Today had a delicious filling.

This morning I woke up with a headache that made me worry my right eye was in danger of popping out. I don't like beginning the day like that so I took a short nap in hopes of starting fresh in a couple of hours. I'm so glad I did because Justin woke me up with coffee and a little brownie and miraculously my headache vanished!

Newly pain free and satisfied with my treats, I was able to appreciate the warmest sunniest day I've seen in a long time. My home was freshened by the breeze and I even bought some bright pink daisies to enjoy. Hodge and Yoshimi seemed especially content napping in a patch of sunlight. I soaked up all the richness of the fine weather and now it's nearly 6:00 and I'm just starting to get to work.

Today started with pain and will end with loathsome paperwork but I'm so happy that the middle was filled with goodness!

PS: Did anyone notice that my photos look crisp and bright? Justin got a really nice camera for his birthday and I think it has made all the difference!

Polaroid

Polaroid announced this week that it will cease production of it's iconic instant film.

Damn! I love using my Polaroid camera and I'm pretty bummed that film is going to be extremely hard to acquire after 2009. I am also sad for the 150 employees in Massachusetts who will lose their jobs because of this. I understand that it isn't profitable anymore due to digital photography... but it's so fun! Now I'm afraid I'll be even stingier with the film than I was before.

I'm also particularly sentimental about Polaroids. Justin and I got ours a few years ago during a stressful period in our relationship. We were both too busy with school and work and bunny health issues and our own health issues and our money situation was dismal. The result was that we were spending our limited time together running errands and complaining about our situation. We were both getting depressed so we decided to try and make an effort to do something fast, simple and nice every once in awhile with each other.

We decided to take portraits of each other with the Polaroid camera as a way to pause and pay attention to one another. When I look back on these pictures, I remember the exact way I felt and how hard that time was for me. The portraits became less moody and more fun as winter moved into spring and our life got itself sorted out. I think that the portraits we took of one another were instrumental in our emergence from a crappy mentality. We have them displayed in our living room and I use them as reminder to appreciate each other and to be optimistic when I'm feeling stressed.

The Polaroid set above was taken while each of us had a Vladmaster viewing experience. Actaeon At Home was the piece we were watching. I just bought another one last week for Justin's birthday.

New toy!

I bought a Lomo camera off a friend yesterday and gave it to Justin as an early Christmas present. We both had the day off today so we spent the morning exploring Salem with our new camera in the fresh snow slush. The format of the Lomo is pretty neat but we haven't gotten the knack of knowing exactly what we're capturing with it yet. It has four lenses in a row and exposes one negative with four shots in rapid succession. The result reminds me of film stills.

I had such a good time today going on a photo seek with Justin. It was like the "good ol' days" when we used to go out exploring with our cameras regularly in High School. We lived in Connecticut at the time and there was nothing else to do besides sneak around abandoned houses and cow pastures looking for elegant compositions. Back then, we took ourselves way too seriously and only shot black and white photos with our ancient Nikons. We considered digital photography some cheap artistic abomination. Today, we realized how long it has been since we actually shot on real film. We must be getting lazy in our old age because we used to develop and print all our negatives a few years ago and now we're complaining about how big of a pain it is to drop the film at the one hour photo place. We've been completely spoiled by the instant gratification of digital photography.

I'm hoping that we go on many more excursions with our new Lomo. The mystery of not knowing what we caught on film and the excitement of waiting for our images to get developed will be what makes us choose to use the Lomo over our digital camera somedays.