The Autumn Collages

I made it.

I took a photo a day for 366 days following the color scheme by PositvelyPresent.com.

In mid-January 2012, I started positing the photos daily on Instagram.

The Gallery effect is very pleasing to me.

All photos were taken with my iPhone4.

 

The collages here are created with Picasa.

I have created my own list for the coming year should I choose to take it on. I looked forward to taking and posting these each day. I am not sure I want the discipline of this again, or if I want to post spontaneously. Not sure. To be seen. I feel tired of the challenge yet was inspired daily by it. I take a photo everyday. Maybe that is enough. I am so trying to find enough and not my usual too much...

The Summer Collages

June: Cloud

 

I kept it up all summer, the Positively Present Photo365 Challenge.

 

I chose not to follow the suggestion for royal blue.

July: White.

I just hadn't shown you.

August: Robin's Egg Blue

So here they are...

I surprised myself daily...

30 Day Photo Challenge: Gratitude II

In an effort to keep the winter blues at bay, I have chosen to do the PositivelyPresent 30 Day Photo Challenge with specific prompts for pictures of things for which you are grateful. I used my iPhone 4 camera phone and edited with BeFunky Pro app, my favorite for editing. I am printing wallet size photos. I made my own journal signatures in kraft paper and will bind in a cover at the end of the project.

Day 2: Smile. My daughter's. That was easy...

Day 3: Happiness

Day 4: Leaves. I love this moody edit on a leafless tree.

Day 5: Morning Sky. I have since corrected the number once I had my coffee!

Day 6: Books. So grateful for books.

Day 7: Something Funny. That leaf. It's been staring at me for months...

Day 8: Favorite color. Of course...

Really enjoying the prompts for this challenge. More to come...

I want to thank you for positive feedback on my little beauty video. Low tech baby. I did another. Still not sure what my point is. Make up is my latest toy I guess. I haven't been buying art tools so much but I have been shopping for cosmetics.

So here's another little video about some items I bought from Ulta and Beauty Brands.

Ha, nice face!

30 Day Photo Challenge: Gratitude I

The first month of the new year. Inhale...

I really enjoyed the daily challenge provided by Hope's journaling prompts for December 2011. I am finishing that up now. I used pictures very often to express myself as I have done since I got my first camera, an Instamatic in the 1970s. When I saw this challenge by PositivelyPresent on Pinterest I hoped it would be a great way to start the year and fend off the cold January dark thoughts...

One-One-One Two:  Favorite Food

Yep, its peanut butter. It is the first food I remember crawling on the old Formica counter top to reach. It got me through grade school, college, PA school, rotations, years of work and now, days at home, stretches of ennui. I am always seeking protein, and here it is. I prefer Peter Pan just soes you know...

Dear Daddy...

October 3rd is my dad's Deathday. October is full of anniversaries, his death, my dead brother's birthday, my own. I was thinking how I could easily get drawn down into at least melancholy, at worst depression. Its been 13 years but I've feeling so close to dad as I finish up mother's things following her death in April. I have been so quiet. Living slowly and with purpose. There has been loneliness too.

Its pretty easy to live a life of gratitude when there are good days. It is easy to be grateful for beauty but what about pain? Ugliness?  Death? It is far more challenging to, say, look at the beaten, bloody body on the cross and feel grateful. Its easier to feel shame. Recently, God told me pretty clearly 'gratitude transforms pain into joy.'

Looking directly at today I am thinking about my father's influence in my life and wanted to say a few things about daddy and feel grateful...

He adored me. I was his beloved. I knew it, everyone knew it and I loved it. Everyone should be adored by someone and he was mine. The last day I saw him, 2 days before he died, he patted me sweetly on the shoulder, cooed to me and called me "sisto." God how grateful I am for that.

He was a feminist. He taught me I could do anything. He worked for the city of Oklahoma City in the 1960s as department head over Personnel Services under Mayor Patience Latting. He loved Patience Latting. She was the first female American mayor of a city greater than 250,000. Dad spoke so highly of her, always calling her by her full name. I grew up with Patience Latting as an icon in our home. I am deeply grateful for that. Turns out she was at the same facility mother lived. I was too intimidated to introduce myself to her.

I grew up going to flea markets with dad. The old school grungy, dusty kind. He had a booth of mostly military related items. I spent Saturdays roaming trash and treasures while he maned his stall. One day I saw this book in his booth, I was about 14, I guess, The Influence of Women and Its Cure from 1936 by John Erskine. Its filled with suggestions about how to keep women and their ideas from spreading around. Dad said he figured a feminist would come by and get all over that book. I told him "one just did," snatching it up.

I am so grateful my father was a feminist. Some of you may have to look that word up. Let me tell you, it changed everything.

He told me I had a good brain. There were no limits on my brain. He told me to look around in class and know I would make the A if anybody could. I do believe in my ability to think and learn. I had such crappy self esteem otherwise but my belief in my brain was the great grappling hook that kept me alive and kept me going.

I am so grateful he gave in confidence in my intelligence. That is a profound thing as the younger sibling of a brother with such severe disabily from retardation.

I am a Sooner. I was raised on Sooner football. There was Jesus and Barry Switzer and some days not in that order. I am a second generation Sooner, we have 5 OU degrees between the two of us.

Thank you for OU, dad. I still love college. And the Sooners...

Daddy gave me my first Nikon when I turned 16. It was a very expensive Nikon F2 SB he bought second hand from a local family owned camera shop. I remember my photography teacher being miffed about this great camera in my hands. I don't know how dad knew but he made sure I had the tool that became a life long passion. The Nikon I use now came from the same shop, the same Epperson's from which I bought my daughters first Nikon last Christmas.

I am so grateful dad helped me find photography early in life.

It may have been the dead birds I collected, but he knew I needed to study science. He started early on telling me to major in a hard (not soft) science and to complete my terminal degree before I got married. I did get my BS in Zoology and MS in Microbiology and another from the Physician Assistant program. Part of the failure of my first marriage is quitting my PhD program ABD (all but dissertation). Shoulda' listened.

Thank you dad for recognizing the biologist in me. I have such a passion for it.

Dad left work for the city and became a college professor which was his profession the majority of the time I grew up. When I became an adjunct professor of biology he sent me a card that said Bravo! and Congratulations! and he wrote inside "on the occasion of your first faculty position."

Thank you for paving the way to academia and teaching. It is one of the constants in my life.

Dad knew me so well. He pointed my in my own direction. Thank you daddy, I am so grateful for that. I miss you so much.