Tag Archives: photos

Thoughts on Yosemite

BY bonnie

Google Maps might tell you that Yosemite is about 6 1/2 hours away but that is a dirty lie. Yosemite is actually 6 1/2 light years away and when you add in three or so breaks at about 20 minutes each you won’t arrive at your campsite until exactly 10 hours after you left the house at six am. And you’d want to stab all the people when you finally arrived except that YOSEMITE and you have actually zero desire to stab anything all all.

If you find a gas station in the middle of nowhere for surprisingly cheap it’s probably because you’ve fallen back in time to the only gas station left on earth that doesn’t accept any form of plastic as payment. Just save time and go to the overpriced Chevron down the street.

Bakersfield is, indeed, the armpit of California. I hated it. So much. And we didn’t even stop there. I could just tell I hated it from the freeway.

In the area there is a street called 7th Standard Road. Even Bakersfield hates Bakersfield.
(ALTHOUGH. When googling the road name to fact-check myself, Google asked if I wanted to know about “7th Standard Road Ghost” so it just became slightly more interesting.)

There is a town called Fish Camp. There is a town called FISH CAMP. THERE IS A TOWN CALLED FISH CAMP.

In Fish Camp there is a creek called Big Creek. Really.

Other names that might need reconsidering: Mosquito Creek, Avalanche Creek.

I may or may not have cried when we turned the corner and got our first glimpse of Half Dome and El Capitan. The thing about these enormous rocks is that there is no way to fully capture their power and beauty in a picture. Even Ansel Adams, clearly the god of Yosemite photography, could not honestly convey how incredible Yosemite Valley is. You have to be there. To turn that bend and catch your first glimpse of the valley is a spiritual moment that neither words nor film will ever be able to convey.

People yell “Elmer” across the campground all evening. Really.

Bears like soap. Bears like Chapstick. If you need Chapstick at 4:45 am you will have to leave your tent and fight an actual bear for it. Bears are clearly assholes.

Here is the thing about bears. When researching this trip, I found this on the Yosemite official website:

So, basically, don’t have any crumbs in your car or you will probably die and kill everyone around you with bears. That is the message I took from that. And, to be honest, I don’t even think I am stretching what they are saying too far. Luckily, I knew that bear sitings were fairly rare since the bears are pretty people-shy, so I wasn’t too worried. Until I arrived and signed my bear contract (seriously) saying that I promised to follow the bear rules and while we were discussing this, the ranger told me they’d had bears in the campground every single night for the past two weeks. Naturally then, I saw a bear. It was right outside my tent at 4:45 am, looking through the neighbor’s (empty) boxes on their picnic table. Probably looking for Chapstick.

Because I am an emetophobe, the bear was still less upsetting than the kid with the stomach flu in the next campsite over. I did not sleep at all that night.

On Monday I had the kind of day where I dropped everything I touched (usually onto my feet) and I tripped over huge logs that were not at all invisible and I had a really hard time with Capri Suns.

Animals we have seen (in order of size):
Bear, stag, deer, coyote, ravens, blue jays, woodpeckers, squirrels, chipmunks, squirrel babies, massive ants, slightly less massive ants, regular ants.

The problem with learning to skip stones is that once you plunk it in the water it’s gone. And who has the time or patience to go looking for more skipping stones? NOT THIS CHICK.

On the other hand throwing stones as far as you can is fun.

Pros to being the driver on twisty mountain roads: Having control over not allowing the car to go careening down a cliff ending in the death of everyone on board.
Cons to being the driver on twisty mountain roads: Not being able to see the scenery while you carefully watch the road so that you don’t send the car careening down a cliff ending in the death of everyone on board.

The trick to being in icy rivers is just to wait until all your extremities are too numb to feel anything. At that point it’s quite comfortable.

Rain in Yosemite is beautiful and I’m so glad I got to enjoy it. I’m slightly less amused having to lug home a wet tent and camping chairs.

Los Angeles can have traffic at any hour of any day. But it will definitely have traffic at 9:30 on your way home after an exhausting trip. Especially if you were kept awake all night the night before by a crying baby at the site next to yours. Related: I feel somewhat stabby to those parents who walked their crying baby outside my tent all night.

When you leave cats alone for like five days, by the time you finally arrive home their eyes will be all big like they’re afraid they might be hallucinating, they won’t stop asking you if you are real, and once they are convinced this isn’t a dream, they’ll automatically get crazy and climb all the walls.

My mom’s high school best friend went to Yosemite for a summer job and never came back. I can see why.

If you want to see the rest of the pictures, you can find them at my Flickr album here.

I visited here with my grandparents nearly 30 years ago and it’s been a beloved and fairly clear memory ever since. I’m so glad I got to go back, and to share the place with my children, forming their own beloved memories in the process. I hope that the next time we go will be sooner than three decades on.

7 Days, Children of Hoarders, I Own a Home. WTF?

Evolution of My Living Space

BY bonnie

I think threeish years ago I started taking birds-eye views of my living room for 7 Days shots. Tonight I took the final one. It went from a place where I felt very trapped and suffocated by all the clutter (as an adult child of a hoarder this is a really sensitive thing for me) to a place warmed by red walls and cozy and welcoming.

December 2010

I’ve moved a few times in my life and I’ve always kind of enjoyed it. A new place holds a kind of excitement. But moving to this place back in September has been actually surprisingly difficult for me. Maybe because I hadn’t moved for like 14 years, or maybe because I actually own this place and that alone was a huge step. Or maybe because any of the 467 other things that were happening this fall heightened my anxiety. I don’t know. But people would ask me how my new house was and even though I knew I was happy to be here, I also had incredibly amounts of anxiety about it. In the last month or so I’ve finally started to feel like I’m settling in, and seeing this living room makes me really, really happy.

March 2011

Now if only these &*%$! &%!!@#&% &@$%!& !!@!! @$#!&! ants will die I can see myself being happy here for a long time. If they won’t die, I’ll just have to move to Canada.

December 2011

PS. those extra shots in the collage up top there were after I’d taken about 50 shots I didn’t love so I was getting a little loopy. And by “loopy” I mean “hilarious”.

7 Days, Just Life

Then and Now. 7 Days.

BY bonnie

Seven years ago I took part in a self-portrait project. It was, I think, inspired by the various 365 projects that were popular at the time, but only required a week’s participation at a time, four times a year. Just my speed! Over the course of the years I got to know new people, and I brought some of my friends from other areas of my life into the group. Some of the people I met or got to know better through the 7 Days group have become very important to me. In fact, as I write this I am sitting Bethany’s living room while I make use of her laundry facilities (my dryer decided to take the day off today). In fact fact, I’ve spent like almost all the last week with Bethany and her family. They are sure to get bored of me any moment now.

Seven years is a long time. When I started this project my little one wasn’t even two and my daughter was about to be five. They are so different now (although my daughter looks exactly the same somehow). Through these last years of this project so much of life has happened. Marriages began and ended, babies were born, people moved, friendships were forged, relationships changed. But babies were born, man. Like where there once was no human, now there is a human. What? How does that even happen? (Don’t answer that, I actually know how it happens. I’m being deeply philosophical here, smartass.)

It seems so random that a chain of events of various importance could lead me to this group which had such an impact on my life. And on my laundry.

And now the project is coming to an end. I understand it, but I feel sad about it. An era is ending. There is so much I still wanted to share with these people. And many of them have become a part of my life so they will share those things, but that particular community will be gone and I will miss it.

7 Days, Philosophy, Spirituality, This Shit is Thursday as Fuck

Yule Blessings

BY bonnie

O HAI.

(I think I’m dating myself by speaking in lolcat. I mean. That was SO four years ago. All the cool kids these days speak doge. Basically I’m internet-ancient.)

The world just will not let up. As soon as I was finished with my finals I had to do holiday shopping (so far I’ve only done my kids. have not even begun to think about other people yet. oy). Then a water filter sort of exploded under my kitchen sink which – in the grand scheme of plumbing issues – wasn’t THAT big of a deal, but it left me without water in the kitchen for a few days while I learned how to fix it (almost) myself (a friend helped by replacing the waterlogged wood for me). THEN. I got a mysterious pain in my side which I still don’t really know what to do with, but it was briefly accompanied by a fever so I had to decide whether to go to the ER or not. The pain is still around, the fever is gone and the pain is very different now, but I’m still not really sure how to handle this. In between all these things I’ve had two fairly major paperwork things to accomplish which took up a lot of time and energy.

I know. This is the most boring kind of entry ever. (Does it help to know that I nearly just wrote “the most borking entry”?) I just can’t help myself because I MEAN REALLY WITH THE NEVERENDING STUFF NEVER ENDING WHAT EVEN THE HELL ALREADY? Someday when I look back and think to myself, “GOD why was I such a big whiner in 2013?” I will have these entries to remind me that 2013 was, indeed, a fucking motherfucker.

But this is the longest night. Figuratively (DEAR GOD I HOPE) and literally. The sun is reborn today and the Northern Hemisphere heads back towards summertime.

I think there are two aspects of Paganism that really speak to my soul. The holidays that coincide with the beginnings of each season are the most powerful to me spiritually because they mark a literal cosmic moment in which the Earth’s position in the solar system and on its axis cause an effect on Earth’s seasons. This morning, at 9:11 in my time zone, the Earth was tilted at its farthest from the sun and began to wobble back the other direction. To know that, to picture it, to meditate on it, connects me to the Universe like nothing else. This is how I feel the glory of Nature on Earth and beyond – through science. It is humbling and exhilarating all at once. Connecting with nature, Earth, the Universe, in every way from a simple hike to a holiday celebration is what feeds my soul.

The other aspect is the spiritual and psychological work. This is where metaphor and myth come in. Gods and goddesses, I believe, are as real as you need them to be. In mythology they are facets of the human psyche and the stories are the keys to understanding who we are. To say a prayer, to burn some sage, to participate in any ceremony is holy because it is stating an intention. An intention to connect with the Universe (or any name you choose to call your Source), to cleanse your energy, to focus on the past, present, and future. This is how I do my work to grow emotionally and spiritually.

My life has been chaotic so my ceremonies have been simple. We watched the sun rise on his birthday; this year Bethany’s family joined us. We feasted on bacon and sausage, biscuits with clotted cream, coffee, and cherry cider. I find prayer in every little action. In decorating the tree. In taking pictures of the sun rise or of our breakfast. In wrapping gifts and setting them under our artificial tree. In walking around at night with the neighborhood, looking at all the festive lights, guiding humanity through this dark time of year. But simple ceremonies are no less valid than elaborate ones, and, in fact, I find that looking for prayers in my every day actions increases the meanings of the prayers themselves. Looking for prayers is another prayer.

Whoa. Meta.

And so the days grow longer, even though we won’t notice that right away. I am hoping this will apply metaphorically to my life as well. Because I am tired. And I have a break from school right now, but it is only for a few weeks and I am afraid that won’t be as much time as I need to finally catch up. Or to, you know, stop my body from developing a new problem every week. And if not, I guess we can just give in to my elderliness and celebrate my 80th birthday in February.

Happy Solstice! Here’s to sunny days and celebrations (and quiet moments) with friends!

(PS. This was actually a 7 Days post. It’s the last run. Ever. *sniff* That last picture there is my official 7 Days post today.)

KITTIES!

Kitteh Pron

BY bonnie

I’m not going to become one of those blogs that only blogs about kittehs. (Yes I am.) (Are there even blogs that become that? Or am I thinking of crazy cat ladies who don’t even have blogs?) But KITTEHS. And procrastination!

This is cuddly kinda.

Long story very short, the kitten’s cold wasn’t just a cold. It was some shit shitass virus that makes kitty’s noses fall off and they they’ll have forever and ever (but not be symptomatic forever, thank Bast). So that was a large part of why last week was so sad for me. I was so angry that my perfectly healthy cat was infected forever with a virus from the new kitten. I wasn’t really angry at the shelter (they didn’t know – I assume). I was probably more angry with myself for having chosen a kitten from a place even though so many of the cats were obviously dealing with respiratory stuff.

Still, this kitten is a good kitten. She’s sweet and loving and fun but not too kitteny if you get my drift. And she and Leia are bffs already. Which is not only a miracle, but also really sweet and makes my heart grow three sizes every time they cuddle or play. Which might actually be a health concern for me. Enlarged heart and all. But they play together in the middle of the night and they yell at moths together in the middle of the night. And really it would be pretty cool if they’d sleep in the middle of the night, but you can’t have everything in life.

I Own a Home. WTF?

The House So Far

BY bonnie

I wrote some entries last week. I even posted them. But then I had a fit of depression/anxiety/insecurity and removed them. They will probably come back in some form, but I felt all cloudy-brained and I felt like that didn’t make for very good writing. I’m clearer now (in more ways than one) (not physically, though. I don’t mean I’m more invisible than I was last week) so hopefully I can rewrite them in some more coherent manner. In the mean time I have only about 15 minutes before I have to do my next chore and that’s just enough time to throw together an entry of befores and afters. Of the house I mean. Not my process of becoming invisibler.

(By the way, if you click through on the after photos, you can read some of the notes I’ve added to them on Flickr. Or if you want, you can click here to see the whole set.)

Living room!

Entry! And Dinette!

Kitchen!

My bedroom!

Elliott’s room!

(OK I didn’t have great after pictures of his room.)

Margie’s room!

(OK or of her room.)

Obviously we still have work to do. We need some organizational stuff in order to finish unpacking. I need to get updated photos printed in order to put out new photo albums. I think I’m supposed to, like, hang pictures or art or some shit on the walls, but how can I dare to hammer anything into those beautifully colored walls? Except curtains. I’m rather sick of living without curtains. Very soon, hopefully, I’ll be able to afford some and also to find the confidence to learn how to actually do it.

In the mean time this place is becoming quite cozy and homey. Whenever the Universe allows it, I’m feeling quite happy here.

KITTIES!

Meet the Kitten

BY bonnie

We’ve wanted to get a buddy for our cat, Leia, for awhile now. And what better way to make life easy after a stressful and busy couple of months than to get a kitten!? (Don’t mind me. I have no mind left.)

Right now the San Diego Animal Control shelters are having a $5 sale on cats. And I reminded the kids that we weren’t there just to get a $5 cat – I’d rather pay the full fee another time for the right cat for our family than just grab any old cat cause it’s cheap. But we went to just go look. JUST TO LOOK. And then we adopted a kitten. Cause that’s how I roll. Surprise cats.

My daughter named the kitten Khoshekh after the floating cat in the Night Vale podcasts (although our Khoshekh is a girl kitty) (and also she’s not floating). I was really quite nervous about how she’d do with Leia since she seemed to hiss at all the other cats in the shelter, but I was banking on the fact that kittens tend to be more flexible than adult cats in forming friendships.

So we brought her home a few days ago and kept them entirely separated for awhile, but then it seemed as though they might be ready to meet each other. I started with just a few minutes here and there but they handled it really pretty well, actually. Soon they were playing in the same room. Today they sat in the same window and ate out of the same bowl together. Consider me impressed.

Khoshekh has come down with a cold, though. It’s pretty common in shelter cats. She’s a complete mess right now, actually. Still recovering from her spay surgery last week, and now feeling low with a cold and suffering with a chapped nose that’s quite bloody actually. She’s on antibiotics now, though, as well as some lysine to help boost her immune system and some Neosporin for her nosey. So here’s hoping she’s back up to full speed soon. Because Leia is really looking forward to having a playmate. Maybe then she can stop battling the bathroom rug. (Probably not.)

I Own a Home. WTF?, The Zebra

I have no idea at all what this post is about. If you figure it out, can you leave me a comment?

BY bonnie

The house is coming along. Some days I feel overwhelmed by all there is left to do, other days I feel confidant that everything will work out and even if it doesn’t it will. Those days, apparently, I am full of zen contradictions. I’m like a damn hippie riddled with anxiety.

These are the things I have learned about myself.

1. I am a picky person when it comes to paint colors. I didn’t think I would be. And then, when I started to notice that I kind of maybe was a little bit, I tried to deny it saying things like, “Oh I don’t really care except I hate all those colors except this one and no I actually hate that one, too.” At some point (I think it was the point where I bought the 36th sample of orange paint to try in the bedroom) I had to admit to myself that I am a picky paint person. I don’t know why this is such a hard thing for me to embrace, but I suspect it goes back to my extreme need to please ALL THE PEOPLE. If I’m picky, I might be frustrating, and if I’m frustrating I might lose all my friends and live alone forever.

I may or may not have been a drama major in high school.

2. I forgot this thing that I learned about myself. If I remember it, or re-learn it, I’ll get back to you.

3. Painting and fixing up an empty house is not unlike cleaning out a hoarder’s house, as it turns out. You spend all day working and at the end of the day you feel like nothing’s been accomplished. You feel certain that this will NEVER EVER END. The jobs just keep adding up. They seem endless. Overwhelming is an understatement. And, yet. My mom’s house got cleaned up. So here’s hoping that someday September will be over and I’ll be settled in my orange-no-purple-no-brown-no-back-to-orange bedroom writing a post about how THANK GOD 2013 is almost over and perhaps I’m about to become superstitious about odd-numbered years.

I’m sorry. I don’t think this post makes any sense whatsoever. Have some pretty pictures of the sky to make up for it.

I Own a Home. WTF?

Five Days in and I Have a Home Depot Guy

BY bonnie

You know, cause I’ve been there so much this week.

I must warn you now that blogging for the next few weeks while I have six different full time jobs will probably be on the back burner. I hope to fill in those gaps with amusing home improvement stories. Or at least photos of home improvement projects. Or photos of silliness in the home improvement store. Like this one:

Where I practice for when I’m a robot princess.

Or this one:

Where I brought my son’s pillowcase to Home Depot to match paint samples and then got bored of holding it so I threw it over his head and he just went with it cause he inherited my sense of humor.

Or photos of the process itself like this one:

Where we discuss HOW VERY HOT PINK my bedroom was (it’s now primed). True fact: the previous owner (apparently) chose this color herself and then decorated it with all sorts of Jack Sparrow memorabilia.

So, as you can see, this is a shitty cop-out of a blog post. I’d like to write about where I’ve been mentally all year and how that relates to shitty potato chips, or maybe about that one two-parter episode of Welcome to Night Vale which is like a massive metaphor for life in general, but tomorrow I have to start learning about biological psychology (which, the book’s author assures me is the most interesting subject EVER. FACT.) and also I have to paint a lot of walls so I’m thinking it will be more shitty cop-outs for a little while. Bear with me. I’ll try to make it HILARIOUS.

Geek, Local, Places We Go and Things We Do

And the Nerds Descend Upon San Diego, Part the Second

BY bonnie

Comic Con is crazy-stupid to get tickets to these days. Back in the day we used to just show up that day and buy tickets and then something happened where it exploded in population and all the people on Earth show up to stand in line. Last year we wound up being gifted a free comp ticket that a friend of a friend didn’t need (and kids are free) and I was happy with that. I want to visit other cons now (I actually had plans for both Leaky Con and Gallifrey One this year, but The Universe was all NOPE). Even so, I went ahead and entered to win Comic Con tickets because if the process was free and easy I’d totally go. I never expected to win. BUT I TOTALLY DID. (And I fully realize that I’ve used up all my Comic Con luck for ever and ever now.)

I had two tickets to the Con and I wasn’t sure who to give the other one to because most of my friends hate crowds with a passion (I don’t – but the crowds at Comic Con last year did even me in) but when I heard that Rainbow was doing a panel I offered my other ticket to Bethany so she and her daughter could go. (And you know what’s stupid? I forgot to get a picture of all three kids together.)

I don’t know these people. I just know that they are awesome.

Last year we went to the Doctor Who panel. That required waiting in line all morning and we *just* made it in the panel (see? LUCK). So this year we decided that we’d rather do other stuff all day rather than just one thing for most of the day. Besides we’d done the Doctor Who Tumblr Meetup the day before and breathed the same air as Matt Smith and all so we were good there.

So we didn’t do… much. We walked the floor (and by “walked” I mean “elbowed our way through the masses”), we had lunch with our friends and laughed a lot, we saw awesome cosplay. The kids went to a panel with their dad and I joined Bethany in Rainbow’s panel. We hung out at the Lego booth and took a picture in the Ice King’s jail. We had fun, but at the end of the day I felt underwhelmed.

And here’s why: I’m not really all that into comics. I know, I know. I feel bad for going to Comic Con when I’m not really into comics, but it’s not my fault that’s where the BBC goes. Ideally they’d plan a second, perhaps linked, con that is for geeky entertainment in general. But unless that happens Comic Con is where I want to be. Only. Most of the panels – the ones that aren’t the huge ones, I mean – are comic book-based. (There were a few for kids we wanted to check out – like how to draw comics – but we missed them due to timing.) So as a con it’s not that interesting to me. I should clarify that I am not in any way anti-comic book. I know they are an intelligent and legitimate art form. I just don’t relate to them as well as I do to books or movies. Maybe someday I’ll find a comic that will change my mind.

The panels at Gallifrey and Leaky Con sounded really, really interesting to me, but it’s just the E-ticket panels I want to go to at Comic Con. And then I realized: I like Comic Con for it’s Disneyland aspects. I would rather wait in line all day (or night) and see one awesome panel than fight my way through the crowds on the floor for a few free buttons (disclaimer: my kids may or may not disagree with me on the value of free buttons). But other cons – ones that are built around the fandoms I am a part of – I think I’d like for the convention itself.

I’m sorry. I just can’t stop showing off my awesome shoes.

Someday perhaps I’ll buy tickets to Comic Con and sleep in line to see the Doctor again, but I think (unless I get free tickets again!) I will stick to the free outside-the-con events instead. Because, frankly, for one weekend a year, all of downtown is full of magic (and crowds. Don’t forget the crowds).