an explanation, an absence, and a bribe

absence: I will be away from the blog for approximately a month.

explanation: I am going to have a white Christmas! Marjorie and I are fortunate enough to be going to Ohio with Doug and his entire family. We would prefer to spend all our time shooting in the snow, rather than going through photos, so there will be no posts until we return.

bribe: Since I cannot seem to function without a camera, I will be taking tons of photos. I have a nifty planner that I intend to take semi-meticulous notes in so I can offer captions with said photos and truly write a letter home from Ohio.


As a bonus, I'd like to share with you a Hanukkah tradition in my family.

We have been getting together and baking Hanukkah cookies since my mom was small. We use the same recipe for dough that Aunt Eitchey used as well as her cookie cutters. (Aunt Eitchey was my mother's aunt and one of the coolest people on earth.) Her daughter, my Aunt Mar, continues this tradition with my generation. We always get together about a week before the family Hanukkah party and bake an obscene amount of cookies, most of which get buried under mountains of sprinkles when we play around with the shakers.


To any of my readers who won't be seeing me this winter break, happy holidays! And to those that will, let's make this the happiest holiday season of our lives.

playing catch-up might require ketchup

I feel like I haven't been posting enough lately, especially when it comes to words. I'm tired, it's 1am, and I'm trying to be productive with regards to my photo backlog since I am pretty much exhausted studying for finals. Maybe exhausted is the wrong word; I'm more burnt out than anything else. I spent the past 5 days without my beloved Marjorie, whom I tend to refer to as "the love of my life" and all my pent-up creativity has just been smacking me around. I've had no outlet to vent all this frustration and inspiration. But now she's back and you're stuck with ramblings to go with a few pictures.
I'm pretty sure no one else notices but I uh... need to be smacked upside the head if I don't resize my photos before I post them to flickr. If I'm just blogging, full-size photos take up my allotted space before I hit the end of the month and then I have to link photos from Facebook. I've also stopped watermarking since I don't feel it makes much of a difference either way.

For those of you who read my crazy rambling, I present to you a glorious moonrise as I was waiting for Doug to kidnap Marjorie and I to go to the Camera Store:

Perhaps I should explain the context. Marj's sensor had this icky spot on the left side. In trying to clean it, Uncle Alan left a bunch of lint. So I spent a week clone stamping out every particle I could find in my shots for hours on end and generally sulking. I'm not proud of my behavior. I was planning to take her to a shop down south while I was packing to go to Ohio (Wait, you don't know about Ohio yet. Please disregard the previous statement.) but Doug rallied his family to surprise me with a sensor cleaning ASAP. He basically called me and told me to wait for him to pick me up because he had a *surprise*.
On the way to the shop was a glorious, color-fueled, fae Florida sunset and I took a few pictures from the car on the way.

That's the way I feel about Doug's family fixing Marjorie and I am so excited.


It is now finals week so I may have one or two more posts before I take a leave of absence. At the least, I will explain my leave of absence in detail. But for now, I'm mildly sleep-deprived and prone to shout about a desire to have hashbrowns with ketchup so rather than sound more deranged, I'm going to go cuddle with my camera and whisper about snow.

withdrawal is painful

Dear home,
I miss you. I'll be back as soon as finals are over to take long-exposures before sunrise on the main street. In the mean time, I'm going crazy on campus. My camera is in the shop being fixed. I have papers to write, presents to share, and no way to document my insanity. But life will go on. In the mean time, I thought I'd show you how it looks to head back to Jupiter.

One more week...