Summer is upon us and the heat has been oppressive. I know I can’t complain since we live at the beach and it’s probably a zillion times hotter in other parts of the country. It’s just that we don’t have air conditioning in our old broken down apartment and sometimes I find myself wondering if winter ever existed. And if it did, why did I complain so much about being cold?!!! I would take that cold any day right about now.

Do you like my makeshift curtains? I knew that crocheted blanket would come in handy when I swiped it from my mom last year. I swear it drops the temperature on the couch about five degrees which is really wonderful when the weather feels like hot dog’s breath.

I’ve been daydreaming about Paris again, as I’m wont to do when the sweat is rolling down my back. It’s my happy place I go to when I’m hot and hating my ugly stained carpet. I like to think about the old broken down apartments I saw when I was there. Window ledges were crumbling, paint was peeling, walls were cracked. Life wasn’t all clean and modern and air conditioned but it was still beautiful in that gritty, these-walls-have-been-here-for-hundreds-of-years sort of way.

My apartment might not be a hundred years old but it feels like it sometimes. So I’ve been trying to see the beauty in it. Not just in my hot sweaty apartment but in life all around me. You know, just ordinary life. Just like that famous photographer said, if you look hard enough you’ll find a picture.

Actually I’m quoting that all wrong. It was Stieglitz who said, “Wherever there is light, one can photograph,” But in my mind I paraphrased it to be something like, “There is a picture everywhere, you just have to find it.” I love thinking that. I love trying to find that picture. Sometimes I have to bend over backwards to find that weird odd angle but it’s there.

Today I tried to find that picture at the laundromat. It made laundry day a lot more fun. Maybe they are mundane photos but life is mundane. Personally, I don’t have a lot of pictures from my own childhood. I’d pay a lot of money to see photos of myself helping my mom do laundry back in the 70’s and 80’s. (Did I even help my mom do laundry? I don’t think I did.) We’ve got lots of pictures of my brother and I at Sea World and camping in Yosemite but not a single one doing something ordinary. I’d love to go back in time and see what that ordinary looked like.

I wonder how much different it is from how we do things now… I find these mundane details way more interesting than say photos of a mountain or a pretty lake. Of course I love photos of beautiful scenery. But it’s the people who change, the fashions, the moments, the little things… that’s what I want to capture. I wonder what Bug will think of all these photos when I’m old and gone. Will there be so many of them that she’ll find it all exhausting? Or will she treasure them?

As you can see, laundry time ran into nap time but I chose to stay at the laundromat and fold my clean clothes there. Why? Because the swamp cooler was blasting out a nice humid breeze and the oldies were playing. I might even say it was pleasant. Which is a first for me and laundry day.