Ten True Photos

Sheesh, it's been a while since I was here.

Ten True Photos. Because words sometimes just seem like too much work.

1. Roll N Write. This is how I spend my Thursday (late) mornings now. Working in Nate's class with the 3rd graders, doing 'beat the clock' math drills that have a bit of a video-game feel, as you have to beat your score to advance to the next level.

2. Basketball. It's what's on tap for Kelly these days.

3. Camera stuff. I've been shooting fairly regularly, and I like the prompts of the dailyshoot.com folks. But maybe I'm shooting too much, and not giving myself time to tell the stories of the pictures. This is Kelly waiting at the local Starbucks for her drink to be made. She sits in the corner by the barristas, and watches the espresso machine work through the glass.

4. Nate and Kelly were off this past week. Skip was not. So he missed out on the trip to the Exploratium on Thursday. This is a great magnet display where you try to 'float' a metal disc down a chute by positioning a larger powerful magnet over top of the chute. He'd probably still be there if I hadn't made him move on to the Next! Fantastic! Thing!

5 & 6. Also on Thursday, our church youth did a Chinese New Year themed "Chill Night". I provided the sparklers from Chinatown (did I ever mention the hijinks that went on when I chaperoned this year's trip to Chinatown? I must talk about the old guy with the joint, and the direct view into the public men's room urinals from the Tai Chi court. Boo yeah.) Anyways, after they played a rousing game of Kill Ball (I don't want to know.) I fed them all, and then took them out into the middle of the parking lot to play with sparklers.

(yes that's Skip)

7. Kelly is making herself an updated version of the Infamous Cow Pants.

8. Tofu.

Tofu is a young Djungarian hamster, aka Winter White (Phodopus sungorus). This is the place he wants to be: going for a ride-along in someone's hand. He climbed into Kelly's hand in the pet store, and looked her square in the eye. Freaky, actually. But how can you say "no" to a hammie who obviously is a people-person.

Here. Have 9 and 10, too.

You would even say she glows.

Tofu is a little boy. I think we will be on the lookout for a little girl with a similar people-person personality (Wasabi, perhaps? Or Miso?), and see if they can't have one little family. Kelly already has 4 friends (plus our Starbucks Barrista) who would adopt a critter as personable as Tofu.

Accompaniment gig.

Well, I finally went to the middle school to volunteer as a pianist today.

I was so nervous. I actually had to stand by my front door, and talk (out loud!) to myself to make myself get in the car and go to school on time, and not chicken out. I am such a big baby. And my big concern? I was wearing a new (to me) pair of jeans that I've just shrunk into, and I was most worried that maybe they were still a little too snug in the legs, and what if the seam on the right leg, where there's some great applique, split while I was playing the piano???? Oh! The horror!

Sheesh.

I can't believe I even confessed to that. Why did I write that down?

Anyways.

I showed up at 915, and 2nd period started about 5 minutes later, and I walked in, and I was worried that the teacher would want to work on pieces that I really hadn't practiced all that much (oh, I didn't mention that I ran into him yesterday while I was selling ice cream at lunch, and he said 'oh, here are 10 other pieces that the various choirs are working on. I hope you didn't think we were just doing one song...' Eek! And so I had about an hour yesterday to quickly go over the other songs... ok, there were only 6)

The first choir spent a bunch of time working on this Aaron Copeland number that I didn't know at all, but in the end, it was a perfect piece for me to start with, because they really just needed their vocal parts mirrored at the piano, and so that was basically one finger on each hand. Whew.

The second choir had Carrie in it (daughter of long-time local friend, and girl who Kelly considers her BFF, even though they're in different grades.). But my GOODNESS, what a chatty Cathy that girl is in class. I'm going to put a private word in her ear before our next session, because I think she could really be a leader to encourage the other girls in her section to PAY ATTENTION! which was rather lacking during the rehearsal. They spent a good chunk of the rehearsal working on a choral arrangement of Africa (the Toto classic), and I nervously played mostly accompaniment, and some vocal lines when they were getting thready. Then, once I got a bit of my piano-legs under me, they moved onto the Rodgers and Hammerstein piece, and, with my confidence inflated only a little bit more than I deserved, I jumped right into full-on accompaniment. Which, I will say, was a little less stellar than one might have hoped for, but I did remind myself that this was a group of 12 and 13 year olds, and they were probably too busy chatting with each other than worrying about whether I played every note in that one chord correctly.

After lunch, it was the third choir's turn with me. I was thinking "ok, this is the 6th grade chorus. They're going to be WAY more basic, and probably need more help with their melody lines"

Um...

melody lines? Musicality? Turns out that what they needed help with was GETTING PUNCHED IN THE FACE.

Oh, whoops. Did I say that out loud? I swear, I was getting ready to stand up on my piano bench and shout at them to PAY ATTENTION. Good lord. I guess there is a down side to selling ice cream at lunch. You get 40 kids on a sugar rush at 1pm.

But discipline isn't my responsibility, so I sat at the piano and noodled around, while the choirmaster gave them a stern talking to.

And then they settled down.

And then they started working on a piece that I kind of NEVER PRACTICED, and the director said "Oh, they know the tune, so if you could just play the accompaniment..."

Egads!

Nervous sweat glands go into OVERDRIVE.

But it was not nearly as bad as if that had happened during my first session of the day. I was getting a little bit more comfortable at the piano, so I was able to cover the fact that I was TOTALLY OUT OF MY DEPTH.

And then! THEN!

They're doing a version of Somewhere Over the Rainbow. It's the version done by IZ, this Hawaiian guy with a ukulele, and the director said something like "If you could sort of play the accompaniment, and then plunk out the melody, but I'd like this one melody line to go less like it's written, and more like the way that Judy Garland did it in the Wizard of Oz, can you do that? Or maybe we could do BOTH melodies at the same time..."

And something in my head broke. And some primeval piano-playing neanderthal took over, and I guess there is something hard-wired into my fingers after years and years (and years) of lessons, because if I didn't actually MANAGE TO DO WHAT HE ASKED!

And now I have two days to figure out exactly what it was that I did, because I'm going back there on Thursday.

Oh.

Time!

Gotta get Kelly from basketball practice.

Oh, and can I just say that she had her first game yesterday?

Score?

24 to 6.

I don't think she'll be complaining for a while about how she was sure she was put on the WORST team in the school... (last week she wanted to quit because all her 'good' friends were on the other teams. Heh!)

Anyways, I took photos. They're still on the camera, Along with photos of Nate and his first smoke bomb (I'm so proud! ahem), and shots of the food the kids made for the Superbowl party on the weekend.

Later!

Flowers! And bees!

I am still doing the Daily Shoot.

This afternoon, I popped out into the driveway after school, and played around in the golden-hour light.

Ah, my three-dollar Christmas cactus from last year is blooming AGAIN! I feel like I've gotten my money's worth out of that purchase.

The rosemary was a-buzz with bees. I guess you would call them Rosemary's Bee-bees...

Reprieve

I don't know whether to jump around and pat myself on the back, or smack myself upside the head, but last week I was approached by one of the music teachers at the middle school, and asked if it was true that I was a piano player. Instead of just looking at my feet and mumbling something about messing around when nobody's listening, I said "Why yes, I am..." and before you know it, I was being given sheet music, and a schedule of the rehearsal blocks for the three advanced choruses. "Now, I don't expect that you can make it to all four rehearsal times for each of the three choirs, but it would really help them a lot if you could get in there when you can. Trust me, anything's better than me plunking out a few notes, and making them repeat it" he said, when I started looking like I'd bitten off more than I could chew.

So since last Thursday, I've been pacing back and forth in front of our piano, looking at the Rodgers and Hammerstein compendium sitting on the music stand, and thinking "WHAT HAVE I DONE?????"

Truly, it is above my pay grade, when all is said and done. Oh, the first page lulled me into a false sense of security. It's a solo voice, and she's singing "The hills are alive with the sound of music" and there are FOUR NOTES underneath her. I can totally do that.

And then you turn the page. And all hell breaks loose.

Why didn't I look at the music before he gave it to me, and I walked out of his office, crossing the Point of No Return?

So of course yesterday, I thought "ok, it's time to BUCKLE DOWN! I've gotta beat this music into submission. Either I've gotta get completely familiar with the tunes and the gist of the accompaniment, or I've gotta get all the vocal lines under my belt, so I can say "Why don't I just play their phrases for the various parts until they get the hang of how the music goes together?""

And then Mr Migraine came in for a landing.

Argh.

So I did a grand total of about 3 minutes of practicing. Even when I was 11, and could fake my way through the easy book, that wouldn't have worked for me.

I woke up this morning with sweaty palms. It's do-or-die time.

But first, tutoring!

I'm tutoring a high school senior through his AP Chemistry, and it's really being a brain-burner for me, because I swear I didn't do most of this stuff in COLLEGE! But he comes to my house, and he's a wonderful young man (I remember him when he was 7... here, let me see if I have a photo...

Here he's just duct-taped Skip to the wall. I can't believe those little guys are all in high school now. Time flies!)

Anyways, tutoring went from 8 to 915, and then I had to race over to the middle school because the first rehearsal block started at 930.

It was when I got to the school that i realized that i only had a vague idea of where the chorus room was. Skip never took chorus, and Kelly's doing band instead of chorus, so I just started wandering in the general direction, thinking that i would hear the music as I got closer.

Silence.

:crickets:

Hmmm.

I poked my head in one door, and it looked promising, so I went in, and down a short hall, and poked into a room that was, indeed, the Chorus rehearsal room.

But the music teacher was nowhere to be seen.

It was a sub.

And a last-minute sub, too, if I guessed right by the looks of things.

Fortunately, I saw one of Kelly's best friends sitting right by the door, so I snuck in and checked. Sure enough. It was a last-minute sub.

So I quickly tip-toed out of the room, hoping not to be noticed, and raced all the way home.

Where I promptly sat down at the piano and went over the music for a good half hour.

I don't know that I'm any better at it, but at least now, I'll feel a bit more prepared.

And now, if you'll excuse me, I need to go exercise my lungs while I sing along with the schmaltziest bits of "You'll Never Walk Alone".

Dailyshoot update

I have been keeping up with the dailyshoot.com prompts.

Even I don't believe I've been able to go for more than a week without fizzling out. Good intentions paves the way, and all that.

Here's the recent activity:

#7: Triangular composition. I mentioned that I used the shot of kelly and Nate and the sparklers. It was a stretch, but I was tapped out by the time I got around to processing the day's photos.

#8: Path. I used the path to the beach, with Kelly and Nate running off into the distance, meeting the waves. I've already posted that here in "meanwhile, back at the ranch"

#9: Low. We went to the beach again, and I ended up going with the double meaning. Both a low point of view, and a 'low blow' as I made my friends who are shivering through an atrocious winter storm see ANOTHER photo of the beach.

#10: Monochrome. Laziness prevailed, as I just pushed myself away from the desk and pointed the camera out the family room door close to sunset.

#11: Stripes: The Peninsula Orchid society show was this weekend in Redwood City. Kelly and I went, and she bought her first orchid from the fellow who grew it from birth (or from seed, or from fluff, or however those things come). he was a new vendor this year, and grew the orchids in his house, and he gave her a lot of great information, and helped her pick out the best one of his stock. So this was my submission for 'stripes'

Although I also posted this shot, of her with her purchase, or as she likes to say "Mr. FlowerPants".

#12: Beauty. This was tough. You were supposed to photograph "the most beautiful thing you see today", which is so open for interpretation and hard feelings "you took HER picture, but not MINE? Do you like her MORE than me? Whose are you going to put as the MOST beautiful?" or the thought of "This is a great photo, but I'm sure there are more beautiful things to see" bla bla bla.

In the end, it was getting late, and i just went for the beauty that I see when kelly is taking care of her pets. How she's turning into a compassionate care-giver, and will make a great parent (or vet) some day.

(bounce flash. I'm getting the hang of it)

I also posted another light-painting photo. Kelly and I had a bit of fun in the back yard before bedtime.

Oh yes, and for those of you who've read this far, and were wondering about my super spy name...

#13: Hard Light shadows. And now we come to today. I should have gone out this morning with the camera, as the sun was brilliantly shining, and the shadows everywhere had crisp hard edges. But I didn't. So I took Nate into the bathroom with a flashlight, and had a bit of fun. I'll be posting one of these:

Oh phooey, speaking of Nate, I just realized that I won't be able to get him to Kung Fu in time. Oh well. Tomorrow is another day.

And now I must go and intervene in a fractions-and-ratios homework kafuffle.

Thought we lost her

I was putting Kelly to bed the other night, and we were looking in on the remaining 2 hamsters, Kashi and Cheerio, making sure they had water and extra treats, when I noticed that Cheerio was trailing something behind her.

A long... red... string.

Say WHAT?

Now, Cheerio is our brain damaged Roborovski Hamster. She's had what we thought was a nervous tic since we got her, which has caused her to only turn left. As she's gotten older her head-twitch has gotten more pronounced, and her barrel-racing ways have gotten more obvious, and a little more frenetic. If she's not actively turning left, she's twitching her head like Justin Bieber adjusting his bangs.

My first thought was that she'd run into something, and had repeatedly run into it because of her disability, causing a wound. But I would have thought that the wound would be closer to her head, and this seemed to be originating from somewhere in her hind quarters.

Sure enough, when I was able to corner her, and pick her up (good grief, those girls are fast!), I could see that all her left-turning (seriously, we should have called her Nascar. "Just turn left! Just keep turning left!"), and her ramped up speed recently, was causing her to pivot on her left rear foot, and somehow all that pivoting had caused her to spin some of her bedding into a strong string that had managed to form a tourniquet around that pivot foot. The blood was bright red, so I knew it was fresh, but I really didn't know if it had already cut off circulation to the foot, or if it had twisted enough to actually cut the foot off, period. My stomach was churning as I looked at the thread around her foot, and the sticky blood on the thread. How was I going to get that off her foot?

Kelly had a pair of craft snips on her desk that she's been using to make jewelry, and they looked tiny enough, and sharp enough to get in close without crushing any tiny hamster bones. *shudder*

Cheerio didn't like being held, and she was spinning around in my hand, so it was kind of hard to pin her down so I could get access to her rear foot. I managed to snip the thread fairly close to her foot, and I hoped the twisted bit around her foot would wiggle loose as she started tooling around in her tub again. Kelly wanted to make sure she would be OK (the foot was swollen, and bright red), so we took her into the bathroom, and I put her on a hot wet washcloth in the sink, where she could wander around on it, and moisten her wound. I had a wet Q-tip that I was trying to swab her foot with, and Kelly sprayed some Neosporin onto another Q-tip, and she was trying to medicate the foot, so it wouldn't get infected.

I did dread looking into her cage in the morning. Would she be missing a foot? Would she be dead? She is getting old, almost exactly 2 years old this week, and I wouldn't be surprised if this trauma would be enough to put her into shock.

But I was pleasantly surprised.

Hello, Cheerio. Ready to spin for another day?

Meanwhile, back at the ranch...

After school today (Wednesdays are half-days), I motored over to the coast with Nate and Kelly (Skip, at highschool, is stuck in full-day purgatory), and a bag full of Wendy's take-out.

We got to the ranch by 1, and it was looking pretty deserted. None of the horses on the line were saddled up, but that's OK. Usually week-days are pretty quiet.

Eddie was not on the line, but soon our poking around got the attention of Jorge, and he said that Eddie was out in the pasture, and Kelly could get him if she wanted. Did she want to ride him? he asked. Um, no. Kelly's getting a little bit afraid of Eddie, actually. All this time not-riding him has made him head-strong and extra spook-ish. But the ring would be available, after they moved the mare and her colt back to their stall.

Kelly grabbed her lead rope, and headed out to the pasture. Uh oh. Eddie's managed to shed his halter, and his head is naked. There's nothing to clip the rope onto. I went to tell Jorge, and he gave me a rope-halter that would work in the interim. Well, Eddie can smell a trap a mile away, and he'd come near for the sugar cube in my hand, but bolt away the minute he caught sight of the halter out of the corner of his eye.

It became apparent that he was slipperier than Kelly was able to deal with, and I could feel Jorge watching us from his porch. Soon, I could see him walking across the yard. I was ready to call it a day. Some days, you just can't catch the horse, you know? But Jorge was coming over with a little bucket full of tasty, tasty grain. I have no idea what was in that bucket, but ALL the horses perked up their ears, and started moving towards the gate.

I felt bad for Jorge. He wasn't wearing his work boots. He was wearing sneakers, and that pasture, by the gate, was ankle-deep mud. Ouch! I should probably get him a Jamba Juice card, or something, for all his trouble this afternoon. But soon he'd managed to snag Eddie, and make all the other horses mad because they didn't get the snacks.

I was in charge of the bucket of oats for the walk back, and i must say, I was Eddie's Best Friend EVER!

In the ring, Kelly would walk him around, and every time he came to the gate where I was standing, he'd want a snack. Perhaps I was a bit of an enabler, but I did offer him a handful of oats on nearly every lap. Maybe that's why he wasn't really paying attention to the instruction that Kelly was trying to give him.

"Eddie! You are being a butt!"

She was shooting lazer beams out of her eyes at him.

But then two seconds later, she was in love again.

This does not bode well for any young men in her future.

Happy:

Signs of trouble...

Angry:

Finally, the clock told us it was time to go. Kelly took Eddie out to the line-up, and we vacated the premises.

But it was SUCH a lovely day, I decided that we'd be just a little bit late picking up Skip from school.

(oh, and this was my submission for dailyshoot.com today. A photograph with a path)

The beach was glorious.

Perfect for going barefoot.

it's too bad we couldn't stay there all day.

And now they want to know when they can go back.

Coming at you from Kung Fu

I don't know why I never thought to bring the laptop with me when I was going back and forth interminably to Kung Fu lessons these last 4 years. Jeepers. Slow learner, I guess.

So Nate's class is nearly done, and I've spent the time editing photos from this afternoon. Kelly went out to the ranch again, and tried to work with Eddie. It was a literal goat rodeo at first (ok, it was a horse rodeo, but Kelly's skill level is more akin to that of a goat), with us out in the pasture, up to our ankles in stinky mud, trying to get a halter on Eddie, who is a champion halter-loser, apparently. Finally, Jorge had to come and rescue us, and I felt bad because he was actually wearing nice shoes, and not his usual ranch boots. There are (sadly) no photos of that fiasco, which is probably a good thing. If I'd had my camera (I ended up having to go out into the pasture with kelly, as she attempted the snaring of Eddie), I probably would have suffered one or more of the following:

Falling in the mud

sliding in the mud (involving dropping the camera)

being attacked by a horse and dropping the camera

being trampled by hungry horses and dropping the camera

Come to think of it, several of those things did happen, but at least I wasn't having to worry about ruining my camera in the fray.

Turns out the horses like whatever it is that I use on my hair. I had several of them muscling each other out of the way so they could get in really, REALLY close and whisper sweet nothings in my ear. Alas, even though Eddie loves my shampoo as much as the next gelding, he noticed that i had a rope-halter in my hand, and he was on High Alert. Even the bribery of sugar cubes couldn't drop his guard.

Oh well.

Anyways. Kung Fu is almost over, and i just wanted to record that yesterday's dailyshoot.com assignment was to make a 'triangular composition'. I didn't take the camera out yesterday, so I cheated a bit, and used the last photo that I took the day before, of Nate and Kelly with the sparkler. It's triangular if your eye tracks from their eyes to the sparkler. Subtle. Yeah, that's what I was going for...

Today's assignment is to use a path or road to lead the eye into the photograph. I'm not sure how good the pirated net connection is that I'm currently using, so I haven't uploaded any of today's photos to my picasa stream yet. That'll wait until after supper.

Also? Funny photos of Kelly, as she decides that she is angry with Eddie for being, and I quote "such a butt". The faces that I see in these photos are very reminiscent of her stubborn streak that I photographed the year she was two. And the year she was three. And maybe the next year, too.

Oh, the class just got ordered. it's time for everyone to switch, and it's time for me to go home and make supper.

Toodle-oo.

Light Painting

Last night, just as I was getting ready to kick all the kids into bed, Nate reminded me that I'd *promised* that we would 'do sparklers' before bed.

Argh.

So, with Nate and Kelly in their jammies, we headed out into the dark back yard. I'd found a pack of sparklers, and had used some of them for Skip's birthday cake on Saturday. It was time to empty the package.

But first, let's do some test shots with this little pen light I found in my purse.

See the elephant?

Yeah... i don't really, either. I always was a little behind the crowd in art class.

How about this pony, drawn by Kelly?

Well, at least I'm feeling a bit better about my elephant...

OK, let's see what we can do with a simpler shape...

This makes me feel happy. Yes it does. And you can see the trail of a passenger jet in the top right corner of the frame. A 6-second exposure will do that.

Now for some sky-writing.

Oh right. This was supposed to be about sparklers.

Dailyshoot.com "soft"

Busy day yesterday, but of course, none of the photos I took ended up meshing well with the dailyshoot assignment, which was "Make a photo with a soft look today". I ended up tossing something together at night, while I was working on finishing up another prosthesis for my mom.

Here's a bit of softness for my mom. From left to right: pima cotton yarn, waiting to be made into a knitty-titty, a titty waiting to be sewn up (this is in bamboo, primarily so I could tell mom that I knit her a Blue Bamboob), and a silk prosthesis waiting to be put in the mail today. Which reminds me, I need to get to the post office this morning.

Dailyshoot.com "blue"

I do think I am getting into a bit of a routine with this dailyshoot business. Either that, or I'm getting better at making 'what I have' fit into 'what I need'.

Today's prompt was "Blue. Make a photograph dominated by the color or that otherwise illustrates the theme."

At first, I was thinking about rifling through my yarn stash, and pulling out a bunch of skeins. Goodness knows I have an overabundance of blue yarn (of every color of yarn, truth be told)

But then life got in the way, and our day began, and we were go, go, going.

This afternoon, instead of waiting around the house, and being a stalker-pest when Skip's driving instructor showed up in the two-steering-wheel-equipped sedan, and trying to take photos of him embarking on this new part of his life, I headed over to the coast, so that Kelly could give Eddie a bath.

Eddie being the recalcitrant pony, you may recall. He's eighteen shades of dirt-colored these days, and the mud is caked on so that any hairs that he shed (it's about time for their winter coats to start shedding off) would be trapped in the mud, making him itchier and itchier.

Yikes, that is a dirty pony.

Oh, Eddie! You are going to have SUCH a great bath this afternoon!

Spray, spray, spray!

And there on the right you can see the vat of Mane and Tail that Kelly got for Christmas. It's going to come in handy.

See?

So shiny, you need shades.

And this is the shot I submitted for the dailyshoot:

And then she and Carrie toweled Eddie off, while the light of heaven shone down and said "Well done, shiny pony"

And then, because he was SUCH a good pony while he was having his bath, Kelly let him graze in an un-mowed patch of the ranch.

Once Eddie was back on the line, the work wasn't over. There were more horses to feed, and the girls were willing to work.

But soon enough, it was time to open the gate and send the horses back to the pasture.

Get out of their way.

We'll see you tomorrow, ponies.

And you too, Wrangler.