January Picture a Day

The first month of the Picture a Day project is done, and it's been fun so far. Every day at 4:25 p.m., my alarm goes off to notify me to get ready to make an image. When I'm at the photographer's meeting at the The Met student newspaper at Auraria, a few alarms go off since most people doing the project are from the The Met. The photo editor, Cora, tolerates our interruptions of her staff meetings on Thurdays with the veteran patience of a seasoned parent.

Like a good photojournalism student, I have included a caption for the image, where I was, what I was doing, what was important to me on that day. This project kind of morphs into a diary, and captions are needed, because I guarantee I won't remember why I photographed eggs for today's entry.

Here's a link to my Picture-A-Day blog. Take a look at the images so far.

The Process

I keep looking at my blog and wondering why I haven't posted much lately. That doesn't mean I haven't been thinking about things and hammering away at making something work.

Work.

If you listen to a person talk, they will tell you exactly what's in their heart and words on a page will tell you exactly what a person is thinking.

Work has been on my mind as of late. There's not been a lot of shifts to be had at Cr@ig, and something about having a new degree makes it hard to continue to sit in one place and do exactly what I was doing before the degree. I'm not naive enough to think a piece of paper would change everything, I gave up on fairy tales decades ago, but I guess I still hoped.

I spend a lot of time working on individualized resumes for each position I apply for. For anyone who has sat with a career counselor, they'll tell you it's the thing to do. Print out the job description, highlight the verbs and find appropriate places in your resume to plug those words in. If you think about it, there is a small vocabulary that goes into a job description. Write, edit, manage, evaluate, document, maintain, research. These words could be contained in any number of job descriptions, and chances are you've done the job, it just wears a different dress or different pants. Consequently, I have many, many resumes that have a lot of clothes in the closet.

I've had a pretty varied work history; hospitals, bargaining units, title insurance, social work.

The job I was happiest at was being a gas and electric meter reader for the old Public Service Company of Colorado. Walking in weather conditions from -25 degrees to 105 degrees was a good time. Dogs, people with guns, endless quiet suburbs and sub-sub-basements in Denver. An average route totaled about 12 miles, some days you walked longer, some days were ridiculously short. I had one route, a cycle 08, that if you started at 8:00, took a break around 9:15, you would be done by 9:30. Great route, right there on Lincoln from the Blue Cross building to the windshield replacement place by the Colorado Ballet. The nice thing about PSC was that no matter how many hours you worked, you were paid for a full eight. Get done at noon, paid till 4:30.

The cycle 08 made up for my cycle 20, which was Larimer St. from 20th to 25th, Lawrence St. and part of Broadway. I read all this before the stadium was built, and the character of the area wasn't tainted by purple and gray. The best compliment I ever had in my life was on Larimer at 20th, one morning when one of the local working girls standing in front of the little grocery told me she could get off Larimer street if she had a body like mine. Old Russell used to sit behind his desk at the auto repair shop on Broadway and 25th with a loaded 45 within easy reach to shoot the rats that inhabited the building, and he'd throw the carcasses over the back fence and try to hit one of the homeless people who held court in the back alley. How can you not love a job with those working conditions? I certainly did.

I made great friends at PSC, and I could hardly wait to get to work in the morning. It was challenging and fun, a challenge because I read about 100,000 meters a year, and you were only allowed 1-2 errors for every 10,000 meters read. And fun when my fastest route was after the new handheld computers were introduced and I read 995 meters in 25 minutes with no errors. Do the math: that's 39.5 meters a minute.

Jobs like that are no longer available, or else I'd still be there. I wouldn't have left it, wouldn't have expected anything else from myself other than keeping my bad knee (acquired after a customer let a Chow-Chow loose on me) going. Automation is a good thing when it comes to ATMs but not when it means you lose your job.

So, I've expected something else from myself and now I have a degree and a wider vision of the world. Sometimes it feels like the degree means I'm turned down for a better class of job, but only them that has them can lose them.

I'm so looking forward to working full-time again, learning new things, making new friends and seeing what I can come up with. I know there's something out there for my incredible skills, talent, dependability, creativity, wit and charm. And humility.

There is one job I wouldn't ever want to go back to. In 1973, I worked at Casa Bonita.

As the big, dancing Purple Monkey.

Never again.

Manitou Fruitcakes

Manitou Springs held its 14th Annual Fruitcake Toss yesterday, with a respectable sized crowd that diminished as the weather turned winter-like. The remaining crowd consisted mostly of entrant's families, the truly curious, a Discovery Channel film crew that hoarded most of the good shooting locations, and one dumb kid who had a haircut that looked like a cross between Darth Vader's helmet and Punk Rock Barbie. He did his best to get hit with flying fruitcakes; possibly his sights were set low enough that being hit by a flying fruitcake would qualify for his 15 minutes of fame. I didn't ask his name since he wasn't even nailed by any fruitcake shrapnel.

We probably should have headed for Denver after the "event," but Dawn, Drew, Jason and I stayed in a little bed and breakfast that clings to the side of the Manitou valley. Agate Hill Inn's Garden Cottage is where we stayed, complete with a view across the valley, a full kitchen, a roaring gas stove and much to the delight of the crew, a hot tub. I personally stay away from hot tubs, since I have my own theories about water displacement and the use of harpoons.

We ate pizza and drank, watched movies and the snow come down. Lots of snow. When I woke up this morning, there was ice on the inside of the window and reportedly 14 inches of snow on that steep, narrow hill. After that chilly, three dog night, we had a B&B breakfast of home-made waffles and strawberries but much to Jason's chagrin, no bacon.

Jason and I headed down the hill to visit an ATM, get a Diet Pepsi and maybe even a package of bacon that we could surreptitiously cook in our little kitchen. The place that was closest and open that early on a Sunday morning was a little converted gas station-mini mart that's next door to the liquor store. Last night, it seemed like a good place to bookmark for those little trips for things you spend change on but would give a million for if they weren't readily available. Besides, the guy behind the register wearing a red bandana and welding googles looked nice enough.

This morning, the cranky knitter was there and we could do only wrong.

"Don't wipe your feet in here, the carpet's getting wet!"

"Don't you have anything smaller?"

"The ATM is RIGHT THERE!"

I was tempted to ask her if she had recently lost one of her knitting needles, but I didn't. Chastened, we left without the bacon, possibly as atonement for thinking it was OK to wipe your feet on one of those rubber backed rugs, or use a $20 bill.

Yes, Manitou has interesting history, beautiful scenery, and apparently quite a few people that don't spend much time in front of the television set. They're out in the shed hammering away at pieces of lumber and in hardware stores looking for PVC pipe big enough to launch a 4 lb. fruitcake.

I found this bumper sticker on a truck up that was parked in one of the little lanes above the B&B. I was taking a walk, and I walked for an hour and enjoyed the soft, falling snow coupled with the subdued mountain light. It was quiet, utterly quiet. The kind of quiet you need to sort through troubles, make decisions, and view your life and see what needs work, what needs love, what needs discarded. In the middle of this Colorado beauty, I realized:

"What the hell am I doing out in the freezing cold!?"

The bumper sticker? The truck probably belongs to the kid with the Darth Vader/Punk Rock Barbie hair.

New Year 2009: Mac & Mariah

Mariah and I started out 2009 together, although she was snoring soundly when midnight fireworks went off to signify the new year. At five, she's still a lightweight.

After our traditional breakfast of french toast with syrup and bacon, she settled in for a day of playing with her new Christmas toys, given to her the night before. We don't hold to normal rules about holidays, so getting your Christmas gifts on New Year's Eve isn't unusual. She can't read the calendar yet anyway.

We watched a favorite movie this morning, and then we took off for Red Rocks, a favorite place of hers. She had the wrong footwear on today, and soon there were tears over sore feet.

Red Rocks was really hopping today; all sizes and shapes of people were working the stairs, accompanied by someone's stereo that blared oldies music and while most used feet to conquer the steps, some used BOTH feet and hands. One highly dedicated group made their way down the stairs on hands and feet, straddling ungraciously with their toned rears high in the sky. Gloved hands are the only thing keeping noggins from meeting pavement, and Mariah commented to one of the groups that "passed" by us,

"You guys are gonna kill yourselves doing that!"

Sometimes children point out the obvious. I'm not sure I want a toned rear end badly enough to try this new workout method.

We ended up coming back home and she played happily with her paints and ponies. We watched some videos on YouTube, and her favorites are the "Sneezing Panda" and "Funny Cats 3." My phone alarm went off at 4:30p.m., the appointed time in which a few of us have agreed to make a picture every day during 2009. We are documenting where we took the image, the who, the what, and anything else of note. What we do with this project is still up for grabs, but since Gabe thought of it, he can come up with a creative way to put it all together. I personally think it's just an excuse to get together often and look at work, eat Italian food, laugh and do impressions of Kenn asking us,

"What focal length was that shot at?"

"What was your shutter speed?"

"What was your ISO?"

We may joke, but in reality, we like how we sound when we remember these details.

Mariah and Mac are the inaugural image for this project.