Playing with Dolls

Yeah, there’s no good caption to go with this title.

I wondered about this picture, whether it was breaking my rules. In the end I decided that it was possibly stretching them, but I’m going with it. These dolls weren’t something I had lying around, they were something I found among my mom’s old things. There was just this box of dolls from around the world and you can see Betsy Ross there in the back with the flag. Not all of them were in great shape as they have been boxed up for a lot of years.

During that time I’m pretty sure that there was a mole in the box and one of the dolls found out about it. I also suspect that it was the Russian in the back row and she decapitated the witness. That explains why the Russian doesn’t fit in with the rest of the dolls and the severed head in the front row.

A Moth to the Flame

Only seconds before getting little too close and bursting into flames.

It snowed today, which changed my plan for going outside to get a picture. I suppose I still could have but I worked on cleaning up my shop instead and then started to think about a picture for the day. I decided to make a butterfly out of white paper and then suspended it near a candle. This picture is only lit by the candle light so it had to have a longer exposure.

I decided I liked the black and white look for this picture better than the color one. So here is the picture for the day.

Thunderbird

All up in my grill.

Had the exhaust finished on the T-bird today. It’s a project that I have been working on for a while now. Hopefully, my brother and I will get it running soon. It has been good to get together with my brother on a regular basis to work on a project. I just thought I would put a picture of another project in this project. It’s kind of like inception, except not with dreams.

Crocus

Is it crocuses or croci?

I had no intention of another flower picture today. But somehow between yesterday and today the crocus in the picture emerged. I can always tell that spring has arrived when the crocus is in bloom. I always expect a blue crocus, but this year it seems that white is in. I guess it’s ok since its pre-labor day or something.

Yesterday, I heard some good news. I remember that pancreatic cancer was one of those diseases that is pretty much a guaranteed death sentence. Apparently, there is now a treatment that has shown some promise in treating it. Suck it cancer!

Blue Flower

In case the purple one was not your thing.

Just a little blue flower to brighten this cloudy day. I signed up to run the SLC half marathon today (Actually signed up, I’ve been training with the Huntsman Heroes all winter) so I guess I have to go through with it now.

But I also get to go to the cycling team orientation tonight, so that is awesome. If you have a bike it’s not too late to join. There are lots of good events, like the Huntsman 140. It’s all for a good cause and there are nice people (and me).

Spring

Despite yesterday’s snow, Spring seems to really be here.

I got outside today. Just walked around the yard looking at how much work the yard is going to need — and frankly, dreading it. But there were these little purple flowers? To be honest I’m not sure they aren’t just dolled up weeds. In any case I decided that with Spring actually here, at least I think it’s here, it did snow yesterday.

I decided that it was a good day to take out the macro lens and get close to the flowers. The thing about macro, is that you can have a super shallow depth of field. You can focus on one thing and have the rest just fall out of focus. You can see it in this picture. I wanted some of the veins in the leaves and the yellow center to be in focus and the rest just to fade into the background.

I took several pictures with different parts of the bloom in focus and other parts blurred. It made me think that what we see depends on where we focus. Sometimes, things like cancer take the focus from the otherwise amazing or beautiful things that can surround us every day. And it can take a long time before our focus comes back to anything but the disease and the suffering. There are triggers that mess with us long after the sickness is gone. Places we once love are ruined we can’t enjoy things we once loved.

But sometimes after a while, things just adjust themselves a little bit and the things we thought were ruined forever come back into focus, and just like that we see joy in the things that we felt we had lost. Even though sometimes it still hurts, it doesn’t feel like the end of the world. We can even find new purpose in doing things despite the fact that something is missing. It took me months before I could go into Contender, but now, even though I miss my brother every time I ride my bike and I remember sitting on his wheel or the one time he hit a tree and I beat him in a cyclocross race. Then I feel a headwind and I think — there’s my brother. And I can almost hear him telling me that he just wants me to be strong, not that he’s just being the stereotypical mean big brother. I miss him all the time, but I still feel like he’s around when I ride, just like he used to be.


Unexpected

Waxing hot and cold.

Today I was wondering what would happen if I poured hot wax into cold water. My thought was that it would hit the water and spread out forming some sort of interesting shape. But the fact that water is so much denser than wax made the results look more like chewed gum. It wasn’t exactly what I was going for, but after a few trials I took what I had and turned it into a picture.


Hold On

The struggle is real

This picture isn’t really what I’d call art, but while I was climbing and my hand was falling apart I decided to put up a picture of this. Some days we just do the things we do even though we could come up with reasons not to. I could have not gone climbing because my finger hurt, and that actually might have been the smart thing to do, but there are times that we just have to press on with life even though things are tough or we just aren’t feeling it. Fortunately, my problems today were small. There are people who struggle with real issues every day.

First Day of Spring

Remembering why…

Today I went with something simple and abstract. Since it is the first day of Spring I wanted to go back to the roots of the project. I felt that with Spring being a time of rebirth and renewal I should put together a post about the people who were the reason behind the project in the first place.

Marie died of breast cancer in January 2016. Matt died in March 2016 and Nate died in March 2017, both from kidney cancer. Each ribbon is for one of them (pink for breast cancer and orange for kidney cancer).

Here’s to the Spring when we won’t need these ribbons any more.