My Etsy Shop!

Oh, Half-Assed Mama community--I am so, so happy to announce the opening (finally!) of my Etsy shop, amymorgan jewelry. Please come visit!

365 Project Photos

So, regular readers will perhaps have noticed that we're quieter than usual around here. For my part, writing has been low on the list of ways I feel capable of expending my creative energy. Which is really pretty ungood for me, but there you have it. In the absence of writing, I've committed to a 365 self portrait project for the year, which...well, let's just say there may actually be well over 365 photos by the end of the year, but it won't be because I'm diligently taking one photo a day every day. No, not so much.

Which leads me to some genuinely interesting questions about why I'm doing a year-long project, what I want from it, how I want to (gasp!) improve my technical knowledge and execution, why self portraits in particular, how much can you do with self portraits, etc. Which will all maybe encourage me to sit and write at some point, which is a cheerful thought. But for now, I thought I'd take on at least a little bit of the bloggie responsibility around here and share some of the photos I've done so far this month, the ones I'm most excited about.  xoxo

•food boast•

In case I get whine-y and complain, let it be known that today was a good food day. Pumpkin bread was baked with coconut oil & delivered to friends. A persimmon was et. After a run, two soft eggs went down with water. "Soft egg" is what Penn calls a soft-boiled egg, and I like the convention. Okra was breaded with korma spices (and whole coriander!) and fried in olive oil whilst I endured the final presidential debate on the radio, and warmed up Christmas soup. Note: actual soup frozen in December is especially delightful to discover in October. Ten months, well-spent! A pumpkin beer from Uinta Brewing Company helped a great deal. Dessert was a pomegranate.

Today, the forecast was tornadoes. Nicely averted.  xox

This Post is Probably a Mess, and I'm Posting it Anyway.

So, I got this new job. And I left California and the entire life I'd built up there over the last thirteen years. And I had to leave my dogs behind, which is, frankly, so heart wrenching that I'm pretty certain it hasn't even sunk in yet. It just doesn't feel real. I'm just on vacation, or simply in the part of the week when their other parent has them--it's not possible that they're an entire continent away from me, and that I won't get to see them this week, this month, this year maybe.

They have a good life, tons of love and doggie field trips and the best possible medical care imaginable. And I had an incredible opportunity to come back to a place that I love almost beyond my power to describe it. And my life in California had been winding down for a while. I was really only staying put for Annie and Tigger. And if they were human children, that might have made sense, and if they were mine alone, I wouldn't have thought twice--they'd have come with me. 

But I didn't sit down here to write about them, though I think I'll leave it up there.

The job: I'm working at Bryn Mawr College, in the theater, where I spent pretty much all my time as a college student in the late '80s. I haven't worked in theater since the late '90s. And I never imagined I'd return to Bryn Mawr this way. But here I am, polishing up the technical theater skills I abandoned a while back. Remembering how I love the sawdusty smell of a theater, the oddball problems that crop up, the challenge of learning a new technical skill (uber-advanced lighting and sound systems, anyone?). Remembering how much I like working as part of a real team--in person, on a day-to-day basis. It's different from the solitary work I've been doing, writing and editing and only communicating by email. Or putting together a cooking class in my kitchen or making jewelry all by myself. And it's delightfully different from working in an office--a fact I keep realizing every time I find myself climbing something or carrying something or running around the building at the last minute to make sure there are enough chairs on the stage for the event that's beginning in seconds.

But setting aside the theater work, this job is going to be a lot about working with the students--helping, advising, training, mentoring. Giving back and sharing, in a very real way, something that absolutely was given to me in this place. Helping them, I hope, to develop their senses of self, their capabilities, their solidity. Their ability to solve hard problems--fast, on the fly. Their ability to climb tall ladders and carry heavy things and to use power tools. Their ability to make something beautiful. Their ability to plunge into spaces where they know nothing at all and to teach themselves exactly what they need to know to occupy those spaces comfortably--to own them.

Yesterday, the freshman arrived, and at the end of the day, they were all piled onto the main stage in the theater, their families and friends in the audience, as they were officially welcomed by the president of the college and a number of other folks. I sat at the back of the house, watching that sea of 380 young women who don't yet know one another, and all I could imagine was the sea of young women with whom I entered the college 25 years ago. I remember on one of the first nights of orientation (or Customs Week, as we call it), being gathered in the gymnasium to fill out some form or other. We sprawled all over the gym floor, and the lighting was fluorescent and yellow over all the unfamiliar faces, and I felt both a bit lost and so eager to know these people and be known by them. And then I thought about all the ways that this place helped shape me.

And it's 25 years on, and many of those people are among the dearest ones I can imagine, and many of them are quite literally an everyday part of my life--along with many other Mawrters I've met along the way, both during and since college. And here I am again, home in some very deep way--returned to the mother ship, as many of us jokingly refer to it, this place that has been, for me and I know for others, quite literally an "alma mater."

Note to Self II

All those things you're holding onto, all those things you love? 

Sometimes, when you ask the universe for something more, something bigger, the thing you'll get back will be such a large possibility, so much more than you'd imagined you were asking for, that you'll need to put down all the things you're holding in order even to attempt to pick up this new gift. 

If you manage to pick it up, the new gift will wreck some very good ideas, some very beautiful plans, at least for now. And even trying to pick it up will require the willingness to walk away from something so precious your heart will break at the very possibility. 

Remember that holding onto the precious thing requires making a choice that will keep you stunted. Remembering that won't keep your heart from breaking, but it might save you from making the small choice.

Blur

Self portraits taken today for Rewriting the Story. The assignment was to play with blur and focus--blurring things that might normally be your focus, focusing on things that wouldn't. I was a little stumped about how to control the focus while using a remote (which automatically focuses the camera). I could have set the focus manually and then set the self timer, but really--ten seconds to clamber around too many branches or climb past brambles to perch on a fallen tree? In a delicate, filmy dress? Yeah, not happening. So I messed around with making things "blurry" in one way or another during editing.

The blur interests me on levels I have no energy to delve into right now. I've been sick the past couple of days, and I have other posts stewing in my brain, but I can't write those now either. (It's amazing I managed to get any photos done.) But sometimes, I just like to come here and check in. Or reach out. Make a mark somehow.

Starry, Starry...Well, Everything, Just Now...

This week in Swan Dive, we've been creating texture photos to use for layering. Below is a texture I painted last fall (when I took the class for the first time). It's sort of texturally interesting, but so far I've found that it's not entirely well suited to my photos.



A bit of playing around with it in PicMonkey and Pixlr Express, however, and I got this:



Specifically, I softened and intensified the original a bit (using the Orton effect in PicMonkey), then I took it over to Pixlr and layered on one of their star overlays two times at full strength. And now I can't stop layering it over my photos. For example:



Or this, originally seen edited completely differently here:

Fairy Tale Photo Edits for Today

All played with, as that's my M.O. for this month.

I often have mixed feelings about doing this to photos--it's really fun to do, and I can get really into the experimentation. But I'm not always sure I like the results. The beauty of being able to play with them like this? The two below weren't very good photos to begin with, and now they're at least interesting to look at--see the before and after.

Before: Booooring

After. "Who's that trip-trapping across my bridge?"
All edits and textures from PicMonkey and Pixlr Express

Before

After--texture can be found here

So...definitely more interesting than the originals. Definitely a lot of fun to make. But they're not really anything more than pretty, you know? Not that there's anything wrong with pretty, but apparently I have a complicated relationship with making things that are just pretty.

But I don't always feel this way about editing heavily. Sometimes, it's precisely, exactly what a photo needs to become precisely, exactly what it's meant to become. Below, for instance, is my favorite self portrait so far. In altering the image's texture and color, I turned it into something that has less to do with what I look like, and more to do with being...I'm not really sure how to put it. But it became something outside of myself, something that has a deeper story, and something I hope is more than merely pretty. And I love that.

Also interesting--the texture on the self portrait is the very same texture I used on the orchard photo above. It works well on both, but it's astonishing how vastly different the total effect is, no?

Sunday Drive

I got in my car this afternoon with my camera and no particular plan except to get a cup of coffee and go somewhere beautiful to take some pictures for class. So, coffee in hand, I took off toward those hills I love, thinking I'd probably wind up at Cold Canyon to walk along the creek for a while. But once I got to the turnout where everyone parks to access the hiking trails, it was completely packed with cars.

So I just kept driving--up around Monticello Dam, where Lake Berryessa begins, and really into the hills. And when the road split into 128 and 121, I took 128 toward Napa. I've known for a long time that you can get to Napa that way, of course, but I've never driven the route--I thought it would take a lot longer than it actually does. Frankly, it can't be much more than half an hour longer than taking the highway, and it's about a thousand times more beautiful. I stopped a lot to take pictures.

(Photos are clickable for enlargification-type purposes.)

Caution: Hyper Edited Photos Ahead!

Since playful post-processing in the service of freeing one's creative intuition and discovering one's visual voice is sort of the point of the class, a little bit of hyper editing is a very good thing. (Also: Yet another free online photo editing program!)

And yes, I'm posting photos rather than writing anything real. It's a tiny door back into the blog--say, one of those cat doors you stick in your sliding glass door--but at least I'm crawling through it.

Without further ado, I present to you three takes on some nectarine blossoms. (So my landlord tells me, and she's someone I have reason to trust about plants...though, even she seemed maybe not 100 percent sure? So you know, whatever. Oooh, look! Pretty flowers!)

Just a Photograph, Plus Some Online Photo Editing Options

I've been silent lately, mostly out of exhaustion. I miss it here, though, and I'm hoping to come back soon. Meanwhile, I've just started another class with the lovely Vivienne McMaster. (And there may still be time to join, if anyone out there is interested! You all know I can't say enough about how much I love Viv and her online photography classes, right?)

Anyway, this is a photo I took a week or so ago, but just got around to editing today--in the playful, and hopefully messy, manner of our current assignment. Which is to say--a bit on the over edited side, but totally fun in its over-the-topness!

The dip in the hills (also seen at a distance here) is called the Berryessa Gap. Through it and into the hills a bit lies Lake Berryessa, and around the lake and over the hills and some very beautiful and windy roads you eventually get to Napa and Sonoma, set in their own little valleys in the hills. It's a beautiful place, this place I live.

For those of you who are concerned about Picnik closing this month, do you know about PicMonkey, Pixlr, and Pixlr Express? PicMonkey is the most like Picnik, which makes sense, as it seems to have been developed by the same folks. Pixlr Express is easy and straightforward--I'm having some trouble understanding the main Pixlr program, which is apparently a bit more like Photoshop? Which would explain my confusion. But they're all very, very useful to know about as free online photo editing options. That don't force you to join Google+.

UPDATE: After I posted this, I found this incredibly helpful link to a (rather large) collection of short, easy to follow videos all about using Pixlr! It's a wonderful resource--many, many thanks to whoever is behind this little labor of love.

Notebooks

(This essay is old, but I was thinking about it recently when I read Alice's post here, and then I found the pendant and used it for photo experimentation. [And I have to say, the photos are at least a whole lot better than they used to be!])



On the sofa next to me are no fewer than four journals of various sizes, all partially filled. There are also two sketch books (one large, one small), and a large pad of silky, sturdy graph paper that I like to use for taking notes and making lists and for sketching. In addition to the notebook pages that have been written or drawn on, each of these books has its own collection of scrap paper shoved into it, not quite fitting, getting worn and ripped around the edges that stick out.

I was looking for a list of words I’d written down at some point, thinking that I wanted to use them as the basis for a writing exercise. I scribbled them on one page or another, somewhere toward the back of a journal, or so I thought. But I currently have no idea where they are—I can’t find them in any of these books, and I can’t think of any other notebooks I’ve been schlepping around with me over the past year and a half. (I mean really, isn’t seven enough?) The rest of my notebook collection is neatly packed away in a box, historical documents now. But I came across my inspired word list just recently, so surely it’s in one of these living, breathing, and extremely disorganized books.

But if I can’t find the list, I have at least gotten a chance to look over a portrait of my brain as it really seems to work on a day-to-day basis, and I have to say, it’s a little distressing. For one thing, my journal writing has been less than regular of late. I know that my writing is better when I keep a more regular journal—and by “better” I mean that honest-to-God non-journal pieces of writing happen more often.

On the other hand, it seems that I never stop taking notes of one kind or another, even when the goal isn’t anything you could call “writing.” Example: My life is absolutely littered with tiny bits of paper covered in ideas about food. “Steamed carrots with vinaigrette/dill/etc.” says one. Another: “Greek style ‘yogurt’ with almonds and honey.” And then there’s simply: “coffee and chocolate frappé thingy.” The same page contains notes like, “get soldering stuff working,” and the somewhat cryptic-unless-you-live-in-my-head, “etsy!”

Other pages list the measurements of various beloved children for whom I’ve made clothing or plan to do so. Lists of spices my acupuncturist wants me to incorporate into my diet. Over-ambitious to-do lists that, I note, are in most cases still not completed. Almost dictatorial lists of life goals: “Learn to play the guitar/Make more of my own clothes/write more/learn to balance creative endeavors.”

The sketch books are just as overwhelming, with drawings for pieces of jewelry or clothing I want to make, various designs I’d like to turn into texture stamps for jewelry, not to mention all the things that aren’t sketches (more lists of food, more to-do lists, and the occasional more-to-the-point notes on soldering, polishing, forming a bezel, etc.).

So these notebooks are a mess, and I’m not sure what to think about that. My lack of focused writing frustrates me, and it’s super annoying not to know where things are when you want to find them again. I like to think I’d prefer to have one journal and one sketchbook and fill all the pages before jumping to new books. I’d like to keep my writing and sketching segregated from my to-do listing and recipe imagining. Surely I’d be way more productive if I had a place for everything and if everything were in its place.

And yet, just now I found a year-old sketch I wouldn’t have said I was thinking much about—it’s for a small, roughly drawn landscape pendant, with a tree in the bottom left corner, a hill behind it, and a moon in the top right corner. I hadn’t looked at it in months. But as it turns out, I took almost that exact pendant out of my kiln just yesterday:

I can’t consciously remember the words on that lost list, but maybe someday soon I’ll write something with them anyway.

What Friday Looked Like

Yesterday, the light and the cloud cover were all over the place, even during the 15 or 20 minutes over which I took these photos. But it's amazing what can happen when you adjust your shutter speed more or less correctly, eh?

(This in no way means I knew what I was doing--it only means I'm finally brave enough to adjust the dial and see what happens. Which is no small thing, really, I suppose.)

Crow (sort of the unofficial bird of Davis, CA)

Walnut trees and sky

UC Davis research fields

UC Davis research fields

Flowering quince

The town logo

Where I Lay My Head Down

It seems as if one should more easily fall into a river than out of one, doesn't it? But I've definitely been out of the River the last few days. I've had a lot of moments of noticing, and even of composing those moments into small stones in my head, but not so many moments of actually typing them out. Or of visiting other people, which I actually kind of feel worse about--I like the visiting in this project an awful lot.



For now, though, I'm actually not writing a small stone. Today I took pictures of my bedroom for the prompt over at Bella's 52 Photos Project. My bedroom has been slowly becoming a real room--that is, one with a coherent sort of feeling to it and a sense that someone might actually spend some time living in it. I've rarely had such a bedroom, actually, and it feels really nice to see this tiny room develop into a space with a spirit. I started out this morning trying to get just one good shot, but I ended up wandering in and out of the room through the day, taking pictures as I came and went from the house and noticed the light changing and moving across the room. (I'll spare you from looking at all of the 40 or 50 pictures I took, and even from looking at the 14 or so I actually edited.)

(And then poof! As if by magic, a curtain-y thing appears!)

The beautiful oak bed is with me on a long-term loan from my friend Jenny. It's her bed from childhood, and several years ago her dad shipped it out to her here in California from Philadelphia, our hometown. I remember sleeping in this bed in high school, when I would stay at her house, and I love that it's come to live with me. The mattress is high off the ground--higher than in a normal bed, since this one wasn't necessarily meant for a modern box spring--and even when I sit up, the headboard towers over me. The net effect is of being in a safe little boat, with some enormous, protective shield at my back. The other night, it was raining hard, and the wind was blowing all around my little house, and I lay in my warm bed reading and feeling as if nothing in the world could touch me.



What you can't see clearly in the above picture is that the horizon line is not actually flat--in better light, you can see the serrations of the Pacific Coast Range, west across the Central Valley. I love all the variation in that view, the way the weather comes over the hills from the coast; the way the sunset looks different every single night of the year. I've always loved driving north on the very road I now live on--the road just out this window and over the fence--because the light and the mountains are always so dynamic. And now I can sit right in the middle of my own bed and watch it all.

(Okay, maybe the pictures are a sort of stone for today.)

Wild Nights Are My Glory*

Close to the house, the steady, wet sound of rain on pavement, slapping in puddles. Farther off, the wind gusts and swirls; you can hear the trees bending at wild angles in the dark.

*Okay, readers, just for fun: Who can tell me where the title comes from? :-)

Winter View

The sky a wash of cold white and grey; the trees all brown, spindly branches or the most subdued shades of grey-green; and the swimming pool, an unlikely splash of the brightest color, like a giant aqua kidney bean outlined in rosy red brick.

Mirage

The day is chilly, but the sun is bright, and just above the roof of the black car, the air shimmers with heat, distorting the look of the bricks right behind. Above the white car next to it, all is still.

American Scone*

This scone is pale to the point of being only par-baked, pasty in texture and flavor, bloated, sickly sweet. It's a chocolate chip scone, but all through it are fibrous bits of...what, exactly?


*Years ago, an Australian friend and I were in the train station in Philadelphia, and we stopped for coffee at a stall. Somehow, the subject of the scones at the stall came up--possibly the barista asked if we wanted one with our coffee? Anyway, my friend sniffed disdainfully, and I believe her lip may actually have curled as she spat out, "American scones."

In defense of Americans, most of our scones are nowhere close to as bad as the one described above, and some of us even know how to make actual, real, proper cream scones from scratch. With no chocolate chips, even. Because some of us suspect that putting chocolate chips in a scone is kind of along the lines of putting blueberries in a bagel. You can do it, sure, but then you're no longer dealing with a serious scone/bagel.

Sunrise

Driving east in the semidarkness, I crest a hill to find the sky floating over the Sierras in wide ribbons of rose, gold, teal. Morning is heading west to meet me.

Full Stop

The way things build up around you when you're sick: bottles of pills, of herbs, of juice, of sparkling water. Piles of used tissue. Mugs of once hot tea. Sheets and blankets you're too tired to change, and mostly want to burn once your fever has broken in a clammy sweat.

(Note for the concerned [well, hi there Mom!]: I did actually manage to change the sheets today. And shower. And take out the garbage. It was a big day.)