dynamic elf

I sent boxes and boxes of my dad's photos off to be scanned. They're still working on them, but sakes alive do I have a lot to wade through.

Still, ( a few selections )

Two more photos. Here I will show off a choice I regret, a bit, with ( the high priestess ) ( and some more crazy seam-carving with the empress. )

Someone in the elevator was wearing my mom's favorite perfume this morning. She was also wearing a suit my mom would have loved -- but she was my age, which is probably the age she was when I imprinted on that perfume.

My current favorite reusable coffee mug at work looks like a disposable paper cup. I actually love drinking out of the squishy silicone lid, in exactly the same way that I love smooshy rubber keys on calculators and easy-grip handles. Occasionally it gets admiring comments, but I have to wonder if appearing to have a throwaway coffee cup reduces the quiet advocacy potential of reusable mugs in a workplace that strongly encourages the use of disposables.

aroraborealis sent me an adorable image, and now I want to paint little things like this all over:

It doesn't hold a charge very well, and today it took six and a half hours to back up before it hung my machine. At least the screen protector is holding it together!

Thanks to dpolicar, I now know about the piglet squid:



And now, so do you!

Goddamn, but I have a lot to learn about photographing people. It's not -- so, okay, sometimes I take a picture of a person and what I want to capture is that person's essence or whatever, and sometimes I want to show something about the world or about myself, and sometimes I just like the pretty shadows even if it looks nothing like the subject ever looks in real life. None of those is The Hard Part, since all of those things are also true when I'm photographing objects. No, the hard part is the person-to-person interaction part of it, and I have a long way to go before I'm smooth about things like "no, tilt your chin up ten degrees" or "just stand there a few minutes while I get the lighting right, okay?" It's one thing to opportunistically take good pictures of people who are in their element, or to photograph people who are otherwise occupied, but it's another thing entirely to create the whole thing from scratch. Also, I abandoned the square-crop, because this project already takes up so much of my time and that just took up more. I might go back to it, though; it's fun.

So here I am, and I'm learning. Slowly. Thank you to all the people who've been willing to sit still for me and have me awkwardly move you around. Thank you also to the people who've been willing to listen to me complain about how hard it is to see in black and white, and to everyone who comments, whether with applause or criticism. And thank you to regyt, who is doing fantastic portraits right on the same schedule. It's fun to have a buddy in these things.

( a few outtakes )

First, bad RSI-type arm pain. Then, debilitating vertigo for a day, bad enough that spike took me to the ER. Diagnosis: not a brain tumor! BPPV. Which is nice and all, but more or less seems to amount to "sometimes this shit just happens and you can't walk, surprise!"

Yeah so anyway last night I ended up at Sound Bites with redheadedmuse who caught me on film doing exactly what I had been doing before she whipped out the camera. I just wish it had been spicier.

This photo of chenoameg will soon be outdated. rah rah!

From jurgen.ca, via aroraborealis.

N's first day of School was today.



It's so school-y. Look: a world map on the wall. Tiny little institutional chairs. Shelves with books and puzzles. An alphabet floor map and a teacher in sensible shoes. A chalkboard. In the hallway, she has a yellow half-height metal locker, and across the way is a dimly-lit echoey tile bathroom with short toilets and short sinks that just screams ELEMENTARY SCHOOL! from every corner.

In that photo, she's drawing a tree in brown marker. It has roots, and squiggly forking organic lines for branches. When we left, she was putting leaves on the tree with a green marker. This weekend, at regyt and novalis's wedding, she drew a picture of a pear on an index card. My baby! Old enough for self-directed representational art!

Across the table from her up there is a girl who also doesn't speak French at home. I've already forgotten her name, and her mom's name. I guess I'm like that. Her mom, though -- I introduced myself, because she had a big SLR camera and a nonstandard lens, and was taking a few pictures with it. She had that body language that said "I'm good at this, but I'm not taking 1000 pictures and I'm not going to be all camera-y at you." She had curly ponytailed hair and crinkly smiley eyes and I didn't hate her. She asked Natalie's name, and then introduced her to her daughter, and said, "you two will be learning French together." Yes, I guess they will.

The school was a lot whiter than I'm used to, but not entirely so, which helped me relax a bit. There were lots of different languages and accents in the hallways, too -- English and French and even Spanish. She clung to me for a while but eventually sat down and got absorbed in drawing her tree and then barely noticed when we left.

( Doesn't she still look like this? )

I'm sitting here in my chair at work practically vibrating. I want the end of the day to come and I want to go pick her up and hear about everything right now. I'll wait, though; the end of the day will come soon enough, and then the end of the week, and the month. Will she start speaking French at home, to me? To dilletante? How long until she corrects my usage?

(How long until she doesn't want snuggles first thing in the morning?)

((I hope she's okay. I admit that a tiny part of me hopes it's a little hard AND a little good today, so that I can snuggle her and comfort her and share the excitement with her.))

My baby! So big. Not a baby at all, really. When does that part sink in?