Photo Therapy

What to do on a rainy Saturday after Thanksgiving?  This:

I got the last of my pressed leaves from the giant dictionary and played with my bucket of leaves for hours, until the camera battery died.

My daughter helped me with the lighting and composition and editing. I learned to play with the histograms and edit the pictures to make them pop. I'm not sure what you're supposed to do, but I just crop and crank up the black pixels.

I spent hours editing the leaf photo file from November. After deleting all the ones I could part with, this month's file has 1251 photos. That's maybe a few hundred too many. October's has 2055 pictures, so November was an improvement, photo-OCD-wise.

I know I should clean up the files, but who do I delete? All these pretty textures and colors and patterns - 

they remind me of stained glass windows in church, and sunny days, and earthy smells. They make me happy, even if they are filling up my hard drive.

I can't think of a better waste of time or space on a rainy Saturday.

Turkey Day My Way

So, me, miss bah humbug, no travel, no family, no Holiday Spirit, went a little overboard this Thanksgiving. It started with a recipe for chocolate pudding layered dessert that  reminded me of french silk pie. Nobody here eats pie, so it was worth a shot. We're the strangest bunch of picky eaters known to man, so I was going to make a simple meal.

I stopped by the grocery store after my late shift Tuesday for a handful of items and filled the cart, reminiscing about my childhood favorites. It was all downhill from there.

My husband grilled a turkey breast on the rotisserie, I roasted some wings and carmelized onions, garlic, carrot and celery for my gravy stock. We played music and cooked all day, and I didn't mind a bit.

Here's how the menu ended up:

Roast turkey breast and gravy
smashed yukon gold potatoes
cornbread stuffing
slippery dumplings
long grain and wild rice
cooked carrots
steamed broccoli
grean beans
rolls
roasted brussel sprouts *
cooked kale and onions *
yellow squash casserole *
whipped acorn squash and sweet potatoes *

coolwhip cream cheese pudding pecan pie for dessert, also known as better than sex, but I didn't call it that because I wanted the kids to try it. At least one of them did. My husband and I loved it, and thank goodness I only made half a batch, because we're stuffed from eating too much everything.

* These are the items that I alone ate. I tried to get everyone to at least taste them and then decide, but all three of them said no thanks. That's ok. I'll eat this stuff all week. I can't decide which was my favorite.

I took no pictures, skipped the formal dining room, the fancy plates, the shiny gold and silver flatware, the candles, the linen napkins, and we served everything right off the stove from pans and casserole dishes. It just seemed silly to put it all into serving dishes for just us, although I've always done that until this year. And guess what? Nobody cared, in fact, it was easy keeping it casual. Maybe I shouldn't have used the Halloween paper napkins, but oh well, and again, nobody noticed.

Our families may be scattered and our traditions a little threadbare, but at least we had a nice meal together,  just the four of us, with something for everyone, and a lot for just me! I didn't stress out one tiny bit this year and that is a first, because pulling a big meal together with precision timing is not my talent. We made it happen just fine, though, and it was all good. We were appropriately thankful, and grateful, which is the point, I think. That and eating more than usual because you can, and it's all just too good.

I hope your Thanksgiving was all you needed it to be, nobody stressed out and everything was yummy. What's the best thing you ate or did today?

And So It Goes...

I'm carrying this book around like a baby.

Kurt Vonnegut's eyes are the last thing I look at at night and the first thing I look at in the morning.

What I see in those eyes changes daily.

I'm reading as fast as I can, mostly in stolen moments, which is very frustrating. Life is not cooperating with my need to engross myself in this book right now. In a perfect world, I'd be in a self guided college English course, rereading Mr. Vonnegut's stories and novels in chronological order, analyzing them in the context of this biography, trying to make sense of it all, but my world is very far from perfect. So I read on and on in snippets, ever anxious about the review I need to write in exchange for my advanced copy, feeling at once rushed and unwilling to hurry. I don't want this book to end. I don't want to know what happens next, because I know what happens in the end.

Context is everything, and I was missing a lot of context while reading Vonnegut's books over the last thirty years.  I reread both Slaughterhouse Five and Breakfast of Champions a couple of years ago, and they both made me laugh and cry repeatedly, so sad and yet still hopeful. I knew so little about one of my favorite authors that I am somewhat ashamed. Somehow, in the 1970's I became fixated with war stories, soldier's memoirs, especially Vietnam and WWII, probably because I knew and loved some pretty damaged veterans, and I saw them struggle to live a regular life. I tend to compartmentalize their sadness or brokenness as a logical result of surviving the insanity of war. I suppose I saw Kurt Vonnegut through that tinted lens, and failed to see all the other shades of sadness in his life, both before and after his release as a POW. I'm guilty of thinking in my narrow mind that he wrote these cathartic works and went about his quirky way as an esteemed author. I was very wrong. I'm beginning to get a sense of how difficult a project this must have been for anyone to undertake, and a deep respect for the author who convinced Kurt Vonnegut to let him write it.

Of course, when I am done living in the book altered reality of  And So It Goes , I suppose I owe it to myself and Mr. Shields to read his biography of Harper Lee, Mockingbird.

Mr. Shields writes a wonderful blog about writing if you care to give it a look. He's a fine writer, and based on his kind comment on my little corner of the blog world, and his taking the time to email me, a fine person as well. If you're a biography fan, or a Vonnegut fan, his book will make you think, laugh, cry and so on.

Happy reading!


ps!!!

I'm outraged that Blogger deleted the amazing work of art that is The Dishwasher's Tears.

If you love your blog and you don't want to lose it, in your dashboard, Settings Tab, Basic, Blog tools is an Export Blog choice. Blogger will download all the text in your blog to your computer and you will have it on your hard drive. HOWEVER, pictures and embedded items do not follow.

Or, you could open a wordpress account and import from your blogger site with a few permission clicks. Everything is there, easy peasy. I'm working on my transfer now, it's here if you fancy a look. I like the change myself.

Or, if you really want to go all out, the website blog2print will turn your blog into a book and sell it to you for a fee. You should play around just to see what your blog looks like as a book, it's fast and free, unless you want to touch it!

Happy Weekend everyone.

Hope the Dishwasher is back online soon. I need a fix.

On second thought....

I was going to post more leaf pictures and whine about the change of seasons, the time change and my confusing, confounding new job, but screw that. Instead here's a video to make you laugh with satire and irony, and a video to make you laugh and cry with wonder.


Roy Zimmerman's extraordinary political satire:



Hope it made you laugh too. Roy is performing in Florida this week.


Liberty and Sophie encounter a Murmuration:



I've watched this 6 times now and still get goosebumps, and smile along with them at 1:48.

My kids found it fascinating, and it led us down a rabbit hole of youtube videos on such things. The world is a mysterious and wondrous place, my friends.

Happy Sunday and have a great week.

xo


p.s.

OK, maybe just ONE leaf picture, one of the 904 I've taken in November, one photo showing the shrub that now has ONE leaf left clinging to it. not that I'm complaining.  Oh wait, maybe I am. Oh Well.

p.p.s.

I'm reading an Advanced Copy of  And So It Goes  Kurt Vonnegut: A Life,  and it is just so damn sad. I knew he survived the fire bombing of Dresden. I knew he was damaged by war. I did not know he came home on leave prior to his deployment to surprise his family and his mother for Mother's Day, and that his mother committed suicide by overdosing on sleeping pills that weekend, while he was home. His mom was a mess, and never recovered from the loss of social status during the Depression, and Kurt never felt loved in the first place, but this? Too cruel. I'm less than 60 pages into the 420 page book, and my heart is just breaking for poor Kurt. I'm going to have to reread a lot of his work through new eyes when I am finished with the biography.

That is all for now.

Leaf Abstracts

I was just going to press a few leaves to play with, but I got carried away. I have leaves pressed everywhere, and playing with them backlit, macro has been way too much fun.These are from a frenzied but fun hour yesterday. I can't wait until I have a chunk of time to really experiment with light and focus.

I'm fascinated by the variations that light can cause. This little leaf....

... becomes yellow green and pinkish....

....but a slight tilt and the green fades and the purple pops.

This one is as lovely as stained glass windows. I'll be playing with this leaf a lot more.

A few years ago, I decided I wanted to learn to paint abstracts, but I gave up. Nothing I could create could come close to pleasing my eye like these leaf photos. Nature already made all the art I need. I'm just learning to catch it so I can look at it whenever I want to.

Happy Friday from the land of the easily amused.