Off the Beaten Path

For this week's You Capture photo challenge, Beth from I Should Be Folding Laundry called upon us to capture autumn creatively: up close, and outside the box.

My Regular Readers know that I'm fresh from the mountains, where my camera, husband, and I spent a weekend experiencing fall in its most glorious goodness, so I had plenty of opportunities to capture the season from myriad angles. As with most of my endeavors, I began by getting up close and personal with a fresh cup of coffee...



...savored over a stunning explosion of lakeside color.





Although we did linger over breakfast, the scenery in the outside world where we temporarily took up residence was even more energizing:





Since my husband's injury didn't allow us to do much hiking, we took the time to explore the details in little things that might have otherwise gone unnoticed:






And enjoyed the changes the season brought to an area of the park that was much different during the week we were there in August:








We pretty much had the beach to ourselves. With the exception of one friend we met along the way:



Like all wonderful interludes, this one was all too short. Monday morning found me viewing fall as you only can from an elementary art room:

Technology is Great, Unless Your Editor is a Bot

I was a little bit disappointed when I learned that technology is this week’s photography challenge over at I Should Be Folding Laundry, but I finally said to myself, “OK, I’ll bite.”

See, I have a love/hate relationship with bits and bytes. On one hand, I love the freedom and flexibility of a less tethered life.



It’s wonderful to stay “plugged in” to the lives of friends and family, no matter where they are.



Technology has given me the freedom to make mistakes, and to capture as much as I want, whenever I’d like.



It’s changed the way I experience music.




It’s changed the way I work.



For the most part, technology has enhanced my life.

For the most part.

Technology, however, is not pure goodness. It’s fickle. Unreliable. It’s there all the times when you don’t really need it, when time would be better spent on other things and somehow manages to go rogue for the Important Call, the Big Presentation, or the Crucial Email.

And when I said, a moment ago, that its changed the way I work, I didn’t mean it was all for the good.

Not so very long ago, I was happily working from home as a freelance reporter. I relied on technology to record my interviews, write my assignments, submit them to my editor, and get paid. This was an excellent arrangement and I enjoyed it very much.

But journalism has changed a lot, even over the past year. The impact on me has been invariably bad, and technology is the only target I can blame.

I turned in my last assignment at the paper nearly two years ago. Due to the impact that technology has had on print media, the freelancers were all let go. I was disappointed, but in graduate school at the time, so I didn’t have too much time to dwell on it. I chalked it up to experience and figured I’d find a new gig after graduation.

I thought that happened this week. I was thrilled to be taken on as a journalist with a large, internet based company that supplies copy for a host of well-known websites. I waved off the lightening fast acceptance of my application that should have been my first red flag, delving instead into my welcome packet,overcome with a surge of energy and excitement as I realized just how much I missed journalism.

The company promised that I’d continually have access to a database of “more articles than I could ever possibly write,” and weekly deposits into my PayPal account. The literature assured me that it would be “the best writing job I ever had.”

My excitement was palpable as I finally completed all of my prerequisites and was finally cleared to troll the data base and select assignments. Here’s a sampling of the titles from which I could select:


The Best Way to Extract Oil from an African Locust Bean
How to Seal off Brass Andirons
How to Assemble Homemade Gothic Furniture
How to Heat a Swimming Pool With a Wood Boiler
How to Complete Flange Ups

OK, not exactly my forte—but let’s not panic, I thought to myself, as I discovered little tabs with categories. I decided to peruse the available “family” titles and saw that I could snag an assignment about How to Make Couple Cremation Urns.

Under the “education” tab, I discovered that I could do a little write up on How to Pickle an Oak Cabinet.

Here were some of my Religion and Spirituality possibilities:

Life Expectancy of Screw Air Compressors
What Are the Black Spots in St Augustine Grass?
Witch Hazel Tree Planting Zones

Crafts? Surely, there must be something I could write about in the crafts department. At least if I had any Information on Soaking Canes Before Use.

Let’s try “camping,” I thought. There can’t be much I haven’t encountered in thirteen years of tent camping. Well, except for The Best Way to Brush a Hog Field, anyway.

At this point, I realize that these “titles” are generated from search engine queries and may not even reflect reality, something briefly touched upon in the aforementioned literature. There, however, “bad titles” were glossed over as a possibility that could quickly be cleared up in a single email.

I tested this theory, after tentatively claiming a title called Stress Analysis Formula onder the “opinion” tab. I do have a degree in psychology, after all, so I figure I can do about as much justice with this title as the next guy. Until a simple google search of my own revealed that this could just as easily represent a miscategorized engineering piece. Ooops..let’s send that clarification email and find out.

I got nothing. In the meantime, I decided to try another option, suggesting my own assignment. Within an hour, I got an automated reply accepting my idea, along with a randomly generated flat rate offer of $5.00 to do it. Wow. That pay day won’t even buy me a full cup of Dirty Chai to drink while I do the write up.

The best writing job of my life? I think not. I was much happier when a living, breathing editor, offered me tangible stories about real people, with titles we could discuss in person.

And that $5.00 assignment? I can’t even send a “no thanks” back. The email is of the “no reply” variety. From an unmanned account.

I don't have a clue how to resign my post, but I kind of think the bots won't notice when I do, anyway....

Still Life , or AFK

Still life...the artistic celebration of the inanimate. The opportunity to capture the beauty in objects destined to remain immovable for as long as we need them to--no itchy noses, wagging tails, or flights of fancy...not with still life.

I, on the other hand, am the antithesis of still life. For me, the hardest thing about my love for writing is sitting still for long enough to translate mental images into words. Fortunately, I have discovered that my very best writing ideas often com when I'm out and about, living, breathing, and interacting in the real-time world. Those of you who keep up with my blog will probably have a difficult time believing this, but I have been largely AFK--away from keyboard--this week, battling cheesecakes, taking care of my family, and doing some much-needed de-cluttering.

I "worked ahead" a bit to create the illusion of my presence. I am back, now, just in time celebrate still life with Beth over at I Should Be Folding Laundry for this week's You Capture challenge.







If you came here looking for a story today, I do have one about this sunflower.








A note for yesterday's readers...please stop by the comments section of yesterday's post for a postscript...

Seeing Red

This week, I’m seeing everything red.

Red has been my artistic focus since I discovered that its capture is this week’s photography challenge at I Should Be Folding Laundry.

At its best, red is bold, vibrant and invigorating. At its worst, it’s temperamental. Touchy. Difficult. Sure, red is the color of passion and excitement, but it’s also the color of rage and embarrassment. Like extremes of all kinds, it can be fleeting and elusive—if you doubt this, take a look down the main drag of any random burg and look for the pallid rooftop of the local Pizza Hut. Ditto for all of the once-vibrant bumper stickers tooling around town in incomprehensible shades of sickly pallor.

Metaphorically or artistically, red can be a tough capture, as some of my former art students discovered when we pulled this unintentionally distressed tile from the kiln.

Although we broke it up and worked it into a flag-themed mosaic, it took us multiple firings before we got the rich hue for which we were aiming. Consensus among my artist friends is that red pigments are particularly impertinent, which means, in short, that I had a much better shot at capturing red through a lens than with pigment.










Red is more about moments than permanence. It is to be enjoyed in its immediacy, fresh from the bottle and ripe on the vine. The flower will wilt, the cheap student grade classroom tempra will fade, but their hue remains in images that are nothing more than memories captured by my digital eye.

Falling for Autumn

Rabbit, rabbit.

My husband typically greets me on the first day of each new month with the above words. He welcomes the kids in the same manner, unless one of them beats him to it, which I believe to be the goal. I did not grow up with the double bunny salutation, and I’m still not sure how mammals of any kind factor into the flip of the calendar, but if you do, then rabbit, rabbit. It’s October!

October means that it’s indisputably fall—a fact that energizes me more than a six pack of Red Bull. If I started listing the things I love about fall, I’d leave out a couple dozen that I’d feel guilty later about missing: the brisk air, the explosion of color, crunching leaves, warm, tasty beverages…and PUMPKINS!

My love for fall prompted me to link up to the weekly photography challenge that Beth of I Should Be Folding Laundry hosts each week. This week’s challenge was capturing the feeling of fall. I couldn’t resist.

Let’s start with some Dirty Chai, elected last week as the official drink of the season here at Running With Letters. I’m sorry, Pumpkin Latte, I still love you…but I simply can’t resist warm Chai goodness infused with a shot of espresso. It’s like liquid gingerbread in a cup.



I currently have two pumpkins in my yard. This is one of them. By the time the Christmas lights go up, I’ll be removing about 20 of these from my property.



This shot isn’t the sharpest I’ve ever captured, nor does it immediately evoke fall—at least for me. But when my son saw the box of Boo Berry Crunch in the pantry he exclaimed, “You know it’s fall when Boo Berry comes back!” I adore the look on his face.



I don’t have my full fall décor up yet, but you wouldn’t know it from my kitchen table. With any luck, there will be a piping hot lasagna sitting right smack in the middle of the table this evening—but then again, that was the plan yesterday and I ended up eating cold chicken nuggets which my husband hand fed me while I drove through city streets trying to score vicodin. But that’s a story for another post.



My camera is full of shots, but I’ll hold some back for awhile. After all, this whole post is simply a preview trailer for a blockbuster hit I’ve been waiting for all year: warm fires on the patio, trips to the apple orchard, and a World Series destined to play out in the Bronx—here I come!

Thanks for peeking through my lens with me.

(P.S. Regular readers may want to scroll down to the prior post, if you didn't stop by yesterday afternoon. In order to participate in today's challange, i had an unusually short interval between posts, and I don't want you to miss anything. Especially because a couple of you just might have been mentioned in yesterday's post.)