The Unlucky photographer

That's me.

I've been perusing quite a lot of Flickr lately. I've noticed that many of the best photos(or at least from the photographers I like the most), get the best shots with the right light. Whether it be bright, sunny, no clouds in the sky days, or the perfect light of sunrise or sunset. And I hear that some won't even post photos from days that was cloudy.

And then there's me. I wish I was a photographer I guess. I have taken thousands and thousands of photos since I bought that first Pentax back in 1984. But me, I have got to be the worst or unluckiest at getting shots.

I can't buy sunny days to save my life. If there is a great day to be out taking photos, well that's a day that I can't get out to take some for whatever reason. And if I can get out, by the time I get to what I want to photograph, the clouds have shown up and ruined the day.

The things I want to photograph always seem to:
Face north when it's winter
Face east in the evening and west in the morning
Look terrible without foliage and I find them in the winter or I find them in the summer and you can't see them at all because of all of the foliage
Or of course, nobody feels good and we don't feel like stopping at every single place just to take a photo, so I take it from the car and it's 1.blurry 2.cut off half 3.crooked 4.shows all the dirt on the windows or parts of the frame.

Sigh. I can't win. Makes me wonder if I should even keep taking photos. But I know I want to because I just love doing it. Even if I am the only person(as it always appears) that likes looking at my photos. They are a record of what I've seen. My memory can't always recall all of these things. Plus they help record things that will be gone(are gone now) before they are gone.

I just wish I had better luck actually getting the photos taken. :(

YaY Penguins!!

Pittsburgh Penguins are Stanley Cup Champions! Hooray! I've been a Pens fan for a long time, my third fave team behind the Preds and Bruins, so I was a happy camper last night! I think I'll be wearing my old Jagr jersey around all summer. :)

Almost as important, the Wings lost. I can't fricken stand them. And their lovely fans sitting up in the stands booing the whole time after the game. Nice. Losers. I will always root for the Lions and Tigers, the Wings can rot for all I care.

My website

isn't working for some reason. The service page says there are no problems, but the pages won't come up. I hate when it does this. So I log out of Warcraft to work on adding some pages and it's not working. Does that mean I should go back to playing Warcraft?? I guess so. Or spend hours reading other blogs and staring at photos on Flickr. I'm always worried that I screwed something up to make it not work. But it should be fine-I can log into my account, everything is up-to-date, it doesn't list any outages and says 'no problems reported', I can log into my ftp(not sure if I can upload anything though), but that page just takes forever to load and then only shows a white page. :(

Or I could search Google maps and street view trying to figure out where this house is located. I think it is near Springfield, TN, as the photos around in the original photos folder show the Robertson County Courthouse right before this-but I have looked all around Google maps in that area and cannot find it!
Windmill House somewhere near Sprinfield, Robertson County, Tennessee


update: went to the library, come back and now the website works just fine. Just a kink for awhile I suppose. Sigh.

Road trip

It's the little things that make me happy. Really, all I need is my husband and daughter in the car headed someplace I've never been(or even someplace I've haven't been since I got my new camera). After sitting in our den for a week, missing my kid at camp, feeling like I've never felt before, we got out Saturday to get some Vitamin D from that big shiny thing in the sky.

Our trip took us down I-24 towards Chattanooga. We exited in Manchester and picked up State Route 41 South. This is the Dixie Highway and was the north/south route prior to the Interstate coming through. Along this little stretch, near the small towns of Hillsboro and Pelham, I got photos of 2 "See Rock City" barns. The road then climbed up onto the Cumberland Plateau and we were in Monteagle. We drove east a bit, but then backtracked towards Monteagle and points west.

Just past Monteagle is a town called Sewanee. Located here is the University of the South. We stopped and walked around and took tons of photos of one of the most beautiful places I've ever seen. The gothic architecture, the towers, the stained glass windows, it was amazing. And then we got hungry. There isn't much in Sewanee(not that we could find anyway), so we headed down the road. The road meanders down the mountains towards the west. The first town you come to is Cowan. They have a nice little Railroad Museum(we didn't have time to go in, but we stopped and I got several photos of the train and downtown area). But no fast food here either. Finally, a few more miles down the road we come to Winchester, county seat of Franklin County, and a Burger King(which thrilled the kid, she got Pokemon cards).

Unforunately after that hubby's back started to ache and my stomach started to ache, so we headed up towards Tullahoma to catch I-24 home. And I spent the rest of the day on the couch in pain watching D-Day shows on the History Channel.

Hopefully will post some photos soon.

Lonely, I'm so lonely

My baby is at camp this week. I've never really been away from her for this long. Oh sure she spent a week with Grandma when she was about 5, but she was with Grandma! She is 10 now and she is spending a week over 2 hours away with nobody I know!! I know she will be having so much fun, she won't even miss me. But I worry. She is going to be doing things I wish I could watch her do. Swimming, canoeing, archery, ping pong, arts and crafts. And I am thinking about her with nearly every waking moment. It's been a day and a half and I feel sick to my stomach most of the time and I had trouble sleeping last night.

I am sure she will be fine, but is it so wrong that I jump every time the phone rings? I know it's quiet, really REALLY quiet around the house-just the way I like it-but I just can't wait until Friday gets here!