We're getting closer to the end of the Pittsburgh photos that I shot 14 months ago. I think there's only one more roll after this one.



Lolo you are too damn cute. Smile for me Lolo!




D'awww, there it is.



I like this photo of myself, in which I was explaining that to see the light meter in my camera you just rest your finger on the shutter release and... oh. Lolo's got heavy fingers.



I harassed Lolo at the grocery store.



While she shopped for peppers.

Let's finish up with the Occupy Portland photos. These are from October 15th, when Occupy Portland joined up with a peace protest that I do not know the name of.





It's amazing how much you can assume about someone given so little actual information.






I loved this little old lady. You can't tell but she is wearing a purple tiara. Sometimes I do just want to throw my hands up and say, 'Yeah, let's eat the rich. Let's nom nom nom that shit.'






Being a photographer is interesting. You go in there wanting to really capture everything as it is, present it unbiasedly. Then the photographer brain looks at the little kid with the rain boots or the studded guy with the anarchy sign and says, 'Ooh! Photo that! That's interesting! Click click!' It was in this march that a man with a massive, probably balls-expensive SLR took a photo of me chanting, mouth wide, meeting the lens with an uncertain stare, from all of 30 inches away. I was a bit irritated with him, assuming that he was picking out the stereotypical Portland youth with weird-colored hair so that he could spin the Occupy story his way. But then again, I took the photos of the little kids and the anarchists. Some things just stand out as being more photographable.

These are from the Oct. 9 march at Occupy Portland. That was the third day. They are now 38 days in and have been told to evict the two downtown parks they are occupying by midnight tonight.































I support this movement whole-heartedly. I want to see a world where people act with compassion and integrity, and don't step all over and then blame the less fortunate. I fucking support teachers and artists and janitors and I hope that we can learn to give them the respect their hard, honest work deserves. I would really like a government that listens to its people (not just the lobbying ones or the corporate ones) and acts accordingly. I hope change will happen. I hope the movement continues/starts back up. I'll be there supporting it when it does.

Recently I have been thinking more about Blogging. Well actually I went to this show this past week, An Evening with Amanda Palmer & Neil Gaiman, and they are both such bloggery people that I couldn’t help but be driven to check their blogs and that got me thinking about blogging. How was the show? Well, I have a hard time organizing my thoughts even when I have very little to say, and in this case I have a lot upon a lot to say, and so I doubt I will ever really have a proper post on it, but maybe. For now we’ll say it was good. Very, very good. Amazing. Inspiring. I spent more money than I should have on a beautiful print of the married couple and made somewhat of a fool of myself in front of people I admire (as I am apt to do). Anyway, thoughts on blogging.

I think maybe perhaps I should start to blog. Life so far has taught me that the best way to get better at something is to do it. Really practice it. Not just a little bit. All the time. It’s something you’re told often, but it doesn’t really sink in until you figure it out for yourself. Blogging is a way to practice decoding the shit I feel about life. And writing. I guess there is some writing involved. I remember reading in an issue of Cosmo while I was in the bathroom at my friend’s house (she stacks them all up on the back of her toilet and Cosmo has done this clever little thing where they print about a 1/4 inch slice of a photo of a shirtless man model on the spine of their magazine--if I was into oiled shaved pec’d chests I would be really very excited about it) and the Cosmo magazine* had a feature on Emma Watson where she said that sometimes it helped her to write everything that was stressing her out down on a piece of paper because it made it seem smaller and more manageable. So maybe blogging will be like that.

Additionally, there is this odd sort of business around blogging and social media these days. People market themselves and make their living through blogging. I’m thinking of a professional photographer and fashion designer/seamstress that I doubt would be nearly as successful without the mass amounts of blogging each does. It builds up an online friend base; one checks in with a blogger girl who dresses neat or takes good photos or writes exceedingly well about her life, and then the girl launches a business and you can’t help but follow that too. Perhaps even support it with your yummy yummy dollar bills. Maybe recommend it to others. I know because I’ve been the person following and buying in the past. And advertising, which I don’t understand and am not going to get into. Who knows is all I’m saying.

So forgive me if this kind of mind-vomit starts showing up in this place. Eventually I hope to organize it all pretty-like so you, impatient consumer of the digital age, can click somewhere and have all the photographic posts all sorted out from the rest of the garbage, or all the sewing-related posts, or all the rambly words posts. You get the idea. In the meantime, I’m linking to a written thing by Neil Gaiman that he read at the show in this way that transported you to somewhere nice and cosy and exceedingly pleasant, which is to say that he read it in a Neil-y way (I don’t like audio books and yet I still want to own all the ones he’s ever recorded--something about his voice and verbal style...). Reading it will not be as cute as listening to it (and will have a much more bitter attitude, because you won’t have Neil’s peaceful, everything-is-alright voice to calmly deliver the jokes and to add the proper amount of nonchalant humor) but still, it is here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2010/mar/25/neil-gaiman-oscars-coraline.

*I’ve actually just remembered that the feature was not in Cosmo but in a different magazine. Elle, I think. But my little story about the Cosmos stacked on the toilet is just too good to leave out.

There is this thing I do. It involves starting a sewing project, getting about halfway through, and then stuffing it into my already overstuffed drawer-of-unfinished-projects. Recently I managed to finish something from this drawer.



The apples shirt! It's actually printed with red flowers, but I remembered them as apples right up until I was at the store looking for some buttons shaped like apples to match the print and I pulled a scrap of the fabric out of my bag to match only to discover that they were really not apples at all.



I started out with a shirt whose fabric I liked but that was too short and too wide for me, so I sewed in the blue knit things and here it is. It has a functional pocket that could perhaps be called a kangaroo pocket but maybe not because it only opens on one side (which I've discovered drives me nuts because one of my hands is then left out in the cold and I feel uncomfortably asymmetrical).



My biggest issue with things I make is that they still seem to fit a bit oddly, and have unwelcome lumps in places. They just aren't as comfortable as store-bought clothing. I'm not sure if maybe this is because I don't have a serger... But I will get one someday and then I guess I'll find out.

The Carnegie Museum of Natural History has this vast, absolutely stunning collection of gems and minerals. I spent quite a long time in that wing of the museum, as I recall. And because I get such a giddy thrill from textures and vibrant shades of red and orange, you all now get to share in my excitement by way of this post.

I went on a solo wandering around Pittsburgh that put some serious mileage on my Birkenstocks and some blisters on my feet.







And then there was this museum.













I found it amusing that this museum had their dino guys working in this glass cage. Also I was in a mood that compelled me, in a manner similar to a mother with a newborn, to photo-document every minute of my life. The dino guy took all this photographing as a serious interest in old fossils and, emerging from his glass cage with this chunk of dinosaur rib that they were reconstructing, handed it to me and started explaining a bunch of stuff that I probably didn't even remember back then. It was heavy, the dinosaur rib chunk.



Oh and gyro guy! There was this wonderful gyro place that we went to. The man was really nice. As I remember he somewhat insisted that I take his photo.