project 365

When last I posted pictures, I promised to keep up better. Evidently I was lying. Sorry about that. But without further ado, I present pictures!

February 17, 2008:

I thought this might make a nice colorful picture, and it did. I love my Prismacolor pencils. Sophia and I spent the day coloring. As you can see, both her favorite color (pink) and one of mine (green) are well used.

February 20, 2008:

I took about a zillion pictures of the lunar eclipse, and none came out as nicely as I would have liked, but I did like the way the bare dogwood tree branches look all silvery in the flash on this one. And the moon, though small, is clearly partially obscured.

February 22, 2008:

In retrospect, I appear to have been tired of the lack of color during February, because I appear to have gone out of my way to capture color.

February 24, 2008:

This is a performance of a drama I co-wrote for Lent. We did six of these, one a week until Easter, and it was a lot of work but I think people generally liked them.

February 25, 2008:

A second run at the desolate garden.

February 26, 2008:

Snow and water. I thought it’d present a more compelling image somehow.

February 27, 2008:

I have no idea. It must have looked cool in person.

February 29, 2008:

Kids jumping into swimming pool. One of my favorite things about my new camera is the ability to get non-blurry pictures of action.

Oh look, I’ve gotten to the end of February. Now I’m only two months behind! Of course, I took no pictures while ill so that’s about two weeks in April that are unaccounted for, so I’m less behind than you might think by date. I’ll do one more, so I can be in March, and only one month behind.

March 1, 2008:

A sunset, instead of the usual sunrises I offer. The colors were better than I captured, I’m not sure why, but it still looks pretty good. Also you can see all my neighbors’ yards.

Continue reading

February 13, 2008:

What would I take pictures of if I didn’t have pets?

February 14, 2008:

Another one of those pictures that I didn’t expect to work. Or perhaps I didn’t expect to work at all and it worked marginally. Or something like that. You can tell that those are two cats at a window, anyway and the reflected branches and trees look kinda cool.

February 15, 2008:

Sophia eating breakfast at the Kolache Factory on a school free morning.

February 16, 2008:

That child seriously needs her bangs trimmed in this picture. And I still haven’t gotten it done two weeks later. Ah well, maybe this week. Also of note in this photograph: you can see our super cool right on the door doorbell to the left of my husband’s shoulder. I love the way that doorbell looks and the way it sounds.

February 17, 2008:

One of Webster’s Lustron homes. Welcome to the retro-future! Apparently our community has a high concentration of these unusual steel homes, and we went on a geocache tour of several of them.

Continue reading

It’s a leap year. I should say or do something special, right? Hmm, how about some more pictures? We’ll get through the backlog eventually.

February 2, 2008:

View of the backyard, with deeper snow than usual.

February 3, 2008:

Grandpa’s a guitar hero.

February 4, 2008:

My hand, gruesomely wounded and swollen. Actually, the swelling was much diminished by this point, and the wound no longer as painfully infected, but my hand still hurt quite a bit and was basically useless.

February 5, 2008:

And it only took me four years to find a place with a decent King Cake.

February 8, 2008:

Another early morning sky. I am going to try and take one of these every few weeks at roughly the same time, to see if I can get a composite at the end of the year.

February 10, 2008:

Cute kid making cookies at our annual Valentine’s cookie making extravaganza.

Continue reading

Well, I’m having intermittent networking issues, which has made me reluctant to post pictures, because they crash more often than post, being substantially bigger than a standard text post.

Still, I’m getting way, way, way behind, and I don’t have a good handle on how many days I’ve missed pictures for because I haven’t been posting them.

Here begins a small remedy.

January 22, 2008:

Can you see the little squirrel (I’m guessing) footprints on the fine layer of snow? I’m not sure anyone can tell what they are from the picture.

January 23, 2008:

I cannot tell you how surprised I am that this picture worked. I didn’t expect it to, but the fine detail of the ice crystals is clearly visible. It’s the sort of picture I might have told myself not even to bother trying in the past.

January 26, 2008:

Everyone has bunny ears! Well, except Jason, and I don’t know why Jason manages to avoid bunny ears. Out of town friends visiting. Taken in my ugly-colored living room, the one that everyone comes into and says “My, I love this color,” which makes me feel bad about wanting to paint it. I hate that color.

January 27, 2008:

Remnants of the Loop Ice Carnival, a week old. Next year maybe I’ll get pictures of the actual sculptures!

January 28, 2007:

Empanadas, ready to be fried.

January 29, 2008:

There has never been a dog in the history of all mankind who loves rides as much as Sergei does. Here he is, in his usual attentive to surroundings while riding posture.

January 30, 2008:

A kid in Sophia’s class doing work. I had stayed a few minutes to talk to the office and when I walked through the classroom the light level was awesome and all the kids were hard at work, so I took a few pictures.

February 1, 2008:

A big snowfall and a walk down to a nearby park with a good sledding hill led to a ton of pictures. Here’s one of Sophia and a neighborhood friend next to the snowman they built (with help from the friend’s father).

Bonus picture for February 1 of sledding hill:

I have more, but I don’t like to cram all the pictures into one post, so expect more picture posts later. If this one goes through, that is.

Continue reading

So, last you saw was January 10, right? The picture of my not dead oregano.

January 11, 2008:

I drove my daughter to her swimming lessons and went on the pool deck with my camera. I took a ton of pictures and this is one of my favorites.

January 12, 2008:

First is a picture of a UV bead bracelet. The beads change the intensity of their color depending on how much UV light hits them. Inside they are often white. Outside they turn colors, from soft pastel to more intense hues, as they absorb light. Second is a picture of my daughter playing with railroad spikes.

January 13, 2008:

We spent some time at the art museum on Sunday the 13th. Most of the pictures of stuff I took didn’t turn out well (flash is forbidden and I haven’t yet learned how to compensate for that), but this one was decent, I thought.

January 14, 2008:

Tea box I got for Christmas, filled with some of my very favorite teas and tisanes. Makes you want to have a cup, doesn’t it? C’mon over, I have types to please every palate.

January 15, 2008:

Oz curled up in his basket. Rorschach uses it more than Oz, but they both love to curl up in it, especially when it is cold.

I didn’t take pictures on either the 16th or the 17th, so that’s three days I’ve missed so far. The extra leap year day no longer suffices to give me a 365 day streak. Alas. We knew it was bound to happen. Still, the project is working. I’m taking tons of pictures. I’m touching my camera almost every day. I call it good.

January 18, 2008:

I drive by the school garden every day when I drop my daughter off. I’ve been noticing how desolate it looks, and wondered if I could capture that sense with a photograph. I don’t believe it worked.

January 19, 2008:

I took a half dozen pictures of this cardinal in the leafless honeysuckle, trying to convey how bright it looked against the drab tree. I’m not satisfied with any of the shots. It just doesn’t look the way it looked to my eyes, a strong splash of color in an otherwise dull landscape.

January 20, 2008:

On this walk I took directed pictures. That is, I told Sophia to keep her eyes open for interesting things and I would take pictures of them. I didn’t argue with anything she suggested and thus ended up with this pretty awesome picture of a flag, which I would not have photographed on my own.

January 21, 2008:

MLK day, so Sophia was off, and we went in to have lunch with Kurt near where he works. This is Sophia sitting at the table with her paper doll, Natalie.

I apologize for the radio silence, and also for the subsequent gumming up of your feed with multiple entries, including a massive photographic entry. I incapacitated my right hand last week, and that, coupled with some laptop issues prevented me from doing anything useful for the better part of two weeks. I’m still recovering, but I am able to type some if I don’t push it, and most of these entries were already mostly typed, just not posted (because of aforementioned laptop issues). I had no idea how many of my daily tasks required fine manual dexterity. I’m glad I didn’t have to get a pirate hook instead of a hand, that totally would have sucked. Meanwhile, I’m still going to try and get pictures done twice a week, which would mean more like three to five pictures per post, instead of ten.

Continue reading

So far I’ve only missed one day taking a photograph, I think. However, I’ve been slackerly about posting. Brace yourself for an avalanche of photos.

January 3, 2008:

I spend a lot of time in my yoga class looking at this statue of Ganesh. I thought there’d be very little, photographically, that I could share from yoga, but this is at least one thing. Now to come up with a writing thing to take pictures of. I’d wanted to get a picture of my daughter on her first day back to school, but I was thwarted by a dead battery so I got to the latter part of the day without a picture and then at my evening yoga class took this one.

January 4, 2008:

Early wintry morning view from my porch. See, the streetlight is still on in the upper corner of the frame. I like the way the trees look, but if I had more picture taking skills, I’d have set up my shot so you didn’t see the streetlight. If I had photoshop skills, I’d erase the obnoxious telephone and electrical wires, though they do look kind of cool.

January 5, 2008:

I’m animal sitting at a friend’s house, and she has this little trinket on her desk. Sophia suggested I take its picture. I wish I’d done something to better convey the granularity of the sand, but I’ve no idea what that something might be.

Bonus January 5, 2008:

Saturday was errand day, and we were in search of a good wok to replace a dying one, so we took ourselves over to Olive (near where I had animal caretaking duties), with its myriad Asian markets and grocery stores. This particular store has the advantage of being both and Asian store and a Hispanic market so we got local tortillas plus a wok! It’s not much of a picture, true, but I’m pretty proud of it, because this sort of errand running is exactly the sort of place I’m least likely to bring my camera along and take pictures. I did feel a little awkward lugging it but was happy I did.

January 6, 2008:

In the past two years our dog has really begun to look old. He’ll be seven in March which isn’t too old, but his muzzle has gone white, and his tail is full of white as well. He’s a lot calmer than he used to be and I had no trouble getting him to sit still for the photograph. This is another day when I got to the end of the day and realized I hadn’t taken a picture. Thank goodness for pets and kids, because I can always snap a quick photo of them when all else fails. Uninspired, perhaps, but at least I touched the camera that day.

January 7, 2008:

So finally I got the first day of school picture of my daughter, on only the third day of school! Notice the pink boots, which she loves, a gift from her Aunt Kelly. Alas, I am a person who is often behind marking milestones. For example, Sophia lost a tooth last year, right around Thanksgiving. First tooth she’s lost! Monumental moment! You’d have thought there’d be a blog post about it on her blog, right? Not yet, there hasn’t been.

January 8, 2008:

Another day where I got to the end of the day and realized I hadn’t taken a picture. Oh no, and my two most recent pictures were of my dog and my daughter! What to do? Well, there’s always the cats. Or, or, or…hmmm, something representative of my life and days lately. What could be good? I look around. I think. What have I been using daily? But of course. I have finally been catching up on my podcasts and it’s been wonderful.

I missed my first day on January 9. I’m not beating myself up over it because I went into this expecting to miss a day every now and again. I’m not expecting a literal 365. I just mean to get close, with occasional days off. Also, this year has 366 days, doesn’t it? He, he, he. I can still make it!

January 10, 2008:

Ok, so here’s what I didn’t know about gardening, or more specifically, about oregano. I didn’t know that perennial, in the case of oregano, means it doesn’t die in the wintertime (in this zone, it may die elsewhere). I thought it was going to die off and come back, like the mint and the lemon balm. But there it is. Still green. Weird, huh?

Continue reading

This is the last day of vacation for my daughter, who goes back to school tomorrow. Today she had a blow pop, cherry flavored. She was delighted when I said her tongue had turned black and dismayed when it went back to normal color before she was able to show her father or her friends. Fortunately I took pictures, and she can show whomever she wants.

I suppose there may be some rule about doing one photograph a day for this project but here at Tempered Thoughts we scorn rules and do whatever we like. Some days you’ll get one picture, some days you’ll get none, some days you’ll get as many as I feel like posting. That’s right. And you’ll like it too.

Continue reading

Happy New Year!

For today’s trick, I’m giving you a photograph. With any luck it will be the first of many. I mean, not luck, perseverance! With any perseverance, then, it will be the first of many. I heard on the local radio show today that women are more likely to stick to their resolutions if they announce them. This year, I’m going to try Project 365, which means I intend to try and take one picture each day during 2008. The goal is to get better at taking pictures. I mean, granted, the new camera does make me look like I know what I’m doing. But I actually don’t know what I’m doing. Yet. But at the end of this year…364 pictures from now? I will. Seems simple, no?

Does this mean I’m going to be posting every day?

Ha. You’re funny.

I’ll try to get the pictures up two times a week. That’d still be more blog posts than you’ve been getting, right? And they’ll be posts with more than just blah blah blah words. Pictures! Action! Woohoo!

Behold the hexagon lid. I got a new origami box book and I’ve been making boxes since Christmas. That there hexagon lid (base yet to be folded) is the single most complicated thing I’ve folded to date. Not bad, eh?

Also yoga. Also writing. The other things I mean to do this year. There I’ve told you. Keep me honest, right?

Happy New Year!

Continue reading