Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo, March 2009

I can’t believe it’s been awhile since i posted. I think things still seem a bit scattered but getting slowly back into routines. I’ve had an uninspired or hard time getting back into the picture taking groove two things i think have helped get me over that hump. Via Colori, a street painting event, how fun and ephemeral, i feel our photos at least will let the art live in memory. From the images posted, it was a huge inspiration to many.

This last weekend headed down to brazos bend. A beautiful winter light, good company and nice weather made for a very relaxing day. Good to see the park thriving if a bit battered from ike, you can see lots of trees down but the wildlife seemed to be thriving.

Good to be getting back into the swing of things.

A meme i copies from Wynk

The Big Read is an initiative of the National Endowment for the Arts designed to restore reading to the center of American culture. The program was created in response to the National Endowment for the Arts report Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America, which identified a critical decline in literary reading among American adults. In partnership with the U.S. Census Bureau, this study, with a sample size of 17,000, revealed the following about literary reading in the U.S.:

* Less than half of the adult American population now reads literature. (In this survey, literature is defined as any novels, short stories, poetry, or drama, with no distinctions made for quality or length.)
* The percentage of the U.S. adult population reading any book has declined by seven percent over the past decade.
* Literary reading is declining among all age groups, but the steepest decline is in the youngest age groups.

Look at the list and:
1) Bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you own.
3) Underline the books you have seen a movie or TV production of.
4) Reprint this list in your own blog

1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Brontë
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Brontë
8 Nineteen Eighty-Four – George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger -
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
34 Emma – Jane Austen
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52 Dune – Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses – James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal – Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession – AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupéry
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Bank
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

Ike’s been here and gone and didn’t even send thank you notes. The knots are slowly unraveling though I’ve seen anxiety, short fuses, and unsteady steps in it’s wake. Galveston and the coast so devastated still have so far to go, though I’ve been amazed and proud of how quickly routines were uprighted in houston.  I’m still trying to get totally back on center, but getting there. Unraveling the knots he left in his wake

I wish i could have chosen not to deal. A week ago i was sitting in a hotel room in waco, having fled with my animals for safety, my house is in the mandatory zone for evacuation so little choice, not that i would have chosen to ride this one out. I came away from all this very lucky, the house wasn’t damaged, a few missing shingles, a little fence damage, just mostly some major tree damage. On wednesday after coming home i hit the wall, crumbled. I don’t know if i have the constitution it takes to deal with this – i’ve seen so many with such bravado and cavalier attitude – i just wanted to and did crawl into and not leave my hobbit hole, work is the necessity for leaving tomorrow. The cost of taking down trees, the expense of having to evacuate, the never getting ahead of the bills ….

There was some humor – inroute to waco within an hour slycat had peed on me and boudin had thrown up twice all over the back seat – arriving in waco and checking into the hotel i discovered boudin was also scared of climbing stairs. I just did what i had to do to get us through waco – i think it’s the responsibility of having to be the decision maker / responsible one 24/7 that i’m just so over – this just brought it all to a head. Really wish for once i’d meet a man willing and worthy of sharing this life with.

August has come and gone .. mostly without me even thinking of this site – or perhaps intentionally ignoring it! Shooting has been a frustration, looking for inspiration or trying to move beyond “snap shots” … firmly back in the snap shot frame of mind it seems.

A family get together full of opportunities blew past me — just leaving me a bit melancholy about why i’m here but not knowing where i need to be. Overall a feeling of being a bit stuck.

I’m craving a “real” camera so badly but looking at the balances in the financials i know i must wait …

So.. hopefully beginning september these restless, frustrated feelings will start to give way to a more creative fall …

my first attempt at fireworks .. yes, i cheated and used the “fireworks” setting on my camera ..  sparklers for dummies … but i at least pushed the shutter and attempted to time everything. I know if i shoot any again i will definitely go for mis-en-place …without a sense of context it seems like a bit of soul is missing from the shots

playing with multiple images and layering … the typical morning in my home. I have seen several other composites on flickr and thought i would give it a try, what better models than my animals. An exercise in photoshop and patience.