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I have, from time to time, been on the verge of some kind of epiphany, or mental breakthrough to a great truth or some universal wisdom that will change my life forever and give me profound understanding of the universe and the way it works. I’m not sure how to best describe the feeling I get just before this realization will supposedly hit me, but it’s like waiting for a mental “sneeze” that never arrives. You know how that feels…you’re talking to someone and you have to say “wait a minute”, but the sneeze never manifests.

These instances, where I’m absolutely sure I’m going to realize something that will completely change my perception of reality, eliminate all fear and doubt from my life, and show me the way to wealth and happiness, infuriate me instead because the culminating realization never breaks through that “pre-sneeze” stage and I’m left sitting here with the same stupid look on my face, plodding along as usual, not knowing the point of any of this business called life and not knowing where it eventually leads. Hopefully not Alzheimer’s.

In the meantime, the only thing I know for certain is I have to keep taking photographs and making art. At least I’m certain of something in this confusing playground.

They say “be true to yourself”. What does that mean? What if you don’t really know what you want?

I have a lot of interests. That splashes over to my photography. I like the sweeping vistas of a breathtaking landscape as much as anyone else. I love closeups of beautiful flowers. I love interesting trees. I love wood and brick and water.

I keep reading that you need to find a “niche” and concentrate on that to be noticed. what if you like EVERYTHING? what do you do then?

I do have some things I like better than others. Having been fascinated with architecture since I was a teenager, I guess I gravitate a lot toward bits and pieces of architecture and old buildings in general. Now I have a large gallery of architectural images, and I’m trying to figure out how to divide it. I guess I could separate out the black and white versions of everything into another gallery. That’s the only thing I can think of right now, but I like the viewer to have a choice of color or black and white and there is something to be said for having them next to each other so they can be compared.

This is where my brain falls short. I have a hard time organizing my images in a logical manner. They are generally just there. The thought of going through them all and trying to decide how to order and arrange them gives me a headache. Does it really matter? I think it does, but I’m not sure what to do there.

I have seen some people divide their galleries into colors. That’s an interesting concept, but I think that would work better with abstract paintings than photos. I know some people divide their work by horizontal and vertical formats. That’s also interesting, but there’s something to be said for having those images side by side as well so the buyer can decide which format they like better. I try to provide both when the subject lends itself to both formats.

Oh well, for now I guess I will continue as I have been and keep posting away until some brilliant idea strikes me and sparks my tired brain.

I know this subject has been discussed and written about until people are rather tired of it, but I still find it interesting so I decided to analyze my own life from the viewpoint of the right and left sides of my brain. My very first blog post was about my lack of math ability - which is certainly a left-brain related function. Not surprisingly, my math ability has not improved at all since I posted that blog entry.

I notice folks who are more right-brained by nature (at least in my case) tend to see things our left-brain dominant cousins do not. I see “things” - faces, objects, plants, for example - in the way a bunch of buttons are stacked in a glass jar. I take delight in the particular shade of blue in the sky on a particular day. I love the pattern of reflected car taillights on wet pavement.

Give me a choice between a coloring book and a book of Sudoku, I get a warm fuzzy, nostalgic feeling from the coloring book. The Sudoku book gives me indigestion. When I started downloading games to my computer, I very much delighted in the hidden-object games I discovered. These games challenge you to find things hidden in pattern-heavy images and I find it very relaxing. However, a lot of the game companies have been throwing in diabolical puzzles at certain points in these games which you have to solve in order to progress in the game. I work on a computer all day long at work. I don’t want to “think” in the traditional sense when I’m playing. Give me the visual stuff, please. I hate logic!

It’s almost painful to start a re-arrange project in my house. I’ve written before about my book hoard. My right brain actually likes the piles on the floor in my bedroom. It’s sort of organized clutter. But it is clutter due to the fact that the piles are overflow from my book cases. I would love for them to be more organized and all fit somewhere other than the floor, but when I switch on the left side of my brain to try to solve the issue, it’s like wearing one of those electric dog collars - my left brain sends out an electric shock and says “you have too many - they will not fit neatly in your house” and I retreat immediately back to the right side of my brain which allows me to take pleasure in having my favorite books near and accessible.

I recently cleaned out a closet upstairs, which was the subject of another blog post, and it was like watching one of those clown cars where way more clowns come out than could ever have gone in. To this day, I don’t know how all that stuff got in there. What to get rid of and what to keep wasn’t that difficult, but at the end of the process, there were several things left I could not just throw in the trash. My right brain just didn’t know what to do with this stuff, so it just went back in the closet for now. It was too labor intensive to turn on my left brain to figure out what to do with the overflow.

It amuses me to notice what category people fall into after I get to know them. My former boss is the most left-brained person I’ve ever met. He (by his own admission) cannot multi-task to save his life. He told me once he doesn’t read novels because he can’t picture in his mind what the author is describing. His excessive logic sometimes borders on the ridiculous, but any work he does is always error free.

My son, with a masters in computer science, is much the same way, but he does exercise his right brain with photography and music. He can’t draw at all, however.

My daughter, who has a degree in sculpture, struggled like I did through algebra, but is a wonderful artist and extremely intuitive.

Having a 40-hour job at which I must be organized, the left side of my brain does get a lot use, so when I come home, resting for me consists of being right-brained for the entire weekend. So, I’m going out later with my camera and the minute I step out of my car at my destination, I will be turning off the left side of my brain to let the right side run free.

Ever since I have been posting work online to sell, I have felt this pressure to constantly be on line either posting work or checking my visitor stats or going out with my camera on weekends when I don’t feel like going out with my camera.

Don’t get me wrong, I love capturing a beautiful or at least interesting image and photography is still my main preferred art form, but something seems out of balance right now and I have to step back. Unlike a lot of people selling art online, I do have a full-time non-art related job. I started doing the online thing seriously, however, to try to make some extra money upon retirement, which is not that far way for me in the relative term.

The photo work has not become stale for me. I still love finding a great subject. I still like editing my image to a final, professional state. I still like up-loading it and seeing it in my gallery. And it’s gratifying to receive positive comments.

The last few months, however, I’ve been feeling a bit unbalanced. I went to the craft store last weekend and bought some yarn and I have been knitting for a few days. This is an activity I have spent many, many hours doing since my college roommate taught me how to knit 40 yeas ago, and is part of my psyche - it’s necessary for me to do it as much as my camera is always with me when I’m not at work.

My brain seems to be balancing out now. I have pulled back from obsessively viewing my visitor stats, and constantly checking discussion threads. I will still participate, but any time you feel unbalanced, it’s time to pull back and look to try and figure out what’s “tipping you over”. In my case, right now it seems to be my constant mental pressure to produce work.

I had a dream last night that I had a bunch of uninvited guests in my house at night when I was trying to sleep. They were having a party. There were three or four televisions running in the room (supposedly my living room) and I kept trying to turn them off. No matter what button I pushed or what remote I used, there was at least one television I couldn’t get to turn off. It was extremely frustrating, I just wanted to “unplug” and be left alone.

So, I am taking a few weekends off. I visited a friend yesterday and purposely didn’t take my camera. It was a gray day anyway, and I only wished I had my camera briefly when I was looking at her garden. Otherwise, it was nice not to be “on” for a change. I needed that.

I have been to probably at least 30 national parks in the US, maybe more. I always have one reaction when I enter a national park for the first time = WOW. I have several photo albums full of national park photos - all film, all with mediocre developing. Now, several years later, I’m getting a chance to revisit many of these parks. In other words, I’m getting a do-over.

However, since I still work full time, these do-over trips are usually blitz visits where I do not have time to explore a park in depth, but I must content myself with stopping at the major overlooks.

There is another problem, which became apparent on my most recent trip out west. We were in Arches National Park in Utah, which is considered part of the geologic area called the Colorado Plateau. This is high desert - arid and hot and situated at about 9,000 feet above sea level. I live in Michigan. We are generally between 500 and 600 feet above sea level. In any case, we got to a feature in the park called “double arch” which has two massive arches, one behind the other. You can take a short walk over to these impressive structures and sit under them in the shade or explore further back.

We started walking over and my daughter, who is in her mid 30’s and in shape, was complaining about the heat. It was 102 degrees F, but it’s a dry heat and it wasn’t really bothering me so I said so. She and my husband reached the arches first and I was faced with about a 20-foot uphill climb involving some flat rocks and a slope. In other words, nothing major. I finally managed it, and collapsed next to my husband on the lower ledge of the front arch. I was literally praying I would not pass out or throw up. I was gasping so hard for breath, I couldn’t even answer my husband as he repeatedly asked me if I was OK. It took me about 10 minutes to recover enough to walk slowly back to the car. For every overlook we stopped at after that, I stayed pretty close to the car and just photographed what I could see from there.

I started the diet 2 days ago, and I’ve stared exercising again. That scared me. The next trip I hope to be 20 pounds lighter and a lot more aerobically fit.

The other issues I had on this trip are trying to figure out how to convey the massive size of a rock structure in a photograph, which is really impossible unless you have people in the photo for scale, and the other issue was exposure in some areas. In Rocky Mountain National Park, you generally have bright overcast skies and dark mountains with snow making the contrast situation extreme. I found myself wishing for a graduated neutral density filter, which I used to use all the time with my film cameras. I guess I need to order one.

In four days last weekend, I went to three national parks and one national monument, which was truly a blitz visit, but I’m just glad to be able to get back to these parks with a decent camera and occasionally to a park I have not visited before, which on this trip was Arches. It, indeed has the WOW factor.

….dull, insipid, uninspired, lackluster, infrequent, characterless, boring, run-of-the-mill, stuck, repetitive, and just plain not very exciting.

This is how I feel about my art and my life lately. I have to work, and I still like my job, but outside of that, I can’t muster up any spark of an original idea to save my life. I recently took a trip to Maine with my husband and got several nice images, some of which I have posted, but one needs to make good art and not wait for special occasions. I have another short trip planned, but in the meantime, here I sit on my ass with not one original idea or thought for a direction in which to head. I know my strengths and weaknesses in my photography, and I can’t even decide whether to play to my strengths or work on my weaknesses.

Being a bit closer to being called “elderly” now, and having worked for many, many years, I kind of don’t want to make my leisure time and love for art and photography into frustrating episodes of failure after trying to figure out how to do something, so I’m leaning more toward the former and just admit defeat in the areas in which I do not excel.

Is this a “defeatist” attitude, or is this just a reaction to years and years of doing things I really don’t want to do, and just wanting to thoroughly enjoy my later years? Don’t get me wrong, I’m still learning every time I use my camera or put pencil to paper, but if I’m not enjoying the journey, what’s the point?

I have a love for architecture and textures of things. Old wood grain, the pattern in a rock face, wind blown sand on the beach. These things I have learned to capture quite well. Some other things, setup still lifes, and people, for example, I find extremely hard and illusive. At what point do you just learn to admire the work of others and concede the higher ground to those who do something better than do you?

I’m much better at capturing single things and bits and pieces than most people, so maybe it’s time I concentrated on that and revel in the joy that it gives me rather than trying to be a jack of all trades. I think that’s partly why I’ve gone off the rails. I keep thinking (as we all do to some extent) that I have to be great at everything I attempt.

I think it’s time I admit I’m not Leonardo - I can’t do everything equally well and I need to concentrate on the things I really enjoy and which I find second nature and rewarding, and with which I get consistently good results. Don’t get me wrong, I will keep learning, but I think I’m done trying to fit a square peg into a round hole.

Yesterday, I decided it was time to print out some of my vacation photos. I really enjoy flipping through photo albums. Much more, in fact, than scrolling through online. I can’t remember what happened when I switched from my really old, slow Windows XP desktop computer to my Macbook, but they don’t even make a printer driver for my really old HP Photosmart printer. That’s ok, that printer died shortly after I got the Mac anyway, after about 15 years of loyal service. I loved that printer. I will miss it.

In addition to the dead HP, I have a Selphy dye sub printer and a new Canon large format printer. Since I have a whole box of paper and dye for the Selphy, I figured I’d use that up first. Well, when I tried it, the printer would draw the paper through, then just sit there and do nothing with a little hourglass symbol on the tiny screen. I tried printing directly from a memory card, and that worked, so I have a feeling all these updates to my Mac have messed with the printer driver. It worked last year…I tried for two hours to get that thing to work. I finally sent an email to Canon tech support and they sent me a list of repair facilities. I don’t think it’s the printer, though. Oh well, it was only 100 bucks about 10 years ago, so I guess it will go the way of my dead HP.

So, Selphy printer paper in hand, I went upstairs to print on the shiny new Canon large format printer I got in December. The first two photos I tried to print made me panic. The ink just sat on top of the paper in wet globs. I was ready to cry at this point, so I just took a break and made my dinner. While I was sitting there eating, my old, tired brain said “You idiot, you were trying to use dye-sub paper on an inkjet printer”. So I tried some of the HP postcard sized paper I have left from my dead HP and it worked fine.

We won’t discuss the print menus. It takes me 5 minutes every time I print to find the paper type selection option. Why can’t anything be simple? I have the same problem with my phone. Every time I want to find a feature and change it, I have to text my son and ask him how to do it.

I’m not stupid. I really am not. I started watching tv on a black and white set. I took a manual typewriter to college. Our first phone had a party line, and I’ve worked on a big, bulky telex machine. I guess one just has to adapt, but everything just keeps getting more and more complicated. We need a new tv. Our main tv is a big, bulky thing we got when our daughter graduated high school, which was almost 20 years ago, and we’re ready for an HD flat screen, but we’re waiting for our son’s next visit before we buy one so he can hook it up for us. He had to talk my husband through setting up a new wifi router over the phone. We need three remotes just to use the DVD player.

Ah, technology. It’s convenient, but maddening at the same time. I still don’t know all the features on my DSLR and I’ve had the thing for three years now. Oh well, onward and upward, I guess. Today, I’m going to print out some more select photos and see how long that pricey ink lasts. It will hopefully last a bit longer than my patience with all my smart devices.

Yes, holy crap. I have written before about how not in the mood I’ve been to purge my house since I cleared out my parent’s house almost two years ago. I just didn’t have the stomach for it. Well, yesterday, I shook some of that off and started on a closet upstairs. I repeat - holy crap.

I found our old Atari 520 in a box up there. That thing hasn’t seen the light of day in 25 years. It’s going out to the curb this week. Someone will snatch that up. I found a suit jacket my son wore when he was probably 18. That was 20 years ago. I doubt he wants it now. In fact, I generated 5 large garbage bags of good jeans from my lesser-sized days, shirts my husband got as gifts he would never be caught dead in, shoes I wore to my son’s wedding that pretty much ruined my feet. Some old purses that are out of style, a box of my son’s homework from college. I don’t think he wants that now. I made him go through his boxes and take what he wanted when he came out for my dad’s funeral. I did keep his draft card, however. Odd to think I have a son old enough to have a draft card. What year did they stop issuing those?

Anyway, after hauling all that stuff downstairs, I’m taking the clothing to the local drop box that they never seem to clear out. I hope I don’t have to leave the bags on the concrete next to the box.

I then moved on to the antique trunk at the foot of my bed. In there, I found old, worn linens I haven’t used for years. I tossed all those and gained room for my grandmother’s quilts that had been in that closet upstairs just piled in there in plastic bags. When I cleaned out my parent’s house, I lost two dresser drawers to my mom’s old sewing tins, my first pair of shoes and various other odds and ends. I managed to get one drawer of that stuff in my trunk as well.

I found a granny square afghan in that trunk that I started crocheting maybe 30 years ago. I almost pitched that as well, but then I thought “No, I did too darn much work on this thing” so I started working on it again last night. I may actually finish it. Good thing I didn’t just pitch it - I found my old, 1968 team-signed Tiger baseball hidden inside the yarn. Those things were going for a lot of money several years ago. Now….not so much, but still, not pitching that (pun intended).

Today, my legs and my back are very sore, but it feels good that I started the purge. Next weekend, the kitchen. I’m never going to use that turkey carving board again. I just carve them in the disposable pans. It will be interesting to see what else is lurking in there. Maybe I’ll find all the lids to my plastic containers. It’s amazing what crap just accumulates in a house.

I hereby vow to purge more often. It feels good.

I have written about my book hoarding tendencies in the past, and my urge to buy yarn even when I’m not finished with other projects (I have not purchased any yarn for over a year, by the way. I can’t say the same thing about books.)

Well, this morning I experienced a really strange obsession, which I think I have managed to pretty much quash, but at the risk of sounding like a nut case, I will share it here.

Yesterday, a cold and dreary day, I went out with my camera in spite of the gray conditions, in search of some interesting subjects that were not sun dependent to make them look good in photos. I went first to the local outlet strip mall that is sparsely occupied, and drove the to far end of the mall where I found some interesting graffiti, and some concrete retaining wall patterns worthy of calling art. Then I drove up to a park in Port Huron to see if there were any ice chunks still piled up in Lake Huron.

I found the lake is still iced over but flat. The big, beautiful blue ice chunks have dissipated or moved on down toward the Saint Clair River.

I took a few unremarkable images of the lake, then I started combing the ice and snow covered beach for something interesting and came upon an interesting piece of driftwood and a pretty, water-worn red rock. I moved my little red rock around and used it against the icy snow and took a couple of photos with it that I have posted in my gallery.

I love rocks. I have boxes of them around the house tucked away. My father loved rocks. I have a couple of boxes of nice Petoskey stones I bought home when he died. Here’s the weird obsession part. When I woke up this morning, I had the almost overwhelming urge to drive back up to that beach (about 20 miles from where I live) and look for that little red rock. There’s no tide right now because of the ice and snow, and I know exactly where I took those photos, so I could probably find it, but come on, really? It’s even colder out today so I was planning on staying in and working on my galleries, so spending the gas money to drive back there to look for a small rock seems, well, nuts.

I can’t believe I didn’t think to pick him up and put him in my pocket. Would his friends miss him? Would he be lonely here on my night stand? Or would he have bonded with my two quartz crystals sitting here?

I don’t know, but I’ve talked myself out of wasting an hour and a half looking for a small red rock on the beach. I will enjoy him only in the photos I took and leave him to be lapped in the tides of spring.

I’ve never been a real heavy coffee drinker. I used to drink two substantial mugs in the morning, and maybe if I were having a particularly tired day, I would have a cup in the early afternoon. By early, I mean before 3:00 pm, otherwise I would fall asleep at night, then wake up an hour later and stare at the ceiling for several hours.

Recently (within the last two years) I’ve developed a sensitivity to caffeine which makes it impossible for me to drink regular coffee. The symptoms of caffeine ingestion are best left to your imagination, but anyway, caffeine makes me sick.

I decided that should not deter me from seeking out the best tasting decaffeinated coffee…after all, I love the taste of coffee and anything coffee flavored. I had a Kona coffee ice cream in Hawaii that was to die for. I’ve never been able to find its equivalent here on the mainland.

My husband has been watching that show “Uncommon Grounds”. I don’t know if you’re familiar with it. That guy risks his life on a regular basis to find the best coffee beans. He’s crazy. He finds coffee in drug cartel territory or on obscure, hard to reach mountains. He mainly supplies to restaurants, but you can also order coffee from his web site (called La Colombe) that’s directly from some of the scariest places he finds these small coffee farms. This week, my husband ordered coffee from Nepal and Haiti and on the back of each bag is the roast date, which was 3 days before he opened the box, so they actually roast the coffee when you order it. That arrived yesterday so my husband will be trying it this morning. I will have to be content to smell the bag when he opens it.

But back to my decaf - I drink my coffee straight. I don’t want to mask the flavor of the beans with cream or sugar. There is one exception to that rule. I’ll dump some half and half into restaurant or hotel coffee if it’s that insipid Maxwell House pouch…..I hesitate to call it coffee. Tastes more like salty dishwater. In my humble opinion, Maxwell House should be ashamed. It’s going to probably be even worse for me now that I’m confined to decaf.

I’m a Starbucks girl. Or Seattle’s Best and lately a Trader Joe’s girl. Right at this moment I’m sipping a cup of Gevalia decaf my husband bought me. It’s not bad, but I like coffee with an edge. Coffee that screams COFFEE when you sip it. Coffee whose flavor doesn’t dissipate shortly after you swallow it. Coffee that gives you coffee breath for an hour after you drink it.

I used to drink Nestle’s Taster’s Choice instant as a backup when I ran out of regular coffee, but the decaf tastes funny. I really only resort to that if I’m out of the drip grounds and then I have to put something in it to get it down.

So, now I’m on a quest for the best decaf. I’ve just eliminated the Gevalia from my list. It’s good enough to drink straight but it doesn’t pack the punch of the Starbucks or Trader Joe’s. It’s too tame. There is, indeed, good decaf out there. I’ve even had some good decaf in restaurants where the management will not stoop to the M-word insipid pouch stuff. I’m going to have to start a list and buy the good ones according to my particular coffee mood that particular week.

Ah, when life hands you decaf, make it the best decaf you can find.