Moth Delivers Her Message

Last month, EBSQ hosted a juried exhibit of black and white portrait photography. We had a fantastic turn out and saw a ton of new members jump into the fray to participate. Speaking of Fray, our juror is the esteemed Fray publisher Derek Powazek.  I’ve included his winning choices and comments below:

Black and white is the essence of photography: our minds fill in the space left behind after the color fades away.

Juror’s Choice: Dad by Virginia Ann Zuelsdorf

Why I chose it: Casual and yet formal, the symbolism here is incredible. From dad, to guns, to Jesus, this moment says a lot about father figures. And the artist’s incredible story gave me goosebumps.

Juror’s Mention:

Firing Squad by Kelli Ann Dubay

Why I chose it: Perfectly captures the darkness in little boys.

Girl With Dolls by Virginia Ann Zuelsdorf

Why I chose it: Sweet and funny.

Uhh… by Alissa Reed

Why I chose it: Not your typical child portrait.

You can check out the full exhibit here at EBSQ.

I can sum it up in two words: Super Tuesday.  That’s the day when it’s normally all wrapped up in a nice little ball. The media ordains a chosen one for each party and essentially tells the other kids to grab their toys and go home.  It’s why Michigan and Florida moved up their primaries against the will of the DNC–they wanted their votes to be meaningful since in any given primary season, past Super Tuesday, voting on a national level is typically silly. Half the people on the ballot have already conceded and aren’t even running any more.

But this year is different. Despite the general fatigue of people hearing non-stop political stuff since December last year, as I see the elections moving to each state past Super Tuesday, I see people getting excited. “At last!” they say. “A year when my vote will actually mean something.”  I felt it myself here in Pennsylvania a few weeks ago. I definitely saw it in all of my friends in North Carolina.

Yes. It’s a pain in the arse that this is taking up so much airtime on the news when we have a global hunger crisis, when we have the extreme tragedy of Myanmar, when soldiers are dying in Iraq daily.  And certainly, there are election-weary people who have been begging Hillary for months now to take her toys and go home. I for one am humbled by her moxy and passion. But there’s also the wonderful side affect:  she makes this a true national primary. Not one that’s written in stone by the people of Iowa, New Hampshire, and Super Tuesday states.  She gave the rest of us our voices back.

A couple of weeks ago, my dear son grabbed the camera from the kitchen table, took a couple of self-portraits, and banged up the lens. From that point the camera would work in fits and starts since the denting was significant enough to impact the camera’s ability to move boot up and extend to its “on” position. Other times, you couldn’t get it to close. It was pretty much a crap shoot as to whether it would function at all when needed.

I was lucky enough to coax it into working for the Hot Glass Workshop I attended at the Pittsburgh Glass Center on April 19 and get both some film footage and some gorgeous stills. Later that same day, we spent some time at my mother-in-law’s since my SIL and her family were visiting that same day and we love to get our kids together as often as possible. I only managed a lousy 6 shots before the camera gave up the ghost and wouldn’t shoot again.

Since then, I have missed:

• My baby sister in her senior prom dress
• My tulips blooming (now already faded)
• The best wisteria bloom we’ve had in the years we’ve had this house
• The opening of my lilacs
• Our cherry blossoms (already gone)
• Our paltry 5 blossoms on our pear tree this year (comical and now also gone)
• Our yard mid-progress since Bill started to remove our ugly privet hedges in preparation for a new veg bed and new fencing
• and 2 billion adorkable things my children have done in the past 3 weeks.

It’s amazing that it almost feels like none of this happened since I don’t have documentation of any of it. All of those fleeting moments, lost to the ether.  And since we have limited funds, the bulk of which are going to fence the back yard and fix the back porch railings to keep the kiddos safe, we can’t really safely plunk down 500+ for the Digital Rebel XTi I was hoping to get later this year when things weren’t so tight.

I miss my camera. RIP, little Canon.

It’s been a few weeks since my epiphany regarding my unexpected career choice as a metaphorical firefighter rather than someone who actually gets things done. And I have to own that word, “choice” in this case. I am the one who is holding me back. In that time, I feel like I still have yet to move forward.  There are still 410 items in my inbox, awaiting me to take action in some way. And the 410 is an improvement from the 700+ inbox I was living with around Christmas. Even then, I have to acknowledge that dealing with the actionable items in my inbox is still 90% firefighting and 10% actually moving my business…and my life…forward.

 If we were a bigger company, I would delegate so much of this stuff away. It’s not that I am some control freak who has to micromanage things; in a three person company there is literally no one to whom I can delegate all of these administrative tasks that I am doing, and doing poorly, I might add. Ergo, an inbox with 410 actionable items, some of them awaiting action from me for months.

So–I am trying a new tactic. Spending one hour per day dedicated to nothing but moving forward.  And one hour a day on my backlog.  14 hours a week that have a totally structured purpose. Getting those hours won’t be easy since I webwork and am the primary caretaker of my two toddlers while my husband gets to hide in his office in the basement for pretty much as long as he likes (and I don’t see this changing any time in this lifetime).  It takes a while for me to hit the flow where I am completely focused and productive, and my kids can pull me out of that state in an instant, and I get back to that flighty “preparing to work” phase where I read my work-related feeds, or spend some virtual facetime with our art community via our forums, or putz with project inbox zero, since all of those things are easily interrupted and still feel enough like “work” to assuage my guilt.  With Liam no longer napping in the afternoon, I’ve lost another chunk of productive time that is now spent playing referee instead of getting my job done in the most constructive way possible.  I wish I could simply blow it all off until the kids are big enough to be in school, but in this economy in particular, that would be financial suicide and the death of the business we’ve worked so hard to build over the past 6 years.

This isn’t going to be easy.  But it’s rare that something worth doing is. Onward and upward!

My dear daughter has been planning a parade the past two days. She’s insisting that it’s going to have floats, flags, and candy to throw to all of the kids that are coming. Abbey just detailed to me how she wants to wear her hair for the parade, and wants to know when we’re going to to the store to buy all of the candy. She also chastised me for not practicing my instrument. I really do think she expects us to just march down the sidewalk and the whole city will turn out to see her.

I have to say, I am at a loss at how to handle this because she doesn’t want a pretend parade in her backyard with me, her brother, and her dad. She wants the real deal.  Reaching for straws, I asked her if she remembered to file for her city permit.  She looks a little crestfallen, but plans to consult with her father since mom is shutting her down.  This of course makes me feel like the world’s biggest meanie. Our children are born and raised to believe anything is possible, that they can do or be whatever they want to be. And here I am, the one taking that possibility away from her. So if you happen to see a rather red-faced family marching up and down Pennsylvania Avenue and throwing candy, well, that’ll be us.

My 4-year-old daughter is very interested in gardening and has been fascinated with giant sunflowers in particular. So this year, through Local Harvest, I ordered some regionally grown organic giant sunflower seeds from a small family farm in Ohio. The seeds were sent in a little baggie with handwritten growing instructions, no less.  We planted the seeds on the 29th of March with an expected germination time of 14-21 days.  As of today, at least 4 of the sunflowers we planted are over 4 inches tall.

Here’s where Google comes into the story. I was talking to Abbey about the farm where we got the seeds and she wanted to know where Ohio was in relation to us. So I went searching for a very simple children’s map that shows the states in different colours so their borders are pretty obvious.  Here’s what I showed her:  http://www.worldmapsonline.com/starterus_lg.htm

She looked at the map with some skepticism at first, doubting its authenticity as a map, even though the version I showed her showed the confluence of the Allegheny, Monongahela, and Ohio Rivers so I could show her exactly where Pittsburgh is. I pointed out Maryland where her cousins live and where we occasionally vacation. I showed her New York City, San Francisco, and Texas. I even showed her Florida where she’s been dying to go ever since she saw her first commercial for Sea World 2 years ago.  She still didn’t believe it was a real map. Do you want to know why? Because you couldn’t zoom in closer or scroll down to see Mexico or up to see Canada.  In short, Google maps has totally ruined the atlas experience for my child before she’s even big enough to read most of the place names! When learning has gotten this interactive, how much longer will a static map like the one to which I linked serve its purpose?

Last week I was tied up in end-of-month deadlines and sick children. And now, a sick me, although I seem to be in much better shape than my poor daughter was when she brought this particular plague home to roost.  In some ways, it almost feels like nothing happened last week.

Work-wise, we just brought on our newest business advisor (and dear friend), Barbara Gnos, who brings with her a wealth of experience in Marketing and Social Media. Also, the great Drupal re-code continues.  It’s been an education to say the least. With Drupal’s great malleability comes a serious learning curve.  Bill has been doing all of the heavy lifting, so to speak, but I’ll definitely agree with  him that working with it is akin to learning a new programming language.

Life-wise, Liam’s language skills have been growing by leaps and bounds. He was very late in walking, and his speech, while it’s always been on par with where he should be,  was much later in evolving than his sister. But for some reason, his vocabulary and syntax have exploded over the past few weeks and he’s now easily aheadof where his sister was at this age.  He has become a radically different person, and he’s definitely a little kid rather than a baby now. It’s really cool, but also kind of bittersweet since he’s our last child and we’ll never experience that “babyness” first-hand ever again.

So yeah, stuff did sort of happen, even if it was quiet stuff that almost isn’t worth the bandwidth.  But mostly, we were sick.

No, this isn’t an argument about whether Bacn is the new spam. (For those not in the know, Bacn=non-personal email that you do actually want such as newsletters, comment or friending notifications from social media sites, advertisements you opted in for like Pottery Barn, Smith & Hawkins, etc). I have spent the last couple of days watching how much of each I get, and whether it goes to my inbox or my  folder.

I’ve been emptying both my deleted items folder and my junk mail folder every night before bed. Last night, for example, I had ~4100 in my junk folder and ~2000 in my deleted items folder. Granted, some of the items in the deleted folder were items I wanted (bacn) and was simply done with. Maybe 1 in 10 seems to be bacn. But the rest were, by and large, spam that never made it to the junk folder that I had to delete manually. And that was just for yesterday!

Granted, I might be something of a unique case since several of our company’s email addresses filter through my personal inbox.  So there’s no question that in the case of 3 or more of those addresses being out there, I am getting spams in triplicate and quadruplicate (rarer than triplicate). Occassionally, just one will make it to my inbox and I’ll see the others are in the junk folder. But why the heck is so much of this slipping through? Surely Outlook’s spam system should know that the proliferation of these penis enhancement and casino bonus sign-up emails are bogus. And there are a ton of Asian, Greek, Hebrew, and Cyrillic character set emails that aren’t filtered either.

In the time it took to write this, 5 more items appeared in my inbox: 2 casino offers, 2 Asian-character emails of unknown origin, and a forum subscription notification for our site that will be read and deleted. That makes a total of 257 in the manually deleted folder and 470 caught in the junk folder since 11:30pm last night. Not even 12 hours worth yet. And it’s a weekend.

Am I the only one drowning in this much spam?

No wonder I feel like I am constantly in my inbox. It’s a lot of work looking for the actual email in there!

Abbey: Mom, I want a Crashbox robot doll.

Me: Honey, they don’t make Crashbox dolls.

Abbey: Maybe they just have them for sale on your website.

Me: No, honey, we just have art on our website.

Abbey: Oh. I knew that. Maybe they just sell them for Easter.

Me: Honey, no, they don’t make them at all.

Abbey: Maybe they just sell them for birthdays.

Me: Abbey, they can’t sell them if they don’t make them. There is no such thing as a Crashbox robot doll.

Abbey: I want the one with the orange lightbulb hat.

Me: [headdesk]