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Archive for the ‘Randomness’ Category

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Taking a sip of hot coffee freshly brewed, the air was brisk this July morning as I looked out across the Lamar Valley. I had come out to the back deck where the silence of the morning wrapped itself around me to watch the shadow of the Earth set as the fog from the river off in the distance began to lift. I’m a morning person and enjoy taking time to welcome the day. This time between night setting and day dawning pauses like a Gift. I said my quick morning prayer which on this particular morning was overflowing with gratitude – “Glory Be! I’m alive and God has work for me to do today! Thank you, God, for another day.” And then worked to capture the gorgeous scene before me as a means to seal the moment in my mind.

This day I was at Lamar Buffalo Ranch for a class with the Yellowstone Association. Three days to learn and explore a few more creative rabbit trails. The class was a gift from my sister for my birthday – Susan Zwinger‘s Illustrated Journal for Heart, Art and Science. Here I was, on the porch of the Bunkhouse, welcoming the third day.

The class awakened something deep that I’m still getting to know better, but it also gave me definition to how I create with my camera – and that definition gives me a framework and structure to allow the creativity to flourish. As Susan guided us through her process for observing and sketching, I began to see parallels with my photography – how I connect with the subject before me, and then find how to best present it. Here, in the Lamar Valley, it’s easy to connect. Scenes present themselves for easy captures with the shutter release. Distractions are cut to a minimum. No cell phone service. No internet. Regular daily responsibilities are handled. It allows us to just be in the moment.

The trick, though, is to carry that home in the pocket of our hearts. All of us need that centering – and it takes practice – especially when the normal pace we’ve accepted is rocket speed. Since being home, I’ve deliberately taken regular breaks from rocket speed, and I can feel it becoming more comfortable and familiar to do. I just stop for a few minutes here and there throughout the day to connect with the world around me. Giving myself the gift of a rest stop of sorts. Blocking off yesterday and the next hour’s work.

This photo brings me right back to greeting that morning, and reminds me to slow at regular intervals.

Happy Friday!

I posted this on my photo blog that I’m now dismantling after trying to separate out the business from the rest of what all I do. I can’t do that – to me it’s all just ‘my life’ so if you’re here for Yellowstone photos and info or scrapbooking thoughts or portraits or stock, you’ll just have to deal with the rest of my ramblings.   This post was from last February.

I’ve been helping a friend learn a bit more about photography and she asked me at one point why I was sharing so  much of what I knew.  Wouldn’t I just create more competition for myself?  No.  It’s because I finally understood about a year ago that there is no competition other than myself.   There are a jillion ways to make money with photography and the more skills you  have, the more options you give yourself.  And what I shoot will be different from what others shoot of the same scene.

The bottom line comes down to what you have in you to make it.  I haven’t found one person who says, “This is a fabulous time to get into stock photography!”  But it is.  Today.  Tomorrow.  The next day.  It’s also a great time to get into portrait or wedding or fine art prints.  The deciding factor is you – learning to face your fears and still move ahead.  To take a step or two a day toward your goal.   To be brave enough to create your own opportunities.  To be willing to fail and get up and try again.  To search and ask until you get the answers that work for you.  You are the component that makes what you do unique.

Whatever you might want to do with your photography – there’s information on the internet about how to do it.  That goes for darn near anything – whatever you want to do, you  just have to figure out what you love doing enough to love wake up each morning and work at it 10 hours or more a day six days a week.  I’m in that zone and it’s wonderful.  I have no idea how all of it will fall together, but I leave those details up to God.  So sharing information makes no difference on my path and what I do – other than I feel better about myself when I share gladly.

What sparked this post?  A post by Moose Peterson – and realizing how long it took me to fully understand this concept.  I found myself enthusiastically agreeing with every word he wrote.  Read it if you don’t follow him already – he’s a prolific blogger who shares great information.

I can’t quite put my finger on what triggered this layout, but as I find my scrapbooking feet again, I find memories welling up, asking to have their story told.  The cabin’s story has persistently pestered me for awhile now, so despite the depth and breadth of this topic somewhat overwhelming me, I’ll dig in and just make a start here.

We had a cabin in northern Colorado during those formative years of my youth.  Each weekend we’d pack our things, load up the car and drive the hour and fifteen minutes from our house in town to the home of my heart.  When I couldn’t get to sleep I used to work to travel in my mind along every curve, every turn we took to get there, or on a walk taken often. It helped. At the cabin, I could stop long enough to find myself and let the mountains repeatedly impress themselves on my soul until they became a deep part of who I am.    It’s where I could see that really connecting with nature meant that you just knew how to care for the land – no regulations or laws needed because you just did the right thing because it was the right thing to do – because you simply lived a life integrated into nature.   It’s where I learned to get lost in the details of flowers and learn their names.    It’s where I learned that small spaces helped families stay close much more than large spaces.  It’s where I learned to shoot the moon. It became my spiritual geography.  My wish as a girl then was to grow up and marry a man who needed the mountains as much as I did – and that we’d live in them all year round.   God granted those wishes amazingly well – even now my husband and I live in a house that was another family’s cabin – full of their warm memories.

We had a stereo that my parents had when they were first married and my sister and I were toddlers.  It found a home up there at the cabin.  They had it as full of albums as it could hold – their favorites.  As a teen that drove me nuts, but there were a few albums we could all agree on – two were:

• The Soundtrack of Paint Your Wagon
• C.W. McCall – Wolf Creek Pass

The songs from those two albums unleash a flood of memories.  But one of them, Aurora Borealis wrote itself on my heart.  The last line, though, sums up why I scrap.  All these memories, they do go forever.  I recall them endlessly, but only in my own mind.  Memories have a way, though, to pester you until you find a way to tell them.  They want to be told outside of you.  We don’t have kids, but even having kids doesn’t guarantee that your story will be told.  Only you can really tell it. What I see my scrapbooking developing into is part scrapbooking, part memoir, part poetry, part art.  All of that requires time and patience to knead it all together into what it’s supposed to be.

We all have those stories to tell – it’s important to tell them.  Telling them lets you distill them into the strength you can keep and the rest you can let evaporate out into the nothingness.  Telling your story gives validity to your memories – even if you don’t share them with another soul.  And then you don’t have to worry so much about remembering them once you let them out onto the paper, into the computer, onto a scrapbook page or memoir book.  There is no wrong way to tell your story.  Yes, your memories may clash with those of other family members – you decide if you just let them clash or to change words and phrases if their memories fill in a few blank spots for you.  Sometimes it takes a family to fully remember a place in time.

I’ll share some of my work on telling my story of our family’s cabin, but for now – enjoy the song that still brings tears to my eyes simply because it etched itself so deeply into my soul:

Yep, I love it – because I finally figured it out – after much fiddling and stops and starts, I think this is the blog template I love. I created it to work for ME. Take a peek if you join me on some sort of feed reader – http://snowmoon.us

I’m working on a few more to offer as yet another product as well as adding Customized Templates to my list of services – simply because you might be in the same boat as I was – wanting a blog template that reflects you better. Yes, yet another rabbit trail I’ve been down, exploring the possibilities. Of course that’s what makes life fun.

And I’d love some feedback! What do you think? Also – what platform do you use? (blogger, wordpress, joomla, others?)

Finally!  After lots of calls to various tech supports, we have a live image – you can now watch the weather and bird webcam in real time – you can also click on The View From Here up on that top bar to get there.

The regular birds seen mainly on the feeder

• Pine Siskens
• Cassin’s Finches
• An occasional Stellar’s Jay
• Dark-eyed Juncos (all varieties – all numerous except one or maybe two Oregons)

The regular birds seen mainly on the suet feeder

• Pygmy Nuthatches (though they will go to the feeder for thistle seeds)
• White Breasted Nuthatches (seem to have no real preference)
• An occasional Clark’s Nutcracker (aka Camp Robber)
• Downy Woodpecker (shorter bill and smaller – haven’t seen them at the feeder yet)
• Hairy Woodpecker (longer bill and larger – also goes to the feeder)

…our ‘new to us’ 1949 Allis-Chalmers WD tractor.  Yep, we are now tractor owners.  I knew it would happen at some point.  And, actually, it will be nice to get this one fixed up a bit more and let it do some of the heavy lifting around here.

Had to post about it as when I called my husband to give him a message, before he even said hello, he asked WHY I posted a photo of the clock – he knew I had tractor photos.  LOL.  So here he is – proud and ready to start refurbishing and get it into good shape.  What is it they say, “Classic Tractor Fever?”  Yeah, no real cure for it other than find one (or 50) to work on.  We’ll just start with one.  That’s what they all say, though, isn’t it?

I admit it, I adore looking for just the right font for a project.  Though it’s a delightful task I usually leave for evenings and weekends, knowing how easily it can chew up my time.  Yesterday while searching for a commercial font or two to license for a project I’m working on, I came to the conclusion that I see definite specifics in the types of fonts I love.  Just like my journals have narrow lined paper whenever possible, and I use .5mm lead in my pencil, and fine tipped pens (I so miss the cheap, yellow, fine tipped Bic ballpoint pens), I like exact, narrow and light fonts.  I really don’t prefer serif over sans serif, but it’s about the weight and preciseness of it.  I may stray now and again to heavy and bold fonts, but my heart belongs to the straight and narrow. Does that say something about me?  Maybe.  It at least screams, “My name is Janet and I’m a font geek.”

How DO you find the time to both live life and record life?  It’s tough to integrate everything into 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

I’ve decided to be a bit more selfish this year.  I realized after trying for the umpteenth time to integrate all the various commitments I had made, it just was too much.  As much as I love DSP, I decided for many reasons to step down from the team and back to member status.  I have big goals I’ve set for myself this year in many areas of my life and to accomplish them, I know I need to give myself the gift of time.  One of those goals is to scrap in a way that really matches my life instead of some weird way I think I ‘should’ if I’m a team member.  It’s definitely NOT anything anyone at DSP ever asked of me – just my own odd thoughts of what I thought I ‘should’ do.  The team there is wonderfully accommodating, but I need to deal with my weirdness on this issue.  So – I’m just a member now and finding my scrapbooking feet again.

As we’re a tad past half way through January, I find myself catching up on the Daily Scrapping I’m trying this year.  What’s working?  The notebook – jotting a sentence or two about the day a couple of times a day.  Takes all of about 5 minutes a day.  I can do that.  Taking photos – easy to grab the camera and then download every few days.  The template – that’s helping enormously.  I don’t have to think – just plunk down a photo and journalling.  I have more days to catch up on, but I don’t feel any pressure – it’s just a part of the daily routine.   If I can keep the notes and photos going, I don’t mind taking a weekend afternoon to get the layouts done.

I think the simple act of giving myself permission unlocked the secret.   Permission to ONLY address one or two main tasks a day.  Permission to take weekends off from work related to the business.  Permission to take the time needed to really focus on each task – to NOT multi-task. And it’s working – I actually have more time by doing less, but addressing each task with more focus.

It seems – at least in the circles in which I find myself running these days – rather than making resolutions, deciding on a word or phrase to guide you through the year has become popular.  I’ve done this for 4 or 5 years now – starting with just a simple promise to be kinder and more gentle to myself.   Another year I vowed to poke holes in my stumbling blocks.  And as I discover phrases that ring true for me, I add them in – Live Deliberately will continue to carry over.  Jumping into life each day as opposed to passively letting life drift by.  I’m not ready to let that one go – still lots of work to do there.

This past month I’ve tried out a few words to see how they fit and I kept coming back to TRUST.  Every time I feel fear or doubt rising, I need to make that word a deliberate choice.  So, Live Deliberately and Choose to TRUST are what I want to take on as phrases to guide me throuogh 2010.  Trust in myself and my God-given abilities.  Trust that I’m not ahead or behind – but exactly where I need to be.  Trust that no matter what life (or the economy) brings, God has a plan and he’ll get me through to its completion.  Trust that all I have to do is take the next step.

Trust that by simply choosing deliberately to TRUST, the fears and worries will fall away.