So, um, yeah. Photography. Does your wife like errr…. photographs? Know what I mean? Eh? Eh? Wink wink…

No, really, photography. I keep wanting to be immersed in art but when you are a parent it’s hard to paint and draw and grind up glass and put it in big special-made containers with water and light and project it onto a canvas. Especially when you weren’t all that good at focusing on any one thing to start with. It’s hard enough trying to remember whether or not I fed Nicolaus and brushed his teeth… Wait, what? He has TEETH already? and just keep together some semblance of being a halfway normal mother, and the thing is that I haven’t really figured out how watercolor paintings and broken-glass sculptures fit into that. There’s nothing about it in any of the Dr.Sears books. I think Dr.Spock had a whole chapter devoted to such matters, but nobody reads his books anymore. He’s the dumbass who came up with all the crap that created my generation. You know, the generation that is right at this moment doing nothing other than smoking marijuana and playing Everquest.

So, photography. It’s a way for me to do something creative every day. The camera can travel with me everywhere and it’s digital so there’s no real expense involved except for the occasional prints of my favorite photos.

There is so much I don’t know, such grand mysterious terminology – there’s like this whole secret society of people who know what the hell aperture and DOF mean – and even though most of it is explained clearly in the manual for my digital camera, I am definitely an outsider to it all. Which is great. It’s perfect. It forces me to learn stuff. I hate learning stuff but wow do I love knowing stuff. And making stuff. And sharing a little bit of my goofy perspective on the world.

So yeah, if you’re wondering what I’ve been up to other than the obvious, that’s mainly it. I’ve been staring at a tiny LCD screen, mumbling now how in the hell do I adjust the shutter speed on this dang piece of -Snap!

Driving home in the rain.




digital, taken with the little powershot that could

That lady bug is really headed places, just as soon as she finds her way to the open driver’s side window.
Incidentally, that’s not grain or JPG crud – the paint job on my dad’s truck is really that rough. He loves it.

digital, taken with the little powershot that could

Sort of.
http://www.karenika.com/50states/tx4.html

So obviously we survived the Texas tour. Nicolaus did okay on the car ride for the most part. 80% of the time he was the cutest, best-travelling baby ever – a baby who reads curious george in his carseat, babbles at the cars out the window, sings along to the radio. The other 20% of the time he was the toddler from hell who whines and grumps and moans and cries because he is STUCK and he wants UP and wants WATER then says NO GO AWAY when you try to give him water, and throws his toys into the floorboard and then sobs because holy shit someone threw my toys into the floorboard. So that averages out to say that he did okay for the most part.

First we went to Frontier Park in southeast Texas for Kevin’s family reunion. There were some familiar faces and lots of people I’d never met who turned out to all be Kevin’s dad’s cousins and their wives and their kids and their friends from church. Everyone was obscenely nice to me as always, and like every year they all politely overlooked the fact that I look like a freak next to them and don’t have a clue what they are talking about most of the time. Nicolaus slowly warmed up to all the strangers and had a fabulous time digging in the dirt and rocks and leaves and being bitten all over by lord knows what.

Then we went to Houston to visit my grandmother (or “lady” as Nicolaus called her), to see a couple of friends who are moving out of state, and to eat the best sandwich ever made.

And now we’re home. Our house is messy, I’m feeling hormonal and my throat hurts, Kevin did something awful to his shoulder moving a log, and Nicolaus only wants to eat cookies and milk. So you’d think it would suck to be home, but it doesn’t. It’s nice to be home.