It may not be art, but I like it

Lately, all I do is work, parent, clean, and get enough sleep. (When I wasn't doing that last bit, the first and second bits were not going so well.) This weekend, Boy Detective's grandmother and aunt were kind enough to kidnap him for a little over 48 hours. I worked only about 5 of those hours, and didn't sleep enough, which left plenty of hours for me to do... just about nothing. I read all of DC's 52, went to Tribe Comics and Games twice, and cleared out my feed reader in my pajamas while eating eating peanut butter toast and watching C-Man paint Warmachine miniatures.

We lead such a fascinating life.

My life has always been boring like this, which is usually okay with me. But before this weekend, my last brief break from the onslaught of work was a recent 2 hour deviation from my normal one track life, on a Saturday morning, while C-Man took Boy Detective to the library and Whole Foods. That didn't go so well, but I was blissfully unaware of it at the time because I was busy taking a class on how to use my camera.

Do I have a new camera? No. I have an old point and shoot camera whose picture quality is now matched by my phone as long as I'm outdoors. But you see, cameras have these things called settings. The book that came with the camera made my eyes glaze over. I couldn't decipher it. I did find the button for "flower." I used it to get a better shot of Boy Detective's Captain America action figure once when he was climbing the dresser.

Then a Groupon offer showed up for Chimpsy Photo Field Trips. I figured that I could either just give up on the camera and use the phone, or learn how to use the camera. It also seemed like two hours spending something totally different might be a nice change of pace.

The class format was perfect for me. We got a few small, useful tips rather than 75 of them all at once, and then we walked around outside and did stuff so we could see what it meant.

Of the photos I took that day, these are the ones I kept. Angelina asked if I might be able to share them by October when my life will hopefully be less busy, but what the hell, Boy Detective is asleep now and it's not quite bedtime yet. So here you go. You should be able to click on each one for a slightly larger version if you want. Putting my name on them makes them look less cool, but other original photos I have posted to this blog have been ganked by internetizens, so what can you do.

(Reader users, you may need to click through, apologies. I need to fix that someday, but see aforementioned lack of time.)

Too dark, oh well:

Not too dark:

It's hard to take a bad photo of a flower, as long as it's focused. I was mostly glad the damn bee finally sat still, though I wish I'd gotten closer:

I find this one quite cheerful. It doesn't embiggen, I'm still working on my Picasa process here.

Oh look, someone's getting ambitious:

And this last one cracks me up. What the heck am I doing with my fingers? I even have one pinky up like I'm drinking tea.

Don't take the self-deprecating comments for more than me entertaining myself. I was quite happy with that I managed to do that day. I also feel like I may take better photos of what I normally take photos of, which is not strings of light bulbs and holes in fences.