Tag: faith

  • Facing a Fear: I Did It

    I do not like dealing with my toenails. At all.

    When I was a little girl, my Mama had to hold me down to let them cut my toenails.

    It was bad. Really.

    The issue is compounded by the fact that with the scoliosis and spinal fusion, I actually can’t get to my toes super well at all. I can cut my own toenails as an adult, but it is not the easiest thing in the world.

    So when my big left toenail became fungal three years ago, I was filled with a sort of existential dread.

    And immediately, within the month, I went to a podiatrist, who promptly told me it didn’t look like a typical fungus and that I should come back in a year if it was giving me trouble.

    Three years later, it had mostly stopped growing the entirety of those three years and it was clear it was indeed a fungal infection.

    So last September, I faced it and went to the podiatrist, sure they would remove it that very day.

    Turns out podiatrist offices don’t work that way.

    She gave me some ketoconazole and told me to use it and Vicks and she didn’t know how long it would take to clear up; when I mentioned removal she said it was an option.

    Then in December when I mentioned the whole episode to my dermatologist at my appointment there, she said that the ketoconazole was going to do nothing, and gave me some weird enamel paint stuff that made my nail hard and told me to file it weekly.

    That stuff took away permanently any hope of actually cutting my toenails, and actually, for some reason the toenail started growing into the base of my toenail bed, backwards.

    And the backwards growth was what promptly sent me back to the podiatrist last week, begging to have the whole thing just taken off permanently.

    Which is no small thing, because of that whole fear of people messing with my toenails.

    And in fact, the fear is so bad that one of my greatest all-time primal fears ever has ever been someone prying off my toenails.

    So yesterday, as I sat just after having my left big toe injected with local anesthetic to deaden it, I posted this on Facebook:

    “So one of my most primal fears is having my toenails, specifically my big toenails, pried off. No joke, in the midst of the only time I had to be restrained due to psychiatric reasons, the delusion of the day was that they were restraining me to pry my big toenails off.

    So what am I sitting in the podiatrist’s chair waiting on? To have my left big toenail removed, permanently.

    It’s been fungal for at least 3 years but it has given me trouble with ingrown issues since I was a child.

    I am ecastatic it will be gone permanently, and not worried about the cosmetics, and I guess technically today is an achievement and exercise in facing one of my worst fears, all by myself since Jared is at work.

    And the dr says I made it through the worst part, which was the deadening injections.

    And I can go shopping for stuff for the weekend’s weather, too.

    I don’t normally keep my phone with me during Dr appts but she said it was fine for distracting myself.”

    The doctor said afterward, with my having told her about the fear, and told her nurse about the fear, beforehand, that she’d made sure she deadened it well and made sure to let it sit long enough to for sure be effective because she really didn’t want to have to come back in and poke me with a needle again after having hurt me with the procedure.

    But sure enough, the procedure itself took like 5 minutes, maybe 10 max, and it was not bad at all. I took a photo I will spare the world after, in fact– you know, with photography being my coping mechanism for everything and all– of the exposed toe bed before it got wrapped up in the bandage post procedure. I’d taken a photo of it before the procedure started, too, for posterity.

    And pretty much the rest of my whole morning and yesterday during the day was set up for success, because I’d done the very thing I was afraid of most as a child, probably. And that’s saying something considering they cut me open on front and back and messed with my innards in a very dramatic fashion for that scoliosis surgery.

  • Randomness

    You know what? I sure have missed writing.

    Also, randomness: I’m pretty darn good at Russian on Duolingo. Apparently there were hidden subconscious benefits to spending a good amount of time in my toddler years in a college language lab, as Russian, Greek, and Spanish are all fairly intuitive in addition to the French I did actually study.

    And, there’s a new job to get ready for, and I am glad.

    And it’s nearly tax season, and I am glad about that, too.

    But, it’s bedtime. And with said job on the horizon, routine is becoming super-duper important.

    And apparently my back is really messed up. I don’t know why my spine is a corkscrew, but it is.

    Poor Abby has to have a dental on February 2; she has an infection in her mouth and will have to have several teeth pulled too. I guess that comes from us not brushing her teeth– sorry girl. She’s been a trooper but we finally got her to the vet today. I am so thankful my therapy dog only has to have a dental and it was nothing worse to worry about. I was afraid she had kidney issues.

    Aside from the trip to the vet, it was a good day.

    I’m thankful to be getting back into the headspace that I can concentrate on writing. It’s been a long winter and I am grateful that the fictionalized memoir is still a project on the horizon. It may take me a decade to write, but will be well-worth it.

  • On The Bus

    I’ve been on the struggle bus for a while now.

    For years and years, actually.

    Jared is the one who named it the “struggle bus.” 

    This winter is actually slightly more bearable because of the shears in the house. 

    Light helps.

    And even though I am on the struggle bus, there are small mercies.

    A new job.

    A fun New Year’s Eve.

    New tires on my car that make it formidable in the rain.

    Mastering the French pin up-do.

    Figuring out that why yes, I can live without cheese in my life. And be happier for it.

    Figuring out that why yes, I can be happier without some people in my life, too.

    Figuring out that even life without the GFX is pretty darn great. 

    My hair is growing. It’s longer now than it’s been in probably 11 years or so. I forgot that when it gets to a certain length, the ends in the front underneath get curly on their own. Completely forgot that at all. It’s well on its way to being as long as it was on the 404 page.

    And there is terror, and I haven’t been writing.

    It’s mostly been survival mode.

    There are new routines with the new year, and the future is bright. 

    Maybe life is the struggle bus.

    It’s a pretty darn wild ride.

    There is hope. At least I’m on the bus.

  • So Long GFX, It’s Been Real

    Like the title says.

    Last week I got the M65 to FX adapter I needed to be able to adapt the Cinelux lenses to my Fujifilm X-S20. And the 37.5mm focuses like a dream now that I have the proper adapter.

    And, I played around some more with my Minolta lenses.

    And I got to thinking that I really missed that beautiful XF 50mm f1 lens I sold a little over 4 years ago to be able to afford the GFX 50S II camera to begin with. 

    And common sense began to really get the better of me in knowing that really it’s going to be quite some time before I can really afford to buy the XF 70-300mm lens that I really wanted to be able to do bird and other wildlife photography with the X-S20. 

    And since I could still make yummy portraits with the Cinelux lenses (that arguably have a better look), and since I could do 99% of the things I wanted with the X-S20, I started to question the wisdom of hanging onto the GFX camera knowing it had served faithfully for 4 years but was a heavy camera.

    And, I did some heavy comparison shots with both the Cinelux and the Minolta lenses.

    Turns out, if I up the denoise tool and the clarity and the sharpness and the shadows in Lightroom, there’s an awful lot of questions about which lens shot what with what camera.

    And so, the GFX went to KEH yesterday, and I came home with the XF 50mm f1, the 70-300mm that I wanted, and a little extra grocery money for the month. 

    The cat in the photo above is not our cat. This is a cat that belongs to some random unknown neighbor, a cat that has claimed our yard as its own when our dogs are not out in the yard to terrorize it. It’s outside in our yard a lot when I go out there or when I’m backing the car out of the driveway. Today it got to be a test subject since I couldn’t quickly spot any birds before the rain started.

    And, I won’t lie: I will miss the medium format camera. And I won’t lie even more because it’s true that I will miss the self-imposed “status” that came along with shooting medium format even if it was a status that only I recognized. APS-C just doesn’t have the same ring.

    But when 99% of the look I love is achievable with the camera that is more fun to shoot with…..there’s an awful lot to be said about that. Especially when it is far easier to achieve focus, especially when the focus is faster on the autofocus lenses, especially when the whole setup is smaller and lighter, and especially since I can dictate the direction of whatever business I may or may not have.

    And probably most importantly, especially when the itch to upgrade happens and it won’t cost another $4,000 or more to do so next time. 

    So, that’s been much of the labor of this week. Reining in is not easy, but sometimes it is necessary. I have been in a realism and a “buy it once” sort of mindset since Christmas, and it was time to realize that the tools I had in my photography arsenal were not exactly serving me as best they could. 

    Besides, that yummy jute purse I made and carry around is an awful lot lighter when it’s carrying around X Series gear than it was with the GFX stuff. And it’s a heavy purse to begin with. 

  • On Foresight and Being a Self-Proclaimed Armchair Heritage-Modern Strategist

    So this post is going to have a tad bit of an indignant tone.

    Tonight, I took these frames to get new progressive, Transitions lenses:

    And you know what? I bought these frames from Zeelool on July 31, 2021.

    At the time, I just thought they looked cool. These are Zeelool’s Menin frames and they have since been discontinued. I don’t know why they were discontinued, and I don’t know when.

    What I do know is that when I bought them, my kids thought they looked crazy. At the time, I was bald by choice, which didn’t help the “crazy” look. 

    But I had no idea at the time that by late 2025 and early 2026, asymmetrical and geometric frames would be trendsetting.

    In 2021, I just knew they looked cool.

    Same thing with mirrorless cameras.

    In 2011, I wanted an interchangeable lens camera to be able to take nice pictures for a blog. I wanted to be a “Mommy Blogger.” Jared told me if I’d wait till Christmas, he’d buy me a DSLR for Christmas.

    I was in Best Buy by myself one night, and I saw this display with a new kind of camera, and it was a Sony Alpha NEX 5N— a new kind of camera they were calling “mirrorless….” I hardly even knew that mirrors at the time were an integral part of the build of a DSLR.

    I came home with the Sony Alpha NEX 5N. That was November of 2011. I didn’t wait for Christmas.

    And that first year with that camera: I remember camping with church and there was someone who was really into photography at the time on that camping trip in 2012. And I remember the sort of side-eye-rolls my little powerhouse got. Surely it couldn’t be a serious tool for serious work.

    To her credit, the documentary photography instructor at Emory in summer 2012 was actually one of the first affirming folks that said I’d made a good choice: all she cared about was that I could control my camera manually, which she helped me figure out that indeed, I very well could. 

    By 2013, I was standing in the kitchen at Carrollton Presbyterian Church while my friend was getting Wednesday night dinner ready, and I vividly remember feeling sheepish and very meek about it, but I told her, “I’m pretty sure mirrorless cameras are the future,” and she looked at me like I was crazy.

    And by 2013, I was regularly adapting vintage lenses to that Sony Alpha NEX 5N camera. I could sometimes find adapters, but they were not good. Often, they arrived with loose lens mounts. Good adapters were so hard to find that I more than once took apart a Miranda camera or a Minolta camera so that I could have a sturdier lens mount for a cheap adapter, taking apart the adapter, too. 

    Because by 2013 I knew that the yumminess that comes with vintage lenses was worth something.

    In 2025, vintage filters are a ubiquitous part of cell phone culture.

    And now, in 2026, I walked into Costco tonight with 2 French pins holding my hair, pins that arrived not from a glitzy Ulta display but in a plain box as they are sold in Europe and elsewhere, and I was literally the only person I saw with my hair up that way. I saw people with elastics and clips, but not a single other French pin in the store. Apparently they are reserved for special occasion up-do’s in the United States.

    And I have zero idea why because they are so dang practical: They do not leave crimps in your hair when you take it back down again, and it literally takes the time it takes me to put my hair in an elastic messy bun to do the same with 2 French pins. And you don’t have to buy a million of them. The ones I bought will last the rest of my life probably. 

    And in being without a dedicated job for so long, I’m suddenly realized that I’ve developed my own sacred ritual over the years, in a million different ways that I don’t even think to write about because it’s so ordinary to me probably: Wearing hair hardware that would have been familiar to my great-grandmother in 1916 and yet getting ready to wear glasses that won’t be out of place in 2027, carrying around camera gear from the 1970s that performs fantastically on my 2023-model GFX and X Series Fujifilm cameras….. I’m finally figuring out that my brain just works in a way that the conventional workplace simply is not ready for. 

    In 2011, the serious photographers of their day were not ready to hear that that they would be changing out the entirety of their gear systems in a decade or less.

    And I know that I wrote about “buy it once” culture a few days ago and I am very well aware that I found the website “buymeonce.com” probably over 3 years ago at least; it’s been a bookmark on my Safari home screen for that long anyway. And I am very well aware that it is a growing movement now that I am only jumping on the bandwagon for as people are growing weary of fast fashion. 

    And in early 2026 even, there are plenty of people who are still not ready to hear either that it is indeed possible to self-engineer ethical parameters for AI life coaching from readily available platforms. And yet, I’m doing it daily with Gemini.

    And yet, here we are. I’ve been on SSDI since 2011 because my brain needs more to do than the conventional workplace can find me to do in retail or admin assistant type jobs.

    Anybody want to find me a job in trends forecasting?