15 Minutes a Day

Archive for the ‘Photography’ Category

A friend of mine told me about his Photo 365 Project and I was intrigued. The idea is to post one photo a day, but the catch is that it has to be a photo you took that day. I found a place to post my photos pretty effortlessly and I finagled my Mom into doing this project with me. It’s fascinating so far what we have both posted. We started on September 1st and will go through August 31st, 2011.

I started on my trip to Crescent City, CA on September 1st. It’s a lovely little city and I was enchanted with it. It was easy to come up with new photos every day. Today was my first full day home and I was exhausted, so I snapped a picture of my dog. I am finding that the ordinary days are going to be the hardest ones to get interesting pictures. I’ll have to be very cognizant of new and interesting compositions and ideas for venues. I’ve already started exploring. Perhaps this will be a good excuse for me to explore my own community a bit more.

You can follow my progress here. You can see my Mom’s fantastic photos here.

Outdoor Mural in Crescent City, CA - Taken on September 1, 2010 by Catherine Ford

Greetings from beautiful Crescent City, CA! I’m on the road for the rest of this week. Tomorrow and Friday I will be teaching a class at Sutter Coast Hospital on how to build web sites on the Sutter Health Intranet (MySutter – Different from MySutter Online). I love doing this job! I find teaching so much fun and want to do it more than I currently do. Hence, why I’m going to school to earn a doctorate!

I’ve also started a new project today. A friend of mine on Twitter told me about a project he’s doing called Photo365. The concept is basically to take one photo a day for 365 days. If you’re interested, you can follow my progress here. I will also be posting some of the other photos I take on this blog. Today’s photo-of-the-day is a carved wooden statue of a mermaid riding a whale. I believe it’s carved from drift wood. I was very taken with it. Please take a look and let me know if you have any photography tips. That’s part of the point of the Photo365 Project – improving your photography skills. My Mom has agreed to do this project with me, so I may occasionally post links to her photos too. She’s much better at photography than I am because she’s been doing it longer than I have.

Overloaded Donkey Cart OR My Life as a Donkey

The last couple of months have been “interesting.” There is an old Chinese curse that says “May you live in interesting times.” 2010 has definitely been that for me! In the last couple of months my post-concussion syndrome headaches have reasserted themselves. They haven’t been as bad as they were initially, but they’ve still been very hard to deal with. I’m on a different headache preventative Rx, but they still come and go. They just make dealing with everyday life difficult. So I decided to make a few changes in my life in order to try to relieve stress and, hopefully, prevent headaches.

1. I decided to take a break from school. I’m not quitting. I’m not even stopping working on my dissertation. I’m just taking a few months off from classes. I’m thinking that I will start back up again after the New Year. I’ve just been so tired with everything and everyone but school has made the sacrifices for me. Work has been wonderful. My family and friends have been supportive. Mark has been phenomenal! I just need to take some time to relax a bit.
2. I’ve decided to stop watching so much TV. I have already cut out the commercials by recording everything I watch on DVR first, but so much of TV is just pure drivel lately. Even the “educational” channels like Discovery, TLC, National Geographic, and Biography have turned to mush with sensational, shallow, and hollow TV shows. It’s really quite sad… Not even the SciFi (now Syfy) Channel has embraced the lowest form of SciFi for movies and gone away from its original mission and started showing “professional” wrestling and Ghost Hunters.
3. To replace all of my TV watching I’ve decided to read more. I suddenly find myself in various stages of several types of books, depending on my mood. I just finished The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood (more on that later…). I’m also reading Grimm’s Fairy Tales, Ethics: The Heart of Leadership, Socialnomics (as an Audible.com book), and Al Gore’s The Assault on Reason (another Audible.com book). All are interesting and the topics vary pretty widely.
4. I’ve also decided to take on a mini-project called Photo365. The idea is to take one photo each day for a year and post it on the web to share. Yes, this is another social media thing. I’m going to start on September 1st and go through August 31st, 2011. Once I start uploading photos, I’ll post them on http://365project.org/ and share them here, on Twitter, and on Facebook. It will be interesting to see what comes out of it.
5. I also plan to blog more often. I’m considering starting some series on life, photography, interesting questions to ponder, the aforementioned reviews of what I’m reading, and probably some op-ed pieces too.
6. I’ve taken a break from Toastmasters. I was in two clubs and was also being encouraged to participate in leadership roles. While I enjoy the Toastmasters program and have learned a LOT about public speaking, I find that a) I want to dive in and fully participate right before b) I collapse in an exhausted heap from even thinking about diving in and participating fully. I will return to it, but I just found myself having to say “No” and feeling lousy because I really wanted to say “Yes” to everything I was asked to help with.
7. Finally, I’m going to get into an exercise regimen. I joined Curves and really enjoy the program, but all of the headaches I’ve been having, coupled with all of the pressure I’ve been under lately, have made getting there to DO the exercise quite difficult. Starting Monday, I’m getting back on that horse and will go AT LEAST 3 days each week.

Have you ever had to do anything like what I’ve done here? How did you handle it? Any advise? Please comment. I’d love to hear from you.