Bury stuff in the tomb when the person dies. Yeah. Love that.
So when Paul goes, I figure the size of the house will magically double when I clear out all the photo gear. View cameras, bellows, light stands, background stands, tripods, all of which are currently eating up valuable real estate.
The trouble is, I plan to have Paul cremated. That way I can put him in a jar and store him on my living room mantle. And then he won’t be able to interrupt me while I’m talking.
But he probably won’t be listening anyways.
Just not here.
Which brings us to last night. A Friday night with no son around, beautiful weather, and a new cocktail recipe book called, “It’s 5 o’clock Somewhere“. Drink recipes from around the world. I’m not a huge drinker (college kind of cured me of that) but this book looked fun.
A quick trip to the liquor store from some creme de cassis, gin, and other specialty drink ingredients and we have the opportunity for a little fun on the patio while watching a sunset, punctuated by the squirrels jumping onto and emptying our bird feeder. Oh, the hilarity! Who needs to go out when this type of show is free in the backyard?
And then it happened… The photo shoot call. “Please come to our function and photograph the election and installation of officers. We only need you for an hour.”
Call back answer, “Sure, I’ll do it.”
“Great, but now we need you for 4 hours.”
“Even better! I had no plans to spend time with my wife!” Giving me the thumbs up and cheesey smile while on the phone. Hey, cheesey smile and thumbs up back at ya! while mentally I’m dialing a divorce attorney…
“Don’t worry, I’ll be back at 9:30pm so I’ll have plenty of time to charge up the batteries for tomorrow’s wedding. And maybe we can hang together for a few minutes before bed since tomorrow’s start time is early!” Oh yeah, that was my big concern. Guess I’ll be drinking on the patio by myself this evening. Isn’t that how alchoholism starts?
But wait! I’m the forgiving person! So 9:00pm rolls around and I think to myself, “It’s still 5:00pm somewhere in the world. I’ll just pretend I’m in the Alaskan time zone.” I make a couple of our Blackberry Bramble drinks, light a few candles and wait to greet my hardworking hubby.
All of a sudden, I realize I’m not in Alaska anymore. I’m working my way into the Hawaiian/Aleutian time zone… It’s 5 o’clock there…
I finish my drink. Watch a field mouse run out and back on the patio, hear some bats squeaking overhead, swat some June bugs that are flying by me.
His ice has melted. I better polish off his drink since it’s now watered down from the ice water. Wait, it’s 6 o’clock in Hawaii now. Is Samoa the next time zone? Is it an hour behind Hawaii? I really don’t care as I make the third drink of the night.
Finally I throw in the towel and put another melted ice drink on the kitchen counter. Part of me says to drink it. Part of me says a hangover will be my best friend in the morning if I do. I leave it as a testament of the missed together time.
Paul finally comes home. Oooops, those pesky elections took longer than expected. He polished off the drink on the counter. He proclaimed it watery.
Yeah, go figure. Wonder what the next drink I’ll try alone will be…
You’re probably wondering what I did for Father’s Day, given that wonderfully disappointing Mother’s Day.
I took the high road and planned out a getaway weekend in Baltimore, visiting Inner Harbor and the B&O Train Museum. The plan was to leave Saturday morning, after shooting a wedding on Friday night. Visit the National Aquarium Saturday afternoon, stay overnight at the Inner Harbor Renaissance Hotel, right on the waterfront, then trip over to the train musem the next day for Father’s Day.
Paul loves trains. So this would be a really cool trip for him to see that big roundhouse and all those locomotives perfectly restored. I felt I had really hit the mark with this surprise adventure.
Until…
He tells me that he needs to shoot a photo session on Father’s Day. I guess the people who scheduled it didn’t have a father, or they hated their father. Who knows. The only thing I got was that the celebration I had planned was in jeopardy. And not the show with Alex Tribec.
Did I ever metion that I tried out for Jeopardy (the game show)? It was one of the hardest thing I ever did. But easier than being married…
Anyhoo, back to the story.
Seething doesn’t really cover the extent of my reaction. Here we had a weekend where we could actually get away to celebrate a normal person holiday and Mr. I-love-photography-more-than-you was telling me he was going to schedule a shoot. So after making his “I don’t know what you had planned but this photo shoot would be WAAAAAAAAYYYYYYY cooler than that” pitch to have me cancel our plans, I laid it out on the table that “You don’t know what your missing because this trip is WAAAAYYYYYYYYYY cooler than any photo shoot and it will be even COOLER for ME if I take a date!”
I think he got the message.
We ended up in Baltimore, as planned, and I even let Paul use my two good lenses on his camera. I think photographing the sharks made him happy. I know photographing the trains made him happy.
Next year’s Mother’s Day better be good.
Let’s start with Mother’s Day.
Ok, granted the exact date moves around from year to year, but basically everyone knows it’s in May. And everyone knows that May follows April, etc., etc.
So when asked, wait, no. Strike that. When I mentioned off-hand one day that I would really like to go to a Mother’s Day buffet, I thought my gift request was simple to understand and carry out. I wasn’t asking that the men of the house make me breakfast, buy me something extreme, or send them on some mythical quest to the unknown for the Holy Grail. It was, “Let’s do brunch”.
Before going much further, I should probably explain why brunch on Mother’s Day is a big deal. Normally, since moving to Pittsburgh, every Mother’s Day was spent running the Komen Race for the Cure 5K. While this is a great event and we would raise $1000 for the event, it also meant getting up at 4am, driving to Oakland, fighting other racers for parking, standing out in the chilly morning, running up and down some insane hills, becoming completely drenched in sweat, and fighting our way out of Oakland to drive back home. All of this feel good activity would occur right in the prime brunch hours. Paul and I would usually photograph a wedding the night before, getting to bed around 1am, which meant exhaustion as well. And those who have met me know that I am not a runner. I hate it. But this is one event where I will run, even while cursing under my breath the people who invented asphalt and the ancient geologic forces that shaped the Pittsburgh terrain. I ran this event for 7 years straight, even one year when I flew in from San Francisco the night before.
So last year Paul begged me not to sign us up for the Komen if we had a wedding the night before. Something about his body being old, beat up, blah blah blah. Ok, I agreed.
Enter 2009. Wedding scheduled for May 10th. No Komen race to be run. I decided that brunch would be a nice, nice, nice thing since I didn’t get to do Mother’s Day brunch any other year.
What could be easier?
As Paul found out, making Mother’s Day brunch reservations tends to not be a cake walk if you try to make them 4 days before the blessed Sunday event…
Who knew that other families would be taking THEIR moms out for breakfast as well? Come on, brunch with Mom? This had to be some novel idea that no one else would do on Mother’s Day!
So instead of having brunch out, I ended up making my own breakfast because the guys were too tied up in their own thing to get out a mixing bowl and spatula. My son did go out and get me a card and a Barnes & Noble gift card. That was nice.
Paul, however, seemed to think that picking up the phone and attempting to make reservations constituted the whole of his effort. So when I asked him if I could have my MD card, he was stunned that I would want one. Instead, his MD present to me was making the bed and doing the dishes. Wow. What a keeper. Two things he does anyways.
To redeem himself, on May 23rd he ran out and bought a birthday card for me. By crossing out all the “birthday” and hand writing in “Mother’s Day”, he felt this was acceptable to make me feel exhaulted and appreciated.
Hands off, ladies. He’s all mine.
I’ve been absent for a while. Not because Mr. Addicted-to-everything-Nikon has been good and attentive. No, far from it. It’s because I had too much fodder to write about and needed to organize my thoughts into separate stories for greater clarity.
So much to tell…
“You must love being married to a photographer!” Several naive people have uttered these words to me without knowing the full extent of what that means. Here’s a perfect example. Me having a bad hair day and Paul being completely oblivious to the fact that he is two seconds away from death by strangulation with a hotel blow dryer cord.
Come on, really??!??
But the man must eventually go to sleep and that’s when I exact my revenge. This was the moment just before I put the pillow over his face. He looks so peaceful…
Sleepy Paul
In the end, I let him live. It’s a good thing he’s handsome.
He's all mine.
Yep, it happened again. I mistakenly thought I was #1 in Paul’s heart only to find out that I ranked right around lima beans…
So we head out to our big convention in Las Vegas where learning and inspiration are right up there with gambling and buffets. Paul meets me outside the door at the end of one of my Master Classes with a Starbucks cup in hand.
“It’s a Chai Tea Latte,” he says as he hands me the cup. Mmmmmm…. Chai Tea…. My favorite….
I go to take a sip…. WHACK! Paul smacks my arm. “That’s not for YOU! That’s for KEVIN!”
Huh??? What???? Then it hits me. Instead of getting ME, the WIFE, a Chai Tea, Paul has actually purchased this cup o’ heaven for Kevin Jairaj, one of our big-time, famous photographer buddies. So I’m forced to carry this item of desire all the way over to the convention building where Kevin is speaking. Like some ancient tribal leader that has to pay tribute to the almighty conqueror, Cortez. I walk slowly and painfully toward the podium.
I had Kevin the cup. It’s like handing over my first born child. Never to be seen again…..
It’s a shame that schmuck of a husband of mine didn’t realize he had two hands.
Have you ever heard the saying about how the shoemaker’s children go barefoot? The shoemaker is so busy making shoes for other people that he does not have time to make shoes for his own children.
It’s true in my world as well.
We spent last week on an Alaskan cruise sailing the Inside Passage from Seattle to Juneau and back again. At every turn, the splendor of nature unfolded before us. Glaciers, icebergs, eagles, whales, waterfalls, rain forests… just loads of natural beauty. It was like a postcard at every turn. You couldn’t take a bad photo if you tried…
I’d get up each morning, carefully sculpt my hair into place, don my fashion sunglasses and cute sweater outfit and wait for my personal paparazzi to photograph me against the gorgeous backdrops… Waiting, waiting, waiting…
So where was my husband? Where was the familiar click of the shutter? Still waiting, waiting, waiting…
No photos today! I guess the photo op was too easy, the background too perfect, the subject too camera aware. There was no challenge in these easy shots! I wasn’t horribly back-lit, in the midst of a forest of people, or even “real life” enough for my hubby to pick up the camera. “If you want the shot, take it yourself,” was what I heard as he headed out to scour the ship’s photo gallery for examples of what to do and not do with a camera.
Oh, and he took the camera with him…
I’ve been a bit delinquent in my posting this past week. Just a little busy with some other projects and the weddings for the summer. Plus someone has to wrestle those old clothes into the bags for Goodwill…
When I logged into the site this morning, I saw a comment from Kathy (one of our great friends from the wedding world of Southwestern PA). Sadly, her husband has been “infected”:
[Rich] is turning more and more into a photographer nut thanks in large part to your husband!
Ok, Kathy, you have to squash that bug before it gets too big. So here’s what you do. Smear a little Vaseline on his camera lens. Then whenever he takes a picture it will be all out of focus. After about 2000 blurry pictures, he’ll get disgusted and throw his camera gear out the window. Problem averted. Husband reclaimed.
Kathy’s wasn’t the only comment to the blog. Dawn, a videographer we just recently worked with, was looking for a kindred spirit to talk lighting, depth of field, and all things perspective and stumbled across the blog probably hoping that support could be garnered for her video camera addiction. Oh no! A mutant strain of the photo freak plague! No, Dawn, NO! Put down the video camera… You can do it…. Put it down and reclaim your life! You have friends and we’re here to help you through your withdrawal period… You can beat this!
It’s odd for us to have a summer Saturday off, especially on a major holiday weekend. But, surprise, surprise, here we were with both a Friday and a Saturday without a wedding to shoot! So I took it upon myself to do something constructive and decided to clean out the closet.
I mean, really clean out the closet. Like gut it so it looks like one of those nice and neat closets you see in a TV ad where the person only owns 3 pairs of paints and maybe a shirt or two and a jacket. And all the shoes are arranged alphabetically by manufacturer and then by color. Just as bare as a closet can be…
So after my third trip downstairs to the office to ask Paul if I should keep or donate an outfiit, I finally pried him away from the computer and got him upstairs to our bedroom to help with the closet purging. It took some doing. First I had to convince him that there was nothing new on the digital photography message boards for DWF by taking a screen shot and making it into his desktop background. After clicking around a bit, he determined that all of the links were broken. Then I had to fake a thunderstorm with flickering lights and tell him that he could lose valuable digital photo files if he continued to work in Photoshop during a major storm. Finally, I lured him upstairs by strategically placing coffee cups on the steps so he would be tempted by the smell of his addictive brew.
He looked around the room as if seeing it for the first time. I then realized, he had never really seen it during daylight hours since he usually bounded out of bed before sunrise and stumbled to bed after sunset. His usual position during daylight hours was perched in front of his keyboard trying out this gradient or that action, constantly finessing his retouching skills.
“What is this place?”, he asked. “It is a magical place,” I replied, “but one being threatened by a terrible evil. The closet bunnies have taken over.”
“Closet bunnies?”
“Yes, closet bunnies are invisible creatures that cause your clothes to multiply and expand until there are no more spaces in your closet to hold the clothes that truly deserve to live there.”
“What can be done?” he asked looking very concerned and slightly afraid.
“We must take these magical garbage bags, wrestle all of the clothes that have been possessed by the evil closet bunnies into the bag. Then we must take the captured clothes to the Goodwill Store for healing.”
So we began our quest and fought our way through many pairs of too small jeans, blouses with red wine spills on the front, clothes from the 70s, 80s, and 90s, and t-shirts with more holes than fabric. At the end, our closet looked amazingly………..BARE.
And our dining room looked like it had been attacked by closet bunnies. It looks like we’ll need a couple more days to clean things up.
Maybe our wedding on Labor Day will postpone as well….
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