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…
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…
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….