clickmom

chlor-eyes

Yesterday was the first water polo practice for Evan and I knew he was going to be hurting when I saw the other players filing out of the school rubbing their eyes and wincing in pain.  Evan's eyes do not love chlorine.  Evan stumbled out last, made his way to the car like a blind folded kid playing pin the tail on the donkey, with his arms outstretched, fell into the car and asked me to take him to the pharmacy for anything that could soothe his eyes.  Once at the pharmacy I got in line to ask the pharmacist for advice and Evan wandered into the snack aisle.  Evan, with his red and swollen eyes, returned with his arms full of cookies, pretzels, cheese sticks, and beef jerky just as I was explaining to the pharmacist that his eyes were burning from chlorine.  The pharmacist looked at Evan's eyes and gave him that little sideways look which says "Sure kid, I believe those red eyes are from"chlorine".  You might have your mother fooled, but I am not that gullible."  

I could hardly keep a straight face.  So I gave the pharmacist half a wink and pretended that I knew my kid was wasted and was trying to hide it from my husband.  I thought I was so hilarious and quite clever.  

Today I called the athletic director at the school and complained about the chlorine.  

10 more months

If you close your eyes and listen real hard you can hear me sighing.  Another summer is coming to an end and school is less than 48 hours away.  I hate school.  I hate how they are run, I hate the hoops the kids have to jump through, I hate the schedules, the pressure on the kids, I hate everything about it.  I think I'll go back in time when 13 year old kids apprenticed to someone if they weren't helping on the farm or going into the family business.  I'll just tell Evan to get a job and learn a trade, start contributing to the family income, look for a wife, forget about homework and the SAT.  Forget about going to look at college campuses.  I'll tell Evan life is about to get real for him and it's happening now.

Then I'll dance off back to my own school and (in two years when I graduate) I'll figure out how to make a living at my passion.

Mostly I hate leaving the lake.  I must have been a fish  (mermaid?) in a previous life.  When we went back to new town for a night so Evan could take ( and pass) his road test I stood outside the back door, surveryed the dry waterless backyard and wondered to myself how I was ever going to make it to next summer.  The count down begins tomorrow.

 

messed up

Remember how I almost had a heart attack thinking that I was going to have to do jury duty in July and then the night before I was called for jury duty I phoned the court and found out that my date was cancelled and I had fulfilled my jury duty duty for the year?  I was so happy you probably heard your windows shaking at 5:33 that night as a whooped and hollered my happiniess out in the safety of my own garage and wondered what the reason was.  No earth quakes, just me.

I just got another jury duty notice for September, so I called the court to explain to them that they had made a mistake and it turns out that when they tell you you have fulfilled your jury duty service for a year they mean the court's calendar year, which ends on August 31st and begins on September 1st.  F*@#% ERS.

In the mean time, they cancelled the school bus service at Josh's crunchy granola private school and I feel completely screwed over.  I relied on that bus service last year when I had nothing to do and this year I have to leave town each semester for a couple of  graduate school excursion weeks.  Seriously!  I'm furious.  I don't even want to think about it I am that angry.  Josh's school is completely geographically inconvenient and the one thing it had going for it was the bus service.  

So I called the courts and when I relaized they thought I was going to come and serve jury duty for real this time I told some operator that I couldn't even do jury duty because I am completely alone in this world (I don't have child care)  and I have a kid who goes to a school that is at least 20 minutes with no traffic (which is unlikely in this state)  from my house and I am the only one available to chaffuer him twice a day.  It makes me want to weep to think that I wil be spending all that time locked in my vehicle.  

I am having a moving back to the city fantasy as I type.  And if I do ever move back to the city I'm not going to register to vote or pay any bills in my own name or do anything that the courts can trace because I don't think our justice system is fair and I don't want to be a part of it.

I have to wait a week to ten days to hear if I've been excused under the full time SAHM/dependent kid clause.  Otherwise, I'm growing a moustache and going by the name Seth.

in the swim of things

I'm not a big fan of air conditioning and I usually set it at around 74 in the family room.  I have a big dilemma now because it is mid august and in the 60's outside and I can not justify putting the heat on in August, but I want to!  I won't, but I am about one typepad post away from slipping into a pair of sweat pants and a fleece jacket (already have the fleece slippers on my feet), so I can lounge around waiting for bed time in comfort and warmth.   I had visitors this weekend and they left today along with Matt and the husband and my house went from 10 people to three peole.  It sure is quiet around here! 

I'm still fighting the cold I picked up in school, I'm not as bad as the one student was, but I am still stuffed and sniffling.  I am over the bone dead exhaustion though, and that sure is nice.  I'd like to have a couple of photo days before I go back to new town, and that's going to be tough with Evan in tow.  He is so embarrassed when I look through my camera.  It's kind of interesting but mostly annoying.  I am counting the days until he gets over his teenage self.  I love the child dearly, he is a wonderful boy, who is so freaking tough on me!  

I'm making dinner early tonight despite the fact that we ate lunch super late, because I'm afraid I might not make it awake that late.  The weather app on my phone tells me it is going to be 81 degrees tomorrow and 88 for the rest of the week.  I'm so glad!  When I finally got my butt back into the lake yesterday (first time since before I left for school) it was freezing!  I jumped in, came up, shouted an expletive and headed out for my routine swim with bear bait.  She loves swimming with me.  I wish we could swim all year long.  I dunno how well she'd go over at the local Y though.  She might not be the best thing that ever happened to the pool filter.

 

back to the nest

So tired after the past two weeks I can barely move.  One of my classmates got sick the last couple of days and right now my throat is so raw I can barely swallow.  grumble.  curses. 

I have so many new ideas and thoughts bouncing around in my head I think I might explode.  Seriously, I left school with a whole new (better) persective on what I do, why I do it, and how I need to do it.  I kind of wonder why I didn't go to grad school sooner, but then I think I am in the right place at the right time, and quite happy to be here now.  Now is my time.  

It's a strange feeling because I pretty much feellike every time I go off to grad school I am going to have my mind expanded again, and needing to produce work between ind blowing on campus sessions seems liek a waste of time, since I suspect anything I do now will end up not meeting my future new ideals.  I get the goosebumps just thinking about it.  I wish I could do an expiditied version and get amazed again.  Except for the accomodations.  I could do without the crappy bed and the frightening cafeteria food.  

Best part of being home: my most comfortable cloud like untilted bed, sleeping in the dark, not hearing toilets flush all night long, being able to stumble into the bathroom in the middle of the night without having to put on a robe and slippers, good food, and MY BABIES are all here.  God I love my kids.  

 

tomorrow I rest

I'm pretty psyched to announce that I survived my first summer session of grad school!  Tonight was graduation dinner for the outgoing class and tomorrow morning we have a little meeting and then I'm packing up and heading back to utopia.  

I'm so happy to think that I only have to sleep one more night in this creaky slanted bed.  No more rolling into the wall all night long!  

The biggest decision I need to make about going back to utopia is where I want to nap.  Do I want to collapse on the porch?  Bed? In a hammock?  On the dock?  So many wonderful choices, I just might stagger my nap and sleep a little bit everywhere.

my kingdom for a bath

A bath would feel like perfection right now.  Except I'm in a seminary and the bathrooms are exactly like hospital bathrooms, right down to the strange yellow vanilla ice cream colored plastic bath curtains.  No bathtubs in sight.  Not that  I'd hop into a communal bathtub.  But a long hot soak would be perfection right now.  I just wrote my first paper.  It isn't my best writing ever.  I figure I can always get the most improved award.  I hate opinion pieces.  My opinion is usually good for about 200 words and this was a 1,000 word minimum paper so I managed to force about 500 words of my own opinion out and then I just lavished it with related quotes from various internet sources.  I hope it isn't too quote heavy.  I guess I'll see when my grade comes back.  I got it in way before deadline and I have the feeling that the other students will be getting theirs in right under the wire so hopefully that will count in my favor.  

There has been a lot of drinking goign down around here, and I finally bought myself some gluten free beer, which would be the next best thing to a bath right now except I forgot about the bottle opener and I am pretty sure everyone else is squirrelled away furiously typing and I don't feel like wandering the halls in search of another person who did not put the assignment off until the last second just in case they either know hwo to open these things without the bottle opener or actually have one on them.  Oh, the frustrating life if a grad student! 

I am finshed with the first two classes.  One class was for large and medium format film cameras and printing.  I can tell you that lurking about under a black cloth with granny reading glasses on is even less appealing than lurking about without the glasses.  I did good in the end, I'm expecting an A.  I had a good attitude and I submitted a solid body of work, which represented a thorough knowledge and ability in everything we did.  The other class was an introduction to photobooks.  I participated a bit in class, there are some very vocal young people in my group.  I wish one chatter bug in particular would shut up.  You know the senior citizen who talks through the whole movie?  It's like being in the same room as one of them.    We had to hand in that paper I mentioned before by midnight tonight.  I pretty much finished mine by 6:30, but I decided to have dinner first and then give it the once over one more time.  I saw the family for dinner, which was awesome, I hadn't seen Evan in over a month!  Then I did a smidgeon more polishing and sent it off.  I just wish the teacher would be sending out confirmation emails.  Sending an email is not the same as physically handing a paper to someone.   I'm sure I did fine on the paper, it may have been a little quote heavy.  I suffer from the same condition as the boys, which is a lack of wanting to expand on my opinions, when writing papers.  In real life, I am more of a story teller, which isn't shocking.  I blog!  

Tomorrow we start a new set of classes.  We will continue with the photobook class and we will begin critiques.  I'm a little afraid of the critiques.  I know they are going to be brutal. I'm not really prepared enough.  I printed out my work at the last minute and with two emergency room and one orthopedic visit

Whoops, I see that I forgot to tell you exactly how Josh managed to fall towards the open trash can at the exact same time it was falling towards him and end up half way inside the trash can with two broken fingers and a gash requiring three stitches in his knee.  They didn't catch the broken fingers (despite Josh's vivid description of the agonizing finger pain in the exact spot where the fractures occurred) at the ER until we ended up back in the ER 24 hours later because Josh was running a 102 fever, which is a warning sign of wound infection but Josh's wound was fine and I attribute the fever to the tetanus shot they gave him.  Next day he got casted into a huge purple boxing glove of a cast.  And that was the day I left for school.  SO, THE LESSON I LEARNED was not to stupidly wait for the last minute because I live in a world where people fall into strange things, break themselves, and require medical attention.

Also, when I was last minute printing my work I was suddenly low on one color ink, which just happened to be the one of 9 colors that I did not have a spare for, so I was afraid to reprint anything and run out of ink.  It was just one thing after another and I didn't feel like I could stop and do anything about it.  I just had to be zen and see just how much I could print and just take what I got.  In the end I got a bare minimum.  I might have some time this week to print something else, so I think that is what I am going to try to pull off.   

Well, it's getting late here, and I am going to slide into my hard lumpy bed and try not to crash into the wall it leans towards or hear the toilet flushing on the other side of the wall next to my room all night long.  You have no idea how tired I am.  Did I mention that we are not sleeping in the dorms?  We are sleeping in a seminary down the road.  Lot's of statuary.

Politically correct portion of email to my friends

I left out the part where I made fun of described people and also something about my need for prunes.  (Yay, dorm life!)

We have been shooting and developing a lot of film, and that makes me a little sad and confused because I really really want to stay in the digital world. I just feel like the digital world is so close to honing in on the qualities that make film better that it would be silly of me to step back now.  Also, I'm kind of worried about how toxic it is for me and for the environment.  After that fun bout with heavy metal poisoning two years ago, I think I should not be messing with chemistry of any sort.   So, I have made up my mind to stay digital.  I hope they don't give me too much of a hard time about it.  Only one person in the second year class works in digital.  Gulp.  On the other hand I am fully immersed in why I fell in love with photography in the first place.  We had to read all these books before we got here and famous photographers would discuss which photographers inspired them and I realized that for me, I was not inspired by looking at photos I was in love with the process.  So, I will miss the process.  It is very exciting to go in the dark, load up your negatives, shake them around in chemicals for a while and wait to see if something magical appears after you develop them. 

We are pretty much on our feet all day, there is one two hour class where we sit like a traditional class, but athe end of the day I am bone tired and ready to pass out. 

 Tomorrow, I will tell you how utterly creepy it is to lodge in a huge echoing mostly deserted seminary.  

PS I was assigned the room next to the bathroom, which has it's ups and downs.  On the plus side, I don't have to jog down a 30 yard hallway in the middle of the night, on the downside loudest flushing toilets ever.

Grad school

End of day 2-

My feet are killing me, I spent a good chunk of the afternoon fantasizing about a foot massage.

It's good to be talking about photography all day long.

So far I haven't met or seen a professor that I didn't like.

This is going to be more fun and also harder than I thought.

I'm shooting film, (because we are all shooting film, as they are reviewing processing techniques with us)  and there seems to maybe be a little bias against digital, but I can tell you for sure that I won't be able to develop my own film and even the smell of fresh film (much to my disappointment, I used to LOVE the smell of fresh film)  was making my stomach turn a little today while I was shooting.  I have concerns.  I think I also have chemical sensitivities (headaches already this morning after some time in the dark room), and in the back of my mind I'm thinking that digital is going to catch up with with film  (appearance wise)  before we know it and going back to film seems like a step in the wrong direction.  Most everyone around here scans their negatives and edits on photoshop and prints on ink jet printers.  Without the silver gelatin prints, I'm not sure what the big deal is.   I might just have to stick with my digital guns.  I think I might need a better camera before the truly remarkable camera hits the market.  "This will be an issue" is what I say to myself, but the bottom line is that it isn't an issue, I can just go on line and order one, I'm just cheap.