as a matter of fact", "actually" and "anyway", and my propensity to correct people with "Oh by the way..... ... just thought I would mention that." I'm not surprised by the first three, but the fourth was a little off-putting to hear.

Correction

(Do I still do that, in that way? If I do, please point it out to me, thank you)

Other surprises for me... I apparently had a slightly Canadian-with-hints-of-British accent when I was 16 (where did *that* come from?), I had completely stopped listening to heavy metal to the point where the mention of that genre caused me to make a Bill the Cat "Bleaaah!" noise, and I described just about everything I liked as "beautiful".

Beautiful Band

I know that this recording was made in the midst of one of the deepest, darkest swims through depression, and describing songs and bands as "beautiful", and the excitement in my voice as I talk about parties, is in contrast to what I readily recall. Over the years I've relied on my diaries to remind me of what happened when, and who was there... but the diaries are raw data - unpolished, unfinished, not edited for the masses. My diaries were my dumping ground, a place to purge the darker side of me. This tape... this is the Slightly Edited Me. It's not fake... I do remember feeling elated by certain songs and excited by certain experiences - that's all part of me... however the me on the tape is... if not filtered, then happily distracted from my issues by the hustle and bustle around me at school.

Parties and RHPS

The speed of the recorder turned out to be just fine... that is actually how fast I talk when I really get going on a story.

The most surreal part, though, is listening to the chatter in the hallways. I can almost smell the school, see the corridor, feel the cold metal of the locker I'm leaning against on my back. I counted 19 people on the tape that I remember well, 12 of them I've reconnected with on Facebook; one of them is one of my closest friends, one of them is battling breast cancer, one is a new mom of twins, one has passed away, one is about to become an assistant professor of pathology, one is an artist living on the beach, one is something of an MIT think tank all on his own. We are spread all over the country, and beyond. But as I listen to the tape, I don't see them as they are now... I'm back at school with them. I'm sitting in the hallway drinking Dr. Pepper and snacking on popcorn and laughing... insisting that my friends all speak French to Alice... because she's in France and doesn't hear enough French already (?)

Trying to find someone to speak French

(Side one ended on this recording, so click the next link for the beginning of side 2)

More Language Fun

Something else I remembered about myself while listening... I've always retreated to caves. As a kid it was my room to read books, as a junior... it was the dark room.

Darkroom

I suppose the more things change, the more they stay the same, eh? ;)

And now, I'm off to find some Too Much Joy on iTunes.

(Lyrical Title: Nothing On My Mind - Too Much Joy)

Forever waiting divine intervention - Owsley's Memorial

2010-05-27T15:09:00.000-07:00

This week I had the privilege of attending the memorial service for Will Owsley, held in Nashville, TN.

The service was stunningly beautiful.

The stage was set with a semi-circle of chairs, amps, microphones and guitars. As friends and family filled the chapel, about a dozen musicians from various points in Will’s life assembled on stage. After a lovely prayer from the pastor, Amy Grant began the services with a few stories about Will, and then she sang a beautiful rendition of “Threaten Me with Heaven” – one of the songs Will co-wrote with her. The evening progressed with the artists on stage (and some from the audience) taking turns at the microphone, sharing stories and music. They talked about who Will was to them, how he made them feel, how he influenced their lives… what a great and wonderful and important friend he was to them. The stories were heartwarming, the music was breathtaking. The service concluded with all the artists on stage, including Will’s two sons, coming together to perform “Coming Up Roses”.

On a personal note… I have been struggling to comprehend the loss of Will, struggling to come to terms with the reality. I see so many photos of him online and his music readily plays on my iPod and it feels like he should be just a phone call away. During the service, Amy told a story about losing her grandmother so many years ago, and how she took the time one night to sit on her front porch and try to remember every little detail she could about visiting her grandmother’s house. She described how full and warm she felt by the end of the night as the rest of her family returned from where they had been. As I sat listening to the stories and the music throughout the night, I had a constant stream of silent tears rolling down my face, but at the same time I began to feel a sense of peace – like the space Will left behind was being replaced by the love and understanding of everyone who had gathered together.

The group performance of “Coming Up Roses” was a profound culmination… the artists on stage poured their hearts and souls into the song, and as they reached the last refrains it sounded as though the whole chapel joined in… the feeling was overwhelming. The music was a living, breathing entity engulfing every inch of space in the room with warmth and love, and in that moment I understood what Amy had meant by feeling full.

I am grateful I was able to attend and to share in the celebration of Will’s life. It was a touching and fitting tribute to a wonderful, inspiring, caring friend who left us far too soon.

(Lyrical title: Coming Up Roses - Owsley)

On the side of a hill in the deep forest green

2010-05-25T14:06:00.000-07:00

The lovely h. did a post a couple weeks ago talking about TTV photography (through the viewfinder) In essence, it's photography done by shooting digital through the lens of a vintage camera. I read her post, looked up at my grandfather's Century Graphic on my shelf by my head, and got Very Very Excited. I have a back for the camera that takes medium format film rolls, however I haven't shot with it for a number of years due to my relatively recent affair with the wonders of digital and the quirks of Holga... but this... TTV can use digital WITH my grandpa's perfectly preserved vintage camera.

Yay!

The last few weeks have been further to the busy side of thing than I prefer, but I did manage to squeeze in some time to make a workable set up for my first attempt at shooting.

The Century Graphic is a box camera:

The back actually flips open to reveal the focusing glass, which is about 2"x3". I constructed a rectangular box out of foam core covered in black poster board to block out any extra light that might shine on the focusing glass, mounted the Graphic on my tripod, and headed out to the yard.

I've found that unless the subject is in bright, bright sunshine, the shot vignettes a great deal. Here is a shot of some white flowers on my deck.

The shot is vignetted, but it does at least fill the frame of the glass, being a bright subject in direct sunlight.

I wandered up the yard a bit and shot some images of the chives in my herb garden. So you can see the effect of shooting TTV, here is a compare/contrast of the shot taken directly with the digital SLR, and then TTV through the Graphic.

You can see the pretty severe vignette on the TTV image... this is because as I walked from the deck to the herb garden the sky clouded up. This is ideal for shooting directly with the digital, however it limits what I can capture via TTV. In addition to that, the subject itself is less reflective than the white flowers on the deck. Still, I enjoy the effect, and in particular I like the character of the scratches and imperfections of the glass on the Graphic.

I'm not sure the entire contraption can some along on hikes with me... my pack is 28 pounds as it is... but it's awfully tempting to find a way to squeeze the little box camera in so I could try some big ol' landscapes up on Hurricane Ridge with this rig.

(Lyrical Title: Scarborough Fair - Simon & Garfunkel. Granted they don't mention chives, but that's the song that came to mind)

"The hard part about being a bartender is figuring out who is drunk, and who is just stupid." - Richard Braunstein

2010-05-15T20:28:00.001-07:00

We decided to do a family movie night last night, so after looking over movie times and options I purchased a few tickets, gathered the troops, and we headed out to grab a quick bite on our way to the show. In an effort to avoid fast food, we stopped at the local Mongolian grill place. It was not too busy, but there were a fair amount of people inside. We filled our bowls handed them over with our choices of meat, and were at the cash register when I first noticed The Woman.

Her voice cut through the low murmur of the restaurant like screeching tires. She spoke loudly to the people next to her, asking them about their food choices. I thought she was a frustrated mom reprimanding her kids at a too-high volume. When I looked up I realized the people around her were adults, and they were slowing their steps to create some distance between them and The Woman. I turned away to look at some drink choices, then heard her raspy voice overpower the restaurant again... this time in horribly slow, broken Spanish.

"NO. NO... ME... GUSTO... PINEAPPLE. THAT GOES ON THE STEAK... THE CAR---NE..."

I looked up again, she was talking to the cooks at the grill. I noticed she looked to be about 40, her slightly frizzy brunette hair was shoved back with glittering gold framed sunglasses. Her eye makeup was heavy... she looked like Joan Jett's older sister. Several long gold chains dangling from her neck, clattering on the counter and she leaned forward.

"RIGHT. QUIERRRRRRO CARNE."

In her hand I saw she clung tightly to a bottle of Mike's Hard Lemonade, and she sipped it down through a straw between statements.

So that explains it... she's piss drunk.

After gathering up our food we made our way to an outdoor table, leaving behind The Woman as she tried to engage the guy at the register.

"I LOVE THIS GRILL STUFF. HEY, ARE YOU FROM JAPAN? HEY! I SAID ARE YOU FROM JAPAN?"

We settled our plates on the table and I took my empty cup back inside the restaurant to fill it up at the self serve soda fountain. As I considered my options, I heard a voice behind me.

"NOW I NEED MY FORTUNE COOKIES. DON'T YOU NEED YOUR FORTUNE COOKIES? EVERYBODY NEEDS TO HAVE FORTUNE COOKIES!"

I did not move, I did not speak. I just thought "please don't be talking to me please don't be talking to me please don't be talking to me."

"HERE, I THINK THIS ONE IS POINTING TO YOOUUUUUUUUU!" She pulled a fortune cookie out of the bin and placed it on the counter next to me, staring at me pointedly.

I was cornered.

"No thanks," I said, "I can't."

"OH SURE YOU CAN! JUST TAKE IT!"

"No," I said (knowing in the back of my mind that logic wouldn't work anyway...) "...actually I'm allergic. Can't eat them, don't want one. But thanks anyway." I smiled, I tried to walk away but she blocked me.

She picked it up and stood in front of me.

"DON'T YOU WANT... DON'T YOU WANT TO SEE YOUR FORTUNE?"

"Not really," I replied.

She glared at me. "STUPID!" she said, and dropped the cookie in my drink.

As she turned to walk away she lost her balance. I smiled, and (raising my voice to her volume) said "WELL THANKS LADY. YOU ARE A REAL CLASS ACT!" and I waved.

This is when I noticed an employee had come out from the back and was standing next to me. He looked like he was about to stop her, but he looked to me and asked if I was OK. I shrugged.

"I'm fine... she's piss drunk though." I tossed the drink (and cookie) and refilled my soda with a fresh non-contaminated drink, and went out to our table.

The Woman emerged a few minutes later, carrying her pile of to-go containers. I reached for my cell... if she got behind the wheel I was ready to call the police... but instead she walked up to the passenger side of the car. The slick looking g-money Eminem dude in the too big sunglasses and punk-ass jacket opened the door to the black Escalade... revealing what looked to be a little blond teenage driver behind the wheel. The Woman stumbled, handing G-Money the containers of food, and then walking herself down the side of the car (using her hands to stay upright) opened the back door and crawled in. Punk Boy rolled his window down, glaring at the people sitting outside the ice cream shop next door, as the car slowly backed out of the handicap spot and crept it's way around the parking lot.

To answer your question: No... there was no handicap parking permit in the window or the license plate.

Class act, all the way.

I do believe the sky above is Caribbean blue

2010-05-13T09:10:00.000-07:00

Most weekday mornings I wake up with the alarm (after one or two snooze attempts), head down to the kitchen, grab my first cup of coffee, and sit on the end of the couch by my big front windows.
In the winter there is not much to see... the front yard is still dark, lit only by the occasional passing car's headlights. As the days grow longer, and light comes to the yard earlier, I have the pleasure of watching a variety of birds twitter around the lawn. The juncos are always plentiful, they nest in the low bushes surrounding our property. They are usually joined by a cluster of robins and, depending on the time of year, some roufus-sided towhees. In the realm of woodpeckers, red breasted sapsuckers are typical... they cling to the sides of trees for a short while, but find more food on the ground more often. The pileated woodpeckers - 3 times the size of the sapsuckers - are shy, but their distinct "WHACK. WHACK. WHACK." echos through the neighborhood when they pound through dead wood with their massive heads.

This morning, I was surprised - and delighted - to find a pair of steller's jays surveying our front lawn.

They are not uncommon birds. In fact, they are notorious camp site raiders all along the entire west coast, known for their loud calls and bold begging for food. I took the above photo while camping in Yosemite back in 2001... this particular guy not only followed us around, picking up bits of dropped food right at our feet, but I watched him fly to the neighboring campsite, perch on their camp stove, and eat their leftover breakfast right out of the pan when the people had their backs turned.

In my neighborhood, however, they seem to be a rare sight... and when I do spot them, they are pretty shy. Perhaps it's because of the larger predatory birds in the area (bald eagles and osprey are particularly active lately, and crows are ever-present)

Not to say I don't enjoy the multitudes of earth-toned birds who use my front yard as their buffet, but it was nice to see some brilliant blue plumage making a pass through the emerald green landscape this morning.

(Lyrical title: Caribbean Blue - Enya)

I worry over situations I know will be alright

2010-05-11T09:14:00.000-07:00

A couple weeks back I went out to see an acoustic show with a friend. The headliner did a cover of "Overkill" by Men At Work. I've heard the song before - way back in "the day" - but never gave the lyrics much thought. As he sang, and I recognized the melody and listened to the lyrics, I smiled.

I didn't realize I had another theme song out there.

I am still feeling like I'm at a loss for words most of the time. My mind is in a million different places, and I seem to be spending most of my time trying to keep up with all of them at once. There's a lot going on in here, I just can't seem to get it to come out.

Remembering Will

2010-05-03T11:28:00.001-07:00

I first met Will Owsley in 1999. He came to Portland on tour with Fountains of Wayne, and was being interviewed on my favorite radio station. I called in to ask a question after the interview was over, and was surprised that he was still there answering questions directly. He invited me down to the show, and my immediate reaction was (laughably unfiltered) "Oh, but I didn't get any sleep last night." Then I began to babble... It's a week night, I have to work, Dan had been out of town and I was exhausted from sleepless nights. Owsley insisted though... "Give me your name, I'm putting you on the list" then I could almost hear him lean forward, and in a quiet tone (as if he were whispering to me directly, not talking into a microphone on the radio) "... just stay for my set then go home and sleep, you can be in bed by 10:30, I promise."

Though they had been booked at a small venue on a Wednesday night, Owsley played that show like it was a sold out stadium. Amazing energy, amazing talent... I had loved his music beforehand, but now was undeniably addicted.

Over the course of the next year I joined his fan group online, made friends, and conversed heavily with fellow fans and his most amazing brother, Bud. We were all greatly anticipating the break out of his album and upcoming headlining tour. It was during this exciting time that Dan and I had moved to Santa Cruz, and as the tour dates for Owsley popped up around the state, I made plans to hit as many shows as possible.

The next opportunity to see Will was a comedy of errors. There was a show here that was canceled there and rescheduled for over there. I tried to keep up with the updates and changes, but it was about 75 miles away, which meant closing down the computer, getting in the car, and hoping for the best. The show times were wrong, the update came too late and we were already on the road. Ironically, we arrived at the venue with plenty of time to see the concert, but (thinking we were 3 hours early) we left to get food, arriving back at the venue just in time to hear the last three notes of the last song of the set. As we walked into the tiny venue I approached the stage. Will recognized me, and immediately apologized that the set was so short. My face fell.

"Oh... we just walked in the door - you mean we missed it? That wasn't the sound check?"

He stood up, looked around, pulled something out of his pocket, then leaned forward and in a low voice said "Here. Take this. Go to that counter and get some food - anything you want, you tell them you are with the band. I have to clear out this gear, and then we'll be back. You grab a table, we're going to rap."

Dan and I spent the next several hours hanging out with the band, eating dinner, talking music. Though we had missed the show itself, the night was incredible, unforgettable fun. There was another show scheduled for San Francisco just a week away, and at the end of the night Will gave me his cell number, saying if we made it up to the city early we should grab lunch and hang out again.

This photo was taken that night, just as the band piled into the van to move on to the next city on the tour.

The show in San Francisco promised to be a much larger production - a bigger venue on a weekend night. We loaded up our car and started heading north about mid-morning, arriving in the city about noon-ish. Will was out in the city, so we met him in the food court area at the base of a Macy's, picked up our respective lunches, and sat down. Our lunch ran for a couple hours as we exchanged stories of a billion different tangents, then it was time to meet up with the band and head over to the venue for sound check.

I had brought my camera with me, but did not want to disturb the band during the show that night with the flash, so I asked if it would be OK to shoot some pictures during the sound check. As they worked through their set up and testing, turning dials and rechecking, I wandered as quietly as I could taking shots here and there.

After the sound check, the guys wandered towards the backstage area to gather their stuff and get ready to head out and find dinner. Will remained on the stage for a bit, softly playing his guitar.

This is my favorite memory of Will. His energy on stage during shows was unmatched... whether leading his own band or playing with others... but this moment was something else. It was a beautiful thing to watch the music flow through him so organically. There was no show, no audience, no band that he played to... it was just his own contemplation of melody as he stood on the empty stage.

From that time on I became more involved with his group, helping Bud to manage things, conveying announcements as needed. Dan and I were lucky enough to coordinate a trip to Portland with a show Owsley was scheduled for, and we met up and spent that afternoon meandering through some of my old stomping grounds before the gig. He was working on a new album, he was planning for the next set of shows, he was nominated for a Grammy. He was such an amazing talent, we were all so excited he would finally get the recognition he deserved.

Then the music industry began to crumble... record companies closed, contracts were shifted around, the industry seemed to stall out. In the midst of the trials and tribulations, Will fought to take back the rights to his music and put out a second album for his grateful and hungry fans. As the machine changed he rolled with it, working in production and playing while continuing to write his own music and release singles on iTunes. From what I could see, he was always pushing and finding a way to make it work.

Over the years we talked fairly regularly. There would be blocks of time where we would fall out of contact, then we'd catch up with a long conversation... sharing stories about family, work... just life in general. He had a big heart and a passionate soul, and was a great friend to lean on when you needed support, or to celebrate with when you had great news.

I last saw him a few years ago, he was working on Amy Grant's touring band and they had a gig at a vineyard just up the road from my house. Dan and I drove up early and spent the afternoon kicking back with him before the show. It was wonderful to see him again... to talk and to watch him play. Our good-byes that night were swift... just after the show he had to race to catch a flight. We hugged, said good night, and see you next time. Our last conversation of length was this past winter, we caught up on family happenings, life experiences, plans for the future. He had big dreams, big projects he was working on, and he sounded excited... optimistic and as enthusiastic as ever. I always smiled at the excitement in his voice when he'd describe the details of what he was working on next.

Saturday morning I woke and logged into my email to find a barrage of messages asking if the rumors were true. Determined to prove the rumors wrong, I picked up the phone and dialed Will's cell and my heart sank as an unfamiliar voice answered... confirming the worst.

Will Owsley passed away Friday April 30th at the tragically young age of 44. My heart aches for his family as my mind still struggles with disbelief.

I treasure the memories I have of Will... the way he lit up on stage when he played, the enthusiasm in his voice when we talked, the energy he poured into his music. His boldness and passion inspired me to continue to pursue my own creative endeavors, to take chances and find a way to make my mark on the world. I feel lucky to have had him in my life and privileged to have called him a friend.

He touched my life in ways I cannot put into words... I miss him terribly.

"Circular, circle. Feel it. Go with the flow."

2010-04-26T12:53:00.000-07:00

"It's like a carousel. You put the quarter in, you get on the horse, it goes up and down, and around...."

I was woken up early Saturday morning by G... who had taken it upon herself to get up and make us some breakfast in bed. She has become quite skilled in the instant oatmeal arena, so my bleary 7-something in the morning self first smelled blueberries, then realized she was standing over me with a bowl. It was a lovely gesture... but early.

Much of Saturday was spent running errands as a family, and exploring Seward Park while we were out. They had an Earth Day celebration happening, so G had her face painted, and got a cupcake. Saturday night we went out to a sushi dinner with a friend. I'm severely limited with sushi menus - they add egg-laden dressings as toppings, and I can't have imitation crab meat - so D only really gets to indulge when we have someone else there to share the rolls. Me, I end up with cooked food - teriaki beef or salmon, depending upon the menu. G had teriaki chicken. It was a late dinner and a late night, and I crashed... hoping to sleep in.

I was woken up early Sunday morning by G... who tip-toed around the bed so as not to disturb Daddy, so that she could tap me on my shoulder and announce that she felt like she was going to throw up. My 6-something in the morning self snapped awake and I was robed and in the bathroom holding back her hair before I really knew what was going on. I spent a few hours following her back and forth... bed, bathroom, bed, bathroom, futon, bathroom, futon... she threw up no food, but couldn't hold down any liquid. It came and went. Puke, feel better, starting to be not so good, puke, repeat. Laying down hurt her stomach, sitting up hurt her stomach, juice hurt her stomach. We packed her into the car and took her to urgent care - I suspected it was food poisoning, but the cramping made me think "appendix" and there's not a lot I can do about my panic when I'm sleep deprived.

Compared to what they normally see, she looked entirely healthy - was not hardly dehydrated at all and was in general good spirits during the semi-OK feeling parts of the waves. They poked and prodded and the nurse sort of shrugged it off as "eh... you know... sometimes kids puke". They gave her some stuff to help nausea (though that was puked up just as we got home) and I spent a couple more hours hovering... she drank sips of juice and water and finally went to sleep, just as the fever hit.

She slept most of the rest of the day, but once her fever was full blown she was at least able to hold liquids down - which I found odd, but it was an improvement over puking so I didn't complain. I cleaned, I mowed the lawn, I kept checking on her. She kept asking if it was tomorrow yet. I watched her fever spike to 101.5 and drop over the next 5 hours. By midnight it was gone, and she was curled up sleeping soundly.

I was woken up early this morning by G... who was asking if she could please have some blueberry oatmeal, because she was really hungry.

All in all I'm fairly certain it was food poisoning - it seemed to follow the same time line that mine did when I had it the first day we moved into the house. By coincidence, she has a doc appointment this afternoon anyway, so we'll be double checked before she goes back to school tomorrow. But she is eating and drinking happily, and is now bored out of her skull.

(Movie Quote: Garry Potter in Happy Gilmore)

"In wisdom gathered over time I have found that every experience is a form of exploration. " - Ansel Adams

2010-04-19T13:08:00.001-07:00

When I first received my digital SLR from D, I was both excited and overwhelmed. We were on our way down to the coast, and after G had gone to sleep and D went to the casino, I snuggled into the bed and started watching the tutorial DVD that came with the camera. The tutorial showed a few features of the camera, the manual explained which button did what... but nothing in the instructions explained *why* you would want to use certain features. So for the past couple of years I feel as though I've been stumbling through a long, slow learning process... applying what I know of shooting analog and deciphering those tools in the digital camera body.

But I didn't realized how many tools are replaced by digital technology... and I didn't realize how many other effective and quick tools I had at my disposal. I've seen classes on using digital technology being taught at the local community college, but the descriptions seemed to cover information I already knew well enough - composition, lighting, and what the settings on your camera do. I couldn't pinpoint what I didn't find interest in the descriptions, but now I realize it's because they were all about *how* to use the dials, but not *why* you should use them. (Though it's possible those details are covered in the classes, they are not specified in the class descriptions.)

A couple months ago I received a flier in the mail, for a Gerlach Nature Photography seminar. I confess I don't know a lot of modern professional photographers by name, so I looked this couple up and found a list of publications, and acres of examples of their images. John and Barbara Gerlach are a couple originally from Michigan who have been successful nature photographers and teachers for a few decades now. Anyone published in National Geographic is enough to grab my attention, but in addition to just the impressive list of publishing accomplishments, I was entirely drawn in by the description of their seminar. The bullet points that stood out to me were things like...

Why we no longer use spot metering

The luminance and the RGB histogram - how to use them

Why your camera's meter is the best way to determine the exposure

Wait... no spot metering? The in camera meter is better than hand held? The histogram has an actual use in the field? Within an hour of researching the people, the seminars, their books, and their accomplishments... I had myself registered and ready to roll.

The seminar itself was truly amazing... I cannot emphasize enough the vast amounts of knowledge dispersed to the masses in one long/short day, and I'm so happy that I was able to make it. My brain is still bubbling over with too much information to share in one - or even several - blog entries. But I will gloss over - as briefly as I can - the highlights that I walked away with.

1) Back Button Focusing.
At first I was alarmed to realize I have not learned of this technique in the past... it is not new to digital. According to John it has been used for 20 years by sports photographers, and yet nobody ever talks about it. I did feel better, though, when I realized it is specific to auto-focus cameras, and I never had auto focus until I upgraded to the DSLR. Then I felt the crushing blow of realization that - had I known this technique sooner - I could have had SO MANY MORE PHOTOS OF BIRDS IN SHARP FOCUS *facepalm*
The technique is easy. Stupid easy. Most (if not all) auto-focus DSLR's have the option to switch the auto focus function to a button on the back of the camera body, so that the lens doesn't focus when you push the shutter down half way.

Why do you want this?

So that you can set your focus with the button on the back of the camera, then rapid-fire shots with the shutter without having the lens re-focus on a stupid piece of grass in the foreground, or that bug that invariably flies in front of the lens.

I wanted to scream from frustration and excitement at the same time. It sounds like such a little, simple thing, but that fucking auto-focus on my camera has been an evil nemesis from the very beginning. It's wonderful if I'm shooting slow, one carefully composed image at a time, but when shooting any sort of wildlife that moves it is amazingly frustrating to fight with the lens on what it should be focusing on.

In the past I would pick my focal point, hold the shutter halfway to focus and hold the lens in place, then recompose the image and shoot. Then repeat... move the viewer to the focal point, hold the shutter on the focal point, recompose, shoot. By moving auto focus to the button on the back I can now set the focal point, hit the button, RELEASE THE BUTTON, recompose the image and shoot as many times as I want/need to. This will work for continual focus too... tracking a bird in flight? Hold the AF button on the back down with your thumb, and hit the shutter as often as you like without having to wait for the lens to "think" for every shot.

It's bloody fucking brilliant.

(I realize there are probably photographers out there reading this and saying ... DUH... but do keep in mind that my old 35mm was all manual focus, so really - this is entirely revolutionary to me. Plus, I take heart in recognizing that John himself said it's such a simple thing and yet he never reads about it in any magazines, and nobody talks about it... so I can't be the only one who doesn't know)

2) Using the histogram to determine exposure

I did learn on my own - through trial and error - that I cannot determine proper exposure by looking at the image in the LCD screen. Glass glare, screen brightness, shadows in the field... will all affect how it looks on the screen. So how can you tell if you've exposed the image properly? Apparently that's what the histogram is for.

I won't do the technique justice by explaining the detailed steps myself... but basically...

The histogram is a little bar graph on the back of the camera that tells you how much light and dark information the camera is picking up for any given shot. You can use this to determine proper exposure by making sure that when you shoot, your graph gets all the way to the right of the frame (the lightest part) without clipping off to the right (without letting the little bars jump off the graph) If you do this, then you won't loose the highlights in the whitest parts of your shot.

Visions of flat looking snowy mountain peaks danced in my head as I did another *facepalm*.

Using the histogram, with the in-camera meter, negates the need to use a hand held light meter. Which means, you also don't have to compensate for filters as you would with a hand held meter, because the camera sees the filter through the lens and compensates for you. In addition to that... because you are reading the ambient light... as long as your lighting conditions don't change (like, clouds passing over the sun) you don't have to make exposure adjustments as you shoot.

So track the bird as he flies through the sky, over the water, and across the grass. So long as he stays in the same light, you are metered.

*facepalm*

In addition to that... there are two histogram settings... one for the average color (luminescence) and one that splits the signals into RGB (red, green blue). View the histogram in RGB and set the exposure based on whichever color hits the far right of the graph first. Why? Because if you're taking a picture of bright red leaves and you go with the average color graph, you will end up losing details in the reds (they will fall off the graph to the right).

3) Auto-exposure settings read light from the view finder.

In the past, I have shot mostly on aperture priority... which means I'm generally setting the camera to get the most light through the lens and allow it to compensate automatically with the corresponding shutter speed. I also generally have my face right up against the view finder, so this might not have been much of an issue for me, but there have been plenty of times where my shots were exposed oddly when I was using a tripod.

Why?

If you take your face away from the back of the camera, light comes through the viewfinder. If you are on auto-exposure of any kind, the camera meter picks up that light as well... which skews the readings and exposes the setting all wrong.

Lesson learned, my camera is on manual.

Like I said... I could go on and on... and on... about this. There's so much to know about lens types and tripods and using a flash as a fill light in the field (!!) but of everything I walked away with, these three tips above are the most profound to me, and will have the greatest affect on my technique while shooting.

I purchased both of their books during the seminar. This might be redundant, as I flip through them I can see that some information about equipment and general technique is covered in both, however I know I want to have the references to wildlife photography tips in hand, and I need (need!) to get a much better grasp on landscapes specifically - which their second book is dedicated to.

Digital Nature Photography, the Art and Science

Digital Landscape Photography

I'm not one to recommend a book without having read it myself, but based on the information at the seminar I can say that these people have a world of knowledge to share, and anyone wanting to be out there with a DSLR would benefit from their experiences... and as their seminars seem to be over, this is the best and fastest way to get your hands on their knowledge yourself.

They also guide photo trips all over the world. I want SO BADLY to go on one... I get a lump in my throat and butterflies in my stomach just thinking about the possibility.

is this the real life, is this just fantasy?

2010-04-15T09:16:00.000-07:00

My blogging seems to have taken a hiatus as I monkey with real life these last few weeks.

I blame Dell.

I've been shopping for a new laptop for work since January - it's more been a simmering thought on the back burner for a couple months, then a few weeks back I shifted it to the front and turned up the heat. I need something that can handle multiple programs running simultaneously for work, needed to update the OS and Office, and for photo editing I wanted a larger screen and much, much more hard drive space. The need for space became abundantly clear when I was unable to load my photos from Jamaica all at one time, because there is simply no room.

So long story surmised... I researched the size, speed, and physical dimensions I needed... read reviews... and picked the Dell Studio because it fit everything I required, and it came in a very pretty red. I admit, the style of it was the deciding factor for me, all other things being equal.

Unfortunately, all other things were not equal.

That line of Dell has freezing problems. I didn't realize it until after the first two times it froze. I had blamed the installation of Office for it, but it froze one random time more, then I looked it up online. A tip: prior to buying a laptop, Google the laptop name + "problems" and see what comes up. This freeze problem appears to have been an ongoing issue with the line since last November, they thought it was a driver and power supply issue, they claimed it was fixed. However, my pretty shiny red Dell had the latest and greatest of everything and still froze.

On the one hand... when I have a problem such as this I will be inclined to try to find the reason behind it and attempt to fix it myself. On the other hand... I didn't spend 2 grand on a machine so that I could download aftermarket software and resolve the power management issues manually. Damn thing should work out of the box - I don't think that's too much to ask for.

Unfortunately I had already transferred my entire laptop existence onto the Dell over the course of several days, and spent another few backing everything up and re-loading my old little guy with the bare minimum to work. I then insisted on an RMA from Dell, citing the machine as "clearly fundamentally flawed... and I don't want to waste my time fighting with a free replacement machine, I just want a return so I can buy a reliable brand." Yes, that's what I said to the customer service rep... but in a nice tone, because it's not his fault his company's product sucks.

All this put me behind with work, and photo projects, and thus... no blogging. Only short spurts of fun time online with FB in between work tasks and glossing over sites during down time in front of the TV. *sigh* Technology is both wonderful and a royal pain in the ass at the same time.

In the end, I've ordered an HP, which should arrive sometime in the next day or two. With any luck, I'll be able to walk away from reality a little more often.

(Lyrical title: Queen - Bohemian Rhapsody)

Is it itchy in here or is it just me?

2010-03-29T23:32:00.000-07:00

My food allergies are life threatening.

It's not something I specifically think about often, but it's not as if I really forget about it either... it's just become a perpetually humming factoid buzzing in the back of my brain. It is automatic for me to carry my epi-pen with me when I leave the house, check for my medic-ID bracelet before I open the front door, read the label of every processed food prior to buying it (even if I've bought it before). When I make those automatic movements though, I don't actively consider that it is for my safety... mostly I think it's just that annoying quirk about myself that I need to keep in mind so that I don't get sick.

My reaction to the allergen depends on the dosage and method of delivery. Give me a salad dressing with egg, or ice cream, or a sandwich laced with mayo and my throat will erupt with fire in one bite. I know immediately to stop eating, grab my inhaler, puke, brush my teeth, gargle, and hold the epi-pen at the ready in case my lungs tighten up too much. Give me a baked good (bread, cookies, cake) with eggs hidden within the ingredients and I'll be able to take a few bites. My mouth and throat will occasionally react with a slight irritation, but not enough to be conclusive. Once the food starts digesting, however, my stomach begins to turn over. I feel too full too quickly, and my brain receives this subtle command to stop eating. It takes between 10 and 30 minutes, and my stomach will begin to turn. It is a slow rumble at first which quickly churns and builds to the ultimate conclusion... purge this before it makes you sicker.

Going out to a restaurant for food is a great big game of chance for me. Not only do we check on the ingredients, but I have to decide... do I trust the answer I'm getting from the wait staff? Do I trust the kitchen to make my food as it is described? Will the people handling my food keep it clear of stuff that will make me sick? Do I believe that everyone along the chain of command understands what I mean by "allergy", and what I mean by "eggs"?

The latter seems like a no-brainer, but you might be surprised how many people say "Allergic to eggs? Well, that does have dairy in it..." or "Well, if you can imagine one egg in 5 pounds of hamburger... that's how much is in it... would that be too much?" Mostly I just feel like a bother when we go out. I try to pick restaurants I've been to before, and try to pick food I generally know to be safe... but regardless of going to a well known establishment or a new adventure, I have learned over the years to make efficient use of my time in the restaurant.

1. Glance over the menu, eliminate obvious no-no's
2. Decide what sounds good from what's left on the menu
3. Come up with two dishes to ask about, in case I need a back-up choice
4. Consider substitutions for items that may not be safe
5. Waiter comes to the table... ask ingredient questions and gauge response. (Do this before drink orders, before appetizer orders, so the person is only having to deal with ONE thing for our table)

If the response is good (even if the answers are not what I want to hear) I feel confident in eating there. If the waiter doesn't know the answer, but clearly researches to get the right answer, I feel confident in eating there.

If the waiter throws an answer at me that is full of shit, red flags start to pop up.

On Friday night we bought tickets for How To Train Your Dragon, and opted to grab dinner at a close by Italian place. Usually Italian restaurants are an issue for me, however we've eaten at this one before. In fact, the first time we visited... just after they opened... I was most impressed by their handling of my allergies. I mentioned "allergy" and they brought out a chef from the kitchen, who went over the menu with me and wrote my order down on a bright yellow tab indicating special handling.

Service has gone downhill since then.

I knew this going into the place, but I had a stand-by dinner to order that had always been safe in the past, and we were in a hurry to be upstairs for the movie on time, so I decided to give it a shot. As I looked over the menu I knew I didn't feel like having the stand-by safe option, but another dish caught my eye. When the waiter came out I explained my allergies, and said I needed to double check on the linguine noodles because it had been so long, I couldn't recall if I could eat them or not. His response?

"Oh for allergies we have noodle substitutions... either whole wheat noodles or rice noodles."

Red Flag - the type of flour used for the noodles has nothing to do with whether or not they have eggs in them. He's hearing dietary restrictions, not allergies.

That should have been the red flag that stopped me from eating there all together, but he offered for the chef to come out, and the chef went over the menu and was specific with his knowledge of the food (down to the brand name of the dry noodles) so I decided to continue on with the dinner. The food that I ordered should have been entirely safe - the noodles, the sauce, the dressing on the salad - however the first salad brought out to me was the incorrect kind of salad. I don't know what kind it was, or what dressing was on it, but I know it had whole peppers and olives on the side, and that wasn't right. However once pointed out, the waiter took it back and brought me the correct salad, so I ate it.

I did feel some of that questionable twinging in my throat while eating the salad, but didn't think much of it. Salad dressings with egg would flatten me within one bite, and this was not a massive reaction. However, my stomach began to turn slightly, so I set the bowl aside just to be safe. When my dinner arrived I began eating it, but the brick-like feeling in my stomach continued to grow. Halfway through the main portion of the meal I put my fork down and sat there, staring at the table cloth. I was getting that subtle "stop eating... stop eating" signal, though I knew I couldn't possibly be full yet. But the salad was supposed to be safe - I knew the dressing was OK - so I couldn't figure out where the allergic reaction could be coming from. I waited to see if it was maybe just an odd bit of discomfort, maybe it would go away.

It didn't.

Throwing up in public restrooms is possibly my least favorite thing about this allergy these days.... though with this restaurant I had noticed a Family Restroom down the hall from the regular bathroom area. I headed there, figuring the privacy was worth the looks I might get for walking out of the family restroom without children in tow. Lucky for me, it was open.

So the big question - after all the effort of talking to the waiter and pulling the chef out of the kitchen and going over the menu with a fine toothed comb... why did I still get sick? The only conclusion D and I have been able to come to was that they must have either mixed salad serving utensils, or they dumped the incorrect salad and put my salad into the bowl, still with traces of the other dressing. Whatever went on behind the scenes, it was some form of cross contamination... minute enough that my throat did not erupt with fire on the first bite... but enough that my system rolled it over and said "No, this isn't going to work for you at all tonight".

I don't think about it being a life threatening issue because most of my run-ins with my allergy are just this.... an inconvenient situation involving puking in less than ideal circumstances, and a residual after effect of the inhaler. But it's probably my propensity for getting it out of my system by the quickest means possible that stops me from making regular trips to the ER for shots and observation (a fantastic field trip that I haven't had to make since I was about... 7 or so)

The problem is, when I think about it as an annoying quirk I end up being not as careful when I go out. I ignore red flags because I'm in a hurry, or people are waiting for me, or the waiter is clearly over taxed with tables and I don't want to be a bother. I have to look at my medic-ID and remind myself why it is important for me to follow all the steps, get clear answers, and be critical of the wait staff's handling of my food... whether I like it or not. I'd rather be a mild inconvenience than a patient in the ER.

(Movie quote: Hitch - after just having eaten shellfish)