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Undercover Photo-stylist
When we were camping at the end of summer I got this crazy idea that I wanted to take pictures of my Aunt’s old granny square afghan down at the dock near the lake. I brought the afghan with us in the first place because it looked like a cabin blanket to me. It’s old, it’s a little worn, it’s sort of campy in coloring… it just fit.
When we got to the cabin, my old tattered blanket fit even better than I imagined. Since the cabin is just an old broken-down mobile home that is going to be moved off the property someday and replaced with a real wood-sided cabin, everything in it is broken down too. The couches and chairs are cast-offs from the family just used as a stop-gap to make things comfortable until the real cabin is built. No use hauling nice furniture up there if it’s just going to have to get moved etc.. etc..
Anyway the big blue couch in the living room area was pretty ugly… it sort of reminded me of an old college apartment where guys sit around drinking beer and playing video games…which isn’t far from what it is used for at the cabin. But once I spread my old granny square blanket over the top it sort of felt like home. A little.
All week long I looked at that afghan and day dreamed up a photo-shoot I could do with it. Maybe I look at too many Anthropologie catalogues but something about the lake and the rustic coloring of the old blanket inspired me.
On the last day I told Toby about my day dream and how I was really bummed that all week I had not taken a single photo of my old blanket down at the lake. You know what I love about Toby? He totally got it.
He didn’t make fun of me wanting to do something for the photos alone. He didn’t make fun of me taking pictures of myself (which frankly is only because I didn’t have a willing model other than myself). He didn’t volunteer to go with me and take photos of me modeling the blanket (bahumbug) but he did watch Bug so I could. And I’m glad I did. I guess it’s silly just to go stage pictures of yourself… but it was fun. It was like playing for me.
You do what you love, right? There’s always time to do what you love. Maybe someday I’ll get a decent camera (not a point-and-shoot underwater camera that I stash in my purse) and be a photo stylist with real models who don’t have to get their heads chopped off because they have weird profiles and/or double chins.
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Vacation Highlight: Eating Trout
Here’s a little highlight from our trip: Toby caught a fish, a trout. Actually he caught a lot of fish—maybe twenty a day. But on the first day he caught a fish, we took it home and he cooked it. He fried it up in about a pound of butter and some sliced apples that he picked off a tree that was growing by the cabin. He said he wanted to eat a meal that came from the lake. More power to him.
Personally, I do not like fish. But to be a good sport I tried a bite. I figured it couldn’t be that bad since it was fried in all that butter. Surely the butter would at least taste good.
It did not. It tasted like swamp. I suppose it didn’t help that I had seen what was inside the fish when he cleaned it. Some seeds, bugs and a shiny Lifesaver wrapper. I don’t know, something about a fish eating trash just doesn’t do it for me. But then it could also be that trout are just fishy fish and I do not like the taste of fish. Anyway, at least I tried it.
After Toby ate the fish he admitted that it wasn’t all that good. Hmph, I thought. He could have told me that before I tried a bite. Oh well. That’s what camping is all about I guess. At least if I ever get stranded out in nature some day and I’m forced to fish to stay alive, I’ll know that horrible taste is totally normal and I won’t die from it.
It was such a pretty fish. Too bad he had to die, though I suppose he was going to to die anyway from that Lifesaver wrapper. I’m sure that wouldn’t digest very well. Good thing we let all those other fish go. I do have some really great under-water movies of catching fish. I’ll try to put a short one up one of these days.
