Maybe, Baby.

Orange, for Color Week

What to say? Nothing’s coming to me. Swirls and flowers and vectors and bikes and paintbrushes and grass, some mown, some that soft unevenness that you only get before the first mow. After that it’s all sharp edges and squares and grassy smells, isn’t it? I’m still on green, I guess.

When I started this semester, I thought Monday was the hardest, longest day. Now, Monday is the easiest, because I get the most sleep before it happens, in its Mondayglory. The next days I get less and less, stretched thin with projects and responsibilities. Anxiety, some. Until the weekend comes and I can recharge a bit again. I’m really looking forward to a couple of weeks in my future, when school’s out for summer, and I can try to regain some semblance of speed again. First gear rather than fifth. Maybe. Maybe that will happen.

“Maybe” seems to be the word lately. Maybe this, maybe that. Maybe Baby.

In the meantime. Orange. We all know I like orange.

Ode to Tuesday, the 29th of April, Aught Eight

Yellow, for Color Week

Sighworking.

Trying to finish the catalog and the secretdesignproject.

Watching The Husband brew from a room away, through the doorway.

Or the breakfast bar, I haven’t decided.

Stacking words here.

Maybe having popcorn for dinner?

Nope. Cheese and crackers.

Don’t want to devote much time to cooking or eating.

Beer, though, definitely.

Homebrew.

Did And Didn’t

Not much to show for this weekend, I didn’t really take any pictures, just lived it. So here is a green photo from a week ago for Leya’s week of color.

The farmer’s market was COLD, but I did find the green garlic and spinach I wanted to procure to try Molly’s Spinach and Green Garlic Soup. It was different from whatever I thought I was expecting it to be, but it was easy, and lovely, and sadly undocumented visually. It didn’t look nearly as pretty in our red bowls as it did in the pot, but it tasted GREEN. Which makes sense really. So, if you can find green garlic, I highly suggest you try making this soup. It’s like, soup for the end of soup season. Springy, not too heavy, but still warm and soupy.

We walked around the ‘hood with a couple of friends yesterday, and strolled through a couple of open houses with them. Not for us, certainly. We’re happy in our home and I couldn’t imagine moving. They are thinking of buying though. It would be so fun if they lived a few blocks away. This also gave us the opportunity to meet one of our neighbors, who will still be in the neighborhood after they move – down the block. Like, 3 houses down, they’re moving. Which I think is funny.

On the heels of Juno the other night, we also watched Once this weekend. And ohmygod, people. This movie is so moving. I loved it. I’m buying the soundtrack posthaste. The music is stunning.

What I didn’t do this weekend:
Sit on my porch, it was too cold
Put art in frames
Sew
Bake a new loaf of bread
Take pictures
Work on the catalog project that’s going on

Other than that, I’ve been quietly working on a little bit of something. A possibly very exciting opportunity has come up – maybe – but it’s certainly not set in stone, so I am trying not to be too excited about it. Just doing my best to stay calm and do good work and see what happens.

Onward.

Meditate.17

Week 17 . Meditate Project

See it larger here.

Dang. Our house is LOUD when it storms. Maybe it’s the skylights. I love the sound of rain on the roof, but last night the crashbangboom and the rain slamming on the skylights kept me awake for quite awhile. Couple that with some anxiety related sleeplessness earlier this week, and I am a tired gal. And then finally I fell asleep to dream about streams of water coming in through the skylight. And guns. Which is strange, since I’m definitely not a gun person. But apparently they haunt my subconscious.

I do love a good thunderstorm, though. And April showers bring May flowers and all of that. The grass is SO green now, and the trees are starting to flower. I’m wondering when I’m going to start sneezing as a result.

I took last night off. From everything. Homework, blogging, photo editing, thinking about catalog colors and logos. Instead we camped out on the couch for a few hours with some lamb vindaloo and chicken mogalai and garlic naan and watched Juno. Which was all really really great.

I’m really looking forward to the Farmer’s Market on Saturday morning, a neighborhood party tonight, getting together with friends, and maybe doing a little sewing, too.

And now another storm is blowing around outside. I’d better close the window.

Venice

Image from Alexey Titarenko

Alexey Titarenko is a photographer who is known for capturing long exposures of Russian commuters. His images explore crowds, movement, masses of people, the blur of life, and they are beautiful, and riveting.

He currently has a show at the Nailya Alexander Gallery titled Venice. These images of Venice hold a bit of a spell over me. They show a quiet city, the city that people still imagine Venice to be. That romanticized place shown in postcards. Misleading, perhaps? That Venice is hard to find, if not impossible. They hide the teeming hordes of tourists, the throngs of people that swarm the city, in a sense, what Venice has become. Based on Titarenko’s body of work, it seems that he could have spoken more to the hypertourist masses of Venice, made more commentary on that reality of the city.

Image from Alexey Titarenko

On the other hand, I still feel there is some truth to these images. For me, Venice was its best at night, or early in the morning, before it was stifled with tourists. We took walks at night, after most travelers had gone to bed, watched the few gondolas and other boats glide quietly through the canals in the gloam, the lights stringing out in our tired eyes. We exited early in the morning, navigating through narrow empty streets, sharing the city with only a few other people. There is still a peace to Venice, in the off hours, and that is what I feel is captured by Titarenko’s long exposure images.

Either way, they are beautiful.

And the winner is…

My, oh my, thank you for your response to my year anniversary in this space. It’s so cool to hear what people remember, things that maybe they don’t think about every day. Or maybe they do. I don’t always think about the whole past year, and I don’t suspect that many of us do on a regular basis. And it’s nice to hear some voices that I haven’t heard before. Thank you! I so appreciate your memories, your changes, your voices, yourselves.

Molly, your name came out of the bowl! Naturally, The Husband lent his gracious hand in choosing someone, so that it would be fair and square. Thank goodness I don’t have to be responsible for such matters! Send me your mailing address and there’ll be a package on its way to your lovely sustainable door. Oh, and ya’ll, if you haven’t heard about Molly’s pre-compost flickr group celebrating the visual symphony of kitchen waste, you really should. It’s kind of really unexpectedly groovy. I especially love her carrots.

Meet P

He’s pretty dapper. A real charmer. Well, he thinks he is, anyhow. Although he’s a little sensitive about his thin floppy arms. He’s no weightlifter, that’s for sure. But don’t tell him I said that. I love his eyes, though. So soulful. Like you could gaze into them for eons.

I’m not so sure Ms. Bunny likes those eyes, though. She mentioned that she thinks P might be a little shifty. What with his floppy arms and inability to sit up without be propped on something. She looks a little uncomfortable there next to him. Like she’s leaning away from him as far as possible, for an inanimate object.

I made two attempts at P. The first one is lying in scraps on the cutting room floor, but I salvaged the linen for his belly and made use of the black striped fabric for his little wimpy arms. They could use some batting in there, to make them a little more hefty, though. But these are the things we learn. And I’m wondering how long it will be before his arms part ways with his body. His first body’s tail was too short, and his beak was definitely not right, and the fabric just wasn’t sturdy enough for stuffing and hand stitching closed along one edge. Probably the grain was too loose. Kept coming unraveled. So I scrapped it and tried again with a solid black cotton, and it worked much better. He’s more firmly stuffed than Ms. Bunny, which seems appropriate since he’s a man and all.

My nephew L O V E D him. He had specifically mentioned that he might like a penguin, and you should have seen his face when he opened it. He smoothed those thin little arms down many times, lovingly. So I think I done good.

Ms. Bunny was gifted to my niece, and I think she likes her too. I was getting a little attached to her, myself, and it was hard to let her go. But I think she’ll be happy surrounded by young ones and other softie peers.

Meditate.16

Loving yellow and green grass and textures.

Week 16 . Meditate Project

See it larger here.

Assign Profile

Ok, I should totally have written more about this yesterday, but I don’t rightly know where my head was at. Wherever it was, it was a strange, strange place. My apologies. Here, is an elaboration.

So. I don’t consider myself an expert on this, by any means, and part of this is untested theory. Shortly after we bought our Nikon SLR, I began shooting in RAW. I THINK when I shoot in RAW, since nothing is processed in camera, the color space isn’t set either. For displaying photos on the web, the color space should be sRGB. Since I need to calibrate my color space for each image, they look fine in Photoshop or any photo editor/manager, but when I uploaded them to Flickr, the default color space I was working in, Adobe RGB, wasn’t calibrated, and so they lost some saturation and contrast. They didn’t look bad, just different from what I was working with before uploading them.

There are a couple of things you can do to tell if this is a problem for you. In an image’s Flickr page, in the right sidebar under “Additional Information,” click on “More properties.” Partly down the page there will be “color space.” If it says your color space is sRGB, you’re good to go. If it says your color space is Uncalibrated, then you’ll need to set it in Photoshop before you save your image to upload. You can do that by going to Edit>Assign Profile in Photoshop, then making your post processing adjustments after that. It works for me.

This has been a public service announcement.

Oh, and I made that pin cushion awhile ago.

Midweek Kitty Respite

Stupid me and my not figuring out and fixing this sooner. I’ve been wondering for awhile why when I upload images to flickr, they lose contrast and color saturation. Turns out, I’ve not been setting the color profile correctly. The little point and shoot camera has the right one by default, but the Nikon does not. It’s fixed now though. An extra step in post processing, but now they are as vibrant on flickr as they are in photoshop.

And if you’ve no idea what I’m blathering about, no worries. My brain’s a bit of mush at the moment. Or feel free to ask me to elaborate. I’d be happy to, you know, when I can think straight again.