Susan Solo – Photographer | Traveler | Adventurer

Category: my life

  • Project 10

    A few of my photog friends are doing something called Project 365 where they take a photo a day for an entire year. I think most of them started on January 1 of this year. I totally wanted to participate, but I missed the start date. Starting a business on top of my day job has been keeping me pretty busy since the first of the year (excuses excuses!), but I want to do something similar. So I’m going to participate in my own mini exercise: each month I’m going to pick a new list of 10 things to photograph, and I’ll (uncreatively) call it Project 10.

    This month’s list is “10 Objects Found at Home.” And that’s strictly objects found in my own home already, and in their natural location. So here’s Project 10/List 1 – Image 1:

    I guess that’s not really one object, but it’s my collection of photography books and they’re on one shelf, so I think that counts. I sort of thought 10 Objects Found at Home would be an easy topic to start with, but I just realized that I shoot around the house so much that I’m pretty worn out on subjects in my own house. I’ll have to really look hard to find some interesting things to photograph!

    Feel free to play along – I have a few ideas for upcoming lists, but also let me know if you’d like to suggest a list.

  • Meet Charlie

    In the interest of posting about things other than Flourish, I thought I’d introduce you to Charlie.

    I love all animals, but I’m mostly a dog person. Chris and I aren’t home enough so we haven’t figured out how to work a dog into our lifestyle, but I have to have an animal around. Something that I can keep in a cage for a reasonable amount of time while we’re not here works out well. So Chris and I brought Charlie home about seven months ago, and he’s finally starting to like us. It was hard for a while when he was mostly just terrified of us and everything that we did – if we walked by the cage too fast he lost about half of his feathers flapping around in sheer terror. But I have been determined to make this bird like me, and I think we’re getting somewhere now.

    Or maybe we’ve just learned to walk by a little slower. Who is training who?

  • Two More Days!

    Flourish is just two days away! I’ll be leaving Sunday morning at 11am. I just received the schedule for the whole workshop, and they’ve got a pretty full three days planned. I’m especially anxious for the shoots – I think I’ll learn a lot there. I’ll be debuting a new blog with the posts and photos about the workshop, so look for that next week!

  • I’m a Hero

    So it turns out that I’m not too shabby at Guitar Hero on the Nintendo Wii. I beat the game on Easy, and now I’m at the last stage of Medium. Last night I played online against some girl named Jessica. I beat her in the first round, she beat me in the second round, and then I “conquered with authority” in the final battle. (See TV screenshot below.)

    Chris said that she was probably 8 years old. Whatever, I won!

  • Priceless

    In an attempt to recreate a family holiday tradition, last night I tried to bake and decorate sugar cookies. Chris and I are visiting his family all weekend, so I thought it would be nice to have something like that to take with us. Earlier in the week I bought all of the ingredients, some new Christmas-shaped cookie cutters, and fun tins to store the cookies. The baking part went alright I guess, despite the fact that I didn’t realize if you use a light cookie sheet, a dark cookie sheet, and a pizza stone each for a separate batch, all of the bake times are quite different. I ended up with a nice array of light golden brown, dark golden brown, and brown. After chucking the browns, I sat down with my acceptable golden browns and got ready to decorate. I set it up just like my mom used to – all of my bare cookies, frosting and decorations spread out on the dining table, my tasty canvas and artist’s tools. After frosting about five cookies, I realized that the fun of our family tradition was sitting around the table with my mom and brother and listening to my dad in the background watching football. The banter that we had, and the flow of artistic creativity (“Ooo, look at what I did!”) made the decorating go by much faster. At 11:30 pm with only 8 down and the rest of the 6 dozen sugar cookies to go, I decided that the sugar cookie decorating tradition is best left to fond memories. I was covered in flour, and getting whiney, and I might’ve even cursed at the cookies at some point. Thanks Mom, for always making it fun and easy!

    Mixing the cookie dough: 10 minutes.
    Rolling the dough and cutting cookie shapes: 20 minutes.
    Memories of making holiday cookies with my family: a lifetime.

    Happy Holidays, everyone!