Current.

I’ve just returned from visiting with friends this weekend. It was great; it had been way too long since I last saw them. Now comes the unpacking part. I think in the last 2 weeks I’ve actually filled all the pieces in my luggage set.

My brother moved to Brooklyn yesterday. He’s interning at Mishka NYC this summer, working on some of their advertising campaigns. Boy, the kids do grow up fast.

Now that I’ll be home for a bit, I need to catch up on what’s been going on in the world. There are news feeds to read, emails to write, and I’m really eager to start editing a big bunch of photos and video clips I shot this weekend. I also haven’t picked up the cello in ages and have been feeling a wee-bit cranky over it. On the down-side, I had a bit of a run in with persons of the undesirable sort this weekend, too, but maybe I’ll save that for another rant. I’ve got better things to do.

Foto Fettish

This is the title of the archive I keep of my digital photography. The title came from my poetry and short story archives: Pen Fettish. Some 17 or 18 years ago I heard someone use the word in a positive way, and it stuck with me. Several years later, and a little wiser, I looked the definition up in the Merriam-Webster dictionary, and this is the first one I found:

fetish: 1 a : an object believed to have magical power to protect or aid its owner; broadly : a material object regarded with superstitious or extravagant trust or reverence. b : an object of irrational reverence or obsessive devotion.

Very appropriate, I thought.

For those of you who know me well, you know I have a penchant for mad scribblings and a tendency to spend days working over the small details of a photo I’ve shot. I love it, and it’s a definitive, creative outlet, like music. In the beginning, I was too young to know that I was using the incorrect spelling of the word (fettish, not fetish), but the misspelling stuck through the years.

I’ve decided to start putting more of my more personal work on the web – not sure yet if it’ll be on this blog or on a separate page, but the idea is to have everything in one place.

Ursa Major

On Saturday night I had a wonderful time star gazing! I made my way up as far as I could into the mountains without getting too “lost” (yes, I am still a city girl…) and was just amazed at the canopy of stars I saw once I cut the head lights off. So beautiful… I’d brought my laptop along to use the SkyGazer software that came with my astronomy textbook, and I found it easy to navigate through after a few minutes of playing around. While observing the Milky Way through my binoculars, I saw a shooting star! Wow. My photography bug is itching again…I’ve been looking on the web at lenses for night shooting.

For my class, I have a project that requires me to map out five constellations, one of which had to be Ursa Major (The Great Bear, whose seven brightest stars form the “Big Dipper”). Given the horizon I faced and the time of night, it was directly over my head, upside (cup-side) down and very bright. If I can find a good picture of it I’ll post it here.  The nights are getting clear again, and I found a nice lookout point not too far from my house.  I should get out again before the moon gets too full.