falling down

It’s autumn here in the Northern Hemisphere. Fall. Here in New England, the leaves are changing colors. And falling.

But leaves aren’t the only things falling.¹ Gravity appears to have been at work in many areas, as evidenced by the fallen items below.

• Humpty Dumpty: He had a great fall. (Actually, it didn’t turn out so great for him, what with the breaking up. Maybe his summer was better.)
• Jack (of Jack and Jill): Fell down. Broke his crown.
• The sky: It’s falling. (At least according to Chicken Little.)
• The cradle: It will fall. Out of a tree. With a baby in it. (I’m not sure why a song about a baby falling out of a tree is supposed to help bring on sleep…)



• London Bridge: It’s falling down. (Falling down, falling down.)
• Falling Down (1993): A Michael Douglas movie
• “Falling:” a song by Julee Cruise that was well known as the theme song for the TV series Twin Peaks.
• The Fall: a “post-punk” band
• take the fall: to take the blame for something
• fall guy: someone who takes the fall, a scapegoat
• The Fall Guy: An 80s TV series about a stunt man starring Lee Majors (better known for his 70s role as the “bionic man.”)
• to fall short: to not meet expectations
• fall asleep: to enter a sleeping state
• fallout: consequences, especially those that aren’t immediate
• fall in: to get into line
• fall in love:an expression meaning, um, to fall in love. Crap. How do I even paraphrase that? I guess “become enamored of, usually in a romantic way.”
• fall for someone: an expression meaning “be won over by someone,” or sometimes “start to like someone”
• fall for something: to be tricked
• fall into the pudding: this isn’t actually an expression²
• “Fall on Me” A song by R.E.M.
• When I Pretend to Fall: an album by the Long Winters, and a line from the song “Stupid.” She laughs when I pretend to fall…
• Ring around the rosie³:
  

  Ring around the rosie
  Pocket full of posie
  Ashes, Ashes
  We all fall down

And there it is. We all fall down.⁴

—–

¹ Clearly I’ve been falling down on the job with my ThThTh posts, seeing as the last one I posted was in December.

² There are loads more real idioms involving falling

³Apparently there are many different versions of this, some of which don’t even involve falling down. Theo has been reciting a version of this lately. Mostly what I hear is “Asses, asses, we fall down.” I don’t recall seeing that one on the Wiki page.

⁴ Often on our asses.

Cradle falling image from The Only True Mother Goose Melodies, by Munroe & Francis, 1833, found on the Gutenberg Project.

Ahoy!

Today be the 19th o’ September, and lest ye be not aware, International Talk Like a Pirate Day.¹ Arrrrr.

¹ I hae been a celebrant o’ the holiday since 2007 when I first learned of it. That year I enthusiastically put together a series of posts, including a throw-away pirate name post followed by a rather dorky post on how to talk like a pirate, complete with spectrograms of “arrrrrrr.” I feel I did redeem myself, however, with my pirate resume and subsequent rejection letter. In 2008, I put up a pirate ThThTh list. In 2009, I apparently completely forgot about this important holiday. (My excuse was that I was in Spain. This is one of my all time favorite excuses, and I hope to have more opportunities to use it in the future.)

running around

I’ve realized that, once again, I’ve let more than a week go by between posts. I’ve had a lot going on, in my head as well as my life, and I can’t quite manage to get my thoughts together enough for a real post. So I will fall back once more on posting some photos. Here a few from last weekend, when we went for a picnic and walk along a trail that runs beside canal by one of the old mills in a neighboring town.

The August 2010 Just Posts

Welcome to the latest Just Post roundtable, a collection of posts from the month of July on topics relating to social justice hosted here and at Cold Spaghetti.

• wreke of Wrekehavoc.com with homeless
• subWOW of Absence of Alternatives with Lost in Translation
• Stacie of If you want kin… with Using and Abusing
• Rebekka of rebekkaguðleifsdóttir with Excess
• prof susurro of Like a Whisper with On this Historic Day and Dr. Laura: Free Speech Hero
• Paul of Give a Damn about Poverty? with Responsibility and Pakistan Flood Emergency – Why??
• Painted Maypole with Hatred and Fear as American Values?
• Oh, the Joys with The Worst are Full of Passionate Intensity
• Mary of The Eleventh with Let Freedom Ring
• Magpie of Magpie Musing with Cranky About Chase Again
• Leslie of Love Street with Health Care as Human Right
• L.A. to N.O.LA with If God is Willing and da Creek Don’t Rise
• laloca of baggage carousel 4 with a letter from the department of defense
• Kismet of Nuñez Daughter with The Internet of Things Ate My Activism
• Kat of This could get ugly with Just Being Honest
• julochka of moments of perfect clarity with in which she ponders the waning years of the american empire
• Erika of Be gay about it. with No cause to celebrate. and Talking back to talking smack.
• Emily of Emily Rosenbaum with Really?
• Em of Social Justice Soapbox with The OnEarth Weekend Away, The future is in safe hands and Election Rant 2010
• alejna of collecting tokens with stemming the flood of apathy

The posts of this month’s roundtable were nominated by:

Erika
Leslie
Stacie
Holly
Alejna

If you have a post in the list above, or would just like to support the Just Posts, we invite you to display a button on your blog with a link back here, or to the Just Posts at Cold Spaghetti. If you would like to have a post included next month, you can find out how to submit posts and all sorts of other stuff about the Just Posts at the information page.

always late to the party

Theo turned two a couple of weeks ago. Not only did I not manage to post anything here about it on the day itself, but we didn’t manage to have a celebration. Our reasons were many and varied:

a) It was a weekday
b) We didn’t want to have the kids sugared up and and excited over new toys right before bedtime
c) Theo is still too young to understand what a birthday is.
d) We didn’t have our act together.

We would have done something with the family (as in “just the four of us,” seeing as we have no nearby family members) the following weekend, but that weekend had back-to-back parties: Phoebe’s karate school summer party on the Friday, a baby shower for some friends on the Saturday, and Phoebe’s preschool beach party on the Sunday. Not only were we totally zonked, but reasons b through d were applied once more.

So it came to be that it wasn’t until this past Saturday that we managed to get our act together. Not only did Theo get to open his presents, but Phoebe and I baked and decorated a very festive cake.

Phoebe comes in for a smooch.

Theo is intrigued by the colorful circle.

Theo is uneasy about the flaming things.

Phoebe steps in and shows Theo what to do with the candles, thus sparing him the need to get closer to them.

Once Phoebe blew them out, Theo was even more freaked out by the smoke.

“Daddy, save me!”

A piece of cake.

Theo makes his peace with the cake.

One last thing to share: at dinner time on Theo’s actual birthday, Phoebe said, “I’m so glad Theo is 2 now, because that means he won’t argue as much.”

the lazy photographer

I remember my first camera well, though I can’t remember what it was called. It was a little flat black thing that used 110 film, the kind that came in a plastic cartridge. It had no settings, no special lenses, no way to adjust the focus. You could use a flash with it, a separate cartridge with maybe 5 or 6 individual bulbs which you could plug in on top of the camera, and which you’d throw out once each of the bulbs had flashed exactly once. The camera was passed down to me in maybe 1978 or 1979, when my sister was given her first 35 millimeter camera. I was thrilled with my camera, and used it for many years to take an assortment of grainy, blurry, badly composed pictures that were, nonetheless, precious to me.

I had various other cameras in later years (including, eventually, that same 35 millimeter that had been given to my sister). I would periodically take pictures of things to remember where I’d been, or what was going on. I would take snapshots. What’s more, my camera would sit untouched for months at a time.

About 6 years ago, before a trip to Japan, I got my first digital camera.

It was on that trip that I had an epiphany about taking photos: I had never consciously made an effort to consider composition. Composing had meant little more than “getting what I wanted to take a picture of in the frame before pushing the button.” However, having taken painting and drawing classes for several years, various lessons had apparently sunk in. About color. Light. Contrast. Composition. Negative space. Suddenly, I actually paid attention to the image that was in the frame as a whole. The photos I took started to look more like interesting images, and not just images of interesting things.

About 5 years ago, John started getting serious about photography. He read, he studied, he really learned the technical aspects. It didn’t take long before he had completely surpassed me in terms of photography skills. Watching him work, and seeing the results, I started learning, too. The photos I was taking started looking worse and worse to me. For one thing, my little point and shoot couldn’t hold a candle to SLRs. At the same time, I just couldn’t see myself lugging around a camera that was 10 times the mass of what I was used to. I mean, that would require effort.

After Phoebe was born, I started taking a lot of pictures. And I do mean a lot. The quantity of photos, however, didn’t much improve the quality. I just had more chance of getting lucky with a good shot. I used my little point and shoot because it was small enough for me to keep handy.

In the last couple years, I progressed a bit more with composition. I learned to change my position to find more interesting angles, and it’s not unusual to find me squatting down or climbing up. I notice the light, and the background even if I don’t make efforts to manipulate them.

When John got me a shiny new camera last year before our Spain trip, I wasn’t convinced I’d really use it. It had an intimidating array of options. Figuring out what they were seemed like it would be effort.

But, you know, I haven’t gone back to my point and shoot. Not even once. The improved quality of the photos, just by virtue of having a better lens, made me not want to turn back.

Even so, while I take quite a few photos that I really like, I take almost none that I really love. Of the ones that I love, almost all are happy accidents, flukes in the midst of a gazillion bad and mediocre shots.

My photos rarely look the way I want them to.

Part of why I have undertaken this daily photography project is to change that, and get my photos to more closely resemble the images in my head.

As of a few weeks ago, I hadn’t done much with settings. I hadn’t fiddled around with lenses and serious lighting gear. I’d barely entered the realm of manual focus. I could probably count the number of times I’d used a tripod on one finger.

I’m happy to say that in the time since then, I have made progress with changing settings, have mounted a flash, have used manual focus regularly, and have swapped my lenses back and forth.

A couple of nights ago, I even grabbed John’s tripod. (It’s okay. We’re married.)

—

John sent me a link to this graphic a few months ago. I find it fascinating, and a pretty good portrayal of my own path. I haven’t been able to track down the original author of it, as it’s been posted all over the place. But the link from which I grabbed it is here.