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.
“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…
After months of waiting, the Nikon D3 made its grand appearance at our place. You would have thought the Queen of England was visiting. There was pacing backand forth, ears perking up at the sound of any vehicle driving down our street, tracking and retracking the package on the UPS website, and the constant adjusting of items on the coffee table. Pile the magazines in a stack… no, wait, spread them out in a fan pattern. I think my photo freak even cleaned the bathroom, like somehow the D3 was going to judge us on the cleanliness of our bathroom grout.
Suddenly, the sound of a heavy brown truck tire as it crunched on the gravel driveway… Could it be??? And then it was here! Oh, to push the limits of ISO and noise parameters. Would it really be virtually noise free if he set it up to take photos by the light cast by the open oven door? Would a single candle in the neighbor’s window be sufficient to light the backyard and make it look as though it was high noon? And better yet, what would that full frame capability bring to the table?
My son and I were tormented by the sounds of clicks as our photo-ninja jumped out of every hidden nook to capture an image with that camera. Nothing was sacred. Stumbling up the steps at the end of the evening, there was that sound of the shutter… Click, click, click… A beautiful 9 frames per second, whether you needed them or not. I believe my son is now suffering from some sort of Viet Nam type stress every time he hears that single reflex mirror snapping up into position, allowing the light to hit the sensor buried in the beast.
So there was my husband, ooo-ing and ahhhh-ing over the owner’s manual just anticipating the next wedding and the beautiful photos he would create with his newest high-tech paint brush. “Oh look, I’ve just captured you in both RAW and JPG!” he would squeal in delight. “Oh, joy.” I would mutter in return knowing that the photo he just immortalized me in was one where I had just rolled out of bed with funky hair and even funkier pillow wrinkles etched into my cheek.
Of course, he probably feels the same way when I bring home a new plant for the garden…