Starts With G

Have I already bitten off more than I can chew?  Hmmm.  I wonder.

The Fat Mum Slim Photo-A-Day prompt for January 2nd is “Starts with G” which seems simple enough.  Who can’t find plenty of things that start with the letter G?  Only, I ended up with eight photos, all of things from around the house.  I actually took more than eight, but after I downloaded them and did some basic editing in iPhoto, I realized some of them were no good so I deleted them.  Actually several of the ones I deleted were duplicates of the ones I saved (’cause you always take multiple pictures in order to get the good one, right?  Right.)

Anyway, after staying up most of the night last night, and accidentally sleeping all day today, followed by going out for dinner with a friend and not getting home until around 9:00, I didn’t have a lot of time for taking pictures.  Here’s what I came up with:

First up is my swim goggles.  I wore these goggles twice a week, nearly every week from August to December as I took the “Fundamentals of Swimming” class at the local Community College.  I nearly drowned twice before I was six years old, once in the Pacific Ocean when a large wave crashed ashore, knocked me over and then began to drag me back out to sea as it receded and again at my father’s apartment complex when I fell into the deep end of the swimming pool.  On both occasions my father immediately pulled me to safety, but the experiences traumatized me enough that for a long time I was afraid of the water altogether, and once I got over that, I was not willing to get into any water where I could not see the bottom and could not stand up.  I finally decided it was time to conquer my fears and to learn a means of exercise that I would actually enjoy doing.  After one semester of swim classes, I can safely say “I know how to swim”, but I’m not very good at it and I still haven’t gotten into water in which I can’t stand up.  The next session starts up on January 22nd and I hope to make vast improvements during this next class.

Anyway, after each class, I would bring my bag home from the pool and unpack my gear, take my goggles into the bathroom to rinse them off and hang them from my bed post to air dry and be ready for the next class.  They have been hanging from that post since early December because I haven’t been in a pool since the class ended.  Along with the new piercing I vaguely (or not so vaguely) eluded to the other day, I also have a new tattoo I’ll share about sometime later.  Both instances of “body modification” needed to be mostly healed before going into a public swimming pool, essentially exposing “open wounds” to the potential soup of other peoples’ bacteria we’d all prefer not to think about when we go for a swim.

The next two pictures go hand in hand.  One is my glasses.  I made a very unspecific reference to these when posting something completely unrelated several weeks back, but as of mid-October, I am officially a full-time glasses wearer.  I picked these glasses while my eyes were still dilated which is certainly a risky proposition.  I had some assistance from one of the opticians in the vision center, but I wasn’t completely sure what I’d be getting when I went back a week later to pick them up.  I must have done a fairly good job, because when I arrived at work later that day, no one seemed to even notice that anything was different, as if I’d had the glasses all along.

The other picture is of a mirror that hangs behind my front door.  The mirror has hooks along the bottom from which I have always hung my sunglasses.  I have multiple pairs so that I could always match the color and style to the clothes I was wearing that day.  The sunglasses have been rendered somewhat obsolete by the introduction of the glasses in the picture above and a pair of prescription sunglasses.

Some of the other pictures I took are pretty self explanatory.  A few G words around my kitchen:

Gas flame from my stove.

Double Gs:  Green glass sweet and dry vermouth bottles in my bar.  And a bonus G:  The green label on the back of the Apple Puckers bottle you can just see on the bottom right side.  

And a green Starbuck’s label on the front of a plastic reusable cold drink tumbler with a green, plastic, reusable straw.  Heck it’s even “green” in the environmental sense.  Boom!  Triple Gs!

In my bathroom, there is grout between the 12 x 12 marble tiles that make up my floor and shower surround.

And finally, still starting with G, the kind of “green” we all know and love, money.  As a Bartender, I come into possession of many small bills so this is not a terribly large some of money, it’s just the money I had left in my pocket when I came home tonight.