It Seemed Like A Good Idea at the Time

January 22, 2014 ~ riggledo ~ Leave a comment

I said so myself… I might have been wrong.

This idea of using the daily photo prompts to take pictures and write blog posts, seemed like a thing. It really did. Clearly, though, it was not a thing I could keep up with. And I’m so bad at letting these things go and moving on from them that when the first time I didn’t get it done, I thought, “Well, shit. But that’s ok. I’ll just double up tomorrow.” And of course, “tomorrow” came and went and no pictures were taken and no posts were written, and before I knew it, I had a backlog of pictures to take and post and I didn’t know how I was going to make that happen and suddenly, it’s been, what? two weeks since I wrote anything.

But really? I mean, really!

Let’s take a look at the prompts I did not fulfill, shall we?

January 8th: “Lucky Number”

Okay. So I actually had (or rather have) a decent way to accommodate this. I don’t really believe in “luck” per se, and as such, I don’t really have a lucky number. I do have a favorite number, 23, which comes up in my life frequently and without reason, but I wouldn’t call it a lucky number and I couldn’t give you a discernible reason for its prominence if you asked. On January 9th, K and I went back to the tattoo shop where I got my latest tattoo done. She got a new tattoo, adding on to one she’s had for several years. (In fact she got it at the same shop where, and within a few weeks when, I got my first one.) We went together, and when he was finished with her new tattoo, he cleaned up, set up fresh equipment and did my touch up/repair/augmentation work that I alluded to. As it happens, I incorporated the number 23 into the additional art and could have taken a picture of that for the photo prompt… Except it didn’t happen until the day after the prompt and wasn’t really ready for photographing for many days after that. In fact, the tattoo as a whole, still isn’t. It’s been two weeks today and much to my surprise, and displeasure, it still isn’t healed. The sun rays done in the colors of the pride flag, were touched up and extended farther onto my shoulder, which, can I just tell you, was not a pleasant experience! For some reason, those blocks of solid color have taken a long time to heal. They’re much better now, but there are still dry and scaly patches that are bothersome and difficult to resist the urge to pick and scratch – which is disaster for a tattoo.

It’s already evident that I will have to go back for at least one more touch-up, but that most likely won’t happen until May. My swim class starts up again tonight, and while I don’t expect our instructor will actually have us get in the water tonight (he didn’t the first class last semester), I wouldn’t be able to anyway, because it’s not smart to get into a public pool, while a tattoo is still in this scaly stage. I think I’ll be okay by Monday, but I don’t know for sure. Fortunately, it’s the first night of instruction and it’s about getting comfortable being in the water and floating, ducking under the surface and kicking against the wall. If I have to sit that out, it will not be a big loss. Strangely, I am equal parts excited and trepidatious about class starting up again. I really enjoyed the class last semester (and will again) but I also haven’t been in a pool since the last class I attended last semester. I’m sure whatever endurance I’ve built up has been lost. I just hope I haven’t taken too many steps backwards in terms of technique…

January 9th: “Natural”

The instruction was to take a picture of something natural or created naturally. The possibilities for this are endless, and yet, with what was available to me, fairly boring. The same goes for the follow-up prompt the next day…

January 10th: “Man-Made”

Take a photo of something made by man. In a lot of ways, this would have been even easier, because everywhere you look you can see things that are made by man. But that almost makes the prompt uninteresting, because I could easily have taken a picture of my television, or my furniture, or my computer, or… Well, pretty much anything in my house that was not fresh produce. And since I didn’t leave the house that day, the photo would have been something in my house. It quickly becomes uninspiring.

But you see, this is an ongoing problem in the realm of photo challenge photo taking. If I don’t leave the house, then the opportunities for the photos are greatly reduced. If I do leave the house, do I really want to lug my camera around with me everywhere I go? The answer to that is two-fold, because yes, I do want to take it with me everywhere I go. And, NO! I don’t want to have to carry it around and keep track of it and make sure it doesn’t come to any harm everyday, everywhere. Anyway, while I’m unemployed and have limited reasons to leave the house, I spend days at a time inside my home and therefore have far fewer options for creative photos that meet the challenge and don’t become redundant.

January 11th: “Looking Down”

Once again, without leaving the house my options were limited to looking over the railing of the stairs leading up to my front door, which would be… concrete sidewalk, or very poorly maintained grass in the side yard, or looking out a window. Which wouldn’t really be “down” so much as “out”. Of course, I could have taken one of those ubiquitous pictures of my feet, or of my shoes on my feet (which I don’t wear in the house), but that’s not particularly interesting in my mind. Pass.

January 12th: “Something colorful”

I didn’t leave the house. Like the song says, “Second verse. Same as the first!”

January 13th: “Makes me Smile”

This one I actually could have done, with only the smallest bit of cheating. I always figure that the point of the Photo-A-Day challenges, is to take a photo that day that goes with the prompt, however, I was actually with K when she took the photo she posted for “natural”, only it was “lucky number” day. Maybe it’s the thought that counts?

Anyway, I took this picture of Lil’B a couple of weekends prior while we were on an outing to the Hyde Street Pier and exploring some of the ships that are moored there. Lil’B always makes me smile. So if you don’t worry about the fact that I already posted this picture once, or about meeting the date, then it’s all good. 🙂

Taking a picture of Lil'B, taking a picture of me. — Taking a picture of Lil’B, taking a picture of me.

January 14th: “Three Things”

This one might actually have been pretty interesting. The instruction was to take a picture of three things. “They might belong together, or they might be totally random”. But of course, by this time, I was a week behind on this endeavor, and in my mind, I couldn’t have participated in this one without having done all the ones that came before. This leads to my new challenge for myself to be further discussed at the end of this post.

January 15th: “Black and White”

This prompt is much like the “upside down” prompt in that, with modern technology, any picture can be black and white with just the press of a few buttons. I could have made a picture black and white using settings on my camera, or using iPhoto to edit it that way. There’s no real challenge in that, and once again, I only left the house to work. Irony being what it is, I could have taken a “selfie” at work and posted that, since my uniform for most bar tending jobs is a white shirt with black pants, tie and vest. But again, I didn’t want to bring my camera along to work.

January 16th: “Sun”

The instruction was to take a picture of the sun. Of course this was totally doable, even without having left the house. But again. I was too far behind.

January 17th: “Tiny”

Does this really need any explanation?

January 18th: “Happy Place”

I wouldn’t even know where to start with this one. (Plus I worked again, that day.)

January 19th: “Breakfast”

“Take a photo of your breakfast, or where you were for breakfast time.” This was a Lil’B Sunday. I picked him up earlier than usual so we could go to the Oakland, Zoo. I slept through breakfast, and well? Really? Does anyone really want a photograph of my bed? I don’t think so. I took lots of pictures at the zoo, though I haven’t yet had time to edit them. But those photographs had nothing to do with the prompt.

January 20th: “To Do List”

I suppose there might be something interesting in this. The instruction was to take a picture of the actual list, or a series of pictures of things I did. At the moment, my to do list, is only in my head, and it’s so long that it’s actually debilitating and nothing gets done. Something I absolutely must work on. But anyway, this photo prompt wasn’t doable either for many reasons.

January 21st: “Blue”

Sometimes they’re just too easy, which I guess I shouldn’t complain about. While I am not consciously aware of having a favorite color, or a strong preference toward any one color, until recently, a quick glance at my closet would have told you that blue is unequivocally my favorite color. Finding a blue thing to take a picture of would not have been difficult. Then of course, there’s always this:

Me and my new car, taken outside the dealership, Half Moon Bay, CA

Heck, even the blue Honda over my left shoulder was mine. That’s the car I traded in for the Mustang. (Don’t talk to me about the monumental difference in gas mileage. I will cut you!)

And that leads us to today, January 22nd: “Nice!”. The instruction just says, “take a picture of something nice”, which, again, could be anything. Hell, I could even just direct you to scroll up an inch or so. There’s something pretty nice! Maybe I’ll take some additional pictures today, maybe I won’t. We’ll just have to wait and see.

Anyway, my new challenge for my self, as alluded to with January 14th: “Three Things” is to not get so caught up in the idea that I have to post one thing before I can post something else. Especially when that one thing is something that I am avoiding doing for whatever reason. Maybe that thing will get posted, maybe it won’t. But I shouldn’t let that thing prevent me from posting other things. I have, in the past, had a problem with holding back on those thoughts because I hadn’t posted the other thing yet, and then I end up losing lots of ideas that I wanted to convey. Probably this won’t lead to anything earth shattering, but at least it should help me keep my writing muscle exercised… Lord knows it’s the only one that’s getting any exercise.

Starts With G

January 3, 2014 ~ riggledo ~ 2 Comments

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.

Green Money.
“You don’t want to know what I have to do for $20s.”

2014 New Year’s Resolution… Failed Already

January 2, 2014 ~ riggledo ~ Leave a comment

I guess it’s good to get these things out of the way early. Heh!

I had a plan. It was a good plan. A great plan even. If I do say so myself. And I do. Because if I don’t… who will?

As demanded by my nephew, age 2 1/2. My sister has a strict rule against pictures of her children appearing on the internet, but I’m pretty sure a photo of the indistinguishable knees of her only male child would be considered harmless enough to not cause offense, if she even knew this website existed.

You see, it’s like this. Back in April, after I was offered the short-lived disaster of a job I had this year, and negotiated a start date that would allow me to take a much over-due trip to visit my sister and her family, including four children (my nieces and nephew), two of whom I had never seen in person, I decided that it was the opportunity and excuse I needed to invest in a fancy new 35 mm digital camera. I’ve always been interested in photography and wanted to learn more about it and with a digital camera I’d be able to see the immediate results of my attempts to improve on technique and composition. I bought the camera and took it with me on the trip, and of course, as soon as I took the camera out on the first day, the children started being children and wanted to take pictures themselves, and tell me what pictures I should take (my nephew kept saying, “take a picture of mine’s knees”), and insisted on seeing the pictures the instant they were taken. Very few pictures were actually taken on that trip because the camera posed such a distraction and any hope of getting some candid, true life photos was dashed on the first day.

Over the summer, I decided to take a photography class at the local community college. I knew from other’s experiences that this class would teach me not only how to compose a good quality, artistic photograph, but also, how to use editing software to make the picture look even better. A few days after I registered for the photography class, I decided to register for the first level, beginning swimming class and soon after decided that both classes were too much to do all at once, at the time. Ultimately, I decided that the swimming class was a higher priority because I wanted to be able to find a place to go to swim for exercise and once I had that covered I could be swimming for exercise while I learned to take and edit good quality photographs in a later semester. That is still the plan, although when classes start up again in a couple of weeks, I’ll be taking the next swimming class with the hope of getting more effective and confident in that skill. Photography will wait until Summer or Fall Semesters. The camera sits in its case for weeks or months at a time without getting used and I’ve never finished reading the owner’s manual, or the “Photography for Dummies” book that I purchased and lugged all the way to New York and back with me, without ever cracking the spine.

During my most recent previous stint of unemployment, I began participating in a “photo-a-day” program run by the author of another blog, using just my iPhone and an Instagram account I haven’t even looked at in months. When I started working, I found myself far too busy and far to pre-occupied to keep up with it and I let it drop.

Recently, my urge to learn to properly use my camera has returned, as has my desire to practice and build my skill. I have also wanted to get back to more regular posting here on this site, and not have everything be all gloom and doom and woe is me as the last several months have been.

And then it hit me! The great idea! The perfect “solution”! “Photo-A-Day” meets “posting 365” (or whatever the hell they called it) meets new inspiration for both more and better photography AND more and more cheerful writing… I decided I would pull out the photography books and read a little bit of them each day, and I would combine that with the photo-a-day prompts from Fat Mum Slim and everyday, I would take a picture that is prompted by the Photo-A-Day prompt and post it on this here bloggy thingy. I would write a post about the photo if the spirit moved me, or I would just post the picture with a minimal explanation/caption and let it stand on its own. Every day. For 365 days.

I’ve already failed.

I wasn’t going to get too bogged down in the details of actually starting the plan on January 1st. It’s already 2:00 in the morning on January 2nd, so you see how well that worked out. But I was going to do a post for every picture and a picture for every day…

I worked last night. For the first time in more years than I can remember, I worked on New Year’s Eve. I would far rather have been out celebrating somewhere, preferably somewhere far away, like Las Vegas, or Sidney Harbor, but I need the money, and New Year’s Eve seemed like a good opportunity to earn a lot of tips. (It could have been a lot better than it was, but the whole experience is a separate story for another post.) I didn’t get off work until 1:45 AM. One of the other bar tenders who happens to live right down the street from me and I rode BART home from the city together and I gave her a ride from the station to her house. She invited me in and we had a two plus hours over-due celebratory glass of champagne and chatted for a little while before I went home. I arrived at home around 4:00 AM at which time I took a shower. I’ve never been able to go straight to bed after either arriving home, or taking a shower. I need time to settle in first. Plus, I had “nerd things” to do with my tip money. I briefly entertained the idea that I just wouldn’t sleep until bedtime on January 1st, because I knew that what happened, would happen… By 6:00 AM I was exhausted, could barely keep my eyes open and had no idea what I was seeing on the Netflix DVD I was watching. I gave up and went to bed, slept until noon and have not had the slightest inclination to sleep again. This is a scenario I do not want to make into a habit

When I woke up I was hungry and didn’t have time for “what should I cook for lunch”. I needed to eat immediately, so failing all other options (or rational consideration thereof) I ended up eating a couple of Eggo toaster waffles. Once the waffles were gone and the dish was washed off and in the sink (the dishwasher is full of clean dishes and I haven’t put forth the effort to put them away yet) I went to the living room and sat down. It was only then that I pulled up the schedule of prompts for the photo-a-day program and saw today’s prompt: lunch. I couldn’t even think of a viable and reasonable way to cheat.

Sometimes it’s good to set the bar low right up front so you only have one way to go from there…