• finding focus even when the camera won’t

    Four weeks and two days after my hysterectomy, I am finally feeling okay enough to do some light exercise. So, today:

    • five minutes on the stationary bike
    • 20 chest fly’s
    • 15 reps of my five physical therapy stretch band arm exercises

    I’m feeling pretty great about all that, if a little tired after.

    Jared and I got out to the lake last night and I got a sort-of interesting shot with the help of some lens flare:

    I was feeling sort of bummed last night. At the lake, I also tested some of my lenses on one of my cameras that has been fussy about its autofocus capabilities lately…..as in, sometimes the autofocus doesn’t work. I’d been planning to sell one of my cameras to help pay down some of our debt, but obviously I can’t sell a camera that might not be at its best. And I would send it to Edison, NJ for repair if I could reliably get the problem to replicate but it doesn’t always malfunction. So when I took this photo, I was sort of in a mood. The lens flare, though somewhat interesting, also captured the hazy frustration I was feeling.

    But this morning, I remembered that I do have a good number of manual focus lenses: I love my Minolta and my Cinelux lenses! And, the camera works just fine in manual focus. So, it appears that moving forward I will simply have a manual focus Fuji GFX camera and a GFX camera that I use my native lenses with. Not ideal for my plan to pay down our debt, but it does make use of my current gear and is probably a pretty darn good plan moving forward.

    Sometimes I have brief flickers of just selling all my photo gear and getting out of photography altogether. I know that is not likely healthy, and I know I’d likely just want to start up again probably less than a year after I got out.

    I know the answer: Get out and photograph more.

    You can read more about me here.

  • when taking It easy is the hardest work

    I’m going to try to write more consistently.

    Today’s goal was basic: get a shower. Goal accomplished.

    Tuesday was a rough day; I wasn’t feeling physically great after having way-overdone it on Monday. I was pretty sure I was going to have to go back in, which now feels funny considering it’s Friday and I feel much better, if a little washed out.

    It is difficult to remember that I am recovering from major surgery. It’s hard to think of it as major surgery because all in all, pain was minimal and I don’t have crazy external incisions at all. Just three tiny little almost cute incisions.

    But Tuesday reminded me that I have to take it easy. I don’t like it and I am bored and it feels ridiculous. But it is what it is.

    I am considering selling my second camera and a few of my lenses. I sort of have this vision of being a one-camera, one-lens photographer. Kind of funny to circle back around to that after so many years of chasing better and more, photography-wise. But, here we are.

    And then there are the days like today where I am writing, where I only took a single photo of Bess our cat, where I just am sort of existing.

    It is difficult to be kind to myself sometimes.

    Fridays in the summer Jared is off, so we took Oliver to a bouncy house in town earlier in the day:

    It’s pretty funny that I got a photo of one of the little kid bouncy houses– Oliver was playing in a lot of others but not this one.

    It’s been raining a lot, and with my brief setback earlier in the week, Oliver didn’t make it to the pool. I feel bad about it, but we’re going to try to do more next week.

    Summertime is quick slipping by for sure.

    You can read more about why I write here.

  • recovery and beading

    Hysterectomy recovery isn’t so easy. It would probably be easier if there was more actual pain to keep me from wanting to be active.

    Yesterday, I took Liam on a tour of Georgia Tech– well, I attended the presentation, Liam went on the tour while I sat at the student center.

    It has long been a goal to get the things that we don’t absolutely want to keep forever cleaned out from storage in various places around our house. So, after we got home yesterday, I had Liam bring up some boxes of toys.

    And, I went through some boxes that Jared had brought up previously.

    And then, all of a sudden I was bleeding more than I really have at all since the surgery.

    So, Jared has put me on bedrest. I was supposed to take Liam to Kennesaw State for his tour there today, but Jared took the day off to take him instead.

    And I know all this will be worth it in the end, I know that there were problems we didn’t even know about that were addressed by the surgery. But right now, it is not feeling very worth it.

    I am not a very good patient, to say the least.

    Treasures were found when we were going through things yesterday, and among them was this cameo pendant. I made a necklace for my best friend to wear when she was maid of honor in our wedding, and it wasn’t her style so I inherited it after the wedding. It has been several iterations of necklaces at this point, and I was pretty sure it was lost forever at this point. I am thrilled to be able to make another necklace with it.

    It’s not the best photo and the necklace may seem like an odd combo of beads and colors to other people but all these beads are sentimental to me: the cameo because of the wedding. There are also some of the crystal beads I wore myself in a different necklace on our wedding day. And some other antique beads that are sentimental, and the glass beads are ones that I made as part of a lamp work bead-making class that Jared gave me in 2010 or so.

    I made another necklace, too, that was kind of fun:

    Other than that, watching a whole bunch of trashy Maury TV has helped me feel slightly better today, as well.

    In addition to my own treasures, we are in the process of going through the lifetime’s worth of toys that the boys have accumulated, mostly stored for several years now. Soooo very proud of Liam, Porter, and Oliver, both for their work yesterday and for Liam and Oliver setting aside about half of their outdoor toys to get rid of today.

    We are getting ready for a garage sale sometime soon, though it may be September or so before we get around to it. It will be cooler by then, too.

  • on my recent hysterectomy

    Two days shy of three weeks ago, I had a complete hysterectomy. They took everything. While medically justified due to family history, they did find problems with both ovaries in surgery that made it apparent they did indeed need to come out. The decision was made initially because I just wanted to prevent problems as I got older, so the timing of the ovarian problems was just a happy coincidence.

    The first three or four days were the worst, though the physical pain hasn’t been too bad overall. Now I struggle with the not doing too much, as I feel called now to do things like purge my house of unnecessary clutter and potentially rearrange furniture.

    I feel like I should be lamenting the loss of my ability to have more children, but the reality is, I have been mourning that loss of ability for the better part of a decade.

    Our youngest son was a surprise pregnancy and I was so traumatized by that pregnancy that I not only got my tubes tied, I insisted on my husband having his own procedure, too. But after the dust had cleared from those procedures, and after I realized that yes, I can be a successful stay at home mom to toddlers, I regretted that sterilization choice.

    So, I have been mourning the loss of my fertility for most of a decade so it doesn’t feel that jarring now that it is permanently impossible to have more children.

    My husband and I have three beautiful, wonderful, brilliant, kind, and funny boys. I treasure each of them.

    In reality, this whole procedure, assuming the rest of recovery goes smoothly, feels like a big gift to myself, not a loss at all. No more periods; immediate menopause so no more years of the back and forth wondering when menopause will come.

    I’ve been walking a little with Jared most days at the Marina, and yesterday I started doing my lying chest fly exercises that I love to help my chest and back– they are part of my physical therapy exercises and it felt so good to ease back into them. And I got clearance to drive last Thursday, so I have my freedom again.

    Here’s to hoping the remainder of my recovery goes smoothly.