This month is really sailing by isn't it?
It feels like I haven't been here writing much this summer.  I could go and check if this is true I guess but that sounds like a lot of work.  You can let me know if it is true if you believe it to be so.

In only a week I am on two weeks vacation.  I like vacation, you know, like pretty much every other person on the planet.  Vacation is a good, good thing.

I don't think I get enough vacation at only 3 weeks a year but I can't really complain too much I guess because that is fairly standard and that is just what I get.  There is a chance that I might go up a week next year, to 4 weeks but I am not sure.  In fact it may not be so.  It all depends on things like which hire date matters and when I became full time and what colour the sun was the day that I first hit a dog star in my 6th house after being hired.  I could ask someone but right now, the thought that I might get an extra week of holidays next year is quite nice and I am not ready to let it go.

So I have decided what I am going to do on my holidays, or at least part of them. For the first part I am going to go and visit with my grandmother.  My grandmother is the cutest little ukranian woman you would ever want to have cook perogies for you.   Well not you, you can't have her, she's mine. MINE I tell you, ALL mine.  (well, she does have some cooking skills available for my dad and brother I guess but they only really count when they are not in the way of her cooking for me.) 
   Then for the second part I am borrowing my parent's car and I am going to go and wander around the okanagan  for a few days. Not too many actually, Tuesday through Sunday or so.  This will be cool for a couple of reasons.  One of them is that I will get to see a friend that I have not seen in quite a while, that I have missed quite a bit as well.  J and I used to spend a lot of time together, way back in high school, and then in summers home from university.  But then he moved where he was and I moved where I was and we haven't really seen each other much since then.  The other is that I have never been to or seen the Okanagan and this will finally allow me to say that I have I seen it.  I have decided that this will be for sure the type of trip that if I see a sign that says, 'worlds biggest' anything, even if it is goitre, that I will have to stop.  That is just the type of vacation that it will have to be.  There is also the additional factor that I might go a bit past the Okanagan to Castlegar where I will get to visit one of my favourite cousins, whom I have not seen in a couple of years.  This would also be pretty cool I think. But we shall see, I like the idea that this holiday plan is very malleable and alterable with the day or the thing that is going on.

   Ever get a creation high?  It's when you start creating and you get sort of high and light headed and full of energy?  I generally get them to some small extent when I am working on something that will turn out really cool.  Something like a nice new sculpture or piece of jewellery or something like that.  I don't often get that feeling from my photography.  Because when I am doing it, it is a much more subdued feeling.   When you are taking the photo's it is pretty cool and not too hard to get lost in the notion that you are creating but you don't get the same level of thrill of creation. This is due in no small part to the lack of immediate product I think.  In the back of your head there is always the notion that this picture might not turn out and you won't really know this for a few days or however long it takes you to get the stuff developed. 
   And then after when you are getting your photo's back, or you are dealing with them digitally, you are not as closely coupled with the creation process itself so you kind of lose the thrill again.  I wonder if I learned how to develop my own film if I could harness the feeling all the way across the process and regain the high...hmmm...something to think about and possibly explore later.  Well, yesterday I hit a point of total creative elation with respect to photography.

   It all started last weekend when I was watching the movie The Anniversary with a couple of friends (did I talk about this already, it feels like I did, oh well, keep reading it does get to new stuff even if I did).  One of the best friends of the main couple is a photographer, a really good one, much better than I am for sure, and she likes to gift them with photo's that she has taken.  You can tell this because at one point she gives one as a gift and also because their house is positively filled with them.  Well as I was watching these one of my friends indicated that she wished she had a good photographer friend so she could get more things like that.   I responded, jokingly, that she could have as many of my prints as she wanted.  Now, I say jokingly because this friend is an interior designer by education and trade and also one of the most particular people I know about what she is going to have associated with her in any way...meaning that there was not a thought in my mind that anything I had ever done would ever be considered good enough to go up on her wall.  Next thing I know I am rocked back in my chair as she says that she would love to have some of my photo's up on her wall. This friend also has a habit of not doing or saying anything just because it is the right thing to do.
   And it didn't end there we talked about it a couple of times during the week and her excitement level remained as high as mine did.  I am totally in love with the notion that someone else wants me to hang on their wall.  I love that kind of appreciation.  Friday night it even got to the point where we went out and did some frame shopping.  That was loads of fun. Well yesterday I went out and bought a new printer so that I could actually produce the prints that I was going to need to make this work.  I came home and started.  I printed out some, and framed some and all of a sudden I was really getting into it.  I was doing one for me, one for her and one for a housewarming present for my cousin.  As this was happening I started chatting with a friend about what I was doing and she mentioned that she would love to have something done by me hanging on her wall.  Well this was nice and I said she could go to my images section and see if there was anything she liked. 
   It turned out that she had never been to my images section and as a result had never seen any of my photography.  All of a sudden I was being drowned in compliments.  She loves my work, she NEEDS to have 3 of them on her walls.  The compliments, with the need on top of the already creative process shot me right off the walls in a state of creative bliss. It was like floating on air, with a paintbrush and painting god on the undersides of the clouds as I passed on by.  Michelangelo eat your heart out.  Ok, I may have gone a step to far there but you get the idea.  It was so great, so empowering, so wonderful.  Today another friend has indicated that she would like to have a print of mine on her wall.   It continues. It is good. it is grand.

Any of you want one?  We can negotiate.   :)