Pirate Daddy

Arr! There are times when I feel like a nut. I had planned for this shoot about ten days ago and kept rolling it in my head how to get it done. A couple of things I learned were:

1. Setting the white balance on manual helps to make the colors more consistent.
2. Check to make sure you didn’t forget to reset the manual setting on your lens (oops!)
3. Even waking up at 4:00AM sometimes doesn’t give enough time to piece an idea together.
4. I’m never completely happy with my work unless there’s tons of positive feedback (by the way – no feedback on this one. humph) – even then, I tend to want to change things.
5. Sometimes you just have to quit and move on to the next idea.

Dirty

An evil person is like a dirty window, they never let the light shine through. – William Makepeace Thackeray

Today I said some dirty things to people I love. Nasty words, nasty thoughts … just useless mean stuff. I hate it when I lose my temper like that. What does it take to not only learn how to control my tongue, but to have it so much part of my nature that I don’t even lose control of it when I’m exhausted and bitterly angry.

To anyone out there I said mean things to… sorry. Please forgive me. You really are special and important and didn’t deserve it.

A Little Light Reading

I love reading to my children. We just got through reading the unabridged Alice in Wonderland. Before that it was book 6 of the Lemony Snickets series. We intermingle The Boxcar Children, Little House on the Prairie segments and other books throughout the year. I think we’ve read through the Narnia series twice, or at least some of them keep getting reread.

I find the imagination in books to be better than most movies – particularly in older books before there was TV. My guess is that watching mainstream media saps the creativity out of your brain and back before TV just writing out some crazy dream you had was surreal enough to have people question your sanity, if not your intentions.

A great quote for this photo is from Gallagher the humerist – “Don’t you wish there was a knob on the TV to turn up the intelligence? There’s one marked ‘Brightness,’ but it doesn’t work.”

[Book pictured: The Annotated Alice, compiled by Martin Gardner – without dust jacket.]