breaker stage

i’m devoting the rest of my weekend to working on the digital mountain of photos i have waiting to be processed, but before i start i have to clear my head with a blog post.

tour de fat was great. there were around 3,000 riders in the parade, nearly everyone costumed to utter fabulosity...

...including me. my favorite comment, from some guy: “oh, for a second i thought that mustache was fake.”

i wore a black corset and the bike part pendant i made years ago.

and my homemade bike poodle skirt. it’s a vinyl circle skirt and i wear two petticoats underneath so it really poofs out. i’ll post more photos from the festival once i get to them.

the idaho city photoshoot with red light variety show went oh so well. i was kind of dreading it after the wedding fiasco the week before, feeling like i should just give up trying to photograph people for a while, but this restored my confidence. they were wonderful to work with, and they’re all fucking impossible to take bad photos of anyway so it wasn’t that much of a challenge.

in addition to being crazy fun it was also surprising. a lot of what i ended up shooting was beautiful in unexpected ways, like this candid shot of katie walking down a dirt road:

that’s not the image that comes to mind when i think of their group, and maybe they won’t be able to use it for anything, but it’s one of my favorites.

at twilight and after dark we took photos in the pioneer cemetery, some of them lit entirely by candlelight. this was a last-minute idea and a bit of a challenge, especially since i didn’t bring a tripod. i’m having trouble finding one photo that works in its entirety, showing everyone in the group, but if i crop them there’s at least one really good shot of each person.

while we were in the cemetery some people randomly collected behind me, watching quietly...i was wondering what the hell was going on and it turns out they were a group of idaho ghost hunters. they’d gotten special permission from the mayor to hang out that night with their equipment, recording EVPs and whatnot. they were really nice and polite about us messing up their atmosphere so we left as soon as we found out. their event sounded like fun too, i wish i was part of that group...i don’t believe in ghosts, but i LOVE to make believe and get all freaked out and carried away in the moment.

last week i started transitioning to a new job (at the same place.) my new title is “text and image editor,” so i’m still doing lots of photos, website maintenance, graphic design and editing, but i picked up some more hours/money and an official-sounding title. i’m excited! we just started working on the student writing anthology, now that camps are over, and i finished the cover design a couple weeks ago. everything’s running way ahead of schedule despite having hosted a record number of kids this year (432! that’s about a hundred more than were in my high school graduating class.)

i have a neat side-project going: i’m making myself a mascot costume (not sure how hush-hush this is so i’ll reveal more details later,) for use at fundraisers and in classes. it will be enormous and crazy and unlike anything i’ve ever sewn before. they looked into hiring some professional costume person to do it but the estimate was $2,000, which is outrageous and not feasible. i’m basically donating my time on the construction, but i get a $500 budget to work with, and when it’s all done i get to play dress-up!

i’m hoping to have time to do a big “harvest monday” post and catch up with garden photos next week. so much is coming in. as i type this the house is filling up with the smell of roasting tomatoes, herbs and garlic, my first batch of sauce this year.