I haven’t felt like writing a blog entry in a long time, but I have been updating my friends, colleagues, and the world about my life in other ways. This morning, I feel moved to recap the previous year and look forward to the next.
I continue to take photographs and share them on Flickr. Some of my recent adventures include hiking Camelback Mountain for the first time, a weekend getaway to Jerome, going to the Arizona State Fair for the first time in the five years that I’ve lived here, going “full frame” by trading in my Canon Digital Rebel XTi and EF-S lenses for a used Canon 5D, and meeting a longtime Flickr friend from Brooklyn who visited me and my husband with his husband. It was great to bring the online life and real life together, and we all really hit it off. There are several other photo sets I’ve posted in months since my last blog post as well. The best way to keep up with what I’m up to in a visual way is to follow my Flickr photostream.
I’ve also really gotten into Facebook this year. I don’t add people I don’t know as Friends, and I don’t have a Fan Page, but I do enjoy keeping up with my friends through status updates, photos, videos, links, etc. I am sort of the designated photographer at gatherings of friends and coworkers, so it’s always fun to upload an album from a shared event and tag everyone in it who’s on Facebook– which is most of them. For a while there, I was spending a couple/three hours a day on Facebook, but I’ve cut back because I have so many other priorities. I felt I was neglecting my photography and Flickr social circle for a while there, so I’ve returned to spending a bit more time on that. One thing I love that Flickr added in the last couple of months is People in Photos, which allows you to tag your Flickr friends in photos the way you can tag your friends in photos on Facebook. Those friends have to be Flickr members in order to be tagged, so it’s most useful for photos from FlickrMeets; that is, when a group of photo geeks get together to go on a shooting spree. Not necessarily good for your neighbor’s family’s Thanksgiving party unless they’re all Flickrites themselves. Thanks to this new feature and my general hamminess, I can now point you to photos of me on Flickr. As of this writing, there are over 900, though I’m not sure they are all public!
Did you know that APS has partnered with DBG (Desert Botanical Garden) to provide a free shuttle between the Valley Metro Light Rail station at Priest / Washington and the Desert Botanical Garden? I just found out a couple of weeks ago, and I’m riding it to the garden for the first time today.* This is a great convenience that I hope many people will take advantage of.
You can catch the shuttle by the gazebo in the parking lot of the little food court at the NE corner of Priest & Washington. It runs every 15 minutes from 9 AM to 7 PM.
*I sent this to my blog via Flickr in real time, but it didn’t upload. I guess it was interrupted by several incoming phone calls and it timed out. So I’m uploading it now to get the word out about the free shuttle.
I sang a cappella in the chapel (redundant, I know)! I’m laughing because I had just posed like an opera singer with my mouth open and my hands out and then cracked up because I embarrassed myself. There’s an interesting story behind this. A woman in our tour group asked me if I wanted her to take my photo with the chapel behind me because I had just sung in it. How did that come to be? Well, it all began when I saw our tourguide in the restaurant where we all stopped for lunch. He was sitting by himself at a table and I walked up and said, “Ah… tutto sole?” (meaning, “Aw… all alone?” in Italian). He asked me how I knew Italian, and I told him from musical terminology and opera. He asked if I were a singer, and I said yes. Then he told me we were going to be going into a chapel that was designed to be acoustically perfect, and he asked if I would be willing to sing a line or two so everyone could hear. I said sure. I was thinking I would sing the first few lines of “Que Gelida Manina” until we got to the church and I realized that a song from La Boheme would not be appropriate. I racked my brain for something spiritual to sing, and I recalled a short solo I had sung in my senior year at the School of Creative & Performing Arts: the “Benedictus” phrase from Hans Schubert’s “Mass in G.” For those of you who don’t know it, the phrase is “Benedictus qui venit in nomine domini” which is Latin for “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.” I sang it and everyone was pleased. Several people came up to me to thank me personally. I was just glad that the pleasure I had in singing was not selfish, but was considered a gift to others, which is ideal. So, this was a perfectly spontaneous photo to commemorate a wonderfully fortuitous occasion.
(Taken by a fellow tourist in the courtyard by the side of the Cathedral of Santa Croce in Florence, Italy, with the chapel in the background.)
Why buy books when you can borrow? I love my public library!
I took this photo on my new T-Mobile G1 with Google. It automatically geotagged it before I emailed it to Flickr. For those who are wondering how to geotag photos with the G1, I’ll explain– and then you’ll see how easy it is!
When you go to the Camera app, hit the Menu button before you take a shot. Select Settings, and then select “Store location in pictures.” This setting will stick until you change it again.
For even greater accuracy; i.e. to pin your location down to Street level, go to the Home screen and pull up Apps; then select the Settings icon. Then select Security & location. Then select Enable GPS satellites and make sure it’s checked. Deselecting it will conserve battery power, but only when you’re using Maps or an app that uses Maps, such as Camera if you selected “Store location in pictures.” You can always deselect it if you want to save battery power and/or don’t care for pinpoint accuracy.
I love how effortless it is to take and share geotagged photos with the G1, and I am fully satisfied with its accuracy. My husband and I are going to the Mediterranean for two weeks, and while we’re there, I will take geotagged photos with the G1 in Airplane mode (because the GPS works even when wireless services are turned off), and when I find free WiFi hotspots, I’ll moblog them to our family website, smithersgreene.net
And when we get back home, I can’t wait to borrow another great book from the library!
I saw this beautiful bare tree stretched out against a sky whose clouds were similarly stretched out. It’s not exactly the iconic view of Tonto Natural Bridge, but it’s my favorite image from the visit.
On our Alaskan cruise in June, the ship held a talent show/contest. I hemmed and hawed about joining it, but finally decided to go for it at the last minute. I chose to sing “Our Love Is Here to Stay” by George Gershwin because the band had the music, and because I had sung it on my first cruise in 1993 on Norwegian Cruise Lines (which we were traveling with again). I could pick apart my own performance, but I’m sharing it anyway for what it’s worth. Several passengers came up to me after the contest and said they thought I should have won, although the woman who won was not a singer but a fabulous flamenco dancer. Anyway, enjoy!
Here are the lyrics:
It’s very clear / Our love is here to stay / Not for a year / But ever and a day.
The radio and the telephone / And the movies that we know / May just be passing fancies / And in time may go!
But, oh my dear / Our love is here to stay / Together we’re / Going a long, long way
In time the Rockies may crumble / Gibraltar may tumble / They’re only made of clay / But our love is here to stay.
I noticed a problem right away when I sat down in the boat: the only way to get a photo of anything outside was to focus manually; otherwise, the lens would automatically focus on the raindrops. I found myself worrying about all the money I’d spent on the cruise, camera, lenses, excursion– only to be unable to take any photos! (I didn’t even realize yet that there was an upper deck.) Apparently, the good people who run this excursion know about all that (money spent and hopes high), so they are kind enough to squeegee the windows so you can get those coveted photos.
My frustration, though, made me think about the point of vacation. Is it really about the money spent and the things seen? I mean, it is about seeing things, if you’re a sighted person, but it must be about more than that, no? If that’s all it is, it seems petty to me somehow. Yet there is a reality to all the money I spent and all the reading I did and all the practice I did to prepare myself to capture certain images with my camera. Is a vacation like a hunting expedition? Are the photos the “catch” one brings back to say, “See what a big man I am! I spent a lot of money on fancy equipment, travelled the world, and shot these photos?” Or, “Look what I can see with all my money?” It strikes me as ugly. Yet, if going on vacation is not about what you can see, what is it about? What you can smell, taste, touch, and hear? Is it all about exciting the senses? Do we work all year at our jobs, save up our money and vacation time, buy our flights and cruises and excursion tickets– just to thrill our senses? Is there anything spiritual about it? Or is it impossible to have a spiritual experience without exciting at least a few of your senses? I mean, aren’t the most wonderful experiences we’ve ever had about what we saw, heard, touched, smelled, or tasted? Or is there more to life than that? And if vacation is not about perceiving different things with out senses, what is it? Your viewing this photo is dependent on exciting your optical nerves, and reading this text is dependent on either your eyes, fingers (if you’re reading Braille), or ears (if you’re listening to this through a text-to-speech reader).
My vacation really made me question the value of experience and what might be a deeper way to experience a vacation, or for that matter, life. Yet we are sensate creatures, and it could be argued that we experience spirituality through physicality. As Sting sings in The Police, “We are spirits in the material world.”
I know I’ve been a bad blogger lately, but if you’re wondering what I’ve been up to, I’ve been delving into my hobby of photography. If you’d like to see what I’ve been seeing and shooting, click on the photo above to look at my photos on Flickr.
I’m here in San Diego for the Conference of Interpreter Trainers (CIT) conference. We’re all wearing this wristband (pic above) to remind us all to communicate in ASL out of respect for the language at the center of our work and for our deaf colleagues who taught it to us and continue to teach it with us. I came here to learn more about training ASL interpreters. The first night I was here, it was exciting to see some of the grand dames of ASL interpreting, including: Sharon Neumann Solow, Betty Colonomus, Anna Witter-Merithew and Theresa Smith. I also saw Dennis Cokely, co-author of the “green books” and theorist of the “Cokely Model.” I saw a couple of more recent famous workshop presenters: Julie Simon and Robyn Dean. Past President of RID, Ben Hall, was here. I had the pleasure of interpreting his address to the RID Western Regional Conference in Boise, Idaho back in 2000.
Of course I also saw many of my old San Diego intereting colleagues, including RID president Angela Jones and RID Region V Rep Rob Balaam (who moved to San Francicso in 1993 but used to work with me at San Diego Mesa College), Melissa Smith of Palomar College, who mentored me in theatrical interpreting back in 1994, and Jean Kelly, author of Show Me the English, who mentored me way back in 1993 and taught me how to “show ‘em the English” and helped me earn my Certificate of Transliteration (CT) in 1999.
It was a real treat to watch a magic show put on by kids from California State School for the Deaf, Riverside. They entertained us on Wednesday night. After that, it was a hoot to watch Rowdy Vision, a troupe of three deaf actors/comedians led by Jon Savage of lenois.com.
It’s an invigorating and stimulating time! More to come later.
I’m laughing because I had just posed like an opera singer with my mouth open and my hands out and then cracked up because I embarrassed myself. There’s an interesting story behind this. A woman in our tour group asked me if I wanted her to take my photo with the chapel behind me because I had just sung in it. How did that come to be? Well, it all began when I saw our tourguide in the restaurant where we all stopped for lunch. He was sitting by himself at a table and I walked up and said, “Ah… tutto sole?” (meaning, “Aw… all alone?” in Italian). He asked me how I knew Italian, and I told him from musical terminology and opera. He asked if I were a singer, and I said yes. Then he told me we were going to be going into a chapel that was designed to be acoustically perfect, and he asked if I would be willing to sing a line or two so everyone could hear. I said sure. I was thinking I would sing the first few lines of “Que Gelida Manina” until we got to the church and I realized that a song from La Boheme would not be appropriate. I racked my brain for something spiritual to sing, and I recalled a short solo I had sung in my senior year at the School of Creative & Performing Arts: the “Benedictus” phrase from Hans Schubert’s “Mass in G.” For those of you who don’t know it, the phrase is “Benedictus qui venit in nomine domini” which is Latin for “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.” I sang it and everyone was pleased. Several people came up to me to thank me personally. I was just glad that the pleasure I had in singing was not selfish, but was considered a gift to others, which is ideal. So, this was a perfectly spontaneous photo to commemorate a wonderfully fortuitous occasion.
