Tag: Photography

Water, water, everywhere…

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rcsign

Photo courtesy of the Marshalltown Times-Republican

If you follow me anywhere else online, you’ll have seen by now the various flood pictures I’ve been sharing (seriously, much like the water, they’re all over – both my personal and public Facebook accounts, Flickr, Instagram, and soon Pinterest as well).  Despite that, I’m going to post some more here anyway.  The extent of the damage won’t likely be truly realized for a long time yet, and the recovery will probably take years if this turns out to be anything like previous floods have been.

I know I’ve mentioned the Flood of ’93 several times already, but we had another major flood just five years ago that I had forgotten about until a friend mentioned it on Facebook.  I mean, I didn’t really forget, but I had forgotten that some of the severe flooding had been so close to us.  All you seemed to hear about was what happened in Cedar Rapids and Iowa City, but there was plenty of severe flooding in the Waterloo-Cedar Falls area, too, and I had forgotten that.  I think the reason that ’93 is stuck in my head has to do with my mom; seeing all the photos she took of the local damage really imprinted the severity of the disaster on my tender little psyche.  The flooding in 2008, while devastating, just didn’t have the same personal connection for me that the floods of ’93 and ’13 have.

Anyway, we drove through quite a bity of flooding again on Monday as we tried to get home.

Where’s an ark when you need one?

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I shot this picture of a submerged field through the window of our truck as we were heading down to visit Seymour’s parents for the weekend. The rain bands on the window blurred the image and gave it the neat effect; the only processing I did to this was adding Instagram’s Lo-Fi filter to make the blue of the water pop out a little more. Even without it, the grass still glowed that green.

I love this image, but…

Garage sale thirty

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Score one for the savvy garage saler!

Score one for the savvy garage saler!

So today was the City-Wide Garage Sale in Reinbeck.  No, we didn’t have one, as we’ve done in years past, but I had planned to actually go this year.  It started off as such a glorious morning: I slept in, then woke up to find that Seymour bought the kids an old (and by old, I mean antique) school desk to keep their coloring books and things in for a decent price.  When I realized that it was garage sale day and that he was out looking at things instead of working, I decided to get the boys up and do the same.  I haven’t gone garage saling in years and it was a beautiful morning for a walk.

And that’s where things went downhill.  Seymour found a train table that he wanted me to look at, so I tried to get the boys ready in a hurry so I could go look at it.  Bubbles packed some milk and cereal to go for the boys and we were off…till Thumper dropped his all over the bottom of the stroller.  The back seat of the stroller has a crossbar instead of a tray, so when he tried to set his cereal container down on it, it tipped over (and he refused to hold onto it).  Then he screamed all the way to the sale and half the time we were there.

I finally managed to calm him down, and then Miss Tadpole tried to give him back his cereal, which started the whole thing over again.  By then I wanted to scream, so we ended up going home.  Seymour had some errands to run out of town and promised to stay with the kids when he got back so that I could still hit some garage sales early this afternoon, but by the time he got home, the garage sales were only scheduled to go for another half hour and at that point, either people have closed up or they’re starting to. *sigh*   So much for my glorious garage sale adventure.

Foggy Trees

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Foggy Trees

Here’s a little experimental photography for you.  Something tells me the sky will look a lot like this a little later today (read: on my drive home). *sigh*

Stupid weather.  I’m supposed to go to the park for a play date!  Go rain elsewhere!

Anyway, I hope you enjoy the picture.  Let me know what you think below!

(c) 2013.  All rights reserved.

Scenes from the courthouse

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Only in Iowa can it be 80° one day and snowing the next.  While it wasn’t 80° where I was yesterday, it was in other parts of the state, according to two of my friends down in southern Iowa.  And rumor has it that the temperature dropped 40 degrees in four hours.  That’s pretty quick!

So, to recap: The weekend and the first part of the week were sunny, warm, and absolutely gorgeous, leaving us all thinking that winter skipped spring altogether and decided that summer should just follow directly this year.  But now Winter, she’s a-back.  With a vengeance.

Me no likey.

I took all these – and a few others – over the course of the morning.

Sunday Sunday Sunday!

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So this weekend I wanted to get a bunch of different writing projects squared away between a surprise party and visiting family.  No problem, right?  Wrong!  Well, I got one of them taken care of, anyway, but a visiting headache kept me from the others.  Our weekends are always so busy, it seems, yet they’re the only time I really have a chance to get caught up on things at home.  So this morning is going to be catch-up time till the family arrives.

In the meantime, I acquired a shiny new DSLR a while back and have been having loads of fun with it.  For your viewing pleasure until I return with a post of more substance, behold, the things with which I’ve been filling my weekend: behind the cut!

Mix tape memories

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Rumor has it that my generation was the last to make mix tapes.  And you know what?  I believe it – by the time I graduated high school, my friends and I had moved on to making mix CDs of stuff we downloaded from the internet at places like Napster and Kazaa.  I marvelled at the lightning-fast download speeds on my college campus, where you could download a song in only five minutes…while the rest of the campus lay sleeping.  Any other time, you could expect to wait at least a half an hour.  And that was if you were lucky.  It’s hard to imagine routinely waiting that long for a download now.

mixtape

Photo by Kay Kauffman

But back then, it was hard to imagine digital music ever fully supplanting physical copies of songs.  For some people, perhaps it still is.  Playlists are the new mix tapes.  Where CDs were once the height of technology, now they are as antiquated as dinosaurs.  And tapes?  Well, you might as well have crawled out of a cave.  “Tape?  What’s a tape?” the kids will say.  Don’t even get me started on vinyl.

I stumbled across some old mix tapes I made in high school the other day and have been listening to them in my car during my commute.  As a teenager, my living room boasted a stereo system that included a five disc CD changer, a digital AM/FM tuner, and a dual tape deck with auto reverse.  Now I think the only CD player I have in my whole house is in my computer.

Tuesday thoughts

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I’m too tired to come up with much in the way of a post tonight, so I think I’ll just leave you with these pretty pictures instead.  Seymour surprised me with a visit this morning and gave me some pretty lilies before taking me out to lunch.  Then for supper tonight, the kids and I tried our hand at making homemade donuts using Pillsbury biscuits and a deep fryer.  They turned out pretty well, but the kids were wired for the rest of the night.

Pretty flowers from a pretty sweet guy. 🙂
Seymour has good taste. 🙂
Delicious homemade donuts. 🙂

Now if only the sugar had had the same effect on me… 😀

(c) 2013.  All rights reserved.

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The stories we tell ourselves

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From the moment we are conceived, we are part of a story.  And once we are born, we begin to tell our own stories.  New plotlines are added every day; new characters and plot twists pop up like dandelions in new spring grass.  These stories shape our personalities and color our interactions with the world around us; the stories we tell ourselves affect every aspect of who we are and who we will become.

icy

Photo by Kay Kauffman

Stories shape, and sometimes even become, our worldview.  But when that worldview is challenged, how do you respond?  Such challenges are often met with outrage, sometimes even hostility.  People throughout history have paid the price for their inability to rewrite their own sagas, sometimes losing sanity and life.  As ink jockeys, we know that all writing is rewriting, but what about the ordinary storytellers of the world?