What keeps me breathing

That's what I'm gonna call my Wednesday picture posts. A picture, and the feelings and memories invoked by that picture. At the County Fair with the best friends. We got corn dogs, which are always better deep fried, and laughed walked and talked to the animals and it felt free. I don't get to see them much anymore, life got in the way, as it is wont to do, and I guess we never really tried too hard to stop it. I haven't had friends quite like them since, and I don't want to foget what those years with them meant to me.

Ruth's Quilt Shop in Colorado Springs.      Grandma had a list of all the quilt shops she wanted to see (and she definitely deserved a quilt shop stop or two after all the knit shops I dragged her to on the yarn crawl). As quilting is not quite my cup o' tea, I took some shots with my brand spankin' new, all-my-own, in-perfect-working-order magic picture taker.     Just quick snapshots, but I like 'em.        

A Madlibs-type story a friend and I made during lunch last friday. A Crazy Night at the Library One night something really moist happened at the library. The characters in the stories started swimming from their books! Harry Potter climbed in to Charlotte's Web and started sweating with Wilbur the Pig! Celandine wandered into an encyclopedia and ended up lost in Thornton! The craziest part was when Bella Swan wandered into Pride and Prejudice and said, "Baybee, I don't think we're in Alberta anymore." Then Sandy the librarian walked in and said, "Cheese Balls!! Everybody back in place!" The characters shouted around the room. Just in time! The students in grade 11 came in to get books for their reports, but it was safe. All the characters were back in the books where they belonged. The End.

Found this cool idea at  http://lifeaccordingtojanandjer.blogspot.com/2012/10/fridays-fences-55.html Every Friday, you post a picture of a fence, close -up, far away, the view through a fence, whatever. Just has to be a fence. Took this picture several years ago at a graduation party in a park. The camera had a permanent water spot somewhere in the middle of the lens, but the out-of focus parts of this photo camouflage it. It does, however, show up in other pictures, front and center. Some of my favorite pictures of mine have a big old blur smack dab in the middle of all the almost-perfection. Grrr.

snow is falling fast covering the ground in white nothing seems so pure

Instead of  posting a picture for Wordless Wednesday on, well, Wednesdays, I'm going to be doing something new. I'll still put up a picture, but go a step further. I found a website called   http://1000words.net/  It's based on the idea that a picture is worth a thousand words. People submit a photo and write about the memories and emotions invoked by that photo. This is a beautiful idea. Writing about what a picture means to you gives whoever is reading a glimpse of you, and it can be so good for us to look back on certain times in our life and remember what that moment meant to us, remember who we were. I love love love this project and am going to try to do this at least once a week. I don't want to put limits on it. I'll write as much or as little as I'm inspired to by whichever photo I choose. I want this to be a growing experience for me, emotionally and mentally, taking heed from my past mistakes and successes, failures and triumphs. I also want to grow

Eyes fascinate me And when I say fascinate, I mean I'm obsessed. I have a million and five pictures of just eyes. And no two are the same.  Because, much like snowflakes, everyone has different peepers. And individually, eyes change all the time. The color shifts to what surrounds it. Oftentimes our eyes reflect what's in our heart, thus the depth changes, the feeling, the emotion in them varies. My pictures of all these eyes, are a little glimpse of what's inside of the people in each picture. I've got a memory of  the spirit of that moment. Eyes fascinate me.

I got my very first all-on-my-own camera in the Fall of 2009. I ran out of things to capture around the house and so went on a bicycle-powered picture excursion across the neighborhood. I snapped photos of EVERYTHING. This is when I discovered my love of weird angles and super close ups and having one main part of the picture be clear and then fade into un-focusedness (insert smart sounding photography term here). This picture is one of the many fruits of that adventure. I realized I could show people MY veiw of the world through a lens. I'm not so big on writing. It's always been a discouraging and frustrating experience for me. I tear apart my words until everything seems atrocious and I get stuck in my head, knit-picking and trying to get that perfect, profound sentence instead of letting the words come. No one is paying me to write, no one is counting on me to to be perfect, I'm not being graded on this material, it's my story, and my goal now is to let it

This is one of my all time, absolute favorite pictures that I've ever taken. I love the focus, and the depth and mmmm I just love looking at it. The one thing I don't like, is how the detail on the part of the tree closest to the camera is blurred. Oh well. And probably, it's my favorite because it was one of the first times I realized I could show the world a new way to see things. Yeah, I have big expectations sometimes. Okay, not so wordless after all. The end.