Yeah, my prose is better, but I thought I'd toss in something new today...

I've never claimed to be any good at poetry.  I'm not promising that this is a spectacular sample of the verse which I may really be capable of.  But this came to me this morning when I was making breakfast.  Enjoy.

Would you hold my hand, please,
as I step to the edge
and take this leap of faith.


You don't have to push me,
I'll go on my own.
But it's a frightening ride
to the other side
and I don't want to go alone.


I've been hurt before,
broken and shattered.
But God said He'd catch me
so that's all that matters.


He can stitch me back together.
He can erase all my scars.
But first I have to trust Him
and fall into his arms.


I never saw myself as brave,
but it doesn't matter what I see.
Hold me close as I let go,
and watch Him remake me.


I'm leaving behind my shipwrecked dreams.
I've learned that nothing is as it seems.
God, let me follow Your light, whether in flickers or in beams.


Would you stand beside me, please,
as I fall out of my comfort zone
and discover what my life is for.

A Peacock From My Childhood

Reading has always been my favorite pastime.  My top marks in school were always in Literature and English.  As an only child of two working parents, I was often given a stack of library books and allowed to curl up with them for hours at a time.

My favorite children's books were (are) the simple story books by Bill Peet.  Already a fan of Peet's characters in many of Disney's Golden Age animated films, I loved his art style and colored pencil illustrations.  I would check out Bill Peet books every single time we'd visit the library.

My favorite, though, is "The Spooky Tail of Prewitt Peacock".

Prewitt is the runt of his peacock flock.  That in itself is bad enough, but things get worse for him when his tail starts growing into a monstrosity that frightens all of the other peacocks every time they turn around.  Prewitt is picked on and hated and just pitiful.  But his luck turns around when Travis the tiger tries to catch the peacocks for dinner and is scared out of his stripes by Prewitt's scary tail!

I love this book and have read it over and over with my kids.  Look for it in the Easy reader section of your local library.

Sense and Sensibility: Making Edmund Spencer more popular since 1995

We found them!  Praise the Lord!!!! My Nikon D300 AND my wedding rings were found together, safe and sound!  There are a few odd mysteries still, such as how the camera and rings wound up together in the first place, and also the matter of WHERE they were.  But then again, what does it matter if they are returned to me unharmed?

If you don't remember the circumstances (and out and out panic fit that was ensuing) when my camera went missing, I wrote it all in this post.

A good 3 weeks after I posted that, a family member found the camera in one of the only places that I was not free to search.  For obvious privacy reasons, I can't elaborate any more than that.  The camera was found in a gold holiday gift bag.  Fact:  I may have a somewhat faulty memory, but I know beyond any doubt that I never put my camera in a gift bag. Not THAT bag, not ANY bag. EVER.  That bothers me.  A LOT.  Because that means that someone else's hands were on my camera without my permission. GRRRR.

The wedding rings had been missing for a few months.  I vaguely remember that at one point they were sitting in a little clay pot that Jeremy made in Kindergarten, on Jake's side of the headboard shelf.  Due to lack of sleep and stress and 3 jobs and the holiday rush, I'm not clear on when they left that location or whether it was before or after I had them there that I couldn't find them again.  I can't be sure of where I put them after that.  But I know where I DIDN'T put them.

I did not put them in a jar.   But I distinctly and clearly KNOW that I did not put them in a lidded jar.  It was a pimento jar.  I don't even like pimentos.  Gran has a lot of empty jars in the kitchen area for her canning and whatnot, so it was very likely her pimento jar, but she didn't put my rings in it either.  However they got there, the rings were in the jar, and the jar was in the gift bag with the camera.

I think it can be safely presumed that whomever handled my camera and put it in the gift bag also put my  rings in with it.  We've no idea who it was though.

It bothers me that my most expensive/valuable belongings have been meddled with.  I'm certainly glad and thankful that they were returned to me.  But it nags me that they went missing in the first place.

Still wondering about the post title?  One of my favorite parts of the 1995 version of Sense and Sensibility is near the end when Marianne (Kate Winslet) is recovering from her illness and Colonel Brandon (Alan Rickman) is reading to her.  He is reading "The Faerie Queen" by Edmund Spencer.  I knew the lines from watching S&S so many times over, but I never could remember their source.  I had never read "The Faerie Queen" in Literature class, so it was new to me.  Hundreds of years old, but new and foreign to me.  I did a Google search to find the quote in it's context.  And apparently, I'm not the only fan (with a massive crush on Mr. Rickman as Colonel Brandon) who thought of that scene when something lost came up found.  Here is a reference to it in a post by a blogger who lost an earring and then found it again.  There is a link to the entire section of "The Faerie Queen" by Edmund Spencer, that contains our favorite lines, in her post.

 Now that my Nikon has been returned, I am anxious to get back to shooting photos.  I did a set of my friend Meg in the Regency dress I made for her.  When I get those processed and edited, I'll be sure to post a few, or at the very least a link.

"For whatsoever from one place doth fall,
Is with the tide unto another brought:
For there is nothing lost, that may be found, if sought."

How To Completely Ruin Your Future Professional Career In 10 Easy Steps

Step 1: Use your $3,000 Nikon (the one that took 3 years of waiting and most of your 2008 tax refund money to get) to photograph your friend in your "mobile studio" (which is really a pop-up background frame that you bought on Ebay, set up in your Grandmother's borrowed front parlor between a 1970s wing-back chair and a piano so out of tune you can play a piece in tune by transposing the music down a third step or so).  Do this on the first day of the busiest retail month of the year, when you have a part time seasonal job with new and constantly changing hours.

Step 2: Set said $3k Nikon down on a table in aforementioned front parlor, instead of putting it back in it's bag.  WHERE IT BELONGS.

Step 3: Become distracted by 4 kids, Mom (who brings all her Christmas decorations down from the attic [where you have your room and all your stuff] to that front parlor, your job, making Christmas gifts- because even with the new job you are too poor to buy them, your kid's elementary school chorus concert, part of the house randomly catching fire, panicking because you were asleep upstairs and the only one home when it happened, packing 6 people for a 3 hour drive to the mountains, getting snowed in (and your car breaking) for 4 days with extended family, being at in-laws house another 8 days while you figure out what to do about the broken car.  Become so distracted by the time you make it home the week after New Year's that you have a compulsory NEED during a second round of being snowed/iced in (at least this time it's at home) to clean out everything you don't use (including kid's outgrown clothes, stuff you haven't worn since college, and a pile of junk papers that you swear you already got rid of, but here they are telling you how many times you bought milk at Kroger and ate at Taco Bell last month...) AND rearrange every piece of furniture in your attic pseudo "flat", in the belief that it will keep you organized and on task because "it's much more functional in this layout".  Your horrible memory and ADD-laced brain cells wish.

Step 4: Find yourself randomly awake at 1 a.m. and unable to fall back asleep for thinking of an image on your camera that you'd like to edit a certain way.

Step 5:  You have to pee anyway, so get out of bed to fetch camera from the last place you remember having it... front parlor?..., after stopping by bathroom first.

Step 6:  Become confused and concerned when $3k camera is NOT WHERE YOU REMEMBER LEAVING IT.

Step 7: PANIC


Step 8: Search the entire downstairs.  The Christmas decorations had been put away; maybe someone moved it to keep from damaging it.  Nowhere to be found.  Search attic and kid's rooms.  Panic some more.

Step 9: Wake up husband and ask him if he knows what happened to it.  Do your best not to be put out with him when he burrows deeper in the covers and mumbles at you to "come to bed and we'll find it tomorrow." Right.  Like I can sleep now that I'VE LOST A 3 THOUSAND DOLLAR CAMERA.  IT'S SUPPOSED TO HELP PUT OUR KIDS THROUGH COLLEGE!

Step 10: After thorough search of entire house in semi-darkness (well, minus Mom and Grandmother's rooms since it's 3 a.m. and they likely want to stay asleep until past dawn sometime before being bothered about my camera), conclude that your $3k Nikon is temporarily missing and you can't remember anything else about it between the Dec 1 shoot and today. Curse your faulty, fuzzy memory cells and try to stop panicking.  Fail.


If you add one more step, which is to sit down and write a blog post about your complete and epic inability to handle things like temporarily misplacing an expensive career investment and being unable to calmly and rationally wait (asleep) until daylight hours to find it, you'd be about where I am right now.

I KNOW it's IN the house somewhere, because even though it was grossly irresponsible of me to not put it away in it's bag when I was finished using it, I would never have taken it outside the house without it being in that bag.  Extra lenses, memory cards and the battery charger are all in that bag.  I purposefully did not pack it along with me to the mountains so that I could spend my holiday with family, instead of behind the lens.

It's here in this house, but I can't help freaking out until I find it!  I hate cleaning up.  I lose track of so much when I do that.  Ugh.  I'll let you know later what happens...

1/13/11 UPDATE: We've searched the house from top to bottom, moved everything possible and still no Nikon.  I've cried about it. A LOT.  I know I can start saving up for a replacement, but there are other goals and responsibilities laying claims to any money that I bring in, so this could take a while.  It makes me nauseous.  Yet, photography is my chosen career and I will win it.  I don't care how long it takes.  I want to know what happened to the camera, though.  It was in that room when I left Christmas Eve and it's not now.  Very, very upsetting.

How Many Movies??!

I wish it were possible to calculate the number of movies I've watched in my life. I wonder if I can even begin to make a rough estimate. Wait! Maybe Google can show me a website with a mathematical equation for that....

Well, not exactly, but close. Here's a Yahoo Q&A about it, with the best answer being written by a 23 year old who did all the math. Her calculations are for how much total time is spent watching movies in general, but I'm more after how many movies total, as in how many titles, no matter how many times I've seen it. But the math concept is a pretty good guide.

I'm 29, so I'll give it a go:

She watches 5 movies a week, but I don't think I watch that many. I'm going to say, for the sake of argument, that I watch 10 new (that I have not seen before) movies per month, whether new releases or just new to me. So,

10 movies per month on average
10 movies/month multiplied by 12 months in a year = 120 movies a year.

Started watching movies around age 5, so i have watched movies for 24 years.
24 years of movie watching multiplied by 120 movies a year = 2,880 movies so far that i have watched on average.

She goes on to calculate the time, but that gives me a pretty solid idea of how many films I've seen up to this point, give or take a few. Nearly 3,000 films. That's a lot of screen time and popcorn! :)

I have a specific reason for wanting to know a general number, but that will have to wait until the next post. I've run out of writing time and must get the house cleaned and sorted. It's still a wreck from the post-present-unwrapping-now-we-all-have-more-stuff-and-nowhere-to-put-it fun that happened 2 weeks ago.