Lovelihood

The sun was out again today, and I wanted to play some more with that toy lens. So we took a little excursion to the park. Unfortunately, it was also a wee bit cold (nothing compared to rolling blackouts and blizzard conditions presented to other parts of the country today, but still a bit chilly to be taking walks to the park), so we only stayed out long enough to tuck a few pinecones and sticks into pockets and have a single go at the merry-go-round contraption they still have at all the local parks. Even Bear was caught up in provision-gathering today, her brother excited to have another set of pockets to store Christmas tree fodder in for next year.

The funny thing about where I work is that it's the same newspaper that employed The Mr. way back when. Back then there was, more or less, an open door policy, and you could actually walk past reception without the assistance of a keycard/hallpass. It's the kind of workplace that movie set designers like to build for their imaginary hipster start-ups, with exposed brick and windows that open and thick wood columns propping up wood-beamed ceilings and piping and ductwork winding through offices and around desks, lending the backdrop that extra industrial-chic panache. So I used to be able to wander right in and admire it all when I came down to meet the Mr. for lunch or whatever. Because at the time my workplace was a Nixon-era tenement sorta construction sandwiched between a working-girls' motel and adult video store, and whose window air conditioning unit spewed building-grit at me in the summertime. Now that I work here, of course, I never leave my desk, save for intermittent jaunts down the remarkably well-lit stairwell to feed the meter, when I might remember to slow down a little and snap a photo with my phone.

For a while there, like a decade ago, The Mr. had this idea that we'd get a bunch of dog-shaped coat hangers. And use them for what? I don't know. It never happened. What we do have is this doggie coat hook, whose lineage neither of us can quite pinpoint. We are pretty sure that it's his and not mine. Whatever the case, it's chunked off many a piece of drywall for lack of proper wall anchors to hold up our adult-sized woolen winter wear. We're hoping the children's outerwear will be a tad kinder.

Sunday is pancake day. And the responsibility falls squarely on me to make it happen. Doesn't matter if it's Mother's day, or 12K race day, or I'm too sick for life day. Pancakes get made by me. Because if I didn't, I fear there would be family-wide revolt. This shot was taken with a new lens, another baddie procured from Photojojo. The adjective used most often to describe the Diana+ lens' effect is "dreamy". Basically, it's what you might expect when shooting with a plastic toy lens, which is what it is. Which, I gotta say, takes a lot of the pressure off of trying to get the perfect shot. More shots here.

When we got home from lunch today and I saw that the mail had come, I lickety-splitted my creaky-kneed self (9 miles this morning, thank you very much) up to the front door to see if my long-awaited order from Photojojo had arrived. It had. Among the spoils was a wide angle/macro lens adapter that simply screws, like a filter, onto my existing lens. Macro! Basically, it's a custom-fitted magnifying glass, lo-tech stuff. But it was a fraction of the cost of a proper macro lens. So I've got no complaints. Now, I've got to wait for the sun to come out in earnest to play some more with this and the other goodies that it shipped with. I've also uploaded some more macro-tastic shots to the good ol' Flickr. In case you're interested.

I've been working on a roman shade for our bedroom going on four months now. Mostly, it'd been sitting as a heap of cut fabric panels in the corner while I attended to halloween capes and crowns and failed screen-printed scarves. But, now, I'm in full list-crossing-off mode. And all those WIPs have got to go. Had I gone through the instructions for this shade thoroughly before I started on it, all the hand stitching required might have scared me away. But now that I'm in it, just like the binding of a quilt, I'm finding it to be a nice reprieve from a day spent mollifying sick children.

Last week we sat down with one of the Mr.'s old photo albums, the one with science fair ribbons and elementary-era soccer team photos and pro baseball ticket stubs. And it reminded me that when The Boy was born we'd picked up an archival quality blank album, some fancy silver foil embossed photo corners and a photo printer. The little printer has long since been in disfavor in the household. The still-blank book and sealed package of corners were found recently amongst decorative filler. As were some cheesy head-cocked, half-smiley school photos from Houston. So that's how this morning found us, in between breakfast and soccer class, cutting up sheets of wallet-sized photos and inserting them into tongue-moisted corners (The Boy's job, obviously). Added in soccer certificates and pirate coins and tickets to the museum, all that stuff we don't have in digital. And dreamed up more memories to tuck into those corners.