Month: September 2014

There’s been something missing in my life that I have been in denial about for a very long time.  Something so important to my inner artist that I haven’t felt whole.  I have dreams about it weekly.  I sometimes daydream about all the possibilities, everything I could accomplish.  And yet, due to circumstances and a whole lot of fear, I’ve resigned myself to being without it. What I’m talking about is darkroom photography.  I won’t go into the whole thing, because it’s a long story (you can read about it here) but I’ll give you the quick-and-dirty version, emphasis on the dirty.  I started studying b&w and darkroom photography after meeting my fiance from college.  He was into it and had a home darkroom.  From the first moment I spent in his darkroom, I had been in love.  It was amazing, and I came to find out later that my grandfather, unbeknownst to me, took pictures and had his own darkroom.  That was such an unexpected thing to learn, and fitting.  So I took as many photography classes as I could at college along with my Journalism major, thinking it would help my job prospects.  And I ended up learning –and loving — b&w and darkroom photography.

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This past weekend was spent at our local Scottish-Irish festival. This is one of–or the–largest festival of this type in the country, and my husband and I went for the whole weekend, because we’re fairly active with our respective clans and like to go all out at this sort of thing. During some downtime on Sunday, I got out my current read–Connie Willis’s To Say Nothing of the Dog (time travel, on the humorous side)–and had just settled in when someone wandered by and asked what I was reading.

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Way back in June, I told you about my new adventures in gardening — last year we tried vegetables, this year we decided to add flowers. Here’s how it went… Last year, our yard was 1/6 vegetables and, ahem, 5/6 weeds. This year we finally sprang for landscaping — nothing fancy, just grass and three plots, one for vegetables (about the same size as last year’s) and two for decorative vegetation. Having grass instead of weeds made the yard look fabulous even before we started planting stuff. Then we populated our vegetable garden and flower beds, and sat back to see what would grow.

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