Author: lauramchugh

It was a beautiful day today driving between warm and sunny Half Moon Bay and the East Bay, where I went to visit with family near Mt. Diablo.

I took my camera and put on the dreamy Diana lens and got these photos of the hills around Mt. Diablo.

I like the effects I get with this lens.

It’s a couple of days before Christmas and I went to a restaurant to meet a friend to deliver the xmas boxes I made for her. I looked over my shoulder and saw this geocaching box on the counter. Do you know about geocaching? It’s a cool activity I was introduced to several years ago.

I think it may have been invented by the companies that make GPS units. You use a GPS and the Geocaching.com website to locate these geocache boxes. When you find them, kind of an adult treasure hunt, you open the box to find all sorts of goodies. You can leave a goodie and take one.

Here’s a little guy that I could have taken if I’d had something to leave.

Now with the advent of really good GPS features on the iPhone, you can of course find a geocaching app. I’m going to download one soon and start geocaching with my friends. I will be on a quest for little plastic animals that I’m starting to collect in the bowl in my front hallway.

Sometimes (usually) there are little notebooks in the box that you can use to leave a little note about your experience. I like this one: I think Monty is tiring of dating Lillie, or the restaurant, or both.

Today’s Photojojo is No. 67. I’m not sure where Nancy took the candy counter photo; it is paired with my picture of leaves on the stairs of the parking structure.

It always happens right around this time of year – I am reminded of how much I hate Christmas.

To be fair, I don’t really hate Christmas. I actually love the day of – seeing all my kids, going later to see the rest of my family. But the run up – in the few days preceding it – I find exhausting to the point of squelching all the fun out of it. I always manage to get through Christmas, and then on Boxing Day there is an inevitable relief/let down, wondering if my kids are happy with everything or disappointed like I always seemed to be growing up. I know – I project this onto them. I’m a work in progress on this.

Then, by the 27th or so, it’s time to think about birthdays and getting ready for all that, then I’m really ready for a little vacation. This year, I’m going to Bellingham WA to chill. It will probably be cold there. I’ll be ready for a nice little plane ride and some time away from my own environment. Then, after a few days there, I’ll be ready to come home and start the new year.

This year was a bitch in many ways – mainly with the global economic implosion. I hope next year is better, but there is really no guarantee it will be.

Here’s Photojojo #66 – some holiday lights on the left (Laura) and packages all wrapped and ready to go (Nancy).

Yes – I’m still doing art besides Photojojo. I’ve been quite busy, actually, with all kinds of other non-photographic art and art related activities.

For example, this weekend, I moved all my art related supplies (painting inventory, new canvases and frames) plus some household stuff that was cluttering up my garage, er studio, into a new and wonderful little fence hugger shed I just bought. I was installed in my back yard on Thursday, and by today, Sunday, I had it fully in use. See all about it here.

Here’s a picture of the little darlin’ in the yard. It’s 6×12′ and I was able to get lots of boxes of various papers and mementos into it, plus a lot of other stuff. So, now everything is here onsite and I’m happier than a clam.

I also did a commissioned art project over the weekend. A friend of mine is giving jewelry to her family as gifts for Christmas. She wanted an art box to enclose each gift, so I did these boxes which have her mother’s photo on them. There are eight in all – seven smaller and one larger for the client. I hope she likes them!

I’ve also been planning my next print effort. I’m thinking about see saws, my childhood and quilts. I did a pro-form of the piece I want to start with. The photos of the man, collaged on as would be the case in the final piece, are just placeholders. What is significant about them is that there are two different photos of the same person. The placeholder images I used were from carte de visites, a predecessor to our modern day business card in the mid-1800s. These carte de visites were signficant in that the photographers of the day, using what were then recent technological developments (ha ha, no pun intended) were able to get eight exposures of the sitting client onto one piece of photo paper. There was something about the camera that took two exposures at one time and a way to move the negative over so that they got another two slightly different posed shots.

Anyway, I am working with these ideas and hope to have more time over the holiday break to explore more.

My studio was transformed today by getting a lot of important clutter out to the Shed. Now there is room to walk around my press. It was functionally okay in its prior location, with one side up against the back of a shelving unit. But it seems important to be able to walk around it and interact with it when printing. So, now it can breathe and so can I. Honestly, if I had my way, I would have a 2,000 square foot studio co-located with my house with all matching and covered storage so that I could label and then stow away all my art-making supplies.

This is the next best arrangement. Nearly all of the garage is dedicated to art, except for the ironing board, and some cleaning supplies stored near the door from the house out.