until again

moving choices now range from Colorado Springs, CO to Dahlgren, VA. whichever one of you sees me next, don’t be surprised if i’ve pulled out all my hair and tend to stare vacantly at some point between the end of my nose and whatever else is in front of me.

of course, it ain’t all about me. or the Spouse Unit. we discuss each option with the kids. they’re excited, but talking about it just brings to mind the uncertainty of their future.

oh, how i miss the old days. you know, back two months ago, when we didn’t know the Spouse Unit was getting laid off.

grumble. grumble. grumble.

okee…well…i have to confess that the Spouse Unit and the Otherlings are not the only pack-rats in the house. guess who has tax records for his business, including State taxes across three States, all the way back to 1995. but not just the tax filings. all the manuals, preparation forms, multiple copies of W-2, 1099′s etc, etc, etc…gah. it has taken me the better part of two days to purge the office of literally hundreds of pounds of needless paper and other things, and i haven’t even managed to clean off my desk, yet. i have cleaned out my desk, though, which is kind of nice. instead of having four drawers full of outdated computer cables, connectors, small tools, and soccer referee paraphernalia (coins, pins, etc), i now have places where i can put things! whodathukit?!?!

what’s actually amazing is how long i’ve been carrying that stuff around, even paying to move it twice. {sigh}

this really hasn’t started getting fun yet, but i am certainly glad to feel lighter.

are we there yet?

i can readily foresee that moving, even across town, is going to be, if not a long painful process, then certainly one in which every detail is going to be experienced with jolting clarity. and the fact that i sincerely, seriously do not want to move isn’t helping any.

we did find a cool house on Thursday, so if we can get all our ducks in a row and get this house on the market and somehow manage to sell it in the middle of the winter, we’ll be good to go. i wouldn’t expect that house to be available much into the spring, that’s for sure. the property value there is questionable, and thus a bit of a concern, but other than that, it really does look like i place we’d be happy in, and the mortgage would be considerably less. it’s even on a half-acre, so we’d only lose around 2.8 acres of our current space. {sigh} but the current owners tricked it out pretty well downstairs, and built into the underside of the core-floor garage. so, with that addition, the house is actually about as big is this one. and since part of that addition is still unfinished (electrical, air and wall/ceiling treatments), the space of the addition doesn’t show in the price of the house. all we have to do is finish it, and the price of the house goes up as much as it can given the location (there are lease homes starting next door, and the whole neighborhood is interspersed with them).

oh. as the three of us (#1 Daughter was still with her grandparents on Thursday) rolled out of the car, i believe i spied one of our youth referees shoveling snow out of her front driveway. so there’d at least be someone in the neighborhood that #1 Son and i know. on the other hand, she’s a high school senior next year, and that means two things. 1. i better damn well be shooting her senior portraits, and 2. there will be parties at her house next year. neat. and i would not doubt at all that her parents will ask us at some point to ‘keep an eye’ on her while they’re away. at least they’re good people!

anyway, Friday was spent largely in contemplation of the imminent change coming our way. the Spouse Unit also had some work to get done, and a meeting that wound up being almost four hours long. so, i really thought about the move and tried to come up with ways to make it an enjoyable experience for all of us, and then, of course, i started thinking about all the things we’ll have to get done around here to get this house on the market. to be honest, after a full day’s consideration, as well as some time on the same subject spent yesterday, i haven’t quite figured out the best way to get all that going, especially since i really don’t want to move.

i think i’ve probably mentioned that before. i find it rather telling that i have friends dating back to the early 1990′s, largely met solely on the computer, whose friendship has shown more constancy than we have managed to show for settling down in one place, despite our expressed desires to do exactly that.

bah. i don’t want to move. that means very little, though, when part of the reason why we need to move is the massive amounts of money i’m not making in my own business. at this point, it’s either move or be in debt forever. i recognize the need to move, but the doing of it, i’m not so interested in. it’s exciting in its own way, but it’s not really the type of excitement i want to keep experiencing every few years.

all of which ultimately matters very little, and i have to set it aside. now i have to be Mr. Helpful and Mr. GoodExample (and don’t forget Mr. JuggleTheClientsWithTheCleaningAndTheFixing), and i will soon get to be Mr. QuitWorkingAndDisappearWheneverSomeoneWantsToLookAtTheHouseSoPleaseCallAheadYouDumbassRealtor. and then i’ll get to be Mr. JuggleTheClientsWithThePackingAndTheMoving. eventually ending in Mr. JuggleTheClientsWithTheTilingAndTheFinishing. because if we get that house, there is a large room downstairs that will definitely need tile because it has a full sauna in it already and it’s wired for a hottub, which the Spouse Unit very much wants (and we can get pretty decent ones for list price through out brother-in-law). but the absolute last thing that’s going to work in that kind of room is carpet, which is how the current owners left it probably because they realized how much it would cost and/or how much of a hassle it is to tile a room that size (roughly 18×22 with irregular walls). and we all know who bought a big-ass tile saw last time he had to do this stuff, and who moved the big-ass tile saw all the way out here from California, and who has been quietly pleased the whole time he’s lived here to have avoided tiling the entire downstairs of this house.

karma sucks. but i digress. as previously noted, this is something i do well.

we started yesterday going through clothes that should have been given to Goodwill ages ago. #1 son took most of my old referee t-shirts and polos from AYSO soccer out in California, though, as if he needed more crap in his room to work around. after we go through some other stuff today though (old kids games and things like that), we’ll have a van-load of items for Goodwill that never should have made the trip from California with us. the Spouse Unit and i were just so tired during that move that it became easier to throw everything on the moving truck than separate it out. we’re not making that mistake again. there’s really not that much to fix up around here: some minor things, is all. i get to figure out how to touch up the paint on the front of the garage when it’s only 15 degrees outside, though. that should be fun!

doing all this is going to be a challenge. luckily, i like challenges. i’m exceptionally afraid that we’re going to get moved, and the Spouse Unit will land a job that would have seen us sitting pretty in this house, though. maybe someday we can move back out here or someplace like it. i’m certainly glad i shot up the back of here quite a bit already, and in all seasons. i will be pulling photos out of those collections for fine art work for a very long time to come. when it comes time for that, that’s probably what i’ll do if/when a realtor calls wanting to show the house, too. i’ll just put on the snow boots and head out back with a camera or two and do some last shoots.

at 3:00 p.m. central time.

yes, at 3:00 p.m. central time, we begin the frickin’ god-forsaken intriguing process of looking at houses.

everyone just look at your watches or clocks or whatever at that time and heave a big ol’ sigh for me. there’s a couple of reasons:

1. i don’t wanna move.
2. i wanna be incredibly melodramatic about it, at least here on the blog, because it’ll be a decent amount of work to get us out of this house.

ever notice how quickly people collect shit? gah. we’re in trouble….

on the other hand, this will be the first move while (actively) blogging, so at least i’ll be able to vent.

posts regarding the move will be filed largely under ‘tempered impatience’ because i’m already ready for it to be over….

oh…and lest i forget…WAAAAAAAAHHHHHHH!!!!! and BOOO-HOOO-HOOO!!!!

i was able to captured #1 Daughter’s school Christmas Concert, but where we sat for her Nutcracker performance didn’t really allow for me dragging in one of my decent lenses, and the Moscow Ballet is rather stringent on the “no photography” issue, so i declined to go there. #1 Son, apparently, would not have been very happy with me if i had shot his choir concert, either, but his grandfather did. if those photos are provided to us digitally, i’ll get them up here so we can embarrass #1 Son, who really has no reason to be embarrassed at all.

obviously, i need to get a little point-and-click with a decent zoom lens, where i can shut off the back screen and any other lights so i can illegally photograph her dance performances. that, or a nicely compact extreme telephoto lens i can put on something like the D70. bah.

at any rate, these are from #1 Daughter’s Christmas Concert on December 4, 2007. she’s quite the ham, isn’t she? once i figured out where they were, i tried to capture some of the neighbor kids as well, but that really wasn’t my focus, of course.

on to the photos…

as some of my family members know, i have had minor tinnitus virtually all my life. at least, i think, since i fell off a 1.5-meter diving board straight onto the side of my head when i was in fifth grade.

this past summer, i managed to catch a hard-kicked soccer-ball on my right ear (the side with the tinnitus) as it rebounded off a goal-post, and the tinnitus naturally got a bit more pronounced. after a couple of months of dealing with it, i finally got a referral to an Ear, Nose, and Throat doctor, who did a full hearing test (including conduction) who determined that the tinnitus was caused by nerve damage and was not the result of anything wrong with all those little bones in my ears.

i’ve also had an old root canal “go bad”. one of the roots had cracked and it was infected up under the tooth itself. earlier this year, the dentist sent me to a specialist, who ultimately determined with the crack in the roots there wasn’t anything he could do about it. great. i waited to talk to the dentist about it at my next scheduled checkup, which happened to be on Halloween. this was right in the middle of harvest out here, so my allergies were very active. so, i got my teeth cleaned, and afterwards, the dentist poked and prodded around on the infected tooth, causing it to leak a bit straight into the back of my inflamed throat.

the next day, i was sick as a dog. i got prescription and knocked it down to a dull roar, but since the tooth was still continually supplying infection into my bloodstream, i really didn’t get over the infection until a week or so after the tooth was extracted towards the end of November. so, here i was in December now, actually feeling pretty good, except i began noticing that my tinnitus was getting progressively worse. up through about the day before yesterday, when i decided that i would rather be deaf in my right ear than to constantly hear this damned noise, which effectively has hearing stopped in that ear anyway: the tinnitus is that intense. it has also changed from being a straight noise that isn’t affected by anything (pressure changes, etc) to a noise that markedly changed by alterations in pressure, direct contact, chewing, anything.

so yesterday morning, i’m sitting here at the computer working on a blog meme for the otherwhirled (i’ll get it posted after i post this), and i turn my head to the side, looking at one of the kittens coming into the room. my head stopped, but my center of gravity felt like it kept going. “That’s weird,” i thought. i turned my head back to the computer, and it did the same thing in the other direction. “Great,” i thought, “i had just a bit more than usual to drink yesterday and NOW i decide to get tipsy? what the hell….”

ten minutes later, and i was attempting to detangle myself from three cats (one on my lap and two at my feet), because i had to majorly hurl. my center of gravity seemed like it was literally anywhere. i wasn’t dizzy; the room wasn’t spinning, but i couldn’t stand unassisted. hell, i couldn’t sit unassisted. realizing it was primarily an issue of vertigo, which i have dealt with all my life when in high places (yes, even though i used to jump out of airplanes and rappel), i forced myself up the stairs to where i’d left my phone. i got hold of the Spouse Unit at work and asked if we had a Carbon Monixide detector in the house. we do. it wasn’t going off. (i thought of that first because we had some friends who got CM poisoning several years back, and that’s how they said it started). i was on the front porch, and began to realize that every time i move, it set off the hurl. and that’s move anything: head, arms, feet. it didn’t matter. it was sub-20 outside, and i was sweating like a pig. lovely. so, back inside to our master bedroom, then. on the way there, one of the kittens who was with me down in my office, and who is very concerned, very nearly got me killed by twining between my feet as i was trying to navigate past the staircase with the not-very-sturdy banister. i made it to the bathroom and just had to live there for about an hour. every time i moved, the hurl came on. didn’t matter which way i faced, up or down, left or right. i tried laying down and simultaneously realized we hadn’t cleaned the floor in a while and that laying down didn’t help. eventually, i tried calling the Spouse Unit again. sitting up to do that, i was so overcome with vertigo and shakes, hyperventilating, that all i managed to do was lean on the number “3″ on my phone (her work speed-dial). i don’t think i managed to say anything. eventually i just lay down again and worried about the fact that every movement made me hurl, including turning my head to the side, which i needed to do so i wouldn’t choke. i was pretty much helpless and extremely pissed off, and all i could do was listen to the tinnitus raging so loud i couldn’t hear anything else in that ear, including when one of the cats came in to check on me and was meowing like crazy. i thought he was on my left, and i reached out that way, only to feel him bump me with his nose on my right cheek.

i don’t know how long it took, but the Spouse Unit got an ambulance out there to me. nothing like having strangers walk in on you laying on the floor in your own bathroom. (like it was the morning after a frat party or something. at least i was fully dressed.) they got me off to the hospital, where eventually the Spouse Unit hooked up with me. the intern and the doc checked me out, and eventually determined that i’ve got Benign Positional Vertigo. apparently, the infection didn’t completely go away, or it at least left behind my semicircular canals (your balance center between your ears) full of fluid. that’s why the tinnitus is so pronounced and why it can be affected in ways it couldn’t before (pressure changes, etc). so now i’m on motion-sickness medicine, and fighting the drowzy. they gave me a double-dose there in the ER, and i was a good boy and took a dose later yesterday evening, but i didn’t take one this morning. now that i know what to expect, since i’m not having to drive anywhere in the next few days, and i’ll take some meds if it starts coming on again. at least it gives me a few minutes to react to it. and i’ve got to be awake to do client work, which i’m now another day behind on.

but that’s where i’m at, and why i was incognito yesterday. i’m fine, i believe. the meds incidentally help dry up the inflated canals, so i might take one tonight just to keep that going. but the tinnitus, though lessened, is starting to drive me crazier than i already was. am. whatever. but, i’m back among the living, and feel like i owe the Spouse Unit my life…again.

but not on a jet-plane. and i DO know when we’ll be back again, even. it’ll be sometime after i leave. i promise!

but yes, we’re going to bail for a bit up to the in-laws place. in the meantime, visit the folks i just link-loved from here. gah. i need to update this blog’s blogroll. yeah, yeah. i have time for that. really. pfft.

oh yeah. it’s thanksgiving. supposedly we should give thanks for all the shit in our lives. so, at this time, i’d like to give thanks for all the shit in my life. and for all the non-shit. and maybe for all the people, but probably not for their shit. wow, i just used the word ‘shit’ in one paragraph four times. i must be the shit.

okay, maybe six.

anyway, i’m rambling because i have this tooth that desperately needs to be extracted and i have to wait all the way until the freakin’ 29th. it’s fun, let me tell you. especially when i’m about to go stuff my face all weekend. mmmmmm……i just can’t wait to go love me some dentist. eight days. shoot me.

okay, well, the last proof site i was trying to get uploaded finally uploaded so i’ll see you later. have fun!

my next-to-the-last wedding of the year is today. i’ve got a BAD sore throat. thus far in my career, i’ve managed not to have to work a wedding sick, so this will be first for me.

but i thought of this because of what my daughter said about staying away from guys right now and not getting married EVER. i SO felt the same way about women from time to time. several times, even. but in fact, i met the Spouse Unit just three weeks after i had TOTALLY given up on women. our meeting was completely unexpected, and our getting together was more than a surprise. so every time i shoot a wedding, i’m reminded of all the things that were pouring through my head ‘back then’ (positive and negative), and i’m still somewhat amazed that people actually want to get married, despite being happily married myself.

i was engaged three times in my life. sometimes when i look back, the acts of engagement were almost more significant than the acts of marriage that i’ve partaken in. they were emotional promissory notes that seemed to me to have more significant as a promise held in trust as opposed to the exercising of that trust. and if it weren’t for the exercising of Will, which is what a marriage ceremony is about, one of those earlier promises would still have been in effect.

which is not to belittle marriage in any way. there is something grand and inspirational about any marriage, as two people commit before witnesses to join their lives together, even when that joining is only a formality. i normally allow myself to get somewhat caught up in those emotions while i’m capturing wedding scenes, but with the way i feel today, i believe i’ll be more of an impartial observer. perhaps i’ll see some things today that alter my perception of this process.

regardless, every wedding i serve reminds me of my own wedding to the Spouse Unit and as such, during every wedding i serve, i silently renew my vows to her. it’s the least i can do, i suppose, since the weddings are part of what keeps me from spending more time with her and our children.

Okee, so like I turn 41 today. Nifty. *yawn*

Unsurprisingly, it’s just another work day, and I say that with no chagrin whatsoever. I’ve allowed myself to get too far behind this autumn, so I’m going to be playing “catch-up” for another couple of weeks at least.

Sherri admonished me this morning: “…as you take time today to reflect back (and I know you will) on the many, many years you have spent on this earth, try NOT kicking your own ass for a change. Try acknowledging all that you have accomplished and all the good things in your life.” Easy enough for her to say, since she turns forty in five days and thus is 370 days shy of my ability to screw things up. But, I’ll try to give it a whirl while I’m letting a batch of photos run here.

Things I have accomplished in life:

1. I have managed to live significantly past my 25th birthday, and not even in a wheel-chair or mental institution. Let me tell you, as I contemplated this fact on my 25th birthday, it was such an intellectual surprise that it became one of those “pivotal moments”.
2. I have, for the most part, managed not to emulate my adoptive parents in the rearing of my own children. I haven’t chased my kids around the house with a belt yet, threatened them with relatively implausible bodily harm for disobedience, or attempted to shame them into compliance to such a degree that their self-esteem evaporated.
3. I have not kicked, drowned, strangled, tossed off a balcony, dumped in the forest, or otherwise rid myself of the charming-but-annoying felines in my life who insist upon climbing up my leg to greet me, walking across the keyboard in the middle of a PhotoShop batch and stalling several hundred photos in process, sitting on my face in the middle of the night, randomly attacking my toes as I’m walking by, attempting to lay upon my feet while I’m walking (especially at the head of the stairs), bringing half-dead animals and insects into the house, shitting on the bed after we’ve been gone on vacation, peeing on our luggage before we leave for vacation, and playing war games across the entire house at full speed and volume in the middle of the night.
4. I have remained faithful to my wife, but that’s less of an accomplishment as it is an acknowledgment that most other females in my life have had a better sense of discretion than she has, and I felt so lucky when she chose me that there was no way I was going to screw that up.
5. I have tried new foods throughout my life. Some of them, I even liked.
6. I quit smoking over a decade ago.
7. My kids still think I’m relatively cool. I know it won’t last, but it’s still kind of neat if you ask me.

So there. That’s seven accomplishments I can at least be proud of. I had thought of a couple of others, but there was this g@dd@mn3d kitten crawling up my leg and it kind of distracted me. Besides that, I’m actually a bit sick today. Me and the Amoxicyllin are trying to kick a throat infection. Germs are bastards. Hence the wording of the title of this post. That’s about what I sound like right now.

i hadn’t intended on writing this morning, actually. in fact, i had made a pact with myself last night to be even more diligent in regards to client services and to spend more time treating my clients right, then right off the bat, i discovered i was out of space on my Epson P-5000 [eek! product plug!], which i use as the primary backup device for my shoots, and it was time for me to archive it. which essentially means i’ll have two drives tied up for the better part of two hours, and unfortunately, doing any heavy processor work on images during the transfer runs the risk of screwing up the files that are being copied and the files that are being worked on. so, i’m switching my workflow around a little bit today and blogging while doing the boring stuff, instead of getting into the photo processing first.

But back to the title. that old Mother Goose rhyme always wigged me out as a kid, because i don’t think it’s really indicative of any personal condition of anyone in particular. to refresh your memories, here’s the whole thing:

Monday’s child is fair of face,
Tuesday’s child is full of grace,
Wednesday’s child is full of woe,
Thursday’s child has far to go.
Friday’s child is loving and giving,
Saturday’s child works hard for a living,
But the child born on the Sabbath Day,
Is fair and wise and good and gay.”

so, let’s see how much that fits the people i know:

heck, let’s start with me. i was born on a Wednesday. damn, that’s not a good way to start. is it accuracy or coincidence? probably the latter. but, i’m not always woeful, and in fact, i’m not even usually woeful. aren’t we all prone to woefulness from time to time? but, i’ll grant that i wasn’t a very happy child, or at least i don’t remember being happy all that much. so, i’d give it about a 7 on an accuracy scale of 1 to 10.

the Spouse Unit was born on a Friday.  well, now, wait a minute. with very few exceptions, “loving and giving” fits virtually any mother, so that’s not fair! and of course, i didn’t really know her as a child, but i’ll bet she was loving and giving even “way back then” (sorry, dear). okay, another seemingly accurate assessment, at least from this (mandatorily) biased perspective. i’ll rate that a 9, with one point off just because i feel peevish, and she does get mad at me sometimes.

yeah, right. ‘sometimes’.

#1 Son was born on a Tuesday. of which kind of ‘grace’ is he supposed to be full?  if it’s the Christian kind, then the poem is well off the mark, since he’s not even baptized. if it’s the kind of grace that comes with dexterity, he’s getting there, but as he begins adolescence, it’s a sketchy thing. besides, once he gets there, that’d make him a “Tuesday’s adult”, not a “Tuesday’s child”. hrm, i suppose that’s just picking nits, though. assuming it’s the latter definition of ‘grace’, i’ll give it a 6.

#1 Daughter was born on a Saturday. work hard? well, i certainly have to work hard to get her out of bed each morning. and to keep her on task. and to get her to do her chores. or do anything else that requires, oh, i dunno, energy, thought, foresight, or planning. the little darling can spend ten minutes alone in the bathroom after breakfast and come out still without having brushed her teeth or her hair. i mean, if you look at it in the light of working hard to avoid responsibility, then sure, she works her ass off every day. bah. i’d give this one a 4, and that’s being generous.

sure, that’s a small sampling, but overall, not terribly accurate. which begs the question, why do such predictive practices creep up in various cultures across the world? and more to the point, are all republican politicians all born on Sunday?

ooops, i guess that’s the wrong definition of ‘gay’. my bad.

you knew i was going to do that, so hush.

and yes, i know there are deeper meaning attributed to those appellations which i am blatantly ignoring. i’d hate to be terribly serious so early in the morning.

hey, that rhymed. woe is me, indeed.