I’m taking a week or so off from the internet, so forgive me if I’m not around to comment on your blog posts or respond here. No real reason for it, just a lot going on with work and family and I want to clear out the mental cobwebs that are cluttering up my brain. See you all soon!

I am so excited, because we’ve had a nice little cool front this week that should last through the weekend, and as long as rain doesn’t roll in Saturday (which it might) my father and I are heading out to the observation area at IAH to do some plane spotting. Now, I know that in no way are you interested in watching 13+ minutes of plane footage from this location, but I liked this video the best of the ones I found on YouTube – I think it really gives you a sense of the observation park and how close the planes are when they fly overhead. So, I’m including the video anyway and you can watch of it what you want.

Lots could go wrong with this plan, but then again, that’s true of aviation in general; weather dictates what happens more than anything, so if the winds aren’t blowing in the right direction the runway where this observation spot is located might not get used all that much. It’s doubtful, since this runway is one of the busiest at the airport, but it’s happened to me before at Hobby, so we’ll see. Tons of Continental planes here since IAH is a home base, but during the afternoon hours loads of international flights and interesting planes landing and taking off, too. So here’s hoping it works out and we get to go.

I probably won’t post much more until after the trip, because I’m having a bad week with my arm (and Sandy the massage therapist had some surgery and can’t work until after October 20th) and I want it to be in some sort of shape to hold up my zoom lens and 7D. Saving my strength, and I’ll probably take my monopod or tripod along to help out, too. For added fun, here’s another video of footage from IAH, there are some really HUGE planes in this one, 777s and the like:

Oh ,and one other note: Stitch Fix not only contacted me to apologize for sending me a lame shipment, they also gave me my $20 stylist’s fee back for the month. AND, they sent me another shipment which I am due to get this Saturday. So I’ll be able to photograph that sometime too, but it might be awhile since this weekend is going be pretty busy as it is.

I was so nervous for the first day of school, but then I always am. It went off without a hitch, though – the kids were pretty enthusiastic about the class overall, and we had many great conversations about the purpose of the course and how it could benefit them. I didn’t even get through my syllabus or my class rules, but the typically hour-and-a-half class times were reduced to 40 minutes, so the day flew by. The nicest thing of all, though, was how simple and controlled the environment was, compared to the chaos of the administrative offices. When I worked as a counselor, I literally ran out the door the minute the end of the contract day arrived, but as a teacher I willingly stayed late to work on lesson plans and other duties without an ounce of resentment. I think it’s because I don’t have a job I want to escape anymore. It just felt so normal. I know I will still have stresses and challenging times and frustrations, but at the heart of it is a situation I can control, and long swaths of time where all I can do is teach and everything else has to wait. I’m much more convinced now that this was the right move to make  – although I’m still nervous about what might be coming down the pike later, but that’s just how I am.

So, day one of teaching down, and day fifteen of the 365 project got done – sort of. It’s a pretty horrid little picture, although I do like the primary colors and geometric shapes it created. But it’s another iPhone pic, and was snapped at the end of the day without much planning or thought:

That, my friends, is a completely full box of donuts that sat on the floor in the hallway the entire day. I have no idea why. I kept walking past it and thinking, surely there’s a reason for this, a joke someone is playing or something, but nope. Even after the bell rang and the kids left, the box still sat there. Finally I picked it up and threw it in the trash. Weird.

On another note, I haven’t talked about this at all, but another reason I’m so busy right now and not taking many pictures is because an elderly family member is quite ill, and my husband is the primary caretaker for this person. I go with him to help when I can, which means my weekends are pretty much taken up with errands and trips to go visit family. I don’t know how long this will go on, but it may be awhile. That combined with the first weeks of school just hasn’t afforded me any time to do studio shots at all, but perhaps when at least the school side dies down I can get back to it. Then again, maybe not. I’ll continue taking what pictures I can, when I can, and we’ll see how things go.

Go.

School starts Thursday, so of course our furniture didn’t come in until about 3:00 PM Wednesday. Then it had to be assembled and arranged, and it wasn’t until my desk was put together that a computer could be set up in my room. We still don’t have any filing cabinets, so we’re stuck as far as getting files and things together because it’s all confidential information that must be locked down. So we’re really only halfway running at this point – but the kids will show up Thursday morning regardless.

At least they will have somewhere to sit.

That is my Day 14 photo, by the way. Truth be told, I’ve considered at some point during each of the past three days just chucking the 365 project, but in the end some little picture has presented itself to me for a photo opportunity to keep me going. Some of it has been crap, or using my iPhone, but at least it’s something, as I’m sure not taking any studio photos right now. Just way, way too busy for the past week and a half getting ready for the year (even though I’m still not ready).

This was my Day 13 photo, and so far I like it least of anything I’ve shot. But I was seriously out of time Tuesday evening when I snapped it, and I was exhausted from getting only two hours’ sleep the night before at the godawful school lock-in I’ve still barely recovered from. I’ve starting using these DevaClips to get some lift in the crown area, and in spite of my intial doubt that these would be a useful purchase (it’s $13 for 8 clips) they actually work. They’re much bigger than normal clips, and I can pinch a pretty large section of hair together, stick the clip in perpendicular to my scalp, and it will hold the hair up nice and tight until it dries. I’ve even slept in them once or twice and they did not budge. When I take them out, there’s a big old lift and swoop to my hair that I can then tame down with the diffuser. Anyway, I put these in Tuesday night after taking a shower, stuck my head in front of my Canon SL1 and snapped this, then added a ton of quick filters to it in the hopes of making it seem interesting. All it really did was confuse people, but I was too exhausted to even explain. Moving on.

Let’s talk briefly about that lock-in though. I was pretty much dreading it, showed up around 9 PM because I was told I was only needed for the sleepover part and there’d be nothing more for me to do aside from be a spare person available in case of emergency only to find out that the coordinator of the event expected me to do a hell of a lot more than that, then got chewed out by her in front of everyone when I expressed surprise at suddenly discovering I had all these other duties I was not expecting to have. It was terribly embarrassing and upsetting, and led to me having weird panic attacks all night long, resulting in me getting a grand total of two hours’ sleep that night. I know I said it to some of you in the comments already, but to repeat: NEVER. AGAIN.

I should have known I was in for trouble when, as I arrived to the lock-in, it was raining pretty hard, and as I walked up to the gym I had to step through this grassy esplanade-like thing, and I tried to step on the little metal storm drain that was stuck in the ground because, I thought to myself, I could keep my foot dry if I stepped on it since the grass was so wet – but my damn leg went all the way through it and down the drain. Thank God someone was with me to pull me out, and that all I got was a small  bruise on my shin from the experience, as I could have easily injured the hell out of myself.

Given what came after this, I should have just stayed in there

After checking that I was not injured, my friend pulled me out and then, quite honestly, we laughed about it because it was funny at that point instead of freaking tragic (after knowing what the rest of the night turned out to be like, I actually think getting my leg ripped open and spending the night in the emergency room might have been preferable to chaperoning the sleepover). The left leg of the pants I was wearing were completely soaked, as was the brand-new shoe I had on – thank God it was a vegan Birkenstock sandal that survived no worse for the wear – so my friend and I had to drive to her house (I don’t live close to the school but she does) and get some sweatpants for me to wear, and I had to get a new pillow because I dropped mine and it was soaked too. Honestly, I should have just gotten back into my car and driven away, as clearly this was God trying to stop me from chaperoning that thing, but I failed to recognize it as the sign it was.

A bit of an odds and ends post here, I guess, and the next few days are also likely to include hastily-written  blog entries and sloppy photos, but eventually this will all settle down and I’ll get back into the groove. Wish me luck!

This is going to be a brief update, because as the first day of school draws near (Thursday) work gets more and more intense. Not a bad sort of intense, just very busy and rather desperate.

I have a classroom but still no furniture – no desks or filing cabinets or anything. So I’m at a point where it’s hard to plan. I want to determine classroom procedures, but without knowing, for example, where the sign in and sign out sheet is going to reside, I can’t exactly write that into my class rules. And I can’t organize my student files, which are confidential, until I have somewhere to lock them up and file them. So I’m just twiddling my thumbs waiting for my furniture to come in – oh, and I still don’t have a computer so I’m lugging my laptop up to work and back home, which is its own sort of PITA because I have to work off of flash drives, and my laptop isn’t connected to any of the printers at the school, so I can work on documents in my empty room (sitting on that little sofa), then I have to save them, yank the flash drive out, and go log in to some other computer, open the docs back up again, and print them. All of this shuffling around gets me flustered and I start losing things! Not to mention that for almost a week now the air conditioning has been out on the first floor where my room is, and it gets so sweltering hot during the day that I can’t concentrate. Just your typical buildup to the first days of school. Those of you who’ve taught before probably recognize the insanity.

Overall though I am enjoying planning for the school year without having to think about counseling. I’m nervous, as I’ve mentioned before, but as I make my plans I feel much more in control and “in my element” than I ever did as a counselor. I think it was a wise decision.

Here’s something that was NOT a wise decision, however: the school puts on a special camp for all new students at the beginning of the year (we are a small private school, so new students each year don’t total much over 100) and that camp involves a sleepover at the school. I don’t know why they insist on doing this, as it always seems like such a time-consuming and bad idea to me, but they think it’s awesome, so whatever. Except this time, the woman who runs the camp had a hard time getting volunteer chaperones to sleep up at the school (the Diocese insists there be 1 teacher to every 10 kids for lock-ins) so I told her I’d do it if she couldn’t rustle up enough people, but I emphasized I only wanted to be signed up as a last resort. Well guess what? The last resort was needed, so in an hour or so I am off to the school to SLEEP on an AIR MATTRESS overnight in a GYM with 100 high school students. WHYYYY???

They did say I could show up very late as they literally just need me for the sleepover part, so I’m going to roll in around 10 PM in my pajamas and get the hell out of there first thing in the morning. Then I’ll have to drive home, shower, get dressed for the day, and go right back up there for another day of work. Again I say it, WHYYYYYY????? Well we know why. Because I couldn’t keep my mouth shut that’s why. They do pay $100 for everyone who sleeps over, so there’s that. But still. This is so far outside my comfort zone, it’s not even funny.

I thought my photo for the day would be something like my sleeping bag or me lying on the floor in the gymnasium, but then as I was getting ready I spied Simon chilling out on top of these chests that sit on top of a decorative table in our living room, and well, it was too cute not to be my Day 11 shot. So, here it is, and wish me luck tonight. This is in no way going to be fun, and I probably won’t get a lick of decent sleep.

Just a quick catch-up post to say that I’m preoccupied with “real life” stuff right now, so both photography and blogging have been on hold the past few days. Between taking care of work responsibilities, dealing with the bee situation, taking time to visit with family around town, and binge-watching my way through The Sopranos (I’m up to Season 5 out of 6 now) I’ve had little time left for much else – well, if I’m also going to relax and enjoy some down time the last few weeks of summer. It’s OK, as photography-wise things are starting to feel a little stale, so a break will do me good. I have some ideas for a composite shot or two I’d like to pull off, but I need to do some reading and learning so I can avoid the usual pitfalls I encounter when attempting them so I don’t have those frustrations moving forward. Primarily, I need to find a way to ensure my lighting and color will match better from shot to shot so when I layer them all over each other it’s not so noticeable. More internet research and YouTube tutorials are definitely in my future.

But the bees are finally gone – until we got a contractor out here to completely remove and scrape clean the area that housed the hive, though, they were still flying around in the house and making me crazy. I actually spent several nights at a friends’ house because I could not handle getting buzzed at and dive-bombed every time I walked into our master bathroom, which was where the main entry point into the house was located (we had one entrance covered, but unfortunately did not find the other one until the day the guy came to remove the hive). They didn’t just contain themselves to that bathroom, though, and on occasion they’d be buzzing around elsewhere in the house too, and because I am so afraid of  flying, buzzing insects I convinced myself I could hear buzzing bugs nearby even when there weren’t any around – I was even hearing the buzz of bees in my sleep. It was incredibly nerve-wracking.

Anyway, they’re gone now – it only took 4 hours to do the work, and cost us $900, which is a ton less than we expected. We thought we’d be looking at removing an entire side of the house, but it turned out the bees had only built a hive in one section of our subfloor, and hadn’t made it into the brick or anything. So, without further ado, here it is (or was):

My husband thought it looked “cool,” and one of my friends said it was “pretty,” but I am in agreement with my friend Candace, who took one look at this photo and just texted back, “UGH.” I start itching just looking at it. But anyway, it was all cleaned up and re-sealed, and there’s been nary a buzz in our house since, a month after the whole ordeal started. Quite honestly, my husband and I are so sick of home repairs at this point that we may wait until next summer to do the interior painting, but we’ll see.

So Bee Man #1 came out Friday morning and said, basically, that we have a massive hive in our wall which may require an entire side of the house being torn open to remove. And there’s no way around it really. If you don’t remove the hive, even after extracting the bees, the honey in the walls starts to go rancid and smell, which not only stinks but also attracts more bees, as well as other insects and even rodents. So let’s say you take your chances, extract the bees, and just seal up all the possible entrances where bees and other critters could get in, and tell yourself you can deal with the stench…then you still will get rancid honey seeping through your drywall. So there’s no way around this one, I don’t think. We have to wait a week for Bee Man #2 to come out and inspect the situation and give us a new estimate, since Bee Man #1 couldn’t do anything because the job was too big.

Bee Man #1 got to our house about 9 AM and was gone by 10:30, and I immediately left the house to run some errands. I was feeling pretty foul about the whole thing; cranky and depressed in general, and while driving home I started to dig into why all these home repairs have me so thrown and moody; I mean, these things happen. But I feel like such a terrible failure about it all. You should have heard this guy going on about how many bees we had, and how huge the hive must be, and oh wow, look at this huge hole you have in your wall back here (the space where the air conditioner is hooked into the wall actually, so I don’t know what the problem was – he actually wanted me to crawl back there and look at what he was talking about but it was hot as hell and there were bees flying everywhere and I was already dressed for the day and I do not go crawling around sticking my head into wall-holes, sorry), and hey look at the siding peeling off over here against the fence and OMG you sure have a lot of cool air escaping from the wall over here and blah blah blah on-and-on-you-suck-at-homeownership-cakes.

True, our house is old. True, we are not the most fastidious of homeowners in the world by a longshot. But we are not losers, although we may slack on occasion when it comes to tending to the house – only in a cosmetic sense, at least that we’ve been aware. We get the house exterminated every three months, inside and out. We clean up after ourselves. When we see a serious problem, we fix it. We just don’t sweat the carpet or the paint job or the age of our appliances. But this whole summer has worn me down and made me feel like a loser anyway. I know this stems from some other place, some lack of confidence I have in myself as a capable adult that has its roots in childhood, when I was repeatedly told that I didn’t have what it took to take care of myself in the real world. My mother and grandmother always believed I was too sensitive, too soft, to survive on my own, and they both loved to criticize me for it. Grown-ups don’t behave that way, they’d say to me on a regular basis. You’re going to have to get it together and stop being so sensitive if you’re going to be able to function as a grown-up.

I’m not blaming anyone, and my past was what it was. It wasn’t awful, but it wasn’t always great, and I carry some scars from ways in which I was treated. Whatever. The fact is, I was driving back to the house today, and I was hearing this voice in my head over and over saying Face it, you’re a failure as a grown-up in relation to this house business. And I realized that I always feel this way when things go wrong with the house in particular. I didn’t feel like I’d “failed as a grown-up” when I thought I’d damaged up my hair last week, for example, or when I gained weight in the two years when I didn’t work out, or all the times I’ve had problems at work, or conflict in my marriage. But when anything goes wrong with the house, I feel like an absolute failure as an adult. I’m sure there’s a lot more analysis I could get into here – the fact that my mother was a quite unhappy yet meticulous homemaker whose house was the castle she ruled with an iron (if metaphorical) fist, perhaps? But I’m not going to get into that any further here. My mother has apologized for the mistakes she made, and I know if she had it to do over again she’d raise her children differently – and that’s all I can ask for really. What’s left is for me to deal with, without laying blame. But all these years later, it’s still there. And it’s messing with me this summer, in the weirdest way.

It’s at least part of the reason why I’ve felt so strangely bored and restless all summer, I think, something I’ve mentioned here before is rather unusual for me. It’s probably partly to blame for why I haven’t played dress-up and taken pictures. There’s all this stuff wrong with the house, stuff I should have taken care of sooner, and it’s all being pointed out to me and demanding my attention, and rattling my fragile little ego-cage, and triggering my neuroses and making me stir-crazy, and a little depressed. I’m glad I at least got a little glimpse of what’s going on with me though; I think I’m onto something with the connections I’ve made today and that I can start to work through them now. I’ve been reading about people having bees in the walls for years and never realizing it, and it’s actually not all that uncommon, so that makes me feel a little better about all this. But the process of dealing with this is not going to be fun, so I’ve got to suck it up and steel myself for the onslaught of more banging and ripping and exposing the dirty little secrets encased in our walls – like any good grown-up would do (and in fact, when I was feeling down about all this tonight and Doug was gone to play guitar with friends, I actually called my mom to talk through my bee-anxiety, and she didn’t make me feel like a “bad grown-up” at all. In fact, we were laughing about it by the end).