Hot Diggity Dog!

My child. She’s a wonderful child. She’s smart and compassionate and witty. She has goals and dreams and ambition. But she has her vices. She loves shortbread. And texting. And The Food Network. All of which she can walk away from at any time. But the one thing, she absolutely, positively, without a doubt can never EVER resist….is a cardboard cut-out.

Seriously, it must be an illness, ‘cause I don’t know where else she would get it.

Snap Shots

I carry my camera just about everywhere I go these days, but I still find myself without it when some of the best photo ops cross my path. Like the night during the ice storm hell when I stopped at Kroger on my way home from a twenty hour work day and found myself parked next to a car that held a big dog with both paws on the wheel as if he were driving. Maybe I was amused out of exhaustion, but I thought it was hilarious, and I hated that I couldn’t capture it. Everywhere I look these days, I see moments like that I’d like to preserve.

Also, during the ice storm I pulled into the parking lot of the electric utility that serves my home and watched as a middle aged woman exited the building, walked to her car and then laid herself against the car and bawled her eyes out. This was about day fifteen of the power outage, and I assumed she had gotten bad news about her prospects for getting electricity soon. I had my camera that day, and longed to take her picture but refrained from intruding on such an intimate moment. But oh, how I wanted to take that picture. Often, I long to take pictures in the most inappropriate places.

Church is one of those places. The Sunday morning sermon is full of little moments that I would take pictures of if the rest of the congregation (and the preacher) didn’t mind me snapping away. And if I wasn’t supposed to be listening instead of playing. This past Sunday was a prime example. I kept seeing photos everywhere. Even now, I can visualize the pictures and how I’d tweak them in PhotoShop. I would have done most of them in black and white. Alas, I couldn’t take them, and I couldn’t post them. I CAN tell you about them. You will have to use your imagination, but perhaps it’s better that way. Things are often much better in our imagination than they are in real life. I’ll tell you about the pictures I wanted to take, and you tell me if you can see them when you read about them.

1. Five young children eagerly peering over the rail of the balcony with only their little faces visible to those of us below.
2. A senior member of the congregation, a widow, holding and playing with the baby of the young couple sitting in the pew behind her.
3. The face of a choir member as he concentrated on a particularly difficult song note.
4. The fifty-something daughter who always sits with her arm around her mother as if she’s afraid her mother will disappear if she lets go of her.
5. The quizzical face of the four year old near me at the communion rail as he reached for the usher’s bread tray.
6. The same face of the four year old as he struggled to pick a tiny piece of bread out of his little communion cup.

Can you see them? Can you? I think #6 is my favorite. How about you?

Stop, In The Name of Love Before You Blind My Eyes

Hula + new camera + three month old nephew = picture taking to the nth degree. Dinner with Special D. (and the rest of the family but who's counting them) Monday night had me out of control. The quest to get a shot of him smiling in low light under wiggly circumstances took all dadgum evening. I finally landed one right before we left. I tried to make it work without a flash, so as not to blind him, but I think his retinas are at the very least detached. Forgive the fuzziness of these pictures. They're really too out of focus to use, but I'm posting them anyway because they tell the story of the evening.

Now, he's no stranger to the camera, but let's just say he was a little tired of it before the salad even arrived.

Hey, who's that crazy lady with the camera?

What the heck is that noise?

Has she quit yet, Teen Angel? Can I look?

Unc, make her stop. Hey, maybe if I poop on her, she'll quit.

Ack! There she goes again. Good Gerber woman, don't you ever quit?!

A little help over here. Anybody? ANYBODY? Maybe the pitiful look will work. That usually guilt's SOMEBODY into giving me my way.

Oh alright, I'll just smile and get it over with. Check please.

Um, I should be wrapping presents and such however.....

What do you do when you still have way to much Christmas stuff to pull together but you're hours away from a week and a half of vacation and hopped up on appetizers? Why, you piddle on the internet of course. Is it narcissistic to do this?

Or this?

And can I tell you how cool I think it is to be on some hot guy's abs AND his cell phone.

Burp. Somebody pass me some more queso dip.

*photos from photofunia.com

Thirteen puppies!

Take a walk with me down memory lane for just a minute and observe the picture to your left. Let's call it a ghost of Christmas past. Mama finally let me borrow some of her old family photo albums so I can make copies of some pictures, and I found this little gem. Actually, I found enough blog fodder for the next two years, but I don't want to get kicked out of my family, so I'll have to be choosy about what I post. This picture of me and SuperCop makes me smile. This is around around 1972 or 1973. Our Irish setter, Shannon, had her first and only litter of puppies several weeks before Christmas. She had thirteen puppies! We ended up with only twelve because the runt of the litter didn't make it. I'm not sure if he just wasn't strong enough or if he got mashed in the crowded refrigerator box/bed we made for Shannon and her puppies in the warm basement. We loved those puppies and wanted to keep them all, but mama and daddy said no, so we hugged and squeezed them and dragged them around until they went home with new owners. I was sad when each one left. Aren't they sweet? And isn't SuperCop cute with those cheeks and red hair? This photo just screams the 70's don't ya' think? The potential for laughs is all over the place.

First of all there's the pretzel pants I'm wearing. Stunning. I loved those pants. It was one of many fashion faux pauxs I would commit over the years. And look at my crooked bangs. I could never sit still when mama trimmed my hair, so I walked around with crooked bangs a lot. She used to lay a piece of masking tape across my forehead and cut it off, leaving what was supposed to be a straight line of bangs. It never worked. It wasn't her fault that I wiggled like a worm in hot ashes. Check out the artificial Christmas tree with homemade snowflakes. I loved cutting snowflakes out of paper. I was a regular litter bug at Christmas, leaving a trial of paper scraps behind me wherever I went. My very favorite part of this picture, though, is the cardboard fireplace. Now, I remember these being very popular back in the 70's, and I felt pretty uptown because we had one. I especially remember hanging our stockings on it and digging in them Christmas morning for goodies. It's certainly not something the editors of Better Homes and Gardens would publish today, but back then it felt pretty chic. We've come a long way baby, since the 70's, but I have a feeling that in about twenty years when we look back at photos of Christmas 2007, we're going to get the same kind of chuckle out of lawn inflatables, dancing Santas and fiber optic trees. Keep that in mind when someone takes your picture this holiday season. Now, let me see a show of hands. Who had the cardboard fireplace? Come on. It's okay. There's no need to be ashamed. Repeat after me...my name is (insert name here) and I'm a victim of the cardboard fireplace.......