My husband and I visited my Mom today.  It is always an experience seeing her, she’s just different. Not weird, not mean, not anything you can quite articulate, or put your finger on, she’s just different. She’s so many things, basically an enigma wrapped up in a puzzle, with a dash of constant contrary. Whenever Ace and I leave her we are baffled and exhausted, but we file away many future stories to re-hash at a later date. My Mom’s English is suspect, she speaks with a very, very heavy Spanish accent which she doesn’t hear. The thing is, my mother was born in the United States, she was here a good long time before her family decided to move out of the country. They were only away for a nominal amount of time before they returned, but she kept a very thick Spanish accent as a souvenir of her travels. It reminds me a lot of Madonna and her now infamous English accent. The only thing is, my mom seemingly really lost her handle of the English language when she was away, so much so that she gets things all wrong.  Today after lunch she announced that she ate like a ‘bottomless pig’. I have to admit her interpretation still works, maybe even better than the original version and I think I may just add it to my own vernacular, I think you should too.

I will be editing a photo a day for the remainder of 2012::Project MMXII, this is my ‘after’, you can view the ‘before’ here.

Since we have been back I have worked and worked and worked some more.  After all this work, all I have energy for is to sit in front of the television and make my poor husband watch episodes of ‘My Strange Addiction’ and now the amped up version ‘My Crazy Obsession’.  You think your life is rough? Well, what if you had an insatiable urge to drink nail polish or eat toilet paper?  Now, that’s a rough life.  This edition is about my 3 lb. dog George, she has a seriously strange obsession–tennis balls.  I know what you are thinking, you are thinking that it’s not so strange a lot of dogs are obsessed with tennis balls. Yes, but George is obsessed with pulling the felt off of her tennis balls and eating it.  She knows she is not supposed to, so she’ll go to such great measures as to pretend she wants to play ball and then charges it, swoops it up and takes it into some dark and dank opium den, felt eating spot. No amount of scolding can get her to stop.  She will even go off it for a while and when we feel like we can re-introduce tennis balls into her life she will play with them like a ‘normal’ dog and then when our guard is down she’s back to her bad habits. 

On my way to the laundry room today I looked down and noticed what she was doing.  I took her ball away and placed it on top of the glass coffee table (since I had my arms full of dirty clothes).  I came back to witness the top photo.  She was under the table trying to get at it. She was doing it for so long and such vigor I actually had time to go into my studio, get my camera out of its bag, set the dials and shoot.  Obsessed I tell you.

Just when you thought I abandoned my editing project, I am back… I have been doing the edits every day, just not uploading them.  It started with no internet and then sort of waned with my having to catch up with the shop when I got back from our road trip. It does take me a little while to get the images numbered, loaded to Flickr, linked and I do have quite a few to go through! I hope this edit makes you think twice about tossing out a photograph or hitting delete before you had a chance to experiment in the digital darkroom.  I think most photographers would have thrown the ‘before’ away, I almost did, but something made me stop and I went to work.  I am very happy with the result.  I have been working on black & white conversion Photoshop actions for years now.  I have a deep espresso one I love, but this dark chocolate one was perfect for this edit. I do hope one day to release them to the world, but I am such a perfectionist that it may never happen.  I do plan on releasing a set of Foto Rx Photoshop actions, these are actions I use with every edit to get the photograph to a place where the real fun can begin. I have been giving away some free beta copies to my Souvenir Foto School class and will be doing so for the next session as well!

I will be editing a photo a day for the remainder of 2012::Project MMXII, this is my ‘after’, you can view the ‘before’ here.

I will admit, that although I adored taking in all the scenery of our trip my one photographic goal was to be able to get some up close horse shots.  That’s all I wanted, not much to ask for right?  It was nearly impossible. Although there were plenty of ponies on the drive there weren’t any that we could just pull over on the side of the road and get a shot of.  I was feeling very dejected when my husband, uncharacteristically pumped the breaks and hit the car in reverse. What the heck are you doing?,  I screamed. He pulled into a dirt road and pointed wildly out his window–a horse!  How he saw it I have no idea.  The best part was when I walked up to the low fence, the horse which was way out yonder in the pasture came trotting out towards me like we were old friends.  It took everything in me not to start crying, I surely would have but knew I had about five minutes before my insane husband would want to get back on the road.  I was only able to take a few shots before the horse realized that I wasn’t harboring apples on my person and decided to walk away.  I loved that he posed for me for these couple of shots and I love that I have these images. I am pretty sure I will be blowing up the last one for our future home.

We were supposed to just drive by Ukiah, California we did after all have a hotel booked in charming Petaluma, but my husband was tired and we were both cranky with hunger.  I can tell you it’s not easy finding a motel that accepts dogs at the 11th hour.  We ended up pulling up to a motel that took dogs and looked like it was free from bed bugs. My husband kept assuring me that bed bugs only live on the East Coast, but I think he was just saying that to assuage my mania. When we drove into the parking lot in the dead of night I couldn’t see two feet ahead of me, so I didn’t know that I would wake up to find these cherry blossoms blooming in between the blacktop.  We woke up very early the next morning and the air was thick with haze and soft sunlight, there were so many blooms that everything had a rosy, pink hue to it.  It was quite the sight and will be what I file in my memory bank about Ukiah, gosh knows I want to forget about the nearly $30 pizza we ordered that had a burnt bottom and tasted like sugar coated cardboard.