Beautiful Disaster
If it's love
And we decide that it's forever
No one else could do it better
Wow, life is passing me by and when I manage to spend time on the computer I've been so busy with things I actually like doing, there's been no reason to procrastinate by blogging. Not that I dislike blogging or wish to stop, but at present it has slipped a bit on the list because there are so many other things... And I've been too busy to work anything out. I feel like I've put myself on hold until the work is done and Edmonton arrives on my doorstep like an adventure awaiting my footsteps.
I'm pretty sure that this is one of the longest times I've ever gone without posting, yet so many things are happening. I've been married for two months, and after two months it is starting to get a little easier. If anyone told me how hard marriage was going to be, I'd have gone pale. It's more the number of incredible stressors we've been undergoing than our relationship.
Moving repeatedly, wedding planning, marriage, we both have health problems and problems besides, quite a few family issues, Paul quitting his job and going back to school, me adjusting to my first year and a bit of life without school and jumpstarting (and for all intents and purposes starting) a new business, we're trying to rent our place out and find a place in Edmonton, we're going from comfortable home to being nomadic for two years. It's a kind of insanity I can barely comprehend, and I'm living in it.
We finally managed to have enough parts of the house tidied to finish all the photos to put our place up on Kijiji and we're in the process of looking and screening applicants for a tenant. An enormous amount of blood sweat and tears went into cleaning this place up after the wedding and the insanely busy lives we've been leading made it take forever. But it's starting to even out now.
If our newly minted marriage can survive all that, we can probably weather anything. And now that it has survived two months, a great deal of which felt a bit like hell, the strength of our relationship has made us happy and comfortable with each other again, given us reason to trust. We went on two road trips with each other recently, which were great ways to force me to relax and give us time to spend together.
July was mostly a Fringe Prep month, one day we walked a lot - including through fog you could feel, ate at Taste of SK, saw an Anglican Ordination, listened to half a book-on-CD... Read a bunch more. Paul's reading a lot of comics and I'm reading a lot of books and watching TV. We finished Dollhouse (<3) and I started Heroes which I am enjoying.
The Fringe was good for us, we got to spend time together, we each got to see some plays, and we both got better at promoting my business. The plays we saw were "Jesse's Girl" a hilarious comedy about friendship, two-timing women, swords under the couch for the coming zombie apocalypse, and other such things. Paul and I saw it on different days but both thought it was awesome. Paul saw a play called "Robots Eating Humans" but hated it, and I saw a really interesting Cabaret show called "Death LIVE!" which I appreciated for its excellent musicians, jazz version of the Funeral March, and poignant views on the concepts of death and loss of purpose...
The business side of the Fringe was pretty successful as an advertisement. I have a number of clients and contacts that will serve me well, and Paul and I plan to do the Fringe together again next year. The absolute highlight was the Trash the Dress shoot. After getting a lot of excitement, agreement, and general approval from every art vendor at the Fringe that I talked to, I took the lady who I found via Kijiji around to all the vendors and had them paint and draw all kinds of stuff on her. It was amazing - the sense of community, the color, the laughter and sometimes the shock. I bled myself utterly dry of energy (and sweat) over the nearly three hour shoot. Incredible, exhilarating, the stuff that makes me go, this is why I'm a photographer. I have a few amazing photographs from my last family session as well as a few more shoots coming up, including another paint-related dress trashing.
At the end of the Fringe I shot a really cool wedding where the reception was a mashup of ballet, French folksong, and Chinese food. At the end of that I was so exhausted that I felt like I was losing my mind. I don't want to get that low again. Yikes. But the photos were great despite my exhaustion and bad mood, and my first experience shooting with a second shooter (whom I'd only met a few days prior) was actually really great. My favourite photo of them:
To make matters worse, the eczema I've always suffered with exploded after my week of crazy and left me covered in sores. Paul and I went to Yorkton for one of his work trips the day after the crazy died down and I drove back to the city overnight to make it to a morning appointment with a new dermatologist. He walked into the room, smiled at me, and said, "We're going to fix you up. We'll have the eczema gone within a month - it will never be this bad again." He proceeded to explain to me and discuss with his intern, who was a pleasant Asian girl, about how people with genetic eczema like this have a protein deficiency in their skin which leads to bad bacteria causing breakouts - not only that but he said I had a classic pattern on my face of a related problem - an allergy to a yeast the body naturally produces on the skin. He gave me a list of a bunch of things to do (only some of which I was already doing) and about $250 worth of creams and other meds. I am now on antifungal and antibacterial meds, and my skin is clearing to an unheard of degree. The itch is still a bit of a problem, but I am so excited about the healing I've experienced. What an amazing answer to prayer. I waited so many years for this. Paul is helping me stay faithful to a medical regime that seems a little ridiculous in scope, but it's working and that's more than can be said for anything else I've ever experienced in medicine. Finally someone took a look at me and knew what to do.
So after Regina and Yorkton, we've been spending lots of time together having date nights. We have plans for basketball, Folkfest this weekend, and more. Life is great and exciting and adventuresome now, after the valley. Not exactly smooth, but a whole lot better.
Oh yeah. On the overnight trip from Yorkton I lost control of the car trying not to hit a miscellaneous small animal and appreciated all my ice-track time when sliding across the pavement and ending up backwards before skidding to a halt. Then I hit (grazed really) what I think was an already dead cat and missed a trotting skunk by inches. I have never had a trip so laden with wildlife issues in my life. Also, lots of fog. Got home safe and sound by the grace of God, at 4am.
The other night we hosted a birthday party starring Paul and for our two families and his only really good friend who could make it, Zach and Sheena. It was a smoothie night, so extreme amounts of various fruits were consumed in liquefied formats. The gift cards are going to make life cooler for awhile - and one of them was very timely - a theatre gift card that enabled us to go see Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. I am pretty sure that's the best movie I've seen since Ice Age 3 and it's definitely better. It's right up there with the original Matrix for new special effects. And it's utterly hilarious.
As we were walking out, a couple of punk-looking guys stopped us and gave us tokens to play Air Hockey - the guy said he'd bought $150 worth of tokens and was giving them away. We were really pleased and enjoyed a great mano-a-womano game, neck and neck to the end, though Paul won.
My business is really thriving. I have a fairly steady income, a number of long term contracts and a bunch of short term ones too. I'm so busy I had to develop a new filing system for Admire work and greatly improve my To Do list spreadsheet. I am loving it, though. I am making a reasonable amount of money, my work is popular. Today I officially established a relationship with the florist whose art graced my wedding. I really like her and her husband and their business, so I'm happy to partner with them. I will soon be launching a new website with a section for partners, which I am looking forward to.
I am really happy that life is on the uphill slope, but boy do I have a lot of work to do. I still feel pretty messed up. There's a lot of healing I need under my skin, too.
I've got lots of media happening in our lives too... new music, new TV series, lots of new books especially about business and finance (Fast Track Photograher, Marketing Outrageously, etc.) as well as a few great fantasy and mystery series in the works (Patricia Briggs, Tamora Pierce, Laurie King...)
I should note that my business now has a blog and I've posted a number of things there including videos of recent work and some perspectives on photography. Please feel free to follow me or subscribe to the RSS feed!
And we decide that it's forever
No one else could do it better
Wow, life is passing me by and when I manage to spend time on the computer I've been so busy with things I actually like doing, there's been no reason to procrastinate by blogging. Not that I dislike blogging or wish to stop, but at present it has slipped a bit on the list because there are so many other things... And I've been too busy to work anything out. I feel like I've put myself on hold until the work is done and Edmonton arrives on my doorstep like an adventure awaiting my footsteps.
I'm pretty sure that this is one of the longest times I've ever gone without posting, yet so many things are happening. I've been married for two months, and after two months it is starting to get a little easier. If anyone told me how hard marriage was going to be, I'd have gone pale. It's more the number of incredible stressors we've been undergoing than our relationship.
Moving repeatedly, wedding planning, marriage, we both have health problems and problems besides, quite a few family issues, Paul quitting his job and going back to school, me adjusting to my first year and a bit of life without school and jumpstarting (and for all intents and purposes starting) a new business, we're trying to rent our place out and find a place in Edmonton, we're going from comfortable home to being nomadic for two years. It's a kind of insanity I can barely comprehend, and I'm living in it.
We finally managed to have enough parts of the house tidied to finish all the photos to put our place up on Kijiji and we're in the process of looking and screening applicants for a tenant. An enormous amount of blood sweat and tears went into cleaning this place up after the wedding and the insanely busy lives we've been leading made it take forever. But it's starting to even out now.
If our newly minted marriage can survive all that, we can probably weather anything. And now that it has survived two months, a great deal of which felt a bit like hell, the strength of our relationship has made us happy and comfortable with each other again, given us reason to trust. We went on two road trips with each other recently, which were great ways to force me to relax and give us time to spend together.
July was mostly a Fringe Prep month, one day we walked a lot - including through fog you could feel, ate at Taste of SK, saw an Anglican Ordination, listened to half a book-on-CD... Read a bunch more. Paul's reading a lot of comics and I'm reading a lot of books and watching TV. We finished Dollhouse (<3) and I started Heroes which I am enjoying.
The Fringe was good for us, we got to spend time together, we each got to see some plays, and we both got better at promoting my business. The plays we saw were "Jesse's Girl" a hilarious comedy about friendship, two-timing women, swords under the couch for the coming zombie apocalypse, and other such things. Paul and I saw it on different days but both thought it was awesome. Paul saw a play called "Robots Eating Humans" but hated it, and I saw a really interesting Cabaret show called "Death LIVE!" which I appreciated for its excellent musicians, jazz version of the Funeral March, and poignant views on the concepts of death and loss of purpose...
The business side of the Fringe was pretty successful as an advertisement. I have a number of clients and contacts that will serve me well, and Paul and I plan to do the Fringe together again next year. The absolute highlight was the Trash the Dress shoot. After getting a lot of excitement, agreement, and general approval from every art vendor at the Fringe that I talked to, I took the lady who I found via Kijiji around to all the vendors and had them paint and draw all kinds of stuff on her. It was amazing - the sense of community, the color, the laughter and sometimes the shock. I bled myself utterly dry of energy (and sweat) over the nearly three hour shoot. Incredible, exhilarating, the stuff that makes me go, this is why I'm a photographer. I have a few amazing photographs from my last family session as well as a few more shoots coming up, including another paint-related dress trashing.
At the end of the Fringe I shot a really cool wedding where the reception was a mashup of ballet, French folksong, and Chinese food. At the end of that I was so exhausted that I felt like I was losing my mind. I don't want to get that low again. Yikes. But the photos were great despite my exhaustion and bad mood, and my first experience shooting with a second shooter (whom I'd only met a few days prior) was actually really great. My favourite photo of them:
To make matters worse, the eczema I've always suffered with exploded after my week of crazy and left me covered in sores. Paul and I went to Yorkton for one of his work trips the day after the crazy died down and I drove back to the city overnight to make it to a morning appointment with a new dermatologist. He walked into the room, smiled at me, and said, "We're going to fix you up. We'll have the eczema gone within a month - it will never be this bad again." He proceeded to explain to me and discuss with his intern, who was a pleasant Asian girl, about how people with genetic eczema like this have a protein deficiency in their skin which leads to bad bacteria causing breakouts - not only that but he said I had a classic pattern on my face of a related problem - an allergy to a yeast the body naturally produces on the skin. He gave me a list of a bunch of things to do (only some of which I was already doing) and about $250 worth of creams and other meds. I am now on antifungal and antibacterial meds, and my skin is clearing to an unheard of degree. The itch is still a bit of a problem, but I am so excited about the healing I've experienced. What an amazing answer to prayer. I waited so many years for this. Paul is helping me stay faithful to a medical regime that seems a little ridiculous in scope, but it's working and that's more than can be said for anything else I've ever experienced in medicine. Finally someone took a look at me and knew what to do.
So after Regina and Yorkton, we've been spending lots of time together having date nights. We have plans for basketball, Folkfest this weekend, and more. Life is great and exciting and adventuresome now, after the valley. Not exactly smooth, but a whole lot better.
Oh yeah. On the overnight trip from Yorkton I lost control of the car trying not to hit a miscellaneous small animal and appreciated all my ice-track time when sliding across the pavement and ending up backwards before skidding to a halt. Then I hit (grazed really) what I think was an already dead cat and missed a trotting skunk by inches. I have never had a trip so laden with wildlife issues in my life. Also, lots of fog. Got home safe and sound by the grace of God, at 4am.
The other night we hosted a birthday party starring Paul and for our two families and his only really good friend who could make it, Zach and Sheena. It was a smoothie night, so extreme amounts of various fruits were consumed in liquefied formats. The gift cards are going to make life cooler for awhile - and one of them was very timely - a theatre gift card that enabled us to go see Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. I am pretty sure that's the best movie I've seen since Ice Age 3 and it's definitely better. It's right up there with the original Matrix for new special effects. And it's utterly hilarious.
As we were walking out, a couple of punk-looking guys stopped us and gave us tokens to play Air Hockey - the guy said he'd bought $150 worth of tokens and was giving them away. We were really pleased and enjoyed a great mano-a-womano game, neck and neck to the end, though Paul won.
My business is really thriving. I have a fairly steady income, a number of long term contracts and a bunch of short term ones too. I'm so busy I had to develop a new filing system for Admire work and greatly improve my To Do list spreadsheet. I am loving it, though. I am making a reasonable amount of money, my work is popular. Today I officially established a relationship with the florist whose art graced my wedding. I really like her and her husband and their business, so I'm happy to partner with them. I will soon be launching a new website with a section for partners, which I am looking forward to.
I am really happy that life is on the uphill slope, but boy do I have a lot of work to do. I still feel pretty messed up. There's a lot of healing I need under my skin, too.
I've got lots of media happening in our lives too... new music, new TV series, lots of new books especially about business and finance (Fast Track Photograher, Marketing Outrageously, etc.) as well as a few great fantasy and mystery series in the works (Patricia Briggs, Tamora Pierce, Laurie King...)
I should note that my business now has a blog and I've posted a number of things there including videos of recent work and some perspectives on photography. Please feel free to follow me or subscribe to the RSS feed!