busy summer

I can't remember the last time that I had nothing to do. So even though my spring semester ended over a month ago, I haven't really stopped and I'm just as stressed as I was when I was finishing up my term paper. So here's a recap:

April

- I went to Ottawa to shoot the Gloucester Spring Fest skating competition. Great weekend for spending time with my Ottawa fam, not such a great weekend for camera shutters. The shutter died on both my main 50D body and on my backup 20D. On Day 2 of the competition, I had to shoot with Phil's backup body & a lens borrowed from a friend—and it was Nikon, so all the controls felt "backwards" to me. But I was glad that they had them!

I got to shoot quite a few Interpretives at Gloucester, which is a departure from usual competitions, to say the least.

- I joined a small group Bible study, which might sound like a small thing, but I'd been wanting to get involved in one for years and finally found one. I just feel really fortunate to be in the group that I'm in and to have the opportunity to get to know a great group of ladies.

- I wrote a pretty awesome term paper on Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility and how the 1995 Hollywood and 2008 BBC film versions have interpreted it. I worked really, really hard on it and ended up with an A in the class, so I am proud of how it turned out.

- I went to Toronto for the 4th consecutive Annual Canadian Stars on Ice Weekend. Jules, Christina, and I only went to one show this year, since we all thought that the tour was a bit lackluster this year. Some good programs, but overall, too many people on the ice who didn't look like they wanted to be there.

Joannie Rochette was marvelous, as always. She lit up the arena in the second half with "Show Me How You Burlesque."

Jamie Salé & David Pelletier, in one of the few moments in their Prince number where they weren't dancing facing opposite directions.

I thought that Kurt Browning's "Downstream" was the best program in the whole show. Just gorgeous.

So instead of going to the Hamilton show, we picnicked in Niagara-on-the-Lake on Saturday and then Jen joined us for bougie brunch and shopping on Sunday. Great weekend with the girls!

May

- I had to get right to work, as I had some writing deadlines right at the beginning of May. I'm also transcribing a big block of focus group interviews, which I'm supposed to finish before I leave for Europe, but this will definitely not happen. Between all of this, I've also been trying to work on my thesis, but I've been frustrated with how little time I've had. It rained most of the month in Chicago, so at least I didn't mind staying inside!

One nice day, I did get out to see a Sox game with a group from church. I grew up going to a game every year with my family, but before this game, I hadn't been since 2004! This meant that this was my first try at shooting baseball. I discovered that it's much easier than skating, since they stand in the same places and do the same things over and over again. Ha. I would love to shoot more baseball from closer to the field. Although I got a lot of good shots, I was lacking eye contact up in the bleachers.

This also means that it was my first time seeing this sign!

June

- I'm getting ready for the big summer trip of 2011: London, Normandy, Brittany, Paris, Edinburgh, and Cardiff! Woooooo! I'm thrilled about the opportunity, but it's stressful because there's so much I want to get done before I leave, and also because tuition for the course is about twice as much as I thought it would be, so I have to completely clean out my savings account. I don't anticipate being able to afford food in London. Since I'm going to be there for 2 weeks, this might be a problem. I don't think I can bring that many fruit strips.

- Yesterday was a really stellar kickoff to my birthday week. After church in the morning, I walked over to the Printers' Row LitFest and wandered the tables for a bit before having a froyo/latte lunch. Then I met my mom at Symphony Centre, where we went to the CSO's final concert of the season, Mahler's Ninth with Haitink conducting. It was brilliant, as can be expected from Mahler+CSO+Haitink! Finally we capped off the night with dinner at Piccolo Sogno. It's in my neighbourhood, and I've been wanting to go for a good three years, but have never planned it far enough in advance. For a Sunday night at 6, I had to make a reservation two weeks in advance, but I was so glad that I did! Magical patio setting paired with artichoke tortelloni? Yes, yes, yes. Only a chocolate hazelnut molten cake with a scoop of hazelnut of gelato could have made it better. Good thing that was on the menu, delivered to our table with "Happy Birthday" written in chocolate sauce and complete with a candle!

But after such a delightful day yesterday, today's return to the grindstone was inevitable. I started the morning by writing a post for my travel blog about New England, and I've been slowly piecing this together all day as I take little breaks from transcribing. It's beastly hot out, but my next task is to hike down to school to pick up reading materials for tomorrow's class. I might just have to grab a froyo to make the walk less brutal.

art and cioppino: san francisco, day 1

Two weekends ago, I enjoyed a little vacation in San Francisco with my mom! Well, vacation for me, conference for her. She was in sessions most of the time, so I was responsible for planning the itinerary for our free day together and also for finding post-conference restaurants each night. I love picking restaurants.

I arrived late on Thursday, March 24, and Mom was already there. She'd arrived Wednesday evening so she could have two days to sightsee before the conference started, but I have Thursday afternoon class, so I decided to just fly out after class. Thursday turned out to be a bit of a bust—terrible thunderstorms in the Bay Area, so I'm glad that I didn't blow off class for that.

So on Friday, we were both looking forward to exploring the Bay Area! We went to San Francisco together in 2007 and both loved it, and we wanted to do something different this time. One of her friends suggested Sausalito, so I did a bit of research and we planned to take the ferry over on Friday. First, though, I had to pick up a rental lens in SOMA. Since BorrowLenses, a fabulous mail-order lens rental company that I always use when I need glass, is based in SF, they do local 3-day rentals at various pick-up locations around the city. I'd never used a wide-angle lens before, so I was excited to try the Canon 17-40mm f/4L lens. We stopped for breakfast at Whole Foods on the next block over, and my mom and I both tried Icelandic yogurt. She liked it better than I did, but I didn't hate it either. It's similar to the Greek yogurt that I've had.

Next, we headed to the Ferry Building! The F-line (streetcar) was packed, so we took a bus that follows the same route. None of the other tourists appeared to have caught onto that.

I'm pretty smitten with the Ferry Building. We went past it on the 2007 trip, but never got out of the streetcar, so this was my first time photographing it, and I went a little nuts. I'd also forgotten about the palm trees on the Embarcadero. I never think of SF as a palm tree sort of town, but there they are.

Inside the Ferry Building are a bunch of really interesting shops (mostly food-related) and restaurants. I already had plans to eat there with a friend the next day, and we'd just eaten our Icelandic yogurt breakfast, so Mom and I didn't buy anything, but I was definitely tempted by the Ciao Bella gelato shop. Just a few days before my trip, I'd noticed that my grocery store in Chicago had started carrying Ciao Bella, and I loved the key lime pint that I'd bought.

The San Francisco-Sausalito ferry has been hailed as one of the greatest ferry rides in the world. I'm not keen on boats in general, but got used to them fairly well on my Canada trip last summer, so I was looking forward to the views and not thinking about the boat aspect.

Great views indeed! I can only imagine how much more spectacular this view would have been on a prettier day, if the water could have reflected more blue from the sky.

Same goes for this shot of the Golden Gate Bridge, although it was really neat to be able to see it from this angle.

In Sausalito, one of the first things we did was stop at the tourist office, where a very nice lady was kind enough to point out the entrance to a delightful wooden boardwalk along the boat docks. There were a lot of boats, which led to an amusing conversation between my mom and me...we don't really get the whole boat concept, unless you actually live on a lake. Like, how often would you even use a boat that isn't in your backyard? Personally, I would much rather spend my extra money on traveling or art or even a nice car! But then again, I don't really like boats, so maybe that is clouding my judgment.

We walked around for a bit, then settled on a restaurant on the east side of the main downtown

area for lunch, where I ordered a salmon burger and yam fries. Doesn't get much better than that! Then we walked up to Caledonia Street, which is kind of the "local" version of Main Street, so the locals don't have to fight tourists. It wasn't too crowded on a blustery Friday in March, but I'm sure that downtown is super clogged on sunny weekends during the summer. Caledonia Street was a lot of fun and featured two of my favourite Sausalito stops, Studio 333 and the Pinestreet Papery. Studio 333 is a huge art gallery in a renovated warehouse kind of space, featuring work from over 40 local artists. We especially liked the . The Pinestreet Papery is a delightful little shop featuring cards, books, decorative papers, stationery, etc. I love a good paper store.

We headed back towards the main part of town after that, and climbed a huge staircase/ramp conglomeration to the top of a giant hill. We're talking, like, 5-6 stories up. It was brutal, but the view of the bay was pretty grand. I took this from someone's driveway. Can you imagine waking up every day to a view like this?

Back downstairs, a patch of blue sky had moved in, so I took a ton of photos of downtown, including this one of the Sausalito Hotel.

Here's the west end of the main street, where Bridgeway curves around and follows the bay to the Golden Gate Bridge. Around back of the curvy building is Piccolo Café, whose sign out front proclaimed that it had the best cappuccinos EVER. Of course we had to try. I think it's pretty bold to say that they're the best ever, I mean, forever is a long time. But the cappuccino I had was pretty heavenly!

We visited some of the galleries in this part of town, but for the most part, they were a lot more formal than Studio 333, so we didn't linger anywhere too long, since we weren't buying. However, the exception was the Hanson Gallery, which was friendly and bustling and featured some work that I loved by Scott Hanson. We saw this piece (or a similar one), a map of the United States made of out pieces of license plates. My mom and I both loved it, and one of the employees heard us talking about it, so came over to tell us a little bit more. My mom mentioned that she was sure I'd love a Canadian version, and the guy brought us over to his computer because the artist has made a couple! Seriously, if I could afford it, one of those would be on the wall in my living room, pronto! I'm actually already starting to wonder if I could create something similar out of my photos from the trip...

It was starting to rain when we left Sausalito, but an enchanting blue sky was hanging over San Francisco when we got back, so of course I had to shoot the Ferry Building again!

Then we walked to North Beach, a mostly Italian neighbourhood in the northeastern part of San Francisco for more seafood with some Italian flavour.

I'd scouted out Caffe Sport on Yelp on the ferry ride back, and it turned out to be a fantastic find. This shot is of Green Street outside the restaurant. The inside of the restaurant was covered in all sorts of random stuff. It was like Buca di Beppo on crack, but less commercialized, you know? Then our waiter told us that the owner had actually made most of the things on the walls—random posters, painted tiles, bits of mosaic, etc. Really neat. Caffe Sport serves meals family-style, so my mom and I split a house salad (simple but delicious), salmon ravioli (a special), and the signature cioppino. Cioppino, WOW. It had lobster pieces (still in the shell), scallops, mussels, clams, and I don't know what else, but it was all incredible. My mom and I are suckers for fresh coastal seafood, and that definitely hit the spot. And since dinner was such a hit, we topped it off with cappuccino and a cannoli for dessert. The cappuccino was wonderful, but only our second-best cup of the day. Hard to beat the best ever, you know!

We decided to walk back after that, since I wanted to walk through Chinatown, but it was getting late, and everything was closing up. We ended up walking down Stockton by chance, but it turned out to be an excellent choice, since Stockton St. tunnels under Nob Hill for a less strenuous walking experience.

It might be a few days, but I have posts on days 2 and 3 in San Francisco still brewing!

stress, pasta, and bit o' recognition

It's nearly 1 a.m. and I am blogging. It's nearly 1 a.m. on a day when I worked at 6.30 a.m. after only sleeping 3 hours, and I am blogging. I did have a little nap this afternoon, but not much. There's so much work to do and I am really overwhelmed and not doing well at channeling this energy into work, so I'm reverting to one of my favourite tactics: get the fingers moving on the keys, any way I can. Then get back to work.

So here's a blog in 3 parts.

Partie Une: Stress

(Does one say "partie une" or "partie un?" Partie has got to be feminine, right? But 'une' still looks wrong. Francophones, please advise.)

This course I am taking, on British Romantic Lit, is way more stressful than I thought it would be. I've read most of the material before, written papers on most of the material before, and liked most of the material before, but something about this course is not working for me. I don't feel like I'm connecting to the material the way that my professor wants us to. I don't know. I'm just not handling it well. I have to do all this work by Thursday and I need to go to the library tomorrow, which I hate, and beyond the library and the research, I have to reread Frankenstein for Thursday's class and write a final draft of my research proposal, because that's due too, and oh, I basically have to leave directly from class on Thursday to get to the airport because I'm going to San Francisco for the weekend.

The other source of stress is my thesis, aka the book on my trip across Canada. It was my goal for the semester to get a first draft done, but the semester ends with April, and between thesis and the research project, I'm not sure if this is possible. True, there have been times when I haven't worked as hard on my thesis as I should have, but overall, I have been working pretty consistently. And when I've let my thesis sit for a few days in a row, it hasn't been due to slacking off, it's just been to prioritize other deadlines.

Anyway, the present deadline I have is to deliver a chunk of work to my adviser tomorrow. Hence being awake and heavily caffeinated at 1 a.m. I wanted to give her Ontario and Québec, but I have 17 pages on Ontario and I'm not done yet. It's a big province and I was there for a long time. So I guess it will just be Ontario and I will view the deadline as another failure. Well, half failure.

My problem is that if I stay up all night writing, I'll get Ontario written, but then will I have the energy to go to the library and read Frankenstein and write the proposal and pack for San Fran and get up at 5 a.m. again on Thursday for another early day? If I can make it through class and if I can get to the airport on time, I'll have a long plane ride to catch up on sleep, but that was going to be designated reading time so I had less to worry about in SF, where I wanted to actually enjoy the city. Then again, it's supposed to rain all weekend, so maybe having reading material in SF isn't such a bad idea.

And oddly enough, writing all of this out has made me feel a little less stressed. At least I have organized my stress now, pinpointed the sources, you know. I think that counts for something. But moving on...

Partie Deux: Pasta

I love pasta in restaurants. I always have. One of my first grown-up, not ordered off the kids' menu meals was fettucine alfredo at the Olive Garden. I think I was 5. It was a huge deal. I had to split it with an adult, of course, but it was love at first bite for me and pasta.

So when I moved to Michigan and into my first apartment, it was natural that I should turn to pasta. It's easy to make, and it can be prepared in single serving sizes very easily. I defaulted to the packets of pesto that you mix with olive oil and milk for sauces, but occasionally switched it up with a bottled tomato sauce or the alfredo packets.

When I moved back to Chicago, I went shopping with my mom at Sam's Club to stock up on foods that I could buy in bulk, since I didn't have a car and there wasn't a full grocery store within walking distance of my first apartment in the city. One of the things I bought was a 5 lb. monster bag of pasta. And since that was before I knew about how taking 9 hrs of grad credits was a huge rip-off, I was so painfully broke that year. I ate pasta all. the. time. No matter how much I ate, the amount of spaghetti in the bag never decreased. The pasta stopped tasting good, but I felt like I didn't have a choice. Then one night, it backfired. The pasta actually made me gag and I couldn't force down anymore. And I still had at least 2 lbs of that freaking bag of spaghetti left.

It's been like this for two years, friends. Sure, I still love pasta in an Italian restaurant, but at home, I haven't been able to stomach it. I tried different brands of pasta, different sauces, but everything made me gag. It's been rough.

But this week, I had a breakthrough. I don't know why, but on Monday night, I was wandering aimlessly in the grocery store, and I found myself in the pasta aisle. It had been a while since I'd tried it, so I thought I'd give it another go. I ended up trying a new noodle, one I'd never cooked at home before: ROTINI. Rotini is fun and whimsical and cooks in 3.5 minutes! Win-win-win! I paired it with tomato florentine sauce and I loved it. Now I just have to make sure I don't overdose on rotini. Don't worry, I bought a small box.

Partie Trois: A Bit o' Recognition

The ladies at Ice-Dance.com and I definitely do not keep the site going for recognition. We don't do it for thanks, and we don't get paid for it. We just do it because we love skating, especially ice dance. For me, personally, it is linked to a possible career path that I am exploring, but IDC honestly isn't about furthering my own goals or anything like that. I guess I feel some sort of responsibility to share our coverage with the World Wide Web because I know that we do a good job. I'm floored by the talent and dedication of the dancers that we photograph and write about, and I want to honour them, too. We all have a sense of pride in what we do.

So for friends that aren't as heavily invested in the skating world as I am, the short story is that the World Championships were supposed to be this week, in Tokyo. For obvious reasons, they have were postponed. Last week, there was a ton of press about what the options were, so the IDC Staff decided to weigh in. We all had ideas and the article we wrote was passed between all 4 of us before it finally went online. I didn't do any of the rough draft work because I had the first draft of my proposal due last week, but I spent a couple of hours composting the various drafts, throwing in a few more thoughts, and piecing together the final version. So we published the article and did what we usually do—posted links to the IDC Facebook and Twitter accounts. A couple of people said nice things about it on the thread on FSU (skating's main discussion forum) on the subject of Worlds, but shortly after we published, a delusional Virtue & Moir bandwagoner hijacked the thread. And we moved on. The news kind of slowed over the weekend and we all had various things happening, so I was happy with what we'd put together, but I wasn't really thinking about it on Saturday night when I opened an email from Daphne, the IDC administrator.

It turned out that PJ Kwong, Skate Canada announcer and commentator and author, had read the editorial we'd written, had loved it, and had written a blog about it. Okay...whoa. Not expecting that.

Even though we're all really proud to be associated with IDC and we know that we do quality work, we're still underdogs in the media world. People keep getting their media from the web more and more, but web media is still the last one invited to the table. We're the first to get our credentials cut when we're short on space. I don't know about the other federations, since I've only covered big events in Canada, but Skate Canada prints out articles and clips newspapers and puts things on the wall in the media center at its big competitions. But they only print and clip from newspapers, not websites. Well, one of my photos made it onto the wall at Nationals this year—but it was uncredited, stolen by one of the Victoria newspapers off of the IDC website and printed without my consent. They were even careful enough to crop my name off the edge of the photo. So not quite the same thing.

In conclusion...I don't do this for recognition, but it feels really, really nice to get a bit of recognition on occasion. Thanks, PJ Kwong. You've always seemed like a really nice person.

And not to overexpose myself, but I really am proud of the joint effort that brought about this editorial, so if you'd like to read it, it's here.

And with that, my fingers are clearly moving across the keys with no problem at all, so it's back to Ontario.

the sweater + doop doop

30 Days of Skating

Hey, remember when I got through 15 days of this, and then I went to Canadians and forgot to finish? Me too. I opened my blog because I wanted to write about the situation with Worlds and Japan, but my thoughts on that are far too scattered, so I'm channeling my energy into a different skating post. Just for fun.

Day 16: What is your favourite ladies professional/show program?

This is turning out to be a tough category to pick from. Shows and galas always seem to be full of girls skating to GFBs (Generic Female Ballads, for those of you that don't speak FSU) and everything kind of looks the same. And when the girls try to do something different, it often comes off looking fake and overchoreographed. So it's a tough category, and I'm going to pick two true classics for my favourites.

The first is "The Sweater," a bit of comedic genius by one of my favourites, Josée Chouinard. There's just something about it that still makes me giggle now, and something about it that made me wear out my tape of it when I was about 13. I didn't tape a lot of skating in those days, but I was determined to have a tape of "The Sweater," so I sat with a video tape and the remote at the ready every time skating was on TV, just in case Jos happened to be in the event and she happened to be skating that program. I finally got it, but I didn't understand that rewinding a tape without stopping it is bad for it, and that tapes wear out after a while, so using a tape that had already been used for countless episodes of Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman was probably a bad idea. So the tape didn't last long, but the memories are still there.

I like to think that my second pick was part of what inspired "The Sweater." I will never, ever forget the first time I saw Kristi Yamaguchi's "Doop Doop" or how much I loved the entire thing. It's so quirky and goofy and I just ate it up. I want to say that the year was 1994, I know the event was Ice Wars, and I know that I was eating Market Day Split Topper pizza while watching skating in my parents' bedroom. They were probably watching a movie or a game or something out in the living room, and I almost preferred it when they took over the big TV, and I got the little TV in their room, because I could close the door and get lost in the skating world. The skating world seemed so far away to me then, and so glamorous. I remember watching Ice Wars because I was taking very careful notes on the event so that I could write about it for some school project. I guess it was the first time that I wrote about skating. And Kristi's program was the one to get the best review from me...despite the fringed epaulets.

Honourable Mentions:

Michelle Kwan's "Fields of Gold" - Of course I still wish that she'd had the skate of her life and had won gold in a home Olympics, but I think this program was even better without having won gold, you know? Totally heartwrenching.

Joannie Rochette's "Summertime" - After considerable thought, I think this is my favourite Jo show program. I feel like it's a good choice, since she liked it enough to reprise it last year on tour (she originally skated to it in the 2007-2008 season).

Yuka Sato's "I Love You Always Forever" - this program began my obsession with this song that is still ongoing even today, after like 15 years!

Angela Nikodinov's "To Love You More" - Okay, okay, I know I just railed on GFBs, but this is a special program and it was perfect for her. Plus, I love Céline Dion more than I can possibly explain in this post, so to me, this isn't a GFB.

busy break

Technically, I'm on spring break this week, but I'm not any less busy this week than I was last week during midterm week! So I'm not really feeling the "break" part of this week, but it's definitely spring in Chicago. This isn't to say that the weather is nice, just that we're experiencing some of that cold, damp, muddy weather that we look forward to every March here in the Windy City.

I did a phone interview last week with Tanith Belbin & Ben Agosto, Olympic silver medalists in ice dance who are currently touring with Stars on Ice. They were a great interview because they're very poised, they come off as very friendly, and they can pack a lot into a short amount of time. I was able to squeeze the 15-minute phone call into my midterm schedule a week ago, but I didn't have a chance to write the article for a few days. It went live on ice-dance.com today: read it here.

This is also deadline week for IFS, the figure skating magazine that I started writing for a couple of issues ago. I normally plan ahead better, but the timing of this deadline was tough, and I was still gathering information and frantically reading books at the beginning of the week. I'm reviewing two books in one of my columns, which are going to be my 4th and 5th reviews for the magazine, so I guess that's kind of becoming my thing. I like reviewing books and take that task very seriously, so I'm trying not to rush through them.

And of course, I'm trying to keep plodding through my thesis, but I'm having a tougher time with energy and motivation this week. I was so looking forward to working on my thesis this week, but with everything else going on, I guess it's not the relaxing break that I was looking forward to. I have stuck to all of my deadlines with my thesis adviser so far, but I'm worried that I'm not going to be able to keep this one.

When I need a break from the written word, I'm also working on my old scrapbook from 2004, which is proving to be a bit of a challenge, since I can't locate quite a few photos from spring/summer 2004. I'm hoping to find backups at my parents' house this weekend. I thought I had a stack of backup discs here, too, but I can't find them.

This is my most recent page, in progress. I finished it yesterday.

Which brings me to two other projects: 1) cleaning and 2) organizing photos. Both are ongoing and monstrous tasks. I'm not exactly the best housekeeper, especially when I'm busy, so I have all kinds of piles of things to sort through. I cleared a bunch of stuff out of my bedroom last week, but somehow new piles have already appeared. I'm enjoying the extra space right now (my roommate moved out in December and I haven't found a replacement yet), but I definitely kept at least the living room cleaner when B lived here.

The photo organization is also a huge task. It's time for a portfolio update, so I'm trying to figure out which of my skating shots from this season that I should print. I'm also well overdue in posting photos, so I'll try to get a couple more sets edited this week. It's also nearing the end of the season, so I need to make sure that I have double backups of everything. Being a part-time sports photographer is a never-ending task. I can't imagine keeping up if I did this full-time!

And spring break week culminates with seeing Stars on Ice on Saturday. I might be going alone, which will be a weird experience, but at least it's just the U.S. tour and I'll be reunited with the girls for the traditional CSOI weekend in April/May.

superchick in the house

Last Thursday (March 3), I had one of those terribly crazy days. It began at 4.30 am and it involved work and a midterm and a train and driving and exhaustion. But then I got to Mojoes and the music started, I finally relaxed.

I was there for Superchick, a band I've been following since the beginning, to say the least.

It started with Matt Dally, whom I met the summer I was 8. He was the lead in the children's musical at church, playing Gideon in Zeroes into Heroes. I was in the "corps," parading up and down the stage, holding a papier-mâché jar over my head in "Crash Go the Pitchers." I don't think he had any idea who I was.

But in high school, the jazz band was desperate for a pianist, and I was coerced into the job, despite having no idea how to read a chord chart. Matt played guitar, his friend Bill was the drummer, and Bill lived down the street from me. My sophomore year, they were both seniors, and Bill drove us to 7am practice every day. One day towards the end of the year, Matt gave Bill a cassette tape to play when he got in the car. It was a recording of a band he'd kind of auditioned for the night before, and he really wanted to join. 12 years later, Matt is still playing bass for Superchick.

For whatever reason, I'm often out of town or otherwise booked when they have nearby shows, so it had been almost 2 1/2 years since my last Superchick show. It was great to catch up with Matt and his mom, who was working the merch table, and of course, to see the band play. It's a really cool feeling when I look around and see girls shrieking for them and singing along to their songs.

From the beginning, they've always put on spectacular shows. At the last show I went to, in fall 2008, the shutter on my camera broke midway through their set. I've been a little worried about my shutter lately, but it held up just fine and I got some awesome shots. So enough with the sappy stories about the "beginning" and I'll get on with some photos. Warning: these photos have more lens flare than a pivotal J.J. Abrams scene.

The first opening band was Keep the Change, a local band from Joliet.

They seemed a little nervous at first, but looked like they were having fun by the end of their set. I think this is Frank Stella on bass and Jeff Winter on vocals.

Next up was At Rifts End, another semi-local band out of Bradley. This is their frontwoman, Haleigh Boatright. She tossed her hair a lot, so I had plenty of opportunities to get "hair-movement" shots.

I think the show was actually Made Avail's CD release party, and since they've played with Superchick before, they asked Superchick to join them. I'd heard the name before, but hadn't heard their music. It's not usually the type of music I'm drawn to, but they played really well and put on such a great show that I really enjoyed their set.

I tried to find the names of the guys in Made Avail, but I'm having some difficulty, especially since it seems that they've recently added 2 or 3 new members. So I don't know who this is, but I love the way the light is hitting him.

The frontman (also nameless) for Made Avail. Their last song was this crazy performance piece that involved super-dramatic lighting, a rose, and a face mask.

Then Superchick was finally up!

I got this hilarious shot of Matt early in their set. It really sums up the essence of Matt's typical performances. :)

Melissa Brock, guitarist and vocalist, working the crowd during "Hey Hey," I think.

It's really hard to get good shots of the drummer in most bands, because they're generally in the back and generally not well-lit. But I tried! So while this one isn't as pretty as the spotlight shots, it's a fun one. I believe this is a new drummer, and I actually don't know his name. Apologies!

Guitarist Dave Ghazarian in one of his more tranquil moments

Tricia Brock, lead vocalist, in one of my favourite shots of the night. She's an incredibly photogenic performer, so I have a ton of photos of her to eventually post to my Flickr account, along with more shots from all four of the bands. I'll try to remember to post an announcement when they're up.

Whew, this has taken me 2 1/2 days to finish this post! I'm technically on spring break, but that only means that it's crunch time for the projects that I had to set aside while I was trying to get ready for my midterm. I have two chapters of thesis to finish this week, along with two columns to write for IFS by Thursday, which includes reading two books. Off to continue book #1...at least I won't have to worry about being bored this week!

crafty sunday

I hardly ever see movies and I don't currently have a way of watching TV that isn't Hulu after the fact, so here's a Monday-morning blog that's not about the Oscars. Instead, I spent yesterday being fairly productive, though I suppose I should have spent a bit more time working on my thesis. I only gave that a whirl early in the day, and then abandoned it.

Lately, I've been wanting to be creative. I think this is partly inspired by my friend Lori-Anne Jackson, who is working hard to get her brand-new accessory line, Sara Laurence, ready for its launch. She's been posting sneak peeks of some of the pieces on Facebook in preparation for her pro photoshoot, which is coming up soon. I haven't made anything that I've wanted to wear since a poorly-thought-out foray into painted beads in the fourth grade, but I do get paper crafty, on occasion. Though it's been a long time since I've been inspired for those occasions.

Jules and I made an 8x8 photo scrapbook together to give to some friends of ours last fall, but besides that, I'm 7 years behind in my scrapping. And I like to scrap chronologically (I like to do most everything chronologically), so I'm determined to finish up the years I can barely remember before I can't remember them at all. Over the weekend, I started digging through all my tubs and boxes of materials and started to get organized. I currently have an empty bedroom in my apartment, so this has proven to be quite useful for the process.

In 2006-2007, I worked at a scrapbook store for 50 weeks (that's a story for another blog...), and one of the things I picked up there is that it's easy to fall into the organizational trap and never get anything done. So yesterday, I determined that I had unearthed more than enough to scrapbook my March 2004 weekend in Michigan, and I did it!

It took me a long time to pick the paper from my stash. It was for a skating show, but that was before I was a real photographer, so my pictures of the actual skating were worth forgetting and I wanted to highlight the good times of the weekend with paper that was fun, a little springy, and not too girly. This super old paper (all of my paper is super old, since I bought it in stacks in 2006-2008 and never got caught up) by Junkitz did the trick! Sidebar, but the striped paper is reminiscent of Seb's pants, right? I didn't have any specific embellishments to use, so I layered papers, used Distress Ink in a couple of places, and added some Prima flowers and a painted chipboard square with a sticker to the bottom right corner. The brads on the journal box are glittered, so I thought that was appropriate for Stars on Ice.

I actually didn't plan for the paper to coordinate with the tickets, but that was a nice perk, once I decided where to put them! They're actually stuffed into a makeshift pocket behind the patterned paper. I have this weird thing where I don't like to stick things down if I can't see them completely, but I didn't want to take up all of that space of laying out all 4 tickets, side by side. So I put them in a bunch in this pocket and if I ever need to take the tickets out to see exactly where I was sitting in each arena, I can. You know, just in case.

I hate throwing away scraps, so instead of saving all of these tiny pieces of paper, I have taken to making cards out of the leftovers. These are all small (4.25"x3.5") and very simple, but they're cute and will be useful. I'm actually planning on sending the two non-thank you cards out in a package that I'm planning on mailing today, if I can get the rest of the photos for it edited.

I thought I was done after that, but my creativity was still looking for something else to do, so I ended up making another page. I only had two photos from Easter '04 and couldn't find backups of any other photos to print. It's actually tougher for me to come up with an interesting layout with only two photos, since I'm so used to having to cram 10+ onto a two-page spread. I picked remnants of a paper pack that I bought circa 2004, used some vellum and some flower brads and some Prima flowers, and hoped for the best. I don't like this one as much as the other one that I did yesterday, but it's better than the awful layout I did the one time that I scrapped last year! I only had enough leftover paper from this page to make one card.

I should apologize for the quality of the photos, taken on my phone. I was feeling a little lazy about photography last night. I'm not sure I'm going to keep posting photos of craftiness, but if I do, I'll get motivated to post better photos.