Feline download complete

Feline download complete
Originally uploaded by soelo

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horses

horses
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Running Aces
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Outdoor Vacuum

Outdoor Vacuum
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I know it is exciting that the snow is gone, but this is a bit much.
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Opening the Photo Album

My mind is a photo album filled with pictures from my past. Some of them are blurry and unfocused or have someone’s thumb covering the left half of the scene. A few of them are overexposed, leaving the viewer only bright spots and shadows to discern where the faces were and who was laughing while I was crying. Some are portraits where everyone is posed in their Sunday best with hair recently cut and lipstick freshly applied. Lots of them are candid shots that depict some sense of movement or laughter.
There are some landscape or postcard shots that remind me of places I’ve traveled, and there are yearbook photos to remind me of my own painful adolescence. Doesn’t everyone have at least one school picture that they hope no one ever sees again? Some are family pictures that were obviously taken just minutes after some well-meaning third cousin shoved everyone up against the wall and demanded that they smile. Many pictures are from weddings or birthday parties. Some were taken on holidays and some are actually more like video clips or montages that depict several days that were all alike.
When it’s time to write about something that happened, I take out the picture and examine it. Fears, laughter, memories and joy come spilling out of each one. Remember how he wore his hair? Remember how cute she was when she was a baby? Who could forget that sweatshirt that I wore everyday for three months? I can easily get bogged down in the details and forget the big picture. So, it helps me to outline what I want to say before trying to write. I think some of my favorite exercises were the ones that involved imagining an event from someone else’s point of view or if it had happened in another way.

Unwanted?

In response to an essay about how you can edit digital photos to remove ex-boyfriends and girlfriends from pictures.

Are those people really unwanted? I think more often than not, the person doing the removing wishes to forget who they were when that person was around. Relationships can end because of some horrible misdeed, but often they just die out, lose their flavor or stop growing while the people in them keep changing. If I was to remove just one person from a photo, I'd always think of them when I saw the photo and that pretty much defeats the purpose. When I have stuff left from a relationship, I put it away somewhere and usually when I run across it again, I can look at it with fondness. I know I am lucky not to have had any relationships that would give me an urge to destroy things.

Ciao a Roma

Wow, I am here on my third full day in Rome and I still can't believe I am in Europe at all. I have taken so many pictures, I filled two 1GB cards and my 2GB is about half full. I still have today, Tuesday and Wednesday in Rome and Thursday in London.
Florence was beautiful, but frenetic. It is something else to stand in front of iconic works of art like that.
Sorrento was idyllic and gave me the 'chill out' time I needed. In Sorrento, I met a family from New Jersey at dinner and spent the next day in Sorrento with them. We shopped, talked, ate and sat by the sea. If I was ever to move to Italy, it would probably be somewhere around the Sorrento peninsula or Amalfi coast.