Tag Archives: photo-a-day

June 27, 2013 · 9:27 PM

Photo-A-Day: Yesterday

Photo-A-DayThis photo is not from today; it’s not from yesterday. It’s from March 2011 in Chittenden, Vermont. This photo is meant to mark yesterday’s landmark Supreme Court ruling that struck down parts of the Defense of Marriage Act.

There’s a lot left to do in this world. Separation, injustice, and discrimination still happen in American society. The battle for marriage equality is not the only battle.

And it’s a very important battle for me.

We’re married in Vermont but live in Ohio. It’s still unclear–and probably will be for some time–what federal benefits we are now entitled to as a result of DOMA’s demise. In a way, it seems like the court’s ruling only exacerbated the patchwork of “marriages” strung throughout the country. Scalia acknowledged as much in his dissent, recognizing that it’s only a matter of time before the proverbial other shoe drops and all states must recognize same-sex marriages.

I’m grateful and in awe of how quickly public opinion has shifted on this issue. I wish there was a way to bottle this momentum so that every cause could experience such a sea change.

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June 25, 2013 · 10:19 PM

Photo-A-Day: Stretched Thin

Photo-A-DayYep. Look at it this way: at least it’s not wine glasses or beer bottles. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with that–just like there’s nothing wrong with all these stained and drained coffee mugs.

It’s been one of those weeks. I seem to be having a lot of them lately. So many moments and milestones to recount. Prufrock and I celebrated the 10th anniversary of his adoption last week, and some good friends got married. My partner left this morning for her last summer at grad school, and I’m about to leave for a work trip to Brazil. In between all of this, I’ve been juggling lots of random work projects from all the random jobs I work. Whew. I am stretched thin. And I’m grateful to be able to sit down and write this post tonight.Photo-A-Day

And I’m grateful for a moment like this one. I took this second photo on the summer solstice during the rehearsal dinner for our friends’ wedding. Andrea and I wandered away from the party and went strolling down this path. We caught a deer snacking on some grass and watched breathless as it hoped through the vegetation to hide from us. We watched the sun slip behind the trees and the wild raspberries and switch grass change color in the fading light. Yes, it’s been hectic lately, but we did have this moment. And it felt very full.

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June 16, 2013 · 9:34 PM

Photo-A-Day: Success

Photo-A-DayThis isn’t what it looks like. I did not splurge at Whole Foods on several bottles of kombucha, the ancient Eastern elixir. Nope. This is my kombucha, made from my baby. It’s been two weeks since I concocted my first batch, and it’s been brewing away in a dark cabinet. This afternoon, I tasted it, and it’s ready.

I bottled my brew in old glass bottles from Whole Foods. Yeah, I know–not the most exciting picture today. Also, not a very father-y picture, either. (Although, “brewing” does bespeak dad.)

What else can I say? I’m really excited about my ability to make things. I had been worried that kombucha was hard and messy to make. Absolutely not the case. It’s easy…and any leftover culture (that you don’t want to keep for your next batch) can be used in the garden. I get the sense that home-brewed kombucha is more potent than store-bought.

Tonight I’m preparing a new batch of kombucha–this one with green tea. (The first batch was made with English Breakfast.) We’ll see in two weeks how it tastes. I’m also starting a new sourdough loaf tonight–the first one was good, but needed more salt.

Ok, this is a pretty boring post as I’ve spent most of the day preparing for a week of intense meetings. Hope you all had a great Father’s Day.

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June 15, 2013 · 8:45 PM

Photo-a-Day: Gorge

Photo-A-Day I’m back, after a brief hiatus. We took a quick trip to Red River Gorge, in the Kentucky wilderness. To make up for not being able to post the past couple of days, I offer you two photos.

The first one is of one of the funnest things on the planet: playing fetch with the dogs in the water. We’ve got Prufrock, the whiter one in the back, and Scout, the darker one in the front. And, yes, that’s a very dirty me, fixing to throw their stick. Pruf was quite a swimmer in his youth, but now that he’s about 11 and a half, his skills have declined. Instead of a full-throttle paddle in pursuit of a stick, he’s more likely now to bound through the water for a few steps, stop, sigh, and look at me with a pathetic expression that conveys something like, “I can’t find the stick, please throw another.” And we repeat the cycle.

Scout is scared of everything, including swimming, and, just between you and me, she has a fraction of Pruf’s intellect. Sometimes, she’ll bring a stick back to me if the water is shallow enough. Otherwise, she can’t quite figure out the whole swimming thing. I coaxed her a long a bit on this trip and actually got her to dog paddle. In true Scout fashion, of course, her dog paddle didn’t look like any other dog paddle I’d ever seen. She moved like an otter, twisting through the water.

A quick look through my photo library reveals that I have numerous versions of this same photo–in this exact same watering hole–from various years. You can never have enough photos of being in the water with the dogs.

The second photo isn’t a sunset; it’s something almost better. The light at sunset. The way the pinks and yellows stretch across the sky and illuminate something as mundane as a pine cone gives dusk such an energy. Things in the Eastern part of the sky seem to light up as the sun casts its parting rays across the horizon. It’s just beautiful.

So, here are some pine cones.

Photo-A-Day

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June 12, 2013 · 10:25 AM

Photo-a-Day: Driving Sunset

Photo-A-DayOk, part of the motivation behind this “photo-a-day” project is to carve out a bit of mindfulness during my day, to do something deliberate. Take the photo, and write about it in a deliberate, intentional, mindful way, thereby achieving a moment of consciousness.

Well, it doesn’t always happen that way, as evidenced by yesterday’s/today’s post. Last night, at about 9:15, I’m driving home from a meeting when I realize that, dammit, I have yet to take my photo for the day. Naturally, I decide to try to take pictures of the fading sunset while I’m driving. This is not my proudest moment of mindfulness. And then I didn’t even get a chance to post the photo.

Sometimes we rush through our intentions, which makes me wonder, is the point of this project to be truly awake and conscious when I take the photo or is the point to just snap a damn photo every day?

Speaking of which, I’m on my way back out of town this afternoon. I’ll be in a rural area with no internet access, so I won’t be posting for a couple of days. But I’ll be sure to have some beautiful photos. Stay tuned!

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June 10, 2013 · 8:42 PM

Photo-a-Day: Sweet Ride

Photo-A-Day

Photo Credit: Andrea L. Rotter

First of all, please accept my apologies for being away from the photo-a-day project. It’s more like photo-a-week. I was traveling for work and then visiting some family. Time got away from me.

To make up for my negligence, today I offer you two photos. My partner has gotten into this project, so she snapped these two pics with her phone on her way home from a meeting this afternoon.

I wish I could have seen this with my own eyes. This looks like one sweet ride. In the first photo, you’ll notice that this enterprising young man has jury-rigged an easy chair to his bike. In the second photo, you’ll see that his dog is riding in the easy chair. Now, that’s the way to do it.

Photo-a-Day

Photo Credit: Andrea L. Rotter

This is what I love about cities: people doing it their way. Even in a seemingly ho-hum place like Cincinnati, there are sights like this–an easy chair, a bike, and a dog, all together. Sometimes I wish to live my life out in nature, way out, in a desolate, open place. But I know I would miss things like this.

I appreciate how much ingenuity this “dog seat” must have required. It’s also a helpful reminder to work with what we have at hand. And always remember the dog.

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June 6, 2013 · 10:36 PM

Photo-A-Day: Tower

20130606-221210.jpgI’m tired tonight, so I’ll be brief. I’m in New York leading a training, and this happened to be my view out my classroom window. Seeing something like this, Freedom Tower, up close is a lot to take in, for a number of reasons. New York City itself is always a lot to take in.

When I was cropping this picture, I noticed the window washer guy. I didn’t see him when I took the picture. Just like with my first photo-a-day post, I am reminded of Stieglitz. My favorite photograph of his is “Spring Showers” (sorry, I’m using an iPad app to post this and I can’t figure out how to copy a link to the image in here).

The photo shows a crooked little tree and a man in the background sweeping the street clean during a light rain. This was a cropped image. Georgia O’Keeffe kept the original as part of “Waste Basket Collection.” After Stieglitz would print photos and discard the ones he wasn’t going to use, O’Keefe would sneak into the darkroom and empty out the wastebasket, keeping Stieglitz’s cast-offs (The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale has the wastebasket collection, and because I worked there as a student, I got to see the original print of this image.)

So, the original “Spring Showers” is a huge image. The poor little street cleaner is just a blur in the corner. When Stieglitz saw the print, he decided to reframe/resize the image so that the tree and street sweeper were the focal point and cropped out the rest. Artistic choice is so powerful and fascinating.

Makes me want to crop this photo to show just the window washer.

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June 4, 2013 · 10:11 PM

Photo-a-Day: What the Weeds See

Photo-a-DayFinally. I mean, finally. I got in the yard. It’s been a spring of avoidance around here. I’ve made up every excuse not to get the garden ready. It’s the spring’s fault, really. Cincinnati’s spring has been cold. And buying plants has felt like splurging.

But yesterday I got paid and today was gorgeous: sunny and in the 70s. I had the great privilege of spending almost the entire day getting the garden bed ready (we have two raised beds in the backyard–one is fruit, and by “fruit” I mean an enormous, Godzilla-like blackberry, and the other is flowers and vegetables, mostly annuals.) The flower and vegetable bed suffers from clay-like soil which I vigorously amend every year. Due to my negligence, the bed had become home to what seemed like thousands of weeds.

Most of my day was spent just like this. Hunched over the earth, staring down the weeds, hacking through the clay. Amazing how good that makes me feel.

Later in the afternoon, I treated myself to a trip to the garden store. Granted, I looked like a shit storm at a volcano eruption–doused in manure and vermiculite–but garden stores are the only place you go where no one looks at you funny for not having showered and being shellacked in shit. Well, maybe not the only place.

Basking in the colors and mulling over my tomato options, I lost myself wandering up and down the aisles at the garden store. Because the soil is still so bad–and the past few years haven’t been very productive with vegetables–I limited myself to a few peppers and another tomato (I have a Mr. Stripey, my favorite, already growing the front.) I loaded up on petunias and impatiens, though. Can’t go wrong with pretty colors.

I got a few things in the ground this evening and my plan is to finish tomorrow morning. So, maybe that’s what tomorrow’s picture will be. I also leave town for a work trip tomorrow. Be warned that I may get a day or so behind. Hopefully not.

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June 3, 2013 · 7:11 PM

Photo-a-Day: Dirty Preference

20130603-190043.jpgToday was lucky. A couple of opportunities that I was not expecting (either because I simply wasn’t expecting it or because I thought the window of opportunity had shut tight) made themselves known to me. This is a good thing (these are work opportunities, I should say, but good work, the kind you want to do).
Yet, these opportunities required some good ol’ immediate attention. So my day was spent hurriedly “doing things.” I had planned to give the yard so TLC, hence the dirty shirt I’m wearing. That didn’t happen because I was doing things in advance of these opportunities.
I prefer to be dirty. This isn’t exactly the kind of thing you announce at a cocktail party or networking event. And it’s true. I like to be outside, dirty, working in the yard.
The garden needs to be weeded, the soil desperately needs some compost, flowers need watering, vegetables need planting, fruit needs picking. Heck, even the grass needs cutting. And the hedges definitely need a trim. I so wanted to be outside doing all that today and I know I’m lucky to even be able to plan my day that way.
So, tomorrow. Tomorrow, I will be out there, getting dirty, letting my opportunities gestate.

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June 2, 2013 · 8:58 PM

Photo-A-Day: Not-So-Still-Life

Photo-A-DayToday, I want to thank all of you who read and follow this blog. I really appreciate it! So, thank you.

I had high hopes for yesterday’s post. There was a lot I wanted to say about the light that shows the way, yet forbids it. But when I sat down to write, I discovered that there was nothing to say. Chopin’s words alone were powerful than anything I could come up.

And today, I am aware of the light that shows the way and forbids it. There is so much to do. So much I want to do (and, yes, tons of stuff I feel I have to do). This pretend “still life” photo of mason jars and The New York Times is full of movement; it’s full of things I want to be doing. Even though I can sense what I want to be doing, it’s hard to get there.

The jars are for my on-going kefir, kombucha, and sourdough project. I’ve made some kefir already and it’s pretty good. I’m most excited by the fact that it actually tastes like kefir. Tonight, I’m feeding and preparing my sourdough starter so I can make bread in a couple of days and I’m brewing some tea so that I can drop my kombucha baby in there. I’m pretty excited.

That light is shining. Can’t quite see the way, but I can feel it.

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