• a variety of fine pickles •

well, screw it.

so i've been fighting with this whole "catching up" thing... admittedly, i felt pretty inarticulate yesterday and just didn't see myself trying to put words to the last 6 months, and i figured "who freakin' cares what i've been doing the last 6 months, anyway?" i wondered just how curious the 3 people who read this blog actually were about my absence... 

then i started exploring the new typepad dashboard. they've upgraded and added a bunch of new cranks, knobs and levers to the dash to make it easier to navigate - and i have to say they accomplished what they set out to do, and beautifully so. it's not only a lot more aesthetically pleasing, now it's actually... easier.

one of the new features (well, new to me - it might have been there all along and i just never found it... the old typepad dashboard sometimes felt something like a hedge maze) is the nifty "overview" - it's a hit counter and a spiffy chart that shows how many unique views your blog has had, when it was hit, where the referral came from, etc... cool, right? not that i would really care, what with the THREE people that read this blog - and that was when i was keeping it up on a regular basis.

somehow, i had 282 hits since midnight last night. huh? are you kidding? what the... huh? i pored over the data for several minutes early this morning trying to make sense of what i was seeing (pre-coffee and then post-coffee, just for good measure) and unless the good people at typepad are jerkin' my chain, it just might have... actually happened. honestly not sure how, but still...

so...

somebody gives a crap, i guess. friends? maybe. family? possibly. stalker? could be. whoever it is reading my dorky little blog, thanks... and here are those bullet points i sort of said i wasn't going to be bothering with for a while... this is my last 6 months in a nutshell and crap that i probably would have written about:

• let me just start by saying that looking back on the last 6 months, it feels like it might have been sort of rough, but i made it through. and it did have a few high spots. 
• i was in my tent on a camping trip when a tornado came through our campsite and collapsed my tent. my best friend mary saved my life by pulling me out of my tent - even after the tornado literally ripped all of her clothes off of her. 
• i went to los angeles to visit my friend amos and to see my aunt & uncle in hollywood
• i drank a lot while i was there. a lot. it was a pretty darn good time.
• i had kidney stones. i don't recommend them. 
• i found out that my very first real crush, brian palazetti, was killed in a motorcycle accident just after highschool
• i spent a great weekend in austin with my best friends on a pretty snazzy girls' weekend
• i got to sing at the bugle boy in la grange 
• i had cocktails with my first "we've never actually met but we know each other on facebook" friend
• i actually journaled so much that i filled a journal from beginning to end with actual... words
• i took down a few walls that i'd spent years constructing and fortifying... and then i built a couple more...
• i wasted valuable time - that i'll never get back - on the craziest person i've ever met. seriously - he was nuts... like, "needs-locking-up-crazy-out-of-his-damn-mind-gorilla-shit" nuts. he's a very talented photographer, but that's where the not-crazy ends. he was also something of an asshole.
• i learned to actually like my job, most of the time
• i bought a new car
• i developed a huge crush on seth rogen
• i painted my dining room orange, my foyer & kitchen a lovely buttery yellow, and handpainted wallwords in my bedroom
• i turned 38
• i discovered exactly what i'm not looking for in a man
• i learned that a few of my friends are a LOT crazier than i am
• i lost a couple of friends that turned out to be complete assholes... so no real loss, actually.
• i tried to cure my best friend shannon's hiccups by screaming and gave her a righteous, honest-to-god anxiety attack and made her wet her pants. really... still seriously sorry, shannon...
• i reconnected with my oldest running-buddy girlfriends from the 4th grade
• i had a photo published to schmap from my trip to los angeles
• i created a pretty stunning set of sterling silver wedding bands for some friends in NYC 
• i didn't get ANY new tattoos (well, within the last 6 months anyway)
• i ate and enjoyed pecans for the first time in my entire life - and yes, i'm a texan...
• i discovered it's never a good idea to pluck your eyebrows in the dark
• i learned that some people, no matter how old they get, still have the same maturity level that they had when you knew them in highschool
• i found out that the asshole that cheated on me and broke my heart 6 years ago actually married the woman he cheated on me with... and she's really, really unattractive. 
• i learned that it's not a good decision to set your phone on top of a full cup of coffee, even for a minute
• i found out that wounds heal slowly, but they do heal...

i have a feeling i'll add more to this list at some point in the near future, but for now, that's a pretty decent rundown of the last 6 months... it wasn't all pretty, but i learned quite a bit and i suppose that's what's really important... right? that's what they say, anyway. 

on a completely different note, it rained here in temple yesterday for the first time in almost 3 months... 3 long months of temperatures in the triple digits - as high as 107 degrees. anybody that knows me knows what a perpetually crappy mood i'm in during summers in texas, especially during a drought. yesterday saw me in the best mood i've been in since sometime in april. here's to hoping it starts raining sometime around 6pm this evening and doesn't stop until around 6am on monday morning.

 

how adorable is my family!?

hasselblad 500c, shot on ilford delta 400 120 & processed at home.

congratulations, mr & mrs gildon!

congratulations to my sister megen and her new husband kirk!

the wedding was a success! we had a few bumps in the road mainly because i was in the hospital the week before the wedding and didn't get to rehearse. but other than a few "uh-oh" and "oops" moments, it was absolutely beautiful.

my back yard was lit by twinkly christmas lights wrapped in yards and yards of tulle, and beautiful wrought iron torches lit the path that megen walked to the altar, and there were silver paper lanters hanging in my apple tree. my back yard was definitely transformed and i thought it was just beautiful.

my house was packed full of people; so many people that at times you had to elbow your way through the crowd just to get where you were going. i loved having that many people in my home! the food was fantastic. my mother really outdid herself with the stuffed mushrooms and the pork loin and i heard the groom's cake, a german chocolate cake, was out of this world.

dylan looked so handsome in his suit and tie and little kirk and gracie were adorable, little kirk in his suit and curly hair and gracie in her little black & pink frock with curly pigtails. she was dressed to party.  and my cousin will was there with my uncle butchie & aunt dyan, and kirk, gracie & will played all night, running up and down my hallway and laughing. adorable, the pitter-patter of little footsteps in dress shoes.

gracie sat on uncle butchie's lap and ate wedding cake. actually, true to mcgee woman form, she ate the icing and left the cake on the plate.

some of my favorite photos from the wedding:

the matron of honor, tina; the bride, megen; the maid of honor, my sister kristen. this photo is way washed out due to the flash i used, but there's something i just love about it.

megen, cloistered away in my bedroom trying not to be nervous before the wedding. she was wildly unsuccessful.

my mother awaiting a dragon to land on her finger, gracie peeking in a box and dylan getting busted picking at the reception spread.

my back yard as the sun was setting, and my good friend craig standing on my deck. i was standing behind where the wedding was to take place, in front of the oak tree tied with tulle. another photo plagued by lighting issues, but again, i just love this photo.

the bride and her bridal party acting like goofballs.

megen said she learned this pose on america's next top model.

my nephews dylan and kirk junior in his daddy's arms. kirk made such a dapper groom!

my little sister. she's married now. :)

i  have to say a very heartfelt thanks to some wonderful, amazing people without whom this wedding wouldn't have happened:

amanda, you are the hardest working woman in the wedding business. sit down!
craig, you're my bitch and you're damn good at it. your help was immeasurable and hilarious and kept us all from cracking under stress. you know i love ya. new york, this is your last chance!
tina, i didn't even have to ask you to jump, you did it on your own.
fosheezee, where would i be without you?
scotty & chris, amazing hair. fabulous lighting. world class bows. it was like a wedding on broadway.
bino, i'd lay my life down for you, chola. thank you for EVERYTHING. la raza!
doel, you're now a master of all things electronic and you're awesome in a pinch!
marcus, what can i say but it's not the first time you've been there for me...
megs, you shouldn't have had to lift a finger but you did anyway.
nash & kirk, you guys turned my yard into a wedding wonderland!
mom, you rock, plain and simple. we'd all be starving if it weren't for you and your amazing kitchen-witchery. nobody does it better than you, mom. nobody.

i know there are people i'm missing and they definitely deserve a huge thanks... if i left you off of this list it was completely accidental, and thank you very much for helping make my sister's wedding day so very special!

aaaaaaannnnnndddd scene.

well, i can't believe i actually did it.

after years and years of coveting and lust i finally did it.

i bought a hasselblad.

i tossed and turned and fought with myself and my camera demons, but in the end the deal was too good to pass up. so maybe i'll have to tighten the purse strings a bit for the next two weeks... i should be doing that anyway, right? and not too terribly; i did get a great deal on it.

it's not new. it's probably got a ding here or there, and maybe some brassing... maybe even some other minor cosmetic abnormalities, but i don't care. it's nothing that will affect the quality of the camera or the quality of the photos that it helps me produce. i couldn't be more thrilled unless someone had just handed it to me.

mine won't look exactly like the photo above; that's a newer model than mine. different positioning of the winding crank (mine is on the film back instead of on the side) different lens, and probably not quite as shiny. other than that, the differences are completely negligible. and, it's still a hassie.

here's the lens i'm getting:

i got a hasselblad 500c with a 12A film back and a zeiss 150mm f4 sonnar lens. i opted for the 150mm lens instead of the standard issue 80mm lens because i have an 80mm on my mamiya. if i want an 80mm lens for my hasselblad, i can buy one later. right now, i wanted a little more room for distance.

hasselblad is the camera. it's the highest of the high end medium format cameras. it's the camera that all other medium format film cameras aspire to be. it's the one i've always wanted. if i didn't make it abundantly clear earlier, i couldn't be more thrilled.

here's a very famous photo taken with a hasselblad - it's buzz aldrin on the moon.
enjoy while i wait with baited breath for wednesday to roll around...

i can't wait!!!

good, cheap film

i got a package yesterday that i'd been waiting for from freestyle photographic, containing some "trial" film i'd purchased. it's arista ultra 400 speed 120 size medium format black & white, and it's DIRT cheap. seriously. $1.99 a roll. DIRT. i got several rolls just as sort of "throw away" film to keep in the fridge for when i don't want to shoot on something as expensive as ilford (at $4.29 a roll). i figured i'd keep it for times when i just want to load up one of my cameras and roll out in my car to shoot anything. still, i had a bit of trepidation about just how good this really cheap film would be... i wondered if it was going to turn out to be a complete wash.

i shot a test roll yesterday out in my front yard, just shooting arbitrarily at anything and everything with the intent on just getting images on a roll of film, then processed it in the bathroom and WOW! i'm totallly impressed with this new, cheap film. it's super-contrasty - which i love - and has a good, tight grain for a pretty sharp image. when i was sitting in the complete darkness in the bathroom, unrolling the film from the spool to load it onto the developing reel, it felt sort of flimsy and thin... i'm used to ilford and fuji which are a bit thicker and stiffer and easier to handle in the dark. i knew i'd have a hard time getting this thin, flimsy film onto my stainless steel developing reel, so i felt around until i found one of my aprons (the clear plastic "lasagne" film reel) and got it rolled up onto that in no time then popped it into the tank and turned on the lights.

i have to admit, i viewed the entire processing event with some skepticism, thinking that when it was all said and done i was going to end up with some pale, hardly-there images on very thin film... imagine my surprise when the "test" images i'd taken in my front yard turned out like this.

i know the photos aren't anything to scream about, but just look at that contrast! it was a bright, sunny day at about 5:30, and this is 400 ISO film so i think the "cheapness" might lie in the fact that it shoots more like 100 ISO... with all that sunlight, these photos should have come out WAY more exposed, but i've always been a fan of contrast and dramatic exposure, so this mighe be my new favorite outdoor film.

i think i'm going to tootle around town today with some of my new film in one of my holgas, and load up some fujicolor color 400 in my mamiya and see what i can find...

yay for cheap! 

 

light leaks magazine

i got an email this morning from light leaks magazine
telling me that this photo of mine was chosen to be published.

yay :)

light leaks magazine is quarterly, so it will be published in the fall, in light leaks volume 7. won't see it for a while, but that shound make for a nice "oh yeah! i almost forgot!" when it's finally published.

for those who don't know, light leaks magazine is a publication for holga and toy camera users and enthusiasts; it's a place where ideas and words like "sharp" and "in-focus" are tossed aside in favor of ideas and words like "fuzzy" and "out-of-focus", and all other things that holgas are known for.

the untold story of uncle nick & homer

when i was little, every sunday after church my family would drive to see my dad's elderly great aunt berta in ft. worth, texas. aunt berta was in her 90s when i was 10 years old. she never married or had any children. her home was always spotless and filled with black and white photos and tin-types in ornate frames, lots of china and porcelain, and i remember that she had a lot of knick-knacks, but her house never seemed cluttered. we would spend a couple of hours with aunt berta and afterward we always went to the colonial cafeteria in the ft. worth hospital district. i always hated the colonial cafeteria, but was usually starving by the time we got there, and my dad had fond memories of eating there as a child and while he was at TCU. i always got the chopped beef (and doused it with a copious quantity of worcestershire sauce at the table) and the mashed potatoes (runny and oddly grainy) with gravy, and usually mushy, overcooked italian green beans, which were the least offensive of all of the remaining side vegetable choices. i would tuck in to lunch with my parents at the table and anxiously wait for my parents to finish so we could get out of there and head off on our last stop and my favorite part of our sunday: the cemetery. we'd always finish our ft. worth sundays with a trip to one of the city's marvelous historic cemeteries.

i grew up in a family that had a healthy respect for cemeteries as a source of history and quiet beauty. some of my friends used to refer to my family as the addams family because of our love of cemeteries. i always thought that was kind of cool, actually.

cemeteries haven't ever been something creepy or scary to me, except for an old cemetery in euless with the headstone that glowed in the dark; sara might remember that. it was pretty creepy. oh! and that cemetery in bedford where somebody named jacob bobo was buried... i'm digressing again. back then, cemeteries were almost always a place to admire beautifully carved mausoleums and headstones that dated back to the early 1800s. some of the headstones were so old and weathered we couldn't read them without making a rubbing of the stone. i used to still have a few rubbings left until a few years ago, but they have sadly been lost.

my love for cemeteries was born then, on those sunday afternoons in ft. worth, down on my hands and knees, rubbing a black crayon over a piece of paper held up to a gravestone to be able to read the names and the dates. i always made up stories in my head of how these people died and dreamed of one day writing a book, using the names of those i'd found on tombstones as characters. i wanted to tell somebody's story, even if i had to make it up.

when i was in high school, i read edgar lee masters' "spoon river anthology" and my love for cemeteries and the stories that they tell was ignited all over again. this was a story all about dead people; a collection of poems written in the form of epitaphs. there was something so sad and sweet about it. i remember reading spoon river anthology over and over, falling in love with each of the poems and wishing i'd written it myself.

about 6 years ago while driving home from a scuba diving & camping trip at balmorhea, we drove through a tiny little texas town called east sweden. as far as any of us could tell, east sweden was home to an old abandoned school house built sometime in the early 1900s, a church built around the same time, and in the field to the west of the church, a cemetery.

we turned the car around.

east sweden cemetery was surrounded by a chain-link fence on all sides, and was well maintained dispite the fact that upon closer inspection, the church looked to be about as abandoned as the old school house. there must have been at least 150 ground-set headstones in the cemetery in tidy rows; i think i must have read each and every one of them. there were two headstones though that particularly caught my attention.

they piqued my interest and broke my heart.

these two headstones were in one of the corners furthest from the church, up against the chain link fence. they were nearly completely obscured by grass growing around them, even though the rest of the cemetery seemed to have been cared for and maintained. they seemed to be removed from the rest of the headstones in the cemetery, sort of forgotten.

the headstones were semi-square natural stones, just a little larger than bricks. they were weathered and spotted with moss and at first glance it wasn't immediately obvious that they even were headstones. they weren't ornately decorated and carved like the other headstones that said things like "beloved son" and "loving father".

these headstones read very simply.

  "(a negro)
    uncle nick
    born about 1853
    died december 28, 1898"

and

  "(a negro)
    homer
    born about 1860
    died december 28, 1898"

that's all. still, even with as little as both of these headstones revealed, they told more stories than any of the other more stately, ornately carved headstones in the rest of the cemetery.

i wanted so badly to remember exactly what they looked like, so i snapped a picture of each with the only camera i had with me; one of those one-time use, disposable cameras. this one was encased in a waterproof housing and we'd used it to take pictures underwater for our diving trip. unfortunately, the housing had cracked at some point during the trip and water had leaked into the camera, so all the film was ruined. no diving pictures, but more disappointing for me, no pictures of uncle nick & homer's grave markers.

uncle nick & homer's gravestones haunted me for weeks after that. i wanted desperately to go back and take pictures with a real camera, and just be able to sit and look at them. i wanted to know their stories; why did they both die on the same day? were they in a fire? an accident? were they murdered? hanged? had they been accused of some horrific crime and been mobbed by the townspeople? were they related? had they been slaves? was there anything else known about them other than the day they died and that they were black?

i've been searching the internet ever since, trying to learn something about uncle nick and homer online. so far all i've managed to glean is that east sweden is considered a certified texas ghost town, and that the history of east (and west) sweden is short and fraught with tragedy; the church was destroyed by a tornado in 1916 before being rebuilt in 1920 and the school house was destroyed by a fire in 1933 and rebuilt in 1934. nothing at all about the town's residents, itinerate or permanent, except for the founder of east sweden, swen leander hurd, a swede from williamson county who wrote to family in sweden and encouraged them to migrate to the "new sweden" community he and his family had created in texas along with 2 other families of swedish descent.

i've gone so far as to contact the mcculloch county offices to see if anybody working for the department of county information would be able to help with any information. no joy. not only was the woman i spoke with genuinely disinterested in my query, she had a tone in her voice that seemed to say "move it along, folks. nothing more to see here." this, of course, made me even more curious.

when the weather gets a little cooler, i might make a trip west about 130 miles to east sweden and start knocking on doors. it's not that far really, only about a two hour drive with some pretty nice texas postcard views along the way. i would like to go and take some decent photos of uncle nick & homer's headstones as well and as i mentioned before, just sort of sit and feel them. remember them.

there's a cemetery here in temple, a potter's field or pauper's cemetery. as is common, it's located on a narrow strip of field between a road and the railroad tracks, hidden in the shadow of hillcrest cemetery whose entrance is at the end of my street. it's called seven star cemetery, taking it's name from the underground railroad. presumably most of the bodies interred at seven star were slaves and freed slaves. the majority of the headstones at seven star read "unknown", spray-painted in black on cinderblocks. other headstones are made of woodplanks nailed together, bleached by 100 years of texas sun. still others are crude slabs of cement with names - sometimes only a first name and "title" like "miss annie", written with something like a stick or a finger while the cement was still wet. because seven star is so close, i go out there pretty often, and i'm always alone. i've never been to seven star cemetery while there's somebody else out there. it's a sad but beautiful little cemetery. i just read the article (linked above) about a church group taking care of seven star cemetery yesterday and was glad to know that somebody has taken some ownership of the grounds. apparently no local or state government entity will claim it, and since it's a potter's field, it isn't a private cemetery. seven star cemetery belongs to no one. maybe it belongs to everyone. i imagine there are quite a few stories to be told at seven star cemetery.

it's heartbreaking that someone lived their life without leaving the story of their life behind, no matter what that story might be. realistically i realize that this happens every day. i suppose that's just life; people live and die without leaving any kind of a legacy.

or do they? maybe everybody's life tells a story.

one day, i'd like to be able to tell the story of uncle nick & homer.

maybe that could be my legacy.

elements of an opry

why i love cats

because they don't like to fold laundry any more than i do.

wish i was here

may 16, 2004, the tail end of my time on tour with deryl dodd.

sunday morning. checked out of the hotel. we said our goodbyes, and i started to leave for home.
before i went home though, i made the drive back to whitecap beach on south padre island where deryl and i had gone the evening before to take some photos before his show.

i sat there on the sand for about an hour, just absorbing. i knew it would be a while before i made it back again, and i wanted to remember the sun, the sand, the sound of the waves, the cry of the gulls, and the scent and feel of the salty ocean spray.

i scooped up some beach sand and a bit of water from the ocean into a clean glass bottle, dusted the sand off of myself, and drove back home.

i still have the bottle full of ocean and sand.

wish i was there right now.