Random Musings Under Stress

Why do we imagine we're all alone when we're under stress; that no one knows or understands, that no one cares, that no one is there to help? Contrary to what the voices in my head tell me, there are PLENTY of people who, in reality, are there for me. People who say "sure, I'll be there" when I ask for help; people who say "I hope you feel better" when I express doubt, frustration or sadness. People who tell me what I should be doing (whether I asked for advise or not, LOL). My friends are always there for me, whether I remember it or not. Thanks to all of you.

Glendale Train Station

I have to believe that the architect/lighting designer knew the effect of the decoration above the door when up lit at night (center of the photo). I pulled the day image from a blog called Modus Eundi because I just don't have time to drive over there in the daytime to shoot it. I shot the night image myself. They're both the same place. I wonder if superstitious people see this place at night and turn around and drive away.

Travertine Steps

This interesting feature is located in Yellowstone Park. It's in a location called the Travertine Steps. The colors you see in this photo are cause by different kinds of algae that grows in the hot water that runs down the side of this mound. The mound was created by mineral deposits left by the hot water, sort of the same way lava shapes a volcano.

There are so many interesting places in Yellowstone! I specifically wanted to see this area because I had a calendar once that had a photo of the "steps" with water running down it and it was so beautiful. Since that photo was taken the water activity on the steps has changed and they are mostly a bleached white now. No water, no algae. Still, it's a beautiful place to go. I'd like to go back when I have more time and to walk around and explore.

Blue Goo

This thing has been the office for as long as I can remember. It makes the rounds of everyone's desk at one time or another. I'm sure it originally arrived as a promo piece for a company that makes promotional pieces. We get a lot of stuff like that.

It's very therapeutic. You just keep turning it over (like an hour glass) and the blue goo runs down to the bottom and makes bubbles at the top. I think it takes about 3 minutes for it to run through, but it wouldn't make a good egg timer because you'd keep turning it over again and forget to get the eggs!

Pitcher

I like to shoot sporting events. You can get some very interesting shots. I shot this one at a pretty fast shutter speed. If I had used a slower speed the ball would have been elongated and the pitcher's arm would probably have been a blur.

It's cool when you shoot for a stop motion effect because then you see things you would most likely see with you own eyes, weirdly contorted poses or facial gestures. Some are funny some are scary and some you just can't believe a human body can get into that kind of expression or pose.

I have a couple of really good shots where you can see the batter swinging and just barely missing the ball. I'll have to look for those.

Bubbles

I LOVE soap bubbles. Look at the colors in these things! They're like delicate living things. They float and move and change colors. If you can follow one or if one alights on a surface and manages to stay whole for a minute you can watch the haze of colors swirling over the surface.

Soap bubble are a magical things to me - like airplanes. My logical brain knows that it's physics (and a lot of math stuff) with water and soap and surface tension and I know the are physical laws for for how planes fly, but to me it's just magic. I know how it works and I know why it works but I'm in awe that it happens.

I like holding on to that little-kid wonder and awe. It saves me from becoming depressingly cynical.

Cactus

It makes a difference what time of day you photograph something. I first saw this cactus in the evening, maybe around 6 or 7 pm. It was much more interesting looking then - it's leaves (pads?) were open more fully and the pattern of white around their edges was more noticeable.

I took this picture late morning, around 10 am or so. I don't think it's as good an image as what I saw in the afternoon. I'll have to go back and get an evening shot.

House Spirit

I've learned many skills in my life. One of them was wood carving. This was a house spirit I carved. It hangs in my sister's house. Funny, I make lots of things for other people and very little for myself. I should make a house spirit for my home too.

Playing With Trees

All three of these images started out with one tree branch - the same branch image was the foundation for all of these different looks. I copy and rotate the image, playing around with how it's laid out until I see something that I think looks really cool - sometimes for hours! I think maybe you have to be a little OCD to do this. If you click on the image you see a larger image of the three. This is like cloud watching - you can find all kinds of imaged hidden in them. The middle one reminds me of a human torso - kinda creepy!

The Sphere

I went to New York with my sister and her daughter a few years ago. We were only there for a couple of days. We did all the tourist things - Statue of Liberty, Redline Tours, Times Square.

Of course we went to Ground Zero. It was very quiet there. My biggest thought was that as bad as 9/11 was, it could have been so much worse if the buildings hadn't gone straight down. The site was all sanitized by then and looked much like any construction site you can find in downtown LA on any given day. I didn't have any real emotional reaction to the site.

In Battery Park it was a different story however. We were walking back through the park after our trip to the Statue of Liberty, when we came upon this sculpture. It's a winding path that leads to it so you don't see the thing all at once. It was a huge, metal ball and I could see that there were large holes in it. I thought "how sad, vandals have destroyed this piece of art". When we got up to it I could see just how badly this sculpture was damaged.

There is a sign there telling that this sculpture once stood between the twin towers and was removed from the rubble of 9/11 and placed there in Battery Park as a memorial. I cried while I was reading the sign. Maybe as an artist, this touched me more than the empty hole where the buildings used to be. I could see what this sculpture had been and what had been done to it. I could understand the forces needed to create so much damage.

It was a very strange experience. A couple of years after this visit I saw a program on TV about this sculpture and it's strange and sad journey and the message of hope that it offers that although we may have been damaged by the events of 9/11 we're still here and we're still going about our daily lives.

Unexpected Paths

I grabbed a box of pictures to go through last night thinking it was mine. Turns out it was my grandma's box of pictures. Pictures of family from 25 years ago. Man, have we all changed! Pictures of family members I've never met (or met when I was 4) but I've heard their names.

I've become the keeper of the photos for the family. I took grandma's photo books and boxes when she passed several years ago and my cousin sent me a bunch of her mother's photos when she went through her things. It was a surprise to see pictures of all of us so young. I saw a photo of my mother at the same age my sister is now and I saw the same look on her face that I see on my sister from time to time. My grandmother, mother, sister and niece all have the same face. If you saw photos of each of them at, say, age 5, they would all look like photos of the same person.

I learned a lot from grandma. Besides my mom, she was the person who was around the most while I was growing up. She took us on vacations to Catalina and Tahoe. She made vegetable beef soup on cold days. That's probably the thing I miss most about her - her soup on cold, wet days.

The most surprising thing I learned from her (that I wasn't expecting) was how old people die. She was in the process of dying two years before she actually passed and if we had known what was happening we would have made the transition easier for her. She was in a nursing home and they kept giving her blood transfusions and all kinds of drugs just to keep her alive. She had no energy to get up and about. All she could do was lie in bed. She was hallucinating because of the drugs. When we'd come to visit she'd ask how we found her and tell us that they had taken her somewhere in the night and she didn't know where she was and wanted to go home. She was very unhappy.

It took us a while to understand that she was going through the natural process of dying. We talked to her Dr. who told us that the drugs he had her on were only prolonging her life so we told him to stop giving her all the drugs except pain medication if she wanted it. The last two weeks of her life she was quite lucid and remembered seeing her great great grandchild who was newly born. My sister and I were with her when she finally passed.

I hope that particular lesson I learned from her will help me be more understanding, compassionate and helpful to my other relatives as they reach the natural end of their lives.

Determination

This was on the way home from Catalina Island on the Catalina Express. I don't know how fast that ship moves but the seagulls were doing a pretty good job of keeping up. There was a man on the boat holding out sandwiches for the birds. This bird got most of it.

Lilly Pond

Isn't this pretty? You wouldn't know it's in the middle of a college, would you? I found this while I was walking around Pierce College on Saturday. I had to go to school to buy a text book. While I was there I was taking pictures in the Botanical Garden and came across this pool. I'm usually there in the evenings so I don't really see all of this.

There was a cute little box turtle right on the edge of the pool. The only way I could have gotten a picture of him was to wade into the pool. Not really an option. There was something big in the pool making waves but it was staying under the surface. I think I'll go back again.

Masks We Wear

At some point in my distant past I taught clown make-up classes to Campfire Girl groups. It's amazing what happens when you put on a mask, even a painted one.

This particular class was one group so they all knew each other. The other class I did was two different groups at the same time who did not know each other. They sat at separate tables and did not interact with each other. They were mostly very quiet and reserved. By the time they got all their make up on they were running around the room talking and laughing and even went outside to wave at cars passing on the street. Having the masks on made them anonymous and allowed them to do things they otherwise wouldn't do.

The World Wide Web is our collective "mask". Behind it's (perceived) protection of anonymity some people do and say things they would never do in a face to face situation. This is a double edged sword. On one side, it allows some people to express their creative side, their own opinions or defend themselves. On the other side it allows some people to spew forth hate, ignorance, intolerance, and other anti-social behavior that they otherwise would contain.

This virtual mask is also a great leveler; the very nature of it puts most of us on a level playing field with everyone else. On the web you can't see what a person looks like, so you can't judge them by their looks. You can't identify if they are deaf, blind, or have missing limbs. You can't identify (in many cases) gender or age ; all of the things that feed certain ingrained judgements we have about people which directs our behavior toward them.

There is also a whole generation (or two) of people out there who apparently believe that because they have their virtual personal space set to "private" that no one else can see what they write or the pictures they post. They don't get that posting anything in cyberspace is equivalent to putting your diary on a shelf in the library; while everyone may not see it, it's there as a permanent record for anyone to find who wants to and is determined enough to look for it. They also don't get that alliances shift and the person who was your BFF yesterday isn't your BFF today and is forwarding your compromising pictures and/or comments to everyone they know.

The virtual world is just like the real world. There are consequences for what you say and do and the choices you make. You have the power and the responsibility. What are you going to do with it?

Solitary Purple

Who says you need a whole bouquet to make a pretty picture? Not me!

I can appreciate the whole forest (meadow, landscape, cityscape, etc.) as well as the next person, but I like to look for the little details that get lost or overlooked in the big picture. I tried to catch the little bug buzzing around these flowers, but he was moving too fast and I didn't have a tripod with me.

You know, this daily blog business isn't as easy as it looks. I scanned 3 photos last night and uploaded them to my "blogpix" folder, labeled them with dates, so I'd know which one I was going to pick next, then I went out taking pictures this morning and that "schedule" of photos went right out the window. At the moment I'm more inspired by today's photos than the old one's I scanned last night.

Oh, you'll see the others somewhere along the way. They're still in the folder as back up for when I don't have the time to take new ones or I just don't have the time/energy to look through the 1,000s of photos I've taken over the last 20 or so years for something to write about.

I have discovered that it's much easier to keep up with the "daily" aspect of this blog if I preload a bunch of pictures into that folder. Guess that works for most things in life, planning makes the job go smoother. I should have already known this. I DO already know this. If I was going to do a drawing or a painting I would lay out all the tools I need nearby so I wouldn't have to constantly get up and go get a pencil or a tube of paint while I'm in the middle of working. I guess maybe I thought that since this is "virtual" there wasn't any planning or preparation to do. Silly me!

Well, this blog is doing what I wanted it to to. It is inspiring me to take pictures again. I haven't been out shooting in probably more than two years and now I've been shooting quite a bit and most of it right in my own back yard. Well, not literally in my back yard, but certainly within the scope of my normal day-t0-day travels. Might not spend the whole day doing it, but bits here and there add up and I'm seeing things and places I would ordinarily have missed because I'm really "looking" at what is around me, looking for "the shot". I hope you're enjoying this little tour through my life. I am.

Wyoming Snow

This was the view from my mom's front door when she first moved to Wyoming. I went there to visit for her birthday. It snowed the 2nd day I was there. It was quite beautiful to watch the landscape slowly fill up and be blanketed by snow. This was such a beautiful sight.

Being a SoCal girl I don't often get the opportunity to watch snow fall so it's a treat for me. I wouldn't live somewhere where it snows a lot as long as I still have to work. Snow is much more enjoyable when you don't have to go out in it unless you want to.

My niece was still little then. She wanted to go out in the snow as soon as it started coming down and she was still in her pjs. It took us forever to get her to come back in even though she was shivering and her teeth were chattering. She was having too much fun throwing snowballs for the neighbor's dog to catch and sliding down a tiny "hill" created by the snow drifting up against the side of the house.

Ana Baby

This shot is one of those reasons I try to take a camera with me everywhere I go. My family got together in a park for Father's Day and when I arrived I found this scene. My niece is about 3 months old sleeping here in her mom's lap. The "awwwww" factor alone makes this one a keeper even if she wasn't family!

This little baby is 15 years old now and much harder to take a photo of. I discovered with her older brothers that at a certain point in a child's life they will stop pestering you to take their photo and will actually run and hide at the first sign of a camera! She hasn't quite gotten to the disappearing stage yet (her brothers have that down cold) but she doesn't like having her picture taken as much as she used to when she was younger.

Yellowstone Tree 2

Do you see the face in this tree? This has the most wonderful colors and textures. I see faces and animals in trees all the time. This was on the path from the parking lot to the "Lower Falls" in Yellowstone. What an amazing place - so many interesting places to explore! The sound of the fall in this area pretty much drowns out anything else. In other places it's so quiet you can hear the blood moving in your ears. Something of everything is here in this park.