Well, it looks like I made it. I have 52 weeks of creativity under my belt, more or less. Some weeks were chock full of new stuff that I would probably never have done had it not been for this project. There were a few weeks, here and there, where I had to reach into my bag of tricks just to make an entry. For the most part, though, I’m satisfied.

For this week, I have two things: a photo and a short bit of prose, which I’ve done the least of for this project. I was watching a movie that triggered some thoughts overnight, as I slept. I awoke with an idea. The concept is not so new; others in literature have done something similar. But, for me, I’ll take this as a creative piece of work all my own.

She’s His, Now

Tree Shadows In My Front Yard

I came across these shadows after our 19 inch snow storm. I was coming up from the mailbox with iPhone in hand. I wanted a photo of the construction work on the house and noticed how nicely the long, afternoon shadows played on the snow.

My brother and his family came up from New Jersey for a holiday visit this week. He and I often steal away from everyone else on these visits and do some exploration with our cameras. We did that today. This time, I opted to leave my Nikon DSLR at home because I wanted to play with my new iPhone and its own camera capabilities. The iPhone is a newer model and has built-in HDR mode, which means the images should do a much better job of preserving details in contrasty situations. Winter scenes can have those so it was a good day to test this.

We drove west from Feeding Hills out towards Otis on Rt 57. This is an interesting road as it goes over the hills that form the rim on the west side of Connecticut River Valley. We knew that it was going to start snowing in the late afternoon and I’d hoped we could avoid it, but by the time we reached the next valley (that has the Farmington River flowing through it), I decided we should travel south to avoid more hills and possible icing.

I had never gone this way before and we stumbled across some ice falls on the cliffs along side the highway on Rt 8. We were in Colebrook, CT and could see the reservoir and its dam from where we stopped. It was the ice, however that captured our interest. Here’s my brother standing directly under the ice and, quite frankly, if one of the icicles broke off, it would have been very dangerous. What we do for our photographs.

My brother was shooting with his Canon DSLR and, as I stated, I opted for the iPhone camera. Here are my contributions to this weeks creativity from that effort. I’m quite pleased with the performance of my new iPhone.

And The Next Day

We awoke to a fresh snowfall. The night before, we were discussing the upcoming snow depths. I argued that it would be a small storm based on what Intellicast showed in its radar rendering of the approaching weather. The family was hoping for some sledding in the front yard and argued that it would be more like four inches, as if arguing for this would make it so. It turned out that their arguing won. We had at least four inches more snow.

But, as I looked out the windows while having my morning coffee, I noticed the snow clinging to the branches and realized that this would be the perfect time to run out to Mitteneauge Park and do some more photography. I rousted my brother, grabbed my DSLR camera (I took the iPhone, too, but didn’t use it), and off we were.

We weren’t the first ones at the park, but thankfully, most of the previous days footprints were covered with fresh snow. We could have access to any shot with or without footprints this way. Unfortunately, the snow also covered ice in spots and while my brother argued that I should carry my camera in my bag in case I slipped, I said I couldn’t because there was no room. Then, as if on cue, I slipped, did a face plant, and the camera and tripod hit the ground. Fortunately, as if in slow motion, I was able to brace myself and cushioned the fall. The lens hit the snow and ice somewhat gently. The battery popped out of the camera and some items fell out of my bag. We brushed off the snow and continued. I took each step more carefully after that.

I was out with my friend, Mark. We agreed to have lunch halfway between Spencer and Feeding Hills. Before my move from Spencer, we lived 100 feet apart and saw each other often. Now, the distance makes our visits few and far between. As it turns out, it takes about 30 minutes for each of us to drive to Palmer so, whether it’s exactly half way or not doesn’t matter. Time wise, it is.

I took advantage of this opportunity to also check a restaurant in Palmer I was interested in. The folks in Palmer took over the train depot and made it into a very nice restaurant. It’s called The Steaming Tender. There are tracks on both sides with trains running on both. While seated, we saw several freight and AmTrak trains pass. On the way out of the parking lot, I noticed a colorful building across the tracks and thought about coming back to photograph it. I did.

Today it’s Christmas and I’m taking a week off from creativity. It’s not that I haven’t done anything. For the past couple days, I’ve been doing family photos and one or more of them might quailfy for creativity. For sure, when I photograph family members, I try to make things interesting. I may update here with some of that later. The other thing we’ve done is to put up our house project website into a more public facing spot. You can access this via our DanekWorld website. In all fairness, the photo creativity has been ongoing for four weeks and will continue for many weeks to come. So, other than deciding to make it public, it’s not really a Week 49 project.

I managed to go through some of today’s photos and this one piqued my interest. I applied a few effects and liked it even more. Of course, how can I not? …it’s my granddaughter in a huge stocking hung from the fireplace mantle.

As luck would have it, my Son-in-Law, Patrick, posted this phrase on Facebook…

I don’t know if there’s a song buried in this somewhere. The last time Patrick gave me a one-liner, it lead to I Must Be Country from Week 15.

Thank you, Patrick!!! …I can check off Week 48 as a done deal.

Another busy week and we have been working, more or less, along side the building contractors, trying to keep ahead of them in terms of managing the stuff we store in the garage. As they get closer to the point where the garage needs to be empty, we need to have more and more shelving and boxes and bags moved to some other place. So, available time for my pet creativity projects is in short supply.

On the other hand…

…I’ve had some fun with the photography I’ve been doing to document construction progress. I have a website that I maintain just for this and there’s an almost daily upload to it. Today, as I was photographing the nearing emptiness we need to achieve before the builder can start stripping off the roof, I found myself in the doorway with the sun behind me. My shadow filled the frame and I’m certainly not tall enough to do that on my own. But, given where I was standing, I found the top of my head at the top edge of the doors shadow and I felt powerful. So, with wide angle lens on camera, I fired off a few frames, hit or miss (I couldn’t use the viewfinder and get the same presence in frame). On my computer, I thought this black and white treatment was interesting. So, here it is, my effort for the week.

Have Camera; Will Travel.

We’ve been quite busy this week because our construction project started up in earnest. No kidding around anymore. We have to get the garage emptied so that the builder can add a living space above it. So, that means all our junk (treasures) needed to find a temporary home. That means sorting, culling, repacking, and hiding. Today, however, being a Saturday, was the last day for my creativity challenge and I had nothing. (How often is that the case?) Fortunately, my granddaughter, Kaycie, was performing in her acting class holiday show. It was fun and she had a part in all the segments. But, before that even got started, we sat down for a pancake and sausage breakfast at the venue. During the break between eating and Kaycie’s performance, the kids got to color. (OK, so they were bored.)

Here’s a routine snap I took of Kaycie…

Knowing I was going to be jumping right back into packing the garage after the show, and that I’d be too tired to even think about creativity after this, I though “Why not do something clever with my camera as long as I’m here?”

So I did…

Here’s Jamie

Here’s Kaycie Again

Here’s Jessie

This was an easy assignment for me. The light in the hall (Moose Lodge in West Springfield) was coming in from the side windows, but we weren’t lit by it directly. I knew that I could make these images with a sluggish shutter speed allowing me to spin the camera during exposure. I got just about what I expected. The kids didn’t seem to mind. (Really, they were into their crayons. Weird.)

My favorite is Jamie because, as luck would have it, the lens was centered on the lock of hair on his head. So, the swirl no only takes in his face nicely, but the lock of hair – having it’s own natural curl – lent itself to the direction of the swirl. I didn’t plan it that way, either…just good luck.

I think I’m going to go with a musical theme for my creativity effort this week, at least with the lyrics (although I’ll have some sort of melody in mind).

I spent the early part of this week fixing computer problems and, unavoidably, thinking about Thanksgiving dinner. Between the two, not much synaptic energy got spent making up anything beautiful or artistic. Call it a total Creativity Fail for the first half of the week, but, I’ve got today and tomorrow to go and I’m inspired.

Truth be told, I got my inspiration after watching a Taylor Swift show on my computer. Her program probably aired on TV recently and I missed it there, but thanks to Hulu, I got to watch it on my monitor. I was actually testing out the performance of my newly installed Fedora 14 Linux system. Lee and I have swapped computers for the time being. (I wrote about this in an early Project 52 week.) One problem I’m having, now, is that certain HD video doesn’t play well on the new operating system. Hulu and Apple’s trailers seem to work just fine, but HD from other sites sucks. If I really need to, I can use my netbook or my Mac Pro when Lee’s not using it, but I’m bothered by the fact that Linux isn’t working well. I’ve read online that this “problem” has to do with something that I’m less than interested in investigating further…so I won’t bother. Besides, at some point I’ll get my Mac back. I only use the Linux system as a file server for the house, normally. So, this ain’t so bad.

Anyway, back to Taylor Swift. She’s a lovely, talented person and I was very interested in her program. There was a lot of background about how she and her band worked through her latest album. While watching, I kept getting ideas about my own lyrics. It’s not that I was stealing ideas from her work, but that the synergy of listening to another artist produces its own magic. One of the nice things about watching her show on my computer is that I was able to either pause her program, or just pull up a window somewhere off to the side and jot down my lyrics ideas. Neat!

Normally, I use iGoogle. This is a view that Google makes available and one of the applets in the view is a note taker. I have been inserting lyrics into it for a while. I used to use a real pencil and paper notebook, but I can’t find the latter since our move from out of Spencer, so the computer now captures my thoughts for me. While watching Taylor, I put down a couple lines here and there. Later on in the day, even more lyrics came to mind. Here’s what I ended up with in the note taking applet…

LYRICS

There's not that much between genius and crazy
But there's a big wide gap between useful and lazy

LYRICS

If I had to do it over again...

I'm thinking about all the places we've been
All the things that we saw
All the love we were in

LYRICS

Something tells me there's no place to hide
Your love is gonna win tonight

LYRICS

One of us has to be on top
It can't be fixed in Photoshop

LYRICS

Can a dog ever write a song
Or will you hear a mouse in a sing along
Isn't magic really something that we all share
From a human point of view, that sound fair!

LYRICS

All I have is a buck in in my hand
And I think I understand
What you want me to do today

It's all the things that you do
Make it clear that it's true
That I have to get the hell out of the way

LYRICS

I'm driving away
I'm never gonna look back
I've had my say

LYRICS

It's my turn and I've been hanging around,
I've been right here, I never let you down,
So, please, what about me
Say my name, don't forget about me.

LYRICS

Maybe you could shed some light for me
Just what were you doing at a quarter to three?
Were you going out with another guy
Now tell me the truth, come on, look me in the eye

I gotta know
Don't you love me anymore
I gotta know
This isn't something that I can ignore
I gotta know
I can see it in your face
I gotta know
If I should get back in the race

For you...

Several Hours Later

What I have ended up with several hours later was a combination of many of the lyric segments. I didn’t use them all, so I have some left over for another song on another day. Maybe Week 46? But the song I came up with was based on the line, “There not that much between genius and crazy”…and I actually wrioe into this space a song with the title, Lazy Crazy Genius. I knew that it would probably change and, sure enough, the next day I dropped that line. It sounded cute, but made no sense. Lazy Crazy Genius will have to live for another day.

On the other hand…

The Next Few Day(s)

…I ended up tweaking and kind of like this version. I can hear the music in my head for this but, for now, it’s up to the readers imagination.

Even though I’m typing this entry on a Sunday morning of Week 45, this is really something that started yesterday. So, technically, I’m pretty safe in claiming a victory for my Week 44 effort. But first, some background.

It had been a tough week with lots of things going on and, quite frankly, none of them conducive to creativity. I had tried to come up with some song lyrics but failed. On two mornings, in fact, I awoke with tunes and lyrics in my head. On the first day, I didn’t get up right away and write them down. By the time I had my morning coffee, they were gone. I might have won a Grammy with them…but I’ll never know. So, the next day, a different song popped up and this time I did write it down…

…but this is as far as it got. I don’t know if this will go any further. I’ve learned that, sometimes, if I just leave a lyric lying around untouched for a while, I’ll come up with something else, fit the old and new together, and come up with something I like. So, I’ll wait.

Now, back to Week 44 creativity. I was at a Chinese restaurant picking up lunch yesterday (a Saturday)…

…I was thinking about my creativity requirement for the week and I thought, “Hey, I’m running out of time! Why not do something with my camera phone? …why not right here.” So, I looked around and noticed a nice pattern in the table top where I was sitting and decided to give it a go. I knew that I could play with effects later on, as I’ve pretty much done with all my images for Project 52 (I’m so predictable). This time, I thought I’d share the image manipulation progression.

In the first, I have the original capture (I have an older Samsung phone – not great quality but OK for this purpose). I pumped up the color a bit in the second with a glow effect. The third had some contrast adjustments. I like how the red letters pop.

I wanted to go a bit zany, though, so I applied some solarization and ended up with this version…

…and now I don’t know if I prefer it over the third. But, at least, I can claim a victory for Week 44 now, right?

It’s been a very weird week. I have not done anything useful musically or photographically. I’ve had a few songs spin up inside my brain at various times (mostly when I’m waking), but nothing has made its way to paper and pen (or keyboard and screen). So, with just a few hours of time left for this week, I thought I’d try an essay. Basically, I’ll just talk about my week. I think my problem solving was, in its own way, creative.

Am I Crazy!

I’m pretty sure there’s an adage that says you’re crazy if you keep doing the same thing over and over, getting the same result each time, but each time expecting a different result. Yeah, I think that’s what happened to me this week.

It all started with Lee’s PC running real slow. Now, it was a pretty snappy design a few years ago and there’s no reason for it to be slow now. But, sure enough, there it was in front of me. Pogo Games was running at a snail’s pace. You might wonder what Pogo Games is. It’s a set of clever browser based games that require certain kinds of additional software on your system. In Lee’s case, this additional software was running on top of Debian Linux. What’s Linux? …well, it’s not Windows.

Linux! …yep. Last year, Lee’s Windows based computer had a meltdown. It, too, slowed down to just shy of completely useless. Windows XP has a habit of doing that. Over time, I’ve read, you simply need to reinstall and start over again. That helps for a while, but eventually, it slows down again. Over the past 10 years, I have done Windows XP installs about a dozen times. Each time, I would lose whole a day doing installs in bits and pieces, looking for device drivers, rebooting, rebooting, rebooting, installing even more software, then reboot, reboot. Then, there are the service packs. Really? Each time, the same result. Crazy.

So, last year, after the final super slow Windows XP experience, Lee agreed to give up some Windows-only programs that she rarely ran and went with Debian Linux. All went well for a while – a long while, in fact – until Pogo games appeared on our horizon.

She said, one day, “Hey, Jen is running Pogo games on her laptop, why can’t I do that here?”

Ooops.

So, I did some research. I discovered the bits that were missing from Debian Linux and I managed, after a few hours of Googling, to find how and where to do the install. I finished and the games were running. Success! We Pogo; therefore, we are.

…until she said, “Hey, these games run really slow.”

I checked the games on several computers. We tried them on my Mac. (I have a Mac Pro with gobs of memory and four Xeon processors. What’s a Xeon processor? …I don’t know, but it sound cool. Xeon Man!) On my Mac Pro, the games ran great. We tried them on a netbook. Ran great…

…so, I started thinking up all the various options I had to get her set up with a fast running solution that worked. I thought about a swap were she’d get Patrick’s iMac, he’d get my Mac Pro, and I’d get a faster hotrod PC on which to dual boot Windows and Linux. (I need Windows for some video and photo editing software that only runs on Windows. Yuck.) This swap didn’t work out. Too confusing.

Next, I thought I might just surprise her with her own Mac Mini. (They are so cute.) But, that’s $600 or so and I’m on a shoe string budget right now. That’s the one where I mention spending some money, see the look on Lee’s face, and she shames me and I bow my head and see my shoe strings.

In the end, I decided to go zero cost. I dumping the Linux on her PC and installing Windows XP. I thought to myself, “How bad can it be?” (Yeah, this is the crazy part. I’ve done this a dozen times, each time a royal pain in the pumpkins…but this time, it would be different, right?)

Long story short – I wasted more than a day. I got Windows installed, looked for all the drivers for all the quirky hardware I had, did the service packs, did the incessant reboots, and got Pogo Games running….and it ran well…

…until Windows crashed. The screen just froze. Reboot. It ran for a while then rebooted itself. Then it ran and froze. Reboot. Reboot. Reboot.

Now, Windows XP is a pain to install, but it shouldn’t cause the kind of problems we’re having now. It had to be a hardware problem!

I tried a couple things by modifying hardware but nothing made sense. Things still crashed. A lot! So, I went back to Linux.

I downloaded the latest Fedora and Ubuntu releases and tested them (which is something you can do with Linux, unlike Windows). The system seemed stable (no crashes). I chose Fedora (I like the name). I did a full install, moved Lee’s “My Documents” data to the system, rebuilt an environment that would please her. Next, I tried Pogo Games.

Nada. No way. Nothing.

I went online to many of the same places I had tried before, only to find that with the newer Linuxes, something was amiss. A lot of people were complaining about Pogo games not working. It all had to do with something called OpenJDK, which should work, but doesn’t.

In the meantime, Lee is happy using my Mac Pro computer, playing games, reading mail. Cool.

I tried the Ubuntu Linux next. (FWIW – I was able to do a full install of Linux in only a couple hours. Windows, a full day. Linux, hours, Windows, days. Disgusting.) Ubuntu yielded the same results. No Pogo Games.

So, now, I’m typing this up on what will turn out to become “my PC”. It’s Lee’s old Linux/Windows/Linux/Linux computer but now it’s all mine. She kind of likes using my workstation. She’s happy with my Xeon processors and four gigs of memory. She’s playing Pogo games quite nicely.

Little Kaycie walked into our room this morning and saw me sitting where Lee usually sits and her sitting in my old spot. Kaycie said, “Hey, you guys switched places!” Then she laughed.

All I can say is, after install after install after install, this was a result I didn’t quite expect. Maybe not crazy after all.