Journal of a Sabbatical

September 28, 1998

monday rolls around again

Copyright © 1998, Janet I. Egan

When was the last time I had to spend Monday recovering from the weekend? Geez. And I didn't even see Nancy or go out. Between the late night on Friday , the fast strut in the hot sun on Saturday, and the all day writing conference yesterday I was wiped out. I turned zombie like last night, walking around in a daze. It was also deluge day of my period, which added to the general exhaustion.

I canceled the Auntmobile's appointment for a major service plus new cv boots and a look at why the gas gauge doesn't work, and went back to bed until nearly 10:00, by which time I actually felt rested. After coffee and a scone and conversation with Ned about the world economy and Mark McGwire, I was revived enough to make a ton of phone calls I've been procrastinating on, answer some email, send some email about stuff for the shelter, plow through dozens of odds and ends of little stuff until suddenly it was 3:00 PM! I realized two things: I don't want to go to the MRFRS dinner tonight at the Rowley Country Club. It's going to be dark by 7:00 so if I'm going to take photos I'd better get out there and do it.

The writer's block has extended itself to photography now. I get the camera out and either can't find anything I want to make a picture of or try to capture things that are impossible with my equipment. Mentally, I start comparing myself not to photographic greats - I know I'm not Ansel Adams, ok? - but to everybody who's ever picked up a camera. Sort of the way I've been comparing my journal to other online journals.

I'm not sure why I'm so insecure about this lately. My father was a really good photographer and I'll never be as good as he was. On the other hand, I don't photograph fires (Water Fire doesn't count - I mean disaster fires like my father photographed) or race cars as subject matter. And although I had a long black and white period, I mostly do color now - granted a muted palette. Maybe I should use black and white given my predilection for gray but black and white doesn't do it for me on the kind of overcast days I like to photograph. I like the washed out colors, the browns and grays, and the abstract shapes and juxtapositions of colors.

A week or so ago I found myself thinking I should give up photography altogether, yet this afternoon I was fantasizing about the Sony Mavica digital camera with the 10x zoom, that would get me close to them whimbrels, ayup. Whimbrels on floppy disk. Just think of it. Too bad my floppy drive is still weird. Never have figured out what's wrong with it, but instead of taking the whole bleeping computer in to Computertown or whatever to see if they can find the problem the second time around, I solved my immediate problem by scanning in a hardcopy of the vegetation profile that I couldn't read off the disk and then spent painstaking hours correcting the scanned copy. It might have been faster to type it all in. But maybe not since it's all Latin names of plants. I'd be typing slowly anyway. Anybody out there got a botanical spell checker?

Where was I, oh yeah, giving up photography or getting a whiz bang digital camera with a 10x zoom. What are these x's anyway? 10 times what? Is this the 500 mm lens I've always wanted?

Where was I, oh yeah, the lens I've always wanted. I went to the Hellcat dike this afternoon to finish the roll of film so I could get prints of the Strut pictures before my next shift. That's when my fantasies about a 500 mm lens really kicked in. I could see all these cool birds with binoculars but couldn't photograph them. The whimbrels practically walked right up to me but it still wasn't close enough for a good photo with the 160 mm lens. What's 160 in x's?