Sara's dark side...(Who is She??)

I was a little suspicious when I passed by Sara and she was glued to the laptop while Beyonce's "Single ladies (Put a Ring on It)" was blaring out of our crappy speakers. Sara hates that song when it's on the radio. I enjoy it because it's so terrible. Tonight Sara was engrossed by the song. I crept up behind her to see what my sweet Sara was watching...

And it was this...




So now I am intrigued and attempting to learn the dance to make Sara laugh. If she's even she will post some photos of me trying "Soulja Boy." Anything can happen here in NoHa.

Key West photo adventure

We're back from drunken tourist land. I got my camera to take non circular pictures with my souped up heavy lens. Here are some photos from our trip.

Witness the nightly ritual of the sundown celebration. People actually gather at the square to clap as the sun goes down. It makes me think we should be celebrating every sundown. Why does this only happen in Key West?


I love this photo. I love green. I am not sure that I love borscht.


Sometimes you just need to air out the armpits.



When I retire in about 5 years, I want to live somewhere where it is warm and safe to bike.
If we were to ride bikes here in good ole' North Haven I am sure we'd get hit by one of the silver foxes cruising by in her caddy.


Gay guys keep nice homes.


We got a little crazy setting up my new super camera on self timer for some synchronized sipping.



Only in Key West will a restaurant have an outdoor shower not too far away from people eating.

Nikon D700...What the hell?!?!?!

So my fancypants new camera can practically carry itself and take pictures and convert them to Chinese documents that can fly...it can make itself a virtual level...it can record video somehow..and it can put several photos on top of one another to create a new photo...but when I tried out my new camera on my first day of owning it, the results were a bit confusing.

Please see the below sock monkeys. (I got these awesome monkeys in a trade with Diana from sewingmommy.etsy.com. Check her out.)

The confusing part wasn't that a bunch of sock monkeys took up house on our stairs. That's pretty normal in our household. The confusing part is that every damn picture I take with my 17-50mm lens is now fisheye-esque. That black vignetting should not be there. I looked at my Nikon manual, which is about 5 million pages long, and found that vignetting is a common problem with the new fancypants camera. What the hell? So I go through the modes and turn vignetting off. Still all pictures look like this. I called Nikon and I honestly told them the lens is not Nikon, so they say we can't help you, you should be only using overpriced, overweight Nikon lenses. Call Tamron. I haven't called Tamron yet because I hate talking to customer service people who don't want to help and I fear they will just tell me to call Nikon. The sad part is that this used to be my favorite lens. Now it's practically unusable. Unless you are into circular photos, and I'm over that.

We are all made of stars

You've got mail!

It's winter. Not too many people are looking for new apartments right now. So I have time. Lots of time. I can't sit still so I head into our workshop and learn how to use new tools with a lot of help from a coworker. We made this new license plate mailbox last week.

shoot this

When a certain local prestigious university that shall remain nameless asked me to do a freelance job for them, I thought, what a fabulous idea to make some supplemental income.


The space was beautiful, but dark. I tried using my 100 pound tripod for some of the shots, but lugging that around got to be annoying quickly. Most was done hand held at less than 1/30th of a second. I held my breath a lot. And did a little praying that my shaky hands would relax.

I have to get over my fear of tricky lighting. It was nice to be shooting again. This job, while very difficult, switched on part of my brain that has been asleep for ages. Now I am ready to go to Key West with a fresh, clear head ready to shoot pretty things.

The new project (part 2)

Those of you who know me know that I can't stand throwing things away. But also I can't stand when people throw away things that can still be useful to someone else. I think it's a sign of laziness. We live in such a disposal society where everything is fast and easy. If you don't like something, throw it out. If something needs a little work, replace it. It's afforable because little 6 year old Chinese kids are making more for your consumption! Sometime in the past year I have become a little bit of a dumpster diver. I try to keep things out of the landfill that have some life left to them. Lately this means I'm dragging furniture and appliances that were left behind by tenants where I live. It's really not hard to bring your old clothes or old appliances to the Salvation Army or the shelter or even give it to the New Haven Furniture Coop. But we're all too busy to care. It's not difficult to fix things. Where I live especially makes me angry. Tenants and employees throw out perfectly fine working vacuum cleaners, dressers, clothes, tools, appliances...everything. If it's dirty I pull it out and clean it. If it's busted, I unbust it. If it's perfectly fine I put it on freecycle or bring it to Salvation Army. With the amount of waste around here I could probably make a full time job out of this reclaiming materials. This reuse, renew, recycle thing is filtering into my crafts.

I started with making license plate photo albums like this one...

There is minimal waste left over when I am done putting these together. (Just the stuff left behind from cutting the rivets.)

But then I constructed this last week.


About a quarter of each license plate was left over. I held on to it incase I could use the extra pieces. At first I thought I would make key chains with left over letters or numbers. But instead I used the waste to make license plate star JR.

Now the waste is only about one inch per plate. I could probably make another mini star. Maybe next week.

But for now both stars are together at last. Baby Moma and Jr found a new home.



Or maybe Jr will reside in the kitchen.



I have some dumpster diving to do...

The new project

It's winter which means it's time for me to create new things for this summer's craft shows. I really only want to work with license plates these days. And that inspired this new crafty adventure. This is most likely going to lead to many more finger injuries, but I think it is worth it. A coworker and I spent a lot of time trying to get this just right. The day started with a trip to TJ Maxx in hopes of finding an antique barn star to use as a template. Hidden in a dusty corner behind other home junk was a clear plastic bag full of the star's metal pieces. At first I wondered what the hell is this???

After finagling it all together it turned into this beautiful decorative star. I traced over the star to get the correct measurements and angles for my license plates. My tracing was no good so it took the good part of a day to get it right and make a flat jig to use to trace lines onto the plates. After a few hundred reconfigurations, we came up with this...

Decoration or weapon?

I am obsessed with Wyoming license plates.

I heart Cowboy Joe!

I don't know how many of these I will make. They are a bit...well...labor intensive. But pretty awesome once they are done! This first one took 2 people a better part of a day to complete. Of course there are new fangled machines that I could buy that could assemble this in about ten minutes. But that seems like cheating.