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It might be that we are kind of terrible pet owners.  We like to tease our cats, perhaps, sometimes, more than we should.  They seem to still love us, although sometimes I wonder if we just have some feline Stockholm syndrome going on.

Tonight’s entertainment though, has been spectacularly funny.  Wiley put down the cat food container, with the lid open, on the floor next to the (very) empty cat dish.  If any of them knocked over the container, there would be food everywhere for them to eat.  None of them have been smart enough to figure it out.

In turn, each cat has walked up to the container, tried to stuff their faces into the hole at the top, glared at the empty food dishes, glared at me, meowed a bit and then sat around for a few minutes hoping the food would magically pour itself into the bowl.  They’ve all stalked off of their corners of the house now, although regular patrols wander by to see if the situation has improved.  Each patrol repeats their behavior (sniff, glare, glare, stalk off).

Now, they’re all back in here staring balefully at me and at the food container.  I’d long thought we had at least one problem solver in our herd, but it appears not.  I wonder how long this container will stay upright in here.

Oh, and if we’re ever found dead in our beds with strange puncture wounds, the only mystery will be which cat did it.

My lovely Mystery Shawl

Isn’t that a lovely shawl?  I knit it back in 2007, the first mystery knit along I ever joined.  I blocked it on the floor of a hotel room so that I could wear it for my dear Shani’s wedding.  Last night, I realized it was ruined.

I went into my dresser to put a scarf away and noticed that there was a wee bit of brown crud on the shawl.  My heart sank, because around here, that generally means one thing.  Carpet beetles, the scourge of my knitterly existence.  As hungry as moths and, it would seem, much harder to get rid of, I have been battling these things since we moved into this house.  Despite their name, the fact that there is not a lick of carpet to be had in the place means nothing, which hardly seems fair.  Their tastes for expensive wool over crappy just adds insult to the injury.

But this one hurt a lot.  They couldn’t eat the old and pilled clapotis that was right next to this one, or the store bought wool wrap that, while lovely, is store bought and just not that special. No, they eat the shawl I love that.  When I first saw the hole, I thought it could be saved.  I pulled a thread through the loose loops and tried to work out how I might repair it.  Then I realized there were holes all over the piece, and I knew it was hopeless.

So much carnage, so much sadness.  Someday I’ll figure out how to get rid of these damn things.

Finally, enough time to actually talk about my photo class.   I’ve already talked about how much I enjoyed it, but I am hoping that you are interesting in hearing the details.

We started with looking at a slide show of Gales work – both photos that worked, and also ones that hadn’t.  As we went through the slideshow, she talked about the good and bad points of the shots, why this one worked but that one didn’t, the challenges in getting the shots, the choices she had made in setting them up.  I loved this, for a couple of reasons – first it was gratifying to realize that even the teacher, who get paid real American dollars for her photography skills takes bad pictures and makes bad calls about what will work in a picture and what won’t.  If she does it, maybe I don’t have to beat myself up quite so much when I do it – and it doesn’t mean she can’t get amazing and awesome pictures, and so can I.  Second, it was priming the pump for my creative brain to engage, looking at her collection of creative work and thinking critically about color and composition and framing.

After that, we started putting ourselves and our cameras through some hands-on exercises.  Nearly everyone had brought samples of their handiwork to use in our exercises – I brought shawls that I have knit, one woman was a weaver who had brought a bunch of her amazing work, another made these fantastic felted dolls, and a fourth had gorgeous colorwork hats.  We used these for our photos.  Our first exercise was a simple color exercise, trying a sample piece on a number of different backgrounds, to see how the different colors would work together.  After we had played with that for a bit, we moved on to having our volunteer model wear different sample pieces and we worked together as a class brainstorming where and how she should stand, what she should do and snapping picture after picture.  Gale offered advice and suggestions, showed us different tricks for lighting and reflecting light exactly where we wanted it, and then pulled out fabric for backgrounds so we could see the effects we could create with those.

We broke for lunch and downloaded our pictures onto her machine so we could review them after the lunch break.  Before we reviewed the photos, we did a quick photo processing tutorial, where we learned how to do some basic image editing.  A lot of that was review for me, but I definitely learned some new tricks as well as finding a cool online processing app, for those times you don’t need full-blown Photoshop.  The photo review was instructive, with everyone offering compliments and criticism of each others work, and it was interesting to see how a group of people all taking the  “same” pictures ended up with very different pictures, depending on where they were standing, exactly, or the moment that they chose to snap.

We had daylight left after the review of the mornings work, so we headed back outside for more practice, with different garments.  They were different colors, different fabrics, different types of knitwear and we talked while we worked about what we would need to do differently to capture and show off what made each piece special.

I got a lot out of the class, and the hand-on time with guidance was definitely something that I’d not gotten a lot of of from the other classes I’ve taken.  The biggest piece was edging a little further past my biggest block in learning to take good photos – that I need to step up and control my shot, as much as I can.  Working with a model, I need to get comfortable telling them what I need, even if it looks goofy outside the frame of the photo and changing things if something isn’t working.  Working with still life components, I need to get over feeling like it’s excessively twee and precious to create the shot I want.

I carry around this idea in my head that all those gorgeous pictures I see just “happened” – that the photographer was somehow magically in the right spot at the right time, or just always lays out their food just so, or magically sees a perfectly framed shot that I don’t see.  The more I practice, the more classes I take, the more I realize how foolish that mindset is, but I’m still struggling with getting over myself and creating the scenes that I need to create to get the photos I’ll be happy to show off.

I think if the weather is good this weekend, I’m going to make Miss. H be my model and take lots more pictures.

I was going to write all about my class last Saturday this evening, but then work ate my entire evening, and maybe my face.

Instead, I’ll promise to write that tomorrow, and will instead give you a link to one of my favorite comics strips – yesterday’s Two Lumps was particularly apt to the moment.  I was going to grab the comic, then realized that, duh, they probably wouldn’t like it if I swiped their stuff.

While I’m at it, I’ll share a link to clips from last Sunday’s NFL Kickoff on ESPN.  If you know me, you’re wondering why the hell I would even KNOW about NFL Kickoff on ESPN – you’ll see.

Today’s Ten on Tuesday is ten things your local food pantry could use.

I’m not going to write a list, mostly because I think anyone inclined to donate to a food pantry already knows what they need.

I am going to share a story from last year, when one of our local food pantries did something really inspired to collect donations.  One of the weekends between Thanksgiving and Christmas they had volunteers staked out that the front of my local supermarket with printed lists of things that they needed.  They highlighted the things they really needed and highlighted things that were on sale in the store that week.  You could take a list if you wanted, and they had a group of volunteers collecting your donations at the front of the store.

Even though there’s always a food bank collection box at the front of the store, the direct impact of being asked by a volunteer to help, having clear direction of what they needed and having someone collecting the donations and thanking the donors seemed like it was having an enormous effect – nearly everyone was walking around with one of their lists and most people were buying things for the pantry.  I know I was motivated and donated far more than I generally do when there’s a food drive at school or church.

It renewed my belief in the idea that most people want to help, but they need direction and they need someone to ask them.

Hmmmmm, it’s 10:30.  Gotta come up with a blog post.  Log into wordpress, stare at the empty screen for a few minutes.

Realize that I haven’t cleared out spam comments in ages, and there’s a metric ton of them.  Yeeeeah, I should clean those out.  Marvel, once again, at the near-poetic lack of English grammar in most of the spam.

Come back and stare at the empty screen for a few more minutes.   Click over to Facebook and refresh, as if anything interesting has shown up in the last few minutes.  Might as well check my Ravelry forums while I’m at it… aaaaand  come back and stare at the empty page some more.

Knit a few rows on the knitting I’m not allowed to show you, hoping for some profound inspiration there.  Turns out stockinette is not profoundly inspiring.

Stare at the empty screen some more.

Finally start typing, realizing that this is about all I have for today.  I’m calling it as still counting.

This was a class I had been waiting a long time to join.  I’ve stalked Gale Zucker’s blog and work for years, and had not managed to take her class – every time she has been teaching anywhere nearby, I couldn’t make the class.  Turns out, I’m glad I didn’t – I got so much more out of it since I learned to actually use the camera well last June.

I’ll write more, with more pictures when I get back to my good monitor, but the class was awesome.  I have that fantastic inspired with creative juice flooding my brain feeling this evening.   I love it.

Digging deep in my collection of old photos here, but how about a lovely shot up George Washington’s nose?

Mount Rushmore, July 2010

Hoping for lots more eye candy over the weekend, because I am taking a Gale Zucker workshop, and super excited for it!