Monthly Archives: July 2008

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Lisa

Yesterday I was sad, I heard that Randy Pausch, who I first came across the week after he made his speech the last lecture in Sept of last year. He passed away of Pancreatic Cancer. It was a reminder that things do no thappent he way they should. It made me want to call my grandmothers friend who suffers from the same cancer.

I do not think I would have tackled this photography thing had I not heard that speech, right then. You ever look back and know that a moment changed you fundamentally - at your core - it changed you?

I look at meeting people at I know that Lisa as one of those people for me. Someone who changed me just by meeting her. You don’t know what you are missing if you don’t know her.

Today I mention her because she has cancer as well. we don’t know anything more - we don’t know what kind we don’t know what fight we will have to fight but I want to say out loud to the universe, we will fight this with her in what ever way she needs us to, for however long she needs us. “We” are a real breathing group of people who love her and she will not be taken with out a fight.

This is all I can say.. Lisa we are so praying for you and ready to fight with you.
lisa

Weekend recap

onclick="return hs.expand(this)" width="500" height="332" />Ah dear internets - what to say?

It has been a full, full time since my last post.

Have I mentioned my Bri took her first steps? four perfect little steps right to me. I’m sure I mentioned that shes been standing up since Sheba’s visit and when I told Sheba about her now walking she said she was totally taking credit for it. Bri is not really confident about the walking she still prefers to scoot across the floor, and it looks like she will be forgoing the whole crawling thing just as her sister did.

my little angel is such a old lady spirit. She and her sister are total opposites yet just alike, and such fun to watch together.

We had a relatively solid weekend. I have been working on building the photography so consistanly this weekend was a welcome relief and change as most of my building this weekend has been knowledge based, which gives me the space to be home with my husband and children. I see the sacrafice they make by helping me do this. My kids don’t exactly know how they are helping, as I try ot focus as much of my attention as won’t go wandering to my last session on them when they are awake. But bed time is way more strictly enforced as thats the time I am most free to get alot of work done. Even still nothing makes me feel more wonderful than when my kids want me to do bed time, and want me to sit for dinner. Sometimes they choose daddy, as they should. It still leaves a little pang of jealousy.  He is such a wonderful daddy I can’t blame them at all.

This weeknd also gave me a chance to turn the camera on my girls. Cammy and Bri were invited to a birthday party of another blog friend, who was and has returned to IRL friend status with the QUICKNESS. I have learned alot about myself and the thing I learned first and foremost is that I miss having real life friends. Spoken is my heart but she works 90 hours a week, and she doesn’t have kids. Shoot the only kids she even likes are mine and one of her neices. So it was so refreshing to talk to someone who is artistic, and a mom, and has some of the same concerns and desires that I do. We had so much fun talking and then hanging out at the birthday party we went out to discuss all manner of stuff again on Sunday night. I had so much fun I forgot to take a single picture.

The birthday party was a two part affair. We met up at the transportation museum in I guess that would be sort of south county sort of mid county hybrid.

But it was AWESOME.

Dude, I probably had more fun than the kids. But the kids had a great time too. Jerry came with us to the Museum. Which was awesome. Cammy thrives off of us as a family unit and its so good to flex that outside of our four walls. Besides they make me so proud. All the time. I love that I got to watch Cammy trail after her daddy as he showed her all the train cars. Shes so dainty next to his masculine air. My friend has a boy, it was his birthday and he turned two. And it was also very interesting to watch Cammy relate to a little boy and we all agreed it was probably in all of our best interest that Gabrielle was not Gabriel. She was not enthused by his boyish charm.

Gabrielle was the belle of the ball. Shes is such a good baby in general and for the first time she really liked these new people instantly. We went with the birthday boys parents and grandparents and Bri was quite happy to lounge with any of them, and she smiled at them all.

I know, major right!

Cammy got her water play on. She was amazed byt he working large pool in their back yard, and was promptly like, “Mom, we need one of those.” Althought the Cammy line of the night was:

Cammy (while spearking a bite of cake with her fork): My tummy is upset.
Jerry: Cammy you can’t have cake if your tummy is upset. (reaching for her cake)
Cammy: My tummy doesn’t hurt! (pulling her cake away)
Jerry: Cammy you just said it hurts, does it hurt or not?
Cammy: (thinking) Yes…. and NO! big smile.

She got to keep her cake.

 

more blogging to come..

 

random internet tom foolery

So I get this chat request from a Uniformtrout.. and feelin a little bored I accept..

9:38 am  uniformtrout: Yarrr!
                               me: ?
                uniformtrout: okay …ARRRR! Avast! who be this? …ARRRR!
                               me: um - who are you? not that ARRRR isn’t right up my piratey alley
9:39 AM  uniformtrout: aye  i thought so. …ARRR!  we got botted. …ARRRRR!
                               me: botted?
               uniformtrout: it be always people wit’ fish related screen names …ARRRRRRR!   i keep gettin’ a parrot makin’ people say things like “ahoy”   or in this case …ARRR!  yarrr …ARRRRR!
                               me: its been real
                uniformtrout: Avast! okay
9:40 AM                  me: shakes head I am so gonna blog this today..

flickr meme

I have been chatting it up with a very cool lady lately and I grabbed this meme from her blog. Thought I’d try it out..

Few notes.. I could have put a picture of Marcus Patrick with his clothes on.. but why?? I like him naked, thats sort of his appeal for me right now. Shallow but honest I know. Even WOBL’s can be a tad shallow, and he is a tad more nekkid that I expected when I viewed that image large.. but hes got great ken dolls..  :P

Heres the meme:
a. Type your answer to each of the questions below into Flickr Search.
b. Using only the first page, pick an image.
c. Copy and paste each of the URLs for the images into fd’s mosaic maker.

1. What is your first name? Raquita
2. What is your favorite food? sushi
3. What high school did you go to? riverview gardens
4. What is your favorite color? purple
5. Who is your celebrity crush? marcus patrick
6. Favorite drink? pom mojito
7. Dream vacation? hawaii
8. Favorite dessert? brownies with ice cream
9. What do you want to be when you grow up? photographer (does this mean I’m a grown up? maybe I shoulda put clown in there)
10. What do you love most in life? my family
11. One word to describe you. per the husband - ignition
12. Your Flickr name. Raquita I stopped hiding behind fake names years ago (no offense to those who use them there are very valid reasons why people do and should use them.)


1. Boudoir Sessions, 2. デパ地下寿司, 3. Evening along the Yarra, 4. Just an Orchid, 5. MARCUS PATRICK, 6. Pomegranate-raspberry mojito, 7. Botanical Gardens - Hilo, Hawaii HDR, 8. Cho Cho Cho, 9. Showtime!, 10. Latest Family Portrait, 11. We have ignition, 12. Not yo mama’s cakes

Mobile post sent by Raquita using Utterzreply-count Replies.  mp3

Mobile post sent by Raquita using Utterzreply-count Replies.  mp3

Mobile post sent by Raquita using Utterzreply-count Replies.  mp3

Its Tuesday.. wait.. it is Tuesday right?!?

[caption id="" align="alignleft" width="500" caption="Lindseys rearview.. "]Lindseys rearview.. [/caption]

Its been a long weekend, and since I started the whole photography business the weekend just means I get to work on love instead of on spreadsheets, which is good, but it also means I always need a weekend from my weekend.  I have more detailed posts coming up soon, including some behind the scenes stuff, my growth as an artist, and as a person. I went to a seminar last friday that kinda helped kick me along on both fronts. I got to meet a few of the area photographers whose work I really, really admire. I got the chance to see them as people, get to know them beyond images. It was sort of like the first day of highschool and I got invited to sit at the seniors table. Only the seniors have kick arse cameras and like their guiness draft. (Hi Peter!) I got to meet some very nice vendors, who sold me on a new lab, and might have restored my faith in In the same breath I got home from my seminar and had all these ideas and things I want to implement and I got frustrated that I couldn’t do it all right now.  

But I have the chance to step back and think, figure out how I want to work. I have the chance to learn from a lot of great people and not make the same mistakes, no matter how attractive some of those mistakes seem. I get to focus on what will allow me to have the relationship I want to have with my clients. How to produce the best images possible. How to become exactly who I want to be.. Me, only with Jazz hands…

Longer post tomorrow with real recap of stuff. and more pictures..

You only read what?!?

My blog buddy Dwight did this a while ago and I said I was gonna do it too, but I was in the middle of relaunch and all that good stuff. Then someone commented here and they had done it so I decided I can do it too, like I don’t have A zillion non-meme posts to write.. Anywho - this is what I’m doin..

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read. (I’m including any books I’ve started but haven’t finished.)
3) Reprint this list in your blog so we can try and track down these people who’ve read 6 and force books upon them ;-)”

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien This is one of the books my husband has read and I haven’t so I’m trying to catch up before he has my kid reading them..
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling Again same as number 2.
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible

7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare I’ve read a few but not the complete works
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma- Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis same as #2
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini more books we have at the house and I started but didn’t finish
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown

43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility- Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas (en francais)
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom have it started it couldn’t get into it..
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery (en francais)
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

I was a tad disapointed in the choices in this list - not that they aren’t wonderful works I just would have liked to have seen more stuff on it. No Toni Morrison? Not that I could have bolded a bunch of her titles.. I’ve been trying to read Beloved since the year it came out, but she is a powerful american writer. Would have liked to have seen The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran on that list, the complete collections of Pablo Neruda. Would have liked to have seen Sonja Sanchez on that list, but thats mostly the poet in me.  I’m clearly not as well read as I would like to be although I would like to thank My english teachers Mrs. Baker-Bradford, Mrs. Edwards, and Mrs. Raglin who could put the hurtin on you with a critical analysis paper. THey are the reason I read most of these books I have in bold at all. Although after teh first book, if I like the author I would read their other works on my own. I was booky like that.

Thinking of my english teachers bring back wonderful memories.  I would hate for any of them to break out a red pen on my blog.

just the idea gives me shudders.

life revisited

So, Things have been poppin onthe photography end. If you looked at my blog in the last few weeks you would think I STAY behind a camera, and I do, but I get alot of life lived around that part too. And while I love the big images, I think sometimes I need to post in my way. So when I’m talking about my life my posts will look more like - well, my posts. Rather than showcases for the images, I’ll showcase a few by  putting them in the same format that I did before with the thumbnails at the end of the post. So hover and click to see a bigger picture. **Okay that little feature isn’t working and I can’t get to my home pc for uploading to fix til tomorrow.. be a dear and test it for me during Saturday morning cartoons please? Is that okay with everyone? yes? great. Kthanks!

poetry (2 of 4)Bri is standing on her own as of this past Sunday. She was sitting with my poet friend and she just let go and Bri stood there until we started clapping and she decided to clap too and that threw off her balance.  I did go to a poetry reading last weekend. Good friend Sheba came through to grace my couch and brought a friend Georiga ME from Atlanta, who is such a personality.

We spent a fair amount of time with Miss Georgia as her plane was canceled and that resulted in an extra day and night with us. She didn’t seem to mind. I enjoyed her work, and as I work on making my way back into poetry as a hobby It was refreshing to talk to her, and I will probably mark our conversations in my reasons why I decided to come back.

I also got to meet one Mister Kevin Sandbloom. Can I just say, Oh my. That man has vocals that made me stop and turn around to find out if he was actually singing or if I was gonna find an angels or doves sitting in his stead. He was geninuely a nice guy as well which is refreshing for such a talented person. Its a flat out DAMN SHAME that man doesn’t have a record deal.

Miss Sheba did her damn thing as well. I only see her when she comes to town for poetry shows. Her visits are so few and far between. Sometimes I am disapointed that we don’t see each other outside of her gigs. But shes got a house too so I am planning to go visit her in ATL later this summer. And I’ll sleep on her SUPERSTAR FUTON, Sheba do you even HAVE a suserstar futon? Cammy, Sheba and Georgia had the most interesting visit. Cammy is a girls girl. So while they were getting ready, Cammy was hovering, totally enchanted by Sheba’s bangles and Georgia’s makeup bag, as they are DIVA’s they have all the tools to enchant a budding four year old girl.

It was refreshing to TALK to adults whose ideals I didn’t already know, who I don’t necessarily agree with, who I respect and who can take an actual discussion. (Thank you Georgia.) ANd the level of local poetry at the event was suprisingly strong. And I am looking forward to going back outside more often. Wish I could go this Friday, alas I have a photography event I must attend, so next week for sure.

Jerry’s picked up a new weekday hobby that he really enjoys, I am not going to elaborate as I am trying to force him to blog about it. He sucks worse than I do at blogging. Although he is certianly holding up his end of our e-lationship he sent me this, and I think I am totally geeking on it. I have always loved NPH, and this just makes me remember WHY I love him, and now my husband loves him, and I’m okay with that.

I will blog more in the very near future. I have alot more sessions to put up, and lots of life to catch up on.

Life is a verb -its not meant to be something that happens to you, its something you do. “Why not?” is a perfectly good life Strategy!