The weather is gorgeous this weekend; we had some record-breaking low temps this past week and it’s left us with a beautiful but cool weekend for mid-May in Texas. And as luck would have it, I have very little to do this weekend aside from buy groceries, which we all know I enjoy doing anyway so that’s hardly an unwelcome chore. But last night I started to get that anxious feeling when I have a few days of nothing facing me – what will I do? Of course my immediate response is photography, but I just dolled up and posed last weekend and still have plenty of shots from that set I’d like to process, plus I still need to edit more beach photos and I know the farther away from those sets I get the less likely I am to get interested in them enough to continue editing. Plus I’m not in the mood for all the prep-time new self-portraits would take, so I know if I do some shooting I want it to be outdoors or involving other people somehow.

I decided to work more airplane pics into this post, but I’m warning you they’re not very good ones.

I soon hit on the idea of driving out to IAH and checking out the observation area they have there, but it’s an hour away which is a long way to go on one’s own, especially if where one ends up isn’t too safe and/or thrilling. So I started emailing everyone I could think of who might not mind spending a day sitting in a parking lot watching airplanes land, and surprisingly, everyone I contacted was up for it – just not this weekend. Doesn’t me help me in the moment, but it’s sure good to know! The most immediate opportunity appears to be my dad, who said he might be able to go next weekend, which does give me something to look forward to. Once I’ve visited the spotting area once, I won’t be as cautious about going again alone, so in the end I won’t have to force any of my friends to go with me unless they really want to do it; according to what I’ve read, the airplanes are as low as 100 ft above the parking lot when they fly over, so I’d think it would be a fun experience for anyone – but what do I about how normal people enjoy themselves.

So for this weekend, probably no airplanes to shoot, but I may break out my macro lens and try to work with it awhile since my attempts to use it so far have been less than stellar. I bought this cheap ring light off Amazon a few years ago and never used it in the appropriate manner (I just stuck it on a tripod and used it to help light up my face for portraits) so I may dig that out and try to attach it to my camera for the first time, and see if it helps light up a subject for macro-photographing. I’m thinking I might connect the grocery store trip to photography and take macro shots of food; but that’s probably just because I’m hungry, so it’s off to breakfast now.

And I’ll break my general silence about work to say that all hell has broken loose up there in the past week, and next year is shaping up to be even more insane than this one, but in very unpredictable ways. I must be insane myself to sign up for another year of it, but since my idea of enjoying myself on a Saturday involves standing around under low-flying airplanes perhaps we already knew I was bonkers.