Got a Touch of the Blues

(click on photo to enlarge it)

My cousin called me today from Italy and we had a long conversation about growing older, life in general, and the feeling I have lately had of being rootless. I love talking with her, because we were very close when we were much younger and both lived in Italy. Now our conversations are fun but infrequent. Life gets in the way.

I've never suffered from depression and don't really think I do now, but lately I have grown very introspective and have been in this trying-to-figure-things-out mode. For some reason the talk with my cousin made me very blue, and only increased my sense of not having roots. When I was a child my father was in the military so we traveled back and forth from Italy a couple of times. I was not quite ten when he retired from the armed forces and we moved back to Italy. When it was time for college I came back to the US and after college I went back to Italy. Three years later I moved back to the US. I think all this wandering in my youth has finally taken its toll.

I decided that even though I often don't see the point of doing a page in my visual journal, this might be the day to do just that. So I started out using Lisa Bebi's paint over technique  from the Spring 2008 issue of Somerset Workshops, but ended up painting around the images instead of over them, for the page on the left, or not even around them, for the page on the right.

I was going to write stuff about siblings and ancestral roots, but instead opted for the tiny strip of paper that has been floating around my chaotic little workspace for about 10 months, and which I thought for sure I would never be able to find when I wanted it. Miraculously, I immediately found it in a little container of odds and ends and glued it

down. Finished.

The children on the left are my mother and her younger brother, maybe 1920, and the woman and young boy on the right are my father's mother and his older brother, maybe 1915.

Friends and Family

On Tuesday night I boarded Amtrak's Coast Starlight in Emeryville, CA and traveled up to Seattle to visit friends and family.

The trip on the train was long, but as wonderful as always, and totally on time. When I get back to San Francisco I will post photos of the ride up and of my stay here, but for the moment I do not know how to download just a selection of photos, rather than the entire equivalent of 500 photos I have taken in the last 3 days - this includes videos.

Before buying a new camera, an idea I've been mulling over for the past couple of weeks, I thought it would be a good idea to bring the manual for my Canon PowerShot S50 on the train with me, just to see what I did not know about it. Guess what, I didn't know much.

It turns out I had read the "quickstart" guide and stopped there. On the train I learned to take videos (pathetic little videos, but videos nonetheless), BW photos, sepia tone photos, how to set the camera for sun and overcast, vivid color, and how to do manual focus. What I still can't achieve is a decent focus with telephoto, but I don't think this justifies getting a new camera. Not yet, anyway, because this did not stop me from looking at cameras at Costco here in Seattle, and noticing that they have a good deal on a Canon EOS XSi (or something like that), a camera that is highly rated on Flickr.

My friends in Seattle say "hi", from the other side of the sliding glass door right outside the living room of my brother's and his girlfriend's home.

Photos courtesy of Debra L.