An a.m. walk around the golf course photo.

My photography teacher, Carol Leigh, posted a photo she took of a boy on the beach on her blog dated July 31, 2009. If you follow the link and read what she wrote, you'll see what bothers me with this kinda cool photo below.

In my photo below, I wish I'd changed the angle of capture so that the cactus (see blog amendment below to correct succulent name to agave, not cactus) point on the right didn't blend in with the dark background. Another thing I noticed when I zoomed in is that the front left cactus point isn't in focus and that is where I intended the focus to be rather than where it is on the right rear point.

Hey, I'm happy I notice such things lately.


Another student of Carol Leigh's, Lori, has a wonderful portfolio of cactus photos on her site. I thought of Lori this morning and wished I could have picked her brain on how to shoot this shot.

And I just have to post this way too funny photo of Connie's mode of transportation these days.

Connie driving Tony to her car, 20 yards away, following the woman's meeting last night.

Blog entry amended 8/16/09. I received an email from a friend who helped me see that what I had photographed was not a cactus. I was told.."you called your agaves "cactus"... grrrrrr...... they're both succulents, but agaves aren't cactus, and vice versa! Grrrrr...... you know how protective I am of my agaves, so be careful not to besmirch their reputation! >;-}"

I apologize and stand corrected!

Morning hour long walk with Gina and Ray this morning.

We walked right out our front door and walked the Arnold Palmer course around 9:15am this morning. It was free of golfers as the course has been closed for maintenance.

Hiking the golf course with my pack.

I have too many hobbies/interests. I need a lot more hours in the day to maintain balance and moderation in all areas of my life.

Comments on some of my interests and how I'm doing in the area of self care:
-Food/eating has to head the list of interests. If I'm not eating good, I'm not a happy camper. I have been excellent in the area of eating to live, as opposed to living to eat. I've been planning, shopping and making good clean food for Ray and me for 175 days now. No sugar, no white flour, writing down and emailing the 3 daily meals and two snacks to Xochitl every day for the 175 consecutive days and I feel good. I'm afraid if I don't send in my food, I'll go back to my old ways of eating. I've been feeling in balance emotionally as the result of changing my food choices and my relationship with food.
-Exercise. Hmmm. I could always do more. I've been carrying my backpack a couple of times a week hiking about 2 hours. I walk around Mission Hills CC a couple of times a week. Certainly not enough exercise to get me ready for the July 17th backpack I'll be doing. Oh, I'm also doing sit-ups nightly with the hope my stomach muscles will help strengthen my back.
-Photography. Not good here at all. I seem to have put practicing taking photos on hold. But I paid attention yesterday when I blogged that I hadn't picked up a camera lately, so this morning I clicked off the shots below and other shots this morning while climbing up and down the hills on the golf course. The golf club workers, getting the traps and greens ready for the 8am shotgun, were laughing at me climbing up to the tops of a hills, turning around, descending them, only to hike up the same hills again. The goal is to hit all hills on the fairways.
-I subscribe and am monthly automatically deducted for the cost of online access to photo lessons and don't even do the lessons.
-Golf. I've been going out with Ray a couple of times a week around 5pm where he helps me with my golf as we play about 5 - 7 holes. The weather has been really beautiful at that time. We've been lucky to have temperatures under 100 degrees lately.
I'm trying to get my old stiff back ready for our 4 day trip to Pebble Beach where we will use the two rounds of golf given to Ray by his sponsees a year and a half ago. Thank God I made and paid for the expensive golf room for two nights before the market crashed.

I do have a thing with taking photos of my shadow. Pretty place we live in isn't it?

A balmy night walk around the block with the Canon Powershot A640.

Ray probably thought he was safe going out for a walk at night with me. You see, during the day I usually stop and take way too many photos and Ray usually just walks on leaving me to whatever it is that has my attention.

Today it was near 100 here. We knew this morning we'd be doing our exercise after the sun went down.

The night was so balmy. The walk went by so fast. I was fascinated with shooting hand held photos of the night lighting when the shutter was open for a full minute. Trying to get an in focus shot was out of the question but I still was curious what the photos would look like. I had the ISO set to 800.

We're walking on Inverness Drive and I'm shooting back across the 15th fairway lake to our home (the house with the palm tree growing out of it!). I used a 100% sepia photo filter in Photoshop to hide a tiny bit of the noise or excessive graininess.

Ray is already back home when I shot this photo of our street. Our home is at the end of this cul-de-sac. I actually sat down on the street pavement trying to get as much as I could of the lighted tall palm trees.

I entered our courtyard and began shooting the lit cactus. Almost ready to go inside, I noticed my shadow. I never pass up a shadow photo op. I even posed, turning my head to the right to get a good shadow outline of my profile, while I'm holding the camera out away from me with my left hand, trying to check to see if I'm actually framing myself properly in the LCD. I'm glad the neighbors can't see into our courtyard. On more than one occasion I have been accused of self obsession. But the neighbors don't need to see it. After I got this shot and I came out of my shooting blackout, I looked to see if Ray had been watching me. Nope. He was at work on his new Lenovo Thinkpad T500 probably shopping for, yes, another putter. 'Cause you know, like a new camera will make me a better photographer, Ray is on a never ending search for the newest and bestest putter. Every day! Oh, Ray isn't going to like that I wrote this.

Look how long my pony tail is getting.

A non-productive fun day.

I got up at 9:40am this morning! 9:40am. I remember going to bed around 10pm thinking that I would gift myself the process of waking up and not racing out of bed. I did wake a number of times this morning, but never looked at the clock. It's funny but I have this old idea, that obviously isn't so old, that I waste most of the morning sleeping so late. I love the feeling of getting up early and getting lots done before the day really starts. But I must acknowledge I did enjoy waking and rolling over back to sleep this morning.

Ray and I were couch potatoes today. We sat in front of the TV and watched the Masters. I don't ever watch TV during the day. Again, I'd feel unproductive and guilty not "doing". But I'd be remiss to not acknowledge I had a ball watching Tiger and Mickelson and Perry.

An hour after the golf Ray and I went for a walk. While on our walk I shot some photos. Here are a few:
This statue always gets me. I asked Ray to pose next to this statue of a man on a bench with an allegator under it.






See Lane, I may not have sat outside for an hour the other day as you suggested, but I did give myself some "rights" today.