i may be a bird in a cage but at least it's your cage

1. [Holy Ghost Tent Revival @ the Blind Tiger] 02.13.09. Blind Tiger, Greensboro. Supported by Emily Moore, Kooley High & Inflowential. A thoroughly excellent evening, despite the fact that I will never ever ever enjoy the crowd HGTR draws in G'boro. On the other hand, I will also never ever ever get tired of shooting those boys.
   
   
2. [The Old Ceremony @ the Cat's Cradle] 02.14.09. Cat's Cradle, Carrboro. Supported by Roman Candle. CD release show. Another out of this world show, save one moment late in the set, when I nearly got into it with the official videographer for the band -- I didn't mind moving out of the way for her to film the encore, but I definitely minded being shoved out of the way while I was taking a picture, without so much as an excuse me or a request for me to give up the front of stage spot that triskellita had thoughtfully staked before the set started for my crazy camera toting ass.
   
   I never mind moving but I do mind being bullied out of the way. RUDE IS BAD, KIDS.
   
   
3. On Sunday shep. and I used a Valentine's Day Target gift card from my parental units to buy two new sets of sheets and a huge bag of cat food. This is a very good indicator of my life lately, as in, things I get excited about: grocery shopping so that I can cook; new housewares; Carolina baseball (season starts Friiiiiiiiiiday); new camera gear; live music; talking about how awesome our shenanigans will be once we move out of the apartment and into either a rented or purchased house-with-yard-for-dog-and-grill-and-wading-pool; Jason Isbell; Carolina basketball; flip-flop weather; new t-shirts from Threadless; using my increasingly complex budget spreadsheet to actually pay down debt and save money.
   
   I think this is what they call "being a grown-up". In other news, I can no longer rock as hard as I used to: Friday night shows where the headlining set doesn't end until almost 2 am, canonically becoming too late for me, especially when they're an hour out of town. SADNESS.
   
   
4. I have a half-dollar sized bruise on the outside of my left knee, courtesy of the stage at the Blind Tiger on Friday night; I didn't notice until 2/3rds of the way through the evening that I'd been leaning on a bolt all night until my knee twinged when I shifted my weight. Shooting this summer in sundresses and shorts is going to be interesting, because my legs pretty much perpetually look like someone's been beating me. You wouldn't think that stage monitors have sharp edges until you spend three hours with your shins pressed against one.
   
   
5. I found the conclusion to this past Friday's Psych utterly fantastic, and ( brief spoiler )
   
   
   
6. I don't think I mentioned that shep. and I spent most Sundays in January watching Avatar: the Last Airbender on DVD from Netflix, but we did, and I fell completely in love, and sometimes I spend a lot of time at work staring at the ceiling and thinking about Sokka, who is my most favorite of all favorites. Then I think about Aang and Katara and Zuko and Appa and Toph and Iroh and Momo, who are all tied for my next favorite.
   
   
7. Yesterday I bought a 50mm/f1.8 lens off Craigslist for $55. Sometimes, obsessively trolling the photo listings pays the fuck off. Hilariously, though, I have to coordinate with the father of the guy I'm buying the lens from to actually exchange cash for glass. Craigslist, sometimes you baffle yet delight me.
   
   
8. I am having a terrible hair day and also a banjo playing Canadian gave me the plague.

This is sort of an epic entry, but I figure if I only post once a week, I can make up for it in length.

A list of things, mostly photographic, which should surprise no one, but some of them personal and one of them Doctor Who-ish:

1. Photojojo isn't the most technical or artsy photo blog out there, but it's probably my favorite, regardless, because it mixes the technical stuff with the personal reasons you take photos in a really casual, chatty tone. Their list of 2009 Photo Resolutions has been open in my browser since Thursday when I first checked my Google Reader.
   
   
2. [Local 506 Rockin' Eve] 12.31.08, Chapel Hill. I'm still struggling not to overexpose all my shots in the 506 and their red red light, but I'm getting better, which is all I can hope for. This is the last photo I took in 2008, 5 seconds til midnight according to the camera; if you're going to use your flash in a venue, I'm going to steal and take a far, far more awesome picture than you took.
   
   
3. [Holy Ghost Tent Revival @ the Pour House] 01.02.08, Raleigh. Supported by Kooley High, a fantastically enjoyable local indie hip-hop group. I've taken plenty of pictures of HGTR before, and I know what I like in photos of them; motion, and plenty of it, because as a band, watching them twitch and flail and dance across the stage is such a huge part of their show. Trying to capture that motion without the photos turning into unrecognizable color blurs is the challenge. They should be fun at the 506 in a few weeks. And then: Kooley High was a fascinating experiment for me as a photographer, because hip-hop, as a live genre, has such a completely different stage aesthetic than the indie rock and alt country that make up the staples of my usual live shows. I'm used to shooting people with instruments in their hands, singing into generally static microphones -- trying to find the center of photographic focus for people holding microphones, and moving far more freely with those microphones, was a real challenge. A good one. One I shall undertake again.
   
   
4. Fannishly: I am indifferent leaning towards vaguely positive about the Eleventh Doctor. I haven't watched this year's Christmas special yet, though, so I'm not sure I get to have an opinion. It's not like I ever posted about Who that much anyway. Your thoughts? Anybody? Bueller? (Ferris Bueller as the Doctor: discuss.)
   
   
5. We had a lovely weekend full of people -- eleveninches up from the south, quicknow, riverlight and darastar down from the north -- and we ate well, I cooked a lot, we saw some music and played some Apples to Apples and drank some beer (those of us what drink beer), and I'm ready for 2009 to start in earnest now. So far it's been not terrible; and I adore my friends beyond measure, so far 2009 has also been noisy and full of people, and I am ready for a little quiet this month, too.
   
   
6. This post is deceptively cheerful, in an attempt to blast myself out of the black mood I woke up in. My pink shirt hasn't helped, but getting one of my massive work problems dealt with has, and so has using the phrase "look at his servers" as a metaphor for doin' it. So it's getting a little better, but it's still not good. 2009, shape up or I'm going to demand a refund on you already.

A backlog of photo posting:

• [Holy Ghost Tent Revival @ the Garage] Winston-Salem, 12.20.08. These pictures make it seem as though Cousin It plays the trombone for these guys, and also I think it's a good thing that they only seem to play on stages that are 10 by 10, because given any more space than that, their banjo player is basically going to flail himself to death.
  
  
• [Christmas at the beach] I love my parents' time-share at Holden Beach more than just about anywhere else in the world, except for maybe quicknow's condo at Isle of Palms.
  
  
• [American Aquarium @ Tir Na Nog Raleigh, 12.26.08. shep. and I left my parents to their curmudgeonly selves at the beach on Friday late afternoon and drove home twelve hours earlier than we'd planned to see our boys before they went off on tour for January and February. (We gave them a manfreshener for the van as a Christmas gift.) The bar is nice, and the show was excellent, at least for values of excellent that include "we stood in front of [the Rhythm Guitarist]'s fan club and [Lead Singer] sang the second verse to "Clark Avenue" twice".
  
  
• [Rutgers @ Carolina men's basketball] My seniors. This game, tickets courtesy my folks, is likely the only men's game we'll get to this year, but it was a good one. I love these seniors because they moved here when I did, and they stayed. Seniors never stay, but these seniors did. No team will ever be more mine than this one.

Christmas was lovely; shep. won Christmas and got me a set of partial season tickets -- all the ACC home games! *heart hands for shep. and baseballers* -- to the Carolina baseball team in their beautiful new stadium, riverlight gifted me with a certificate for 100 MOO cards, quicknow gifted me with camera gadgets, insidian gifted me with an anarchist librarian sweatshirt, and my parents of course gifted me with Six, the new D60 dSLR, but my mom also found me a copy of Every Day is Saturday, which is a book about the rock photography of Peter Ellenby, and it's simultaneously totally enthralling and inspiring, and totally depressing because Jesus God he's good. But it's something to shoot for. Both literally and figuratively.

I hope all y'all had good holidays, too. Hopefully good holidays that involved far less of your water heater thermostats burning out that ours did, since we returned home on Friday night to my room reeking of burning plastic, which has been awesome, let me tell you what. The hanging bar in my closet broke while we were gone, too, so there's a three foot tall pile of clothes on my bedroom floor at the moment.

I am still digging through Yuletide, sort of half-heartedly because I'm really lazy and unremittingly cranky about all things, but the things I've liked enough to save so far are here. I think my favorite fandom that I only get fic in at Yuletide is Diana Wynne Jones' Chrestomanci series; this year it inspired me to dig out Conrad's Fate and re-read it, which is never a bad thing.

Can I just say? I really over this going to work thing. Working is for the fucking birds, man. I'd rather be at home. DO NOT WANT OFFICE. >:(

Boss: "How about a 9:30 meeting?"
Min: "Okay!" *trundles upstairs at 9:25*
Boss: *not here*
Boss: *still not here at 9:45*
Boss: *still not here at 10:00*
Min: ......... you know, working in the office was supposed to help me avoid this kind of scheduling. *face*

Last week, riverlight asked me if I was planning on doing a end of the year photo wrap up, and I told her I wasn't -- but then I started looking at my photos, the ones stashed in my "personal favorites" set on Flickr, and I found that I wanted to to talk about them. A lot of these y'all will have seen before, but there's a couple of words to go with most of them, and I hope it's interesting to somebody.

( a dozen and a half photos, and not nearly 1000 words, in chronological order )

On Monday, I shot the [Trekky Records Christmas at the Cradle] benefit show. If you're wondering why there are so many pictures of the bearded dude in the red shirt, it was because he was adorable boy technology 1000%, and he kept making lolzy faces.

Yesterday I listened to the Atlantic R&B box set on shuffle for the whole afternoon. It was cheering music on a cool (I do not say cold because it was cold for the NC but warm for most of where you bitches live), blustery, drizzly gray day. Then I lay on the floor and took glamour shots of the cats because it was too gross to leave the house to shoot, except for a trip to the library for more Martha Grimes mysteries.

Tuesdays are quickly becoming my let's-go-somewhere-so-I-can-fuck-around-with-the-camera-:D? days. redwillet and I went to [Hillsborough] last week, and like bird watchers, I have started a life list of places I want to shoot, broken down into the NC, the US, and the World. I shall be poor forever due to insane traveling desires. At least gas got cheap again.

Today I am sending emails and doodling sketches of database interfaces in my journal, interspersed with questions I need to ask at our meeting with the designers after the holidays. One for presentation data is sketched underneath the line i miss you like dreams i've never had. I'm still listening to the Atlantic box set.

It should be clear to anyone reading this that my fannish output has fallen off to almost zero at the moment, so if you want to stick around and listening to me talk about taking photos and ways in which my job is simultaneously amazing and soul-draining, that's awesome, but if you don't, feel free to do that, too. I will start posting music again in the new year, and I might even write a story or three. There are a lot I want to finish. I miss writing.

There's a lot of things I want to finish in general, actually.