Rambling: Farm Rambling

Wow. A month since I posted.

I've been writing scraps of one of my book ideas. Not all that reliably, but more reliably than usual.

The farm is progressing nicely. Much of the following was already discussed, but, hey, I'll re-list!

• Onions! All the onions! Garlic, potato onions, shallots, French grey shallots, perennial scallions. Oh, and I divided one big clump of chives into 21 sub-clumps. There will be a lot of chives. Later on, I'll do the same thing with a big clump of garlic chives.
• The Oregon Giant peas are nice big plants and there's a flower or three in the bed; it shouldn't be too long for peas.
• This past weekend I planted some potatoes--German Butterball, Purple Majesty, and Yukon Gem. Only three beds, instead of the planned six, but I did plant them mostly right. In a later post, I'll probably show pictures. If they, well, grow.
• Sadly, the raspberries that I planted a few weeks ago didn't grow; six out of nine died. I'm not good with bare root plants. I'm going to prep another set of beds, get more raspberries from either the back yard or the grange, and fill those beds with the new ones and the survivors.
• I'm moving the survivors because I really wanted to get some beans planted, and the spaces that the dead raspberries vacated were all ready for me to just poke some seeds into the ground. I planted some Blue Lake bush beans in part of it. In the other part, I planted Russian Mammoth sunflowers, with the plan of growing Fortex up them. I had very few of both means; I'll be ordering more.
• Oh, and herbs. A few weeks ago I planted a new bed of oregano, tarragon, and two kinds of thyme. Soon I'll plant sage and marjoram in another bed.

Oh! And the overwintering cauliflower overwintered! I thought that it had "buttoned" (made an itty bitty head) but I ended up with three perfectly nice heads out of, I think, four plants. (If it was six plants that's obviously rather less successful.)

I'm extra pleased with this year's spring garden, due to the fall and winter planted crops; it doesn't have that sad desolate look. I'm going to try to plant more this coming year. Let's make another list:

• Again, the garlic, shallots, French shallots, potato onions.
• Lots more overwintering cauliflower.
• A much bigger late summer crop of carrots.
• Late winter peas again.
• More potatoes--if they work this year.

But I'm also discovering that I simply won't do all the work required to plant every bed every year. So, I'm thinking about some added perennials:

• If those perennial scallions take hold well, a couple of beds of them.
• Another multi-bed block of strawberries.
• Hedgy perennials that are kinda food: Rosemary, sweet bay, roses known to produce lots of hips.
• Maybe daylilies. People eat the flowers, after all.
• We've been planning a row of blueberries forever. Someday it might happen.
• Probably some perennial flowers.

I look at the annual beds that that leaves, and I get nervous. But I've left a number of beds unplanted every single year; it would be a lot more fun to see things growing everywhere. I need to remind myself that if I have more time, I can always give some things away and go back to annuals.

And so. That is all.

Rambling: Tubers. Or, Feed a Cold!

Potatoes are frying. Hash browns.

I also fried potatoes yesterday.

And possibly the day before.

I'm on the third solid week of the cold, and until I'm better, I'm going to eat potatoes whenever I want them.

We just saw a nice British gardening show with Jerusalem artichokes. Those things in the picture. The gardener referred to them as a "slacker vegetable"--meaning that they're a vegetable for slackers. I've added them to the list of things to consider growing next year.

I'm also debating trying potatoes again. Growing, that is. I have a scheme for using the weed barrier to keep me from having to weed them--starting out folded, so that I can fold it back, hill up, and then put it back in place.

The potatoes have now transitioned from the pan to my stomach. Well, a plate and fork were involved. It's possible that I've actually eaten too much butter. Well, of course it's too much butter; I mean that I'm perceiving it as too much butter. I'm feeling rather overfed.

So I'm now filled with potatoes, acetaminophen, guaifenesin, dextromethorphan, ibuprofen, and butter. Oh, and orange juice.

That is all.

Jerusalem Artichoke picture: Wikimedia Commons.

Rambling: Shiny!

I ordered vintage sequins from Etsy.

I don't know why.

I await them eagerly.

That is all.

Image: By Pea Chesh. Wikimedia Commons.

Blogging: Post Something

Goodness. I thought I'd be posting within minutes of that last administrivia post. But not so much.

So.

Um.

I haven't yet figured out what causes the spurts of regular posting and the intervening lulls. This appears to be a lull. But I thought I'd type, just to see what happens.

Tappity tap.

I'm watching Bob's Burgers. It's become one of my very favorite TV shows. Which is impressive, since I don't like cartoons. Louise is my favorite. Right now she's trying to persuade Teddy to let her "inspect" his blow torch.

So.

Again the um.

"All right, this is going to be fun. We have a babysitter and a lot of alcohol."

Yes, that's Bob on a later episode of Bob's Burgers. They're on the wine train. The steward just severely displeased Louise and kept her from the chocolate. He's gonna pay. Don't thwart Louise. She's rather like Helena that way. From Orphan Black. You know.

Here's another Louise link. For your entertainment.

Um.

OK, that appears to be all.

Rambling: The Season Turns

So, it's November and the garden is done bearing. Well, mostly. I did just thin the carrots, rather late, so there's a Ziploc of baby carrots in the fridge waiting for me to figure out what to do with them. And some scallions and leeks saying, "Look, we grew; aren't you going to do something with us?" And some lettuce occasionally inching along when there's a pocket of warm weather. And so on.

But there's only so much to do in the garden right now, and the sewing machine and serger said, "Ahem. Remember us?" So I'm sewing. 

From far too many patterns new and old, I chose Butterick 5261, an out-of-print raglan shirt jacket pattern (see pattern envelope here), to work on. First I made a too-large size in a silk/linen blend in a denim blue. Then I started a a smaller but still-too-large-size in a nice lofty green cotton flannel with a small woven pattern The main body is done and pressed and topstitched and...it's too big. I'll finish it anyway. I'm hoping that I end up using them--I do like oversized clothes, but when I sew clothes I feel that they should fit. Maybe I should pretend I bought them.

Why did I make the wrong size twice? Frankly, I got tired of making muslins--two patterns had failed at the muslin stage, so I chose a simple style in a size that I knew would be big enough and just made it up in real fabric.  When I reduced the size I chose a sturdier fabric, and a sturdier fabric needs less ease, so the smaller size was just as too big. Whee!

Anyway. I think that the right size would be to go down yet two more sizes above the waist, one size at the waist, while staying at the current size at my hips. I want to persuade myself to finish that process; I tend to get irritated before a pattern is fitted and move on to the next one, ensuring that I never make a garment that really fits. The Liberty Shirt, for example, has been waiting a year or so for me to fix the armhole for my odd shoulders, and add an inch or two to the length. I love that shirt, but I just don't want to do the work.

Meanwhile, I've been doing almost no writing. I'm going to try to resume random burbling on the blog. We'll see how it goes.

That is all.

Rambling: Hobbies Again

I'm melting, melting!

Not really. But that's how I sometimes feel when a hobby-eager brain abruptly loses interest. My garden-planning notebook is on the table next to me, and I'm not driven to open it. I was going to look up more cultivars of cosmos, and now...meh. I was going to order radish seeds...eh, it's probably too late in the year anyway. Sewing? Yeah, whatever.

I suspect it's about sunlight or shortening days or some such thing. I'm sure I'll be over it soon. But I wish it would hurry up.
Image: Wikimedia Commons.

Rambling: Hobbies

I continue to plan next year's farm.  The plan's settled down a bit, so there's less to blog about. I always find it vaguely disorienting when a hobby that has filled my brain to overflowing suddenly leaves room to spare. I'm still taking notes, drawing plans, choosing varieties, but it's just polishing and refining right now.

So the other hobbies edge in, peering and sniffing and vying for space. NaNoWriMo is on its way. The seasonal shift in my perfume preferences should be finished soon, so I could start in with the perfume again. I want to make a few more of a particular skirt that I wore over and over this summer. There's some cooking that I'm thinking about. I have a stack of books that I started reading and didn't finish. And so on.

But I want to avoid that splintered focus thing. My mind seems to be healing up, at least in the hobby realm (the work realm is another matter), but I don't want to start pulling it in a dozen directions again.

Maybe habits don't splinter focus as much? I've been working on a walking habit (Exercise? Exercise? Nooooo!) and a morning writing habit. Is there a place for a sewing habit, too?

Splinter splinter.

We'll see.

Image: Wikimedia Commons

Rambling: Again the Rambling

So, what if I started blogging from all devices and without a plan? Would I blog more? Would it be worth reading?

Hm.

I'm writing on my phone right now (taptaptap) but I'm not logged in to the blog so I won't be posting instantly.

Part of the recent blog slump was because I was preparing for a Big Trip, and then on the Trip, and then back from the Trip. And I felt like I should blog about the Trip. But I didn't wanna. It was a lovely Trip, but apparently it requires some pre-blogging percolating. So I didn't blog at all.

Illogical.

If I had been able to blog in the moment ("Hey! I just saw a Himalayan blue poppy at the Chelsea flower show!") would I have?

Worth trying. Maybe.

Taptaptap.

I've been thinking a lot about my next career. I don't know if that will happen when I turn 65 (is 67 the official retirement these says?) or if I'll make a slow shallow turn in my current career. Or some other shift.

No, I'm not going anywhere with that idea in this post. Probably.

The farm is producing snap peas. Oregon Giant Sugar. I think. I need to recheck the name on the packet. Carol Deppe recommended them in The Tao of Vegetable Gardening, for both snap peas and pea sprouts eaten as greens. After eating the snap peas just three times, I'm totally sold and planning to plant at least triple the number of plants next year, and to attempt a fall-grown crop.

I was  surprised that the pods are flat--I expected them to be fleshy like other snap peas, and was afraid that the snow-pea-like flatness would mean snow-pea-like not-sweetness. But, no, they're quite sweet, the bigger the sweeter. Apparently the quite small ones are more snow-pea-like (I haven't eaten them really small yet) so I could treat them like two vegetables--maybe three if I eat the sprouts/tendrils. They get BIG, and eventually do produce nice little round peas. I suppose technically I could shell out those peas and declare s third/fourth vegetable, but that would be a tragic waste of the pods.

Another advantage is that a pod can sit on the vine for a very long time, from delicate little snow pea to big elephant-earlobe pod with filled-out peas. So if I don't pick in a timely manner, that's OK--I think a weekly picking would be just fine, as long as I'm good with a mixture of different sizes on the plate. And if I were going away for longer, I bet I could pick all the peas of all sizes and be good for two or three weeks.

They taste good. Really good. Sweet, but also with a flavor so distinctive that I want to figure out how to flavor butter and cook other things in that butter.

So far I'm just cooking them plain-with-butter: Boil a big pot of water, throw the snapped pods in, boil for one minute, dip them out into a strainer, dump the water, turn down the heat, throw in a glob of butter, let it foam, throw the peas into the butter, cook a little too hot until every bit of water from butter or bean is gone and the butter is syrupy and an occasional bean has a browned side--maybe two minutes. Put on plate. Salt. Eat. Look around for witnesses before licking the remaining butter off the plate.

Mmmm.

I think that's all. For now.

Image: (Ha! Fooled ya! No image!)
(Yeah, I'm a little sleepy.)

Rambling: Rambling

So I've been away.

Literally in the sense of vacation (no, not since April 17) and figuratively in the sense of the not-writing.

Um.

I thought I'd write more here, but apparently I just needed to break the ice on resuming the posting. So, consider the ice broken.

POTD: Snacks. And the farm. And stuff.

I took the photo at Lardo, in Portland, on Saturday. Fat and fries. Mmmm.

I took it with a rented Fuji X100T, rented for three days because I wanted to know if I like that camera substantially more than my current camera. Not that I'd buy it soon even if I did. I'm figuring I should do this photo thing for at least a year, maybe eighteen months, and put some savings into a Camera Piggy Bank (either real or virtual in the form of an extra bank account) before I buy something like that.

I like the Fuji, but there is no lemming for it yet.  It looks really cool and retro; good. It gets great reviews; good. The sensor is bigger; good. It's pretty expensive; bad. There is no zoom; bad. Well, the lack of zoom is arguably good, but only in the sense that grated carrots are good--it would enforce discipline that I should learn. I should get used to getting close to my subject and get an instinctive feel for just how close I need to be, but the fact is that I'm not there yet. I may never be there.

The Fuji seems pretty bad for macro (look at me pretending I'm comfortable with the term "macro", when only a few weeks ago I would have said, "little things close up") photography. I read that in some reviews, and we went to the art museum and, among other photographic experiments, tried taking close photos of the netsuke on display, and the Sony did a much better job.  Macro isn't my thing, but until I've been playing with this for a while I don't actually know that it's never going to be my thing. I might be cranky if I buy an expensive camera that's no good at it. (Reminder to self: If I ever get around to that plant breeding thing, I might want good close up photos of flowers and leaves and seeds.) The Sony's capabilities are beyond my skills for a while, so there's no rush to choose a next camera.

This year I'm going to try to photograph the farm--both pure record-keeping photos and some photos that might look good as photos. Maybe.

The below is what much of the farm looks like right now, though the photo was taken around this time last year. In case I haven't clarified, lately, the farm isn't literally a farm--it's a garden of twelve wide rows, each row containing ten beds, each bed four feet by six feet, with two-foot paths between beds. So the beds are six feet wide center to center, but we're only planting four feet of that width--though the plants might reach their roots into the paths.

That means (math, math...) 120 X 24, or 2,880, square feet of growing space. We have yet to actually use all of that growing space. Last year we covered much of the farm with high-quality landscape fabric, merrily violating the fabric's warranty by failing to mulch over it. The same landscape fabric used in smaller quantities in the past seemed to hold up quite well across some years without sun protection, so we took the risk. Because weeding more than four thousand square feet of ground--the number goes up from the 2,880 when you include paths and the ten-foot DMZ reserved for eventual shrubs at the back--was never going to happen. Ever.

Ever. Did I mention ever? It took me some failed years of "farm"ing to accept that, but it's accepted now. Even the two lettuce beds in front tend to get out of control.  The fabric makes a huge difference; a few weekends ago I went out to the farm and was able to make a non-trivial dent in the required prep work for the summer garden in one little four-hour afternoon.

I suspect that the next reality-acceptance exercise will be accepting that I won't plant, tend, and harvest anywhere near 2,880 square feet of annual plants every year, even at dryfarm spacing. So we'll be slowly adding more perennials.  Very slowly. We're planning on roses, blueberries, raspberries, possibly asparagus, possibly artichokes, and so on.

I even had brief thoughts of hazelnuts, but after reading about pollinizer trees, it looks like I'd use up more than the entire farm before I planted enough trees to be reasonably confident of a crop. There might be pollinizers in the neighborhood, for all I know, but I'm not going to count on it.

Anyway. The main plan right now is still beans, beans, and beans.

And that is all.

Images: Mine.

Photography: Stopping Time

Tum te tum. Te tum. Tum.

Maybe this blogging-daily thing isn't good for getting any actual blog writing done. Maybe it trickles out all the thoughts and doesn't leave enough to build up any writing pressure.

Tum.

Trickle trickle.

Earlier today, I was thinking about why we like photographs of people. None of the obvious reasons seem to work. For example, I think it's not loneliness for people that we miss, because we're delighted by pictures of people that are right in the room looking at them with us. And not about a memory jogger, because we're delighted by pictures that we just took moments ago.

One thought: With a photograph, we freeze time. We can have a good long look at people's expressions and manner and gestures in a way that we can't in real life, because in real life those expression move, constantly. That's the main thing that pulls me into photographs. Expressions. Gestures. People. Characters.

Many people apparently don't like street photography, because they don't understand the point of taking pictures of strangers. I don't understand not understanding that. Strangers are fascinating. People you know are fascinating, too, of course. But that's no reason to ignore the whole rest of the world, right?

I spent most of my pre-adult years being an isolated introvert. Maybe that also explains a pent-up fascination with people? Of course, I also spent it reading hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of novels. So maybe all of those people are fictional characters.

It's a theory.

Hey,  I wrote paragraphs!

I'm going to quit while I'm ahead.

That is all.

Image: Mine.

Rambling: Rambling

OK, this time I'm going to write something. Really. Absolutely. Stuff, there's going to be written stuff. Sentences, paragraphs, all that. Yep.

So, that photo is another one from Disney. People get tired at Disney.

Um.

So, that photography thing. I notice that a fair percentage of the street photographs that I see on the the Internet are pretty or graphical or otherwise heavily about the visual. Lots of street, not always a lot of person. I seem to be almost entirely into facial expressions and gestures.

I've taken plenty of non-people pictures, but my reaction to most of them is...meh. Except for reflections. I like reflections. Usually in windows.

OK, maybe there will be not so much sentences and paragraphs, as pictures, in this post.

In fact, it appears that that is all.

Images: Mine.

POTD: Aliens!

Aliens! In San Francisco! Aiee!

Well. No. Not really. But it's a cool sculpture, isn't it?

Did you detect the pause there? Another daily post for which I don't seem to have things to say. But, still, daily posting is good, right? Right?

Um.

OK, apparently that is already all.

Image: Mine.

POTD: Bovine Sunglasses

I mostly like photographs of people, but I also like the weird. Like this, of a local shop window.

Um.

See, I was hoping that just opening a blog post would inspire me to write things. But I find my mind a blank. I did just eat dinner, so it could be a simple food coma blank.

Um.

Well, I posted, right?

Right.

That is apparently all.

Photo: Mine.

Rambling: Photography and Like That

"If you're traveling with small children...good luck with that." (Droid, Star Tours preshow.)

I've been away from the blog, playing with the camera and taking countless photos of strangers; the street photography thing. So far, I only like a few. The above, taken at the Kingdom of the Mouse, is one of them. (Click to make it bigger!) I may start doing a Photo of the Day. We'll see.

I'm slowly learning the camera and all that stuff about shutter and aperture and ISO (oh, my!). My knowledge is still around the level of "Fast shutter means I can photograph things that are moving, yay!" (And "Low light. No fast shutter. Dang.") I'm debating whether a brief photography class would speed up the process, or if this is one of those things that I learn best by teaching myself.

And I'm already eyeing fancier and terrifyingly expensive cameras. I've been listening to Valerie Jardin's Street Focus podcast.  She talks a lot about the Fuji X100 series, so in a fangirl-like manner I keep eyeing the X100T longingly. I guess you could call it a camera lemming. It's not a logical camera for me to seriously consider right now--I need to find out whether I'm going to reliably work up the nerve to get close to my subjects, first. If not, I should get something with zoom. (The X100 series has a single no-zoom, no-remove lens.)

The photography thing is weird, because one of my firm facts about myself has always been that I have no talent, not even basic competence, in the visual arts. I hesitate to question that, for fear that I'll find out that, yep, it was always true. But as long as I'm enjoying myself, why not? It is a good thing that I'm not interested in pretty; I'm interested in character. Thoughts. Faces and gestures. So I'll give it a try, and not worry about making a fool of myself.

That is all.

Image: Mine.

Rambling: The Walking Hungry

"Excuse me. We'd like some more croutons."

Ashland has deer. Like dogs have fleas. Yes, they're pretty, but they eat things. Like gardens. And trees. A few years ago, a deer running from a dog crashed through the local fudge shop's plate glass window. These days, the deer are chasing the dogs. In the Halloween parade, some people wear deer costumes. Because you dress as scarey rampaging hungry monsters, right? Right.

I'm not sure if I have a point here, or if I just wanted an excuse to post a deer photo. Probably the deer photo.

That is all.

Image: Mine.

Rambling: More Rambling

So, that photography thing continues. I regained my nerve for photographing people, but didn't work up any for posting them. So, more reflections.

I'm not writing. I'm not sure if the photography is bad for the writing. There's no real evidence, because I wasn't writing, recently, before, either.

Um.

So.

Well.

Then.

My mind appears to be a blank.

Big blank.

An expanse of white sand, obscured by fog.

Featureless.

Yep.

A photo of that would be nice. But I don't have one. I wonder if Wikimedia Commons does.

Um.

It begins to appear that I'm stopping here.

So.

That is all.

Imagine: Mine.

Rambling: Rambling

I think Flowerpot Girl (above) was on my blog years ago. The is an old photo; I can't seem to find her right now. I hope that I'll find her someday in a clump of weeds.

Um.

It's been weeks and weeks (and weeks. and weeks. and (sigh) weeks.) since I drank a Coke, so I'm going to the next step: Starting this weekend, I plan to stop adding sugar to my iced tea. Or, well, to anything, but iced tea, and once in a long while hot tea, is the only thing I add it to. I'll go with that until the desperate craving fades, and then I'll go on to the next habit to break. Just to make it clear, this isn't about eliminating sugar, it's about eliminating the habit of sugaring things.

(Hmm. What will I do when the summer strawberries come in? Hmmm.)

The photography continues. The ethical quandary continues. So this weekend I'll probably photograph more cars and shiny windows.

Um.

Yeah, this post appears to be extra firmly in the "post something" category. So I'll stop here.

Image: Mine.

Rambling: The blog name. Just because.

So I changed the blog title to Rambling Chicken. That is, this blog title. I have the other blog that's...

Y'know, I'm going to do a timeline. Not that anyone cares, but I'm whacky.

• In October 2009, I created this blog and called it Chickenfreak's Obsessions, http://chickenfreaksobsessions.blogspot.com.
• In January, 2010 (Really? That soon?) I created another blog, Rambling Chicken, http://ramblingchicken.blogspot.com. I was going to focus ChickenFreak's Obsessions on perfume and put all the other stuff--gardening, books, fried chicken, fiction, and so on--on that one.
• Sometime around that time Himself bought me the domain ramblingchicken.com.
• In November, 2011 I decided that the spinoff had been a bad idea, and I started blogging about everything on this blog. I left a bunch of old posts on Rambling Chicken. I occasionally think of moving them here, and then I wonder about the advice that having the same content in two places is sometimes punished by search engines, and then I remember that I've never done much about search engine results anyway, and then I take a nap.
• Sometime around that time we presumably pointed ramblingchicken.com toward Chickenfreak's Obsessions. I don't know why. 
• In December 2015 I had a Brilliant Brainstorm! I would post about fried chicken restaurants on Rambling Chicken! Yay!
• Then I posted twice and lost interest. Hmm.
• Then, two or three days ago, while once again puzzling over a name for this blog, I decided that, y'know, Rambling Chicken was a pretty decent name. So I changed the title of this blog.
• So now http://ramblingchicken.com points to a Blogspot blog named Rambling Chicken whose "real" URL is http://chickenfreaksobsessions.blogspot.com.  And the blog whose "real" URL is http://ramblingchicken.blogspot.com is sitting out there saying, "What about me?! That was MY name!"
• Now I'm spending a few weeks deciding whether I like the name. And then I'll probably figure out how to switch from a situation where ramblingchicken.com redirects to chickenfreaksobsessions.blogspot.com, to the reverse. And maybe I'll move all of Rambling Chicken's content into this blog. Or maybe I'll rename that blog, oh, Rambling Annex, or something.
• Then I'll see if my already-weak search engine presence faaaaaades away.
• But I'll have a name that's fifteen percent less silly?
• Is it worth it?

That is all.

Oh, that up there? That's another selfie.  Try to identify me! Just try! Bwahahahaha!

Ahem.

That really is all.

Image: Mine.

Rambling: Journaling and Photography and My Almost-First Selfie and Stuff

The Journaling:

So, I keep thinking about "journaling". Now, this blog is thoroughly journal-like; what else could you call a forum where I babble about dieting, the shoes I wear, and my issues with my mother? (When I first typed that, I mistyped it as "issue." Suggesting that there was only one issue. Funny, huh? OK, moving on...)

But the blog doesn't quite entirely fill the journal gap, because (1) there's a limit to just how foolish I'm willing to sound in public and (2) I someday want to publish a book or books, and if I write every thought that I think, and publish every word that I write, why would anyone ever publish any of that between covers?

What's Your Point?:

I mention this because I'm taking up photography, as the latest addition to my already overstuffed mental storeroom of hobbies. I've occasionally wished that I had written more during the starting-up process of other hobbies and interests, because I quickly forget what I was thinking during the times when I didn't know what I knew later. (Yes, there's an incoherent breathlessness about that sentence. I'm going to leave it right there anyway.) When I go back to re-read what my blog has to say about, for example, my recent forays into kinda-fashion, there's a lot of "Oh, yeah..." about my own past thoughts, and I know that the blog posts represent just a tiny fraction of the thoughts and experiences.

I don't really think that I'll be all that interested in my thoughts and experiences as I start with this photography thing, and I think that it would be even less interesting in a book. But I've thought that about other things. So I'm going to write about photography, here, and also probably in a journal somewhere. I'm not sure what "somewhere" is. I prefer to do all my writing in bbEdit, of all things, but I'm a lousy organizer of files. So maybe Scrivener, because it has built-in organization.

Yes, Scrivener. I just ran off and created a "Fiction, with sub-heads" project and called it Journal. So there.

But, anyway, moving on to photography.

So You're Using Those Section Titles Again, Huh?:

Yep.

Why?:

No idea.

Photography?:

So. I have no eye for visual arts. None. Not a scrap. I never have. At least, I've always assumed that I never have, though now and then I have a faint hope that I'll find that I was wrong. So I'm not interested in photography for the purpose of creating Beautiful Things. But I am under the belief that I have something of an eye for character and the absurd and the weird. Maybe. Possibly. Perhaps. It could happen. So that's the focus.

But right now, the focus is, well, things like focus. And light. And aperture versus shutter priority and all those things that I only barely understand. I'm using a point-and-shoot camera, the Sony RX100 III, but point-and-shoot or not, it has features that I don't understand yet. Well, and sometimes I'm just using my phone, as in the image above. I'm not sure why I'm finally offering an image where you can kinda sorta almost see my face, or at least you could if it weren't for the hat and the phone. You might be able to pick my nose out of a lineup, anyway.

Um. Where was I? Yes, why the selfie? I think it's partly because if I'm going to occasionally blog photographs, they will probably contain people, and if I'm going to post photos of people who aren't me, it seems wrong to be too cowardly to post photos of me. See? And it's partly about the ongoing fashion and learning-not-to-hate-my-appearance process.

That Almost Rates A Digression Heading, Doesn't It?:

No. Shush.

Photography, Still:

So I've been reading about photography, but I want more of what I call munchy books. I discuss munchy books here. I want a book that talks about photography in a story-telling, philosophizing, anecdote-studded kind of way. I want the photography book equivalent of Henry Mitchell's On Gardening and The Essential Earthman.

But while I'm searching for that, I'm downloading Kindle previews for various photography books (which I will probably order through my Local Book Store when I narrow them down) and looking for photography blogs and forums and stuff. And I keep looking at Vivian Maier's photographs. Looking through them, it occurs to me that I've put Vivian Maier (photographer) and Rumer Godden (author) in the same category in my mental filing cabinet. I'm not sure what the label on that folder is, but they're sorted together.

I just converted the selfie of me from a regular color picture to the "Tonal" filter in iPhoto, because...I think out of sheer pretentiousness, because doesn't black and white photography seem more...more of all those things you want to be when you're being pretentious? I see that the resolution was also drastically reduced. I don't know what caused that and if I have any control over it.

I have things to learn.

I'm noticing that the above few paragraphs are an extra rambling dull catalog of thoughts, and that I'm tempted to cut most of them out. That's another reason for journaling--I want to record some thoughts that I don't edit, not even a little bit, for their readability or entertainment value.

Um.

Time For Another Subject Heading?:

No. Shush.

Hmph.:

OK, I think that is all.

Image: Mine.