Friday Photo

The Obligatory Pumpkin

I'm on the move today... Out and about... So I thought I'd stop by my friendly neighborhood pumpkin patch and post the obligatory autumnal image.

Happy Thursday!

A Dog and His Goats

For some inexplicable reason I am fascinated by goats. Specifically, I am in awe of the current use of goats in kudzu eradication.

The invasive plant was introduced to North Carolina long ago and has taken to choking indigenous life out of vast areas for about the same amount of time. Every summer, the interstates sprout their leafy corridors. When I was a child, we just accepted that it was poor planning on someone's part and we were resigned to live with the ramifications.

No more. Now enterprising farmers actually rent their goats out. Every herd has their own guard dog to protect them from predators. The dogs are apparently raised with goats and accept them as their pack.

I can't help it... I'm just enthralled.

Good Advice

Still letting myself work back into what I like to think is "my norm"...

I was blessed last year with a part-time gig that has provided a restored faith in humanity. For too-short a time, I had a boss who was a wonderful example of a mentor as well as just a really cool human being. Due to restructuring, he's not my boss anymore... but I took some of his advice ("Ask for help.") and put it to use this week.

As a result, I'm slowly moving forward again. But it feels like I'm picking up steam. I hope it's not an illusion and that I can handle the velocity.

P.S. Thank you Dr. Neale...

Easing Back In

It was a long, sad, difficult summer and I'm feeling like I'm just now getting my footing again. I'm trying to purge the bad stuff and just let the good back in. It's a process. Licking ones wounds sometimes takes time, especially when you can't quite reach all of them. But I'm getting there... I believe for real this time.

Autumn always feels good to me.

What I Did This Summer...

Sometimes you just hit a creative rut. I think that's what happened to me earlier this summer. I was not really "feeling" creative. I would go through the motions but everything I did left me feeling like a fraud. I hated it all.

Then an opportunity presented itself to me --- I signed up for a graphic design course at Queens University in Charlotte, NC. It presented the chance for me to try my hand at something other than photography.

So every Tuesday evening for the past couple of months had me heading home energized with new thoughts and ideas and methods. I love pictograms and even have some that i created on TheNounProject.com. I got to tinker with Adobe Illustrator. And I discovered a few things about how I look at the world. Some of it surprised me. Some of it confounded me. But it all helped clear my cloudy vision.

Hopefully within the next year I'll be able to weave more of the design principals into my other work... Until then, I'm just waiting to find out what grade I earned.

A Little Bit of Random

I didn't mean to let myself get out of the habit of posting... It just kind of happened. Life just kind of... happened.

I think for me, it's easiest to get hampered by the heat of summer. It just makes me a little less tolerant of living. What can I say? I just don't like to sweat.... It makes me feel less womanly. I know, I know... That's silly (in a bad sense of the word).

I could use the excuse that I've been taking a graphic design class this summer and that's why I haven't been keeping up with writing.... But that would be laying blame where it didn't belong. I'm just going to get back to it.

So to dip my toes in the lake, I'm rambling and posting a random picture.