Okay, so the only movie I have seen lately at the theater is “Breaking Dawn Part 1″ which I really liked, but if you have not read the books, are not into vampires, or really dislike Kristen Stewart – then don’t bother seeing it. I don’t really care for Kristen Steward personally, I really wish she could act with her mouth closed a bit more, but overall she does an okay job as Bella. The movie is fun and if you are a hopeless romantic, like me, then you will enjoy the Twilight saga series. I’m much more of a Harry Potter fan though than Twilight…nothing will beat Harry Potter! 
I have seen some movies on DVD recently though that I would really recommend viewing. The first is an animated movie…”Dragons:Gift of the Night Fury”, if you like “How to Train your Dragon” then you will like this one. All the original cast came back for this little 45 minute mini Christmas movie. The Dragon movies I just love, they have really good morals and stories in them and are just really good, in my opinion.
The other movie you have to see is “Hachi” with Richard Gere. This movie tells the true meaning of loyalty and love. Its a tearjerker though. I cried several times after the movie was over just thinking about it. The really great part is it is based on a true story.
Do you know what I find interesting? Its that typically people that appear a certain way are often the most judgmental people and are often lying about something. I’m not the type of person who can talk to everyone but I will talk to anyone. I know I’m weird, always have been, I enjoy meeting people and I always try to be myself and I can talk to anyone, I try not to ever meet a stranger , in that, I take Sammy Davis Jr’s ideals and the “hello friend” mentality, I’ll talk to anyone (that’s the theater/bold personality in me) and I’m even one of the people that give small smiles when I walk by people in stores.
I’ve been reading some of Paul Eckman lately and he’s a fascinating person to me. He is the man that the the TV show “Lie To Me” is based on. He’s a human lie detector. I’ve taken several deception training tests now and its seems I do have a certain aptitude for reading people’s faces and figuring out their emotions. I scored really high on all the tests and it was recommended on the last test that I consider pursuing it more on a professional level. Its really a unique skill. Travis says that I have always had the ability to see through people before most other people do. Like several times I have met people at the various jobs he has had and I can tell pretty quickly things about the person. Case in point, about 3 years ago, a new employee was hired with his company. I knew the first time I talked to him that he was a selfish, egotistical jerk, I did not like him at all and told Travis to watch out for him that he was going to be a seagull…the type of person that takes credit for everything…hence, “Mine” – think of the seagulls in “Finding Nemo”. While I told this to Travis (who said that most everyone liked him and that I just didn’t know him), less than 3 months later he was a total jerk to everyone and was taking credit for things that he did not do and blaming his mistakes on other people, nothing was ever his fault and in a job situation that is incredibly unfair, especially when he was considered to be in a more managerial type of position. I’m digressing.
Back to Eckman, he’s a deception detector. Again, basically a human lie detector, but far more reliable because there are certain things people do when they reveal emotions and they reveal them all over their face and body. You can learn the techniques to detect when people are lying but some people have a gift at it too. According to the tests I took I have a bit of a gift for it…again, I’m digressing, but I had to tell you all of this in order to explain the next part…
Sometimes when I’m talking to people I have no idea what to say. Especially if its someone that I feel is lying, hiding something, conforming to a certain persona, or flat out being fake.
Example: There was a lot of this on Black Friday and it was fascinating to watch…people talking about what they were going to buy and how much they were going to spend, couples getting aggravated at each other over, people getting upset about the crowds, but if you watched their faces they clearly either didn’t have the money to buy the things or were simply buying it for appearance sake and not because they truly liked the item, or they were very tired and very angry, some just appeared hungry! The judgmental people though are really the fake ones…the people that judge another person or family because they do not appear a certain way or have as much money as they do or even maybe because they are too honest or maybe because they are not fake and have qualities that the other person wishes they themselves could possess.
Just some random observations from me…I’m definitely one of these people though that with certain people, the judgmental people, I do far better composing my thoughts on this blog then knowing how to talk to them and I think its because I have the ability to read their faces, to an extent, more than the average person. Its nice to discover this about myself, but its also nice to know that I really can tell things about people from their faces and emotions. I think I will pursue learning more about these techniques and maybe in turn it will help me learn how to talk to people better when I do detect their deception…
Why is it when some people come into your lives and have such an amazing impact, you lose touch with them? I had a close friend when we lived in Orlando that was both my mentor and friend. We stayed in touch after I moved to Vegas for a couple of years but then I guess life just got in the way a bit. I just found out that my mentor passed away in September. I wish I had known…I wish I had made more of an effort to stay in touch with her. She was such a comfort to me so many times while Travis was in Vegas for 3 months before I moved out there to be with him. I think this is why Orlando feels so much like home to me. It was not only the first place Travis and I lived together on our own, but also the first place that I was truly on my own by myself for 3 months while I worked a job that I came to love and still miss every day. I hope I will get back to Orlando one day and make it permanent…so many of the people there are important to me.
It was this friend though that kept me company and took me to movies and helped me to discover the beauty of teaching. She adopted a little girl from Russia the next year and I loved hearing all about her daughter and was so proud of her for adopting her daughter at her age. We stayed in touch until Anya was born and then we just kind of lost touch. I knew she had been diagnosed with cancer, but wasn’t sure how bad it was.
I sent her Christmas cards still, but I had no idea she had been so sick so recently. I hope she knows how much she meant to me and how much I appreciated her friendship and how I will always remember her.
Her daughter is now with another teacher friend from my first year of teaching. I have been able to be back in touch with her now which I am thankful for facebook for exactly this reason. What an amazing person this world has lost and what an amazing woman to step in and help raise her daughter. There are heroes in this world for sure and while I discovered I lost one today, I also discovered two new ones…the daughter that lost her Mom and the Mom that opened her heart to a new member of her family. I am sorry I lost touch with my friend that passed away, but am so thankful that she came into my life. Christine was truly a great friend to me…I remember going into her room the first week of school and seeing how crazy she was about to paint the walls. She was a 7th grade Language Arts teacher at that time. I also remember she smoked clove cigarettes and had the coolest blue convertible. She also loved jazz music and we both loved Nina Simone. She had two of the sweetest dogs and she took Travis and I to dinner at Donato’s the last night we spent in Orlando. She had her 50th birthday on September 11th 2001. I took her some roses that morning before the planes hit having no idea that her 50th birthday was going to be more memorable than just the number she was turning. She had red hair and the prettiest raspy sounding voice. Love to you always Chris!
I miss using film sometimes. Don’t get me wrong digital photography is great, however, there are things we are losing in using all digital…like prints. When you have a digital camera you don’t have to order prints, you can store a lot of your photos in files on your computer, therefore, you don’t have as much need for photo albums, but more than that… part of the fun with using film was the anticipation of not knowing what the photos would look like. I miss that. I miss that element of surprise. Of course on the plus side, you don’t get 24 photos in a pack anymore with only maybe 3 or 4 actually good photos. I can’t tell you how often I would get the throw away cameras from a wedding and out of probably 12 cameras I would develop that were throw away style, the people would usually get about 10 good shots…10 good photos out of a possible 288 photos! I also really liked working with negatives…developing them and printing from them, that was another neat thing about film photography. The clarity on really good photographs made a world of difference as well on 35mm. Digital photography has allowed us all to become really good photographers, however. The cameras themselves are quite impressive too, especially today, but there really is no big difference between having a 10 megapixel camera and a 12 megapixel camera, unless you are blowing up the photo to extremely large sizes, but again, that goes back to actually ordering prints.
So, having said all that when was the last time you were in a store and noticed canisters of film? I remember telling people in Vegas back in 2002 and 2003 when I worked for Kodak, that the Advantix film they were using in there Advantix camera was about to become obsolete…Remember Advantix? They rarely believed me and there were several people that even told me they had just bought a camera that required Advantix film. Advantix film was the type of drop and load film that you didn’t have to bother with the loading, as with 35mm when you had to work with the tail of the film and load it to where it would catch in the teeth of the camera. With Advantix, the negatives would be developed and then stay inside the Advantix canister, which could be both good and bad…good, in that once the roll was done it was easier to store, and was marked as used with a little black dot at the top of the canister; but this was bad because very often people would forget and would double expose this film…which always made for interesting pictures. However, Advantix film has really disappeared. 35mm is quickly disappearing too. Medium and Large format film was never something that was readily available in most camera stores anyway, but that is truly becoming a lost art…shooting with medium format. Medium format was even a bit above my skill level, it took such time and was quite expensive. I loved 35mm though.
I think because I took the classes in college and got to actually use a real darkroom with traditional equipment! That was so much fun! Working with the enlarger and then the trays of developer, stop bath, fixer and the final wash…then hanging the photos to dry…it was really cool! You would actually watch the photos develop onto 8×10 paper under the glow of the orangish/reddish lights, which was unlike most anything else. And trying to make absolutely sure your paper is not exposed to slightest hint of light so that you will get the cleanest image possible. You really learn what it is like to be blind inside a darkroom as everything is done by touch when you are initially working with the paper, no light…AT ALL…completely black. Light on unexposed paper was a very, very bad thing. To be honest, I have not even been in camera store recently…I should go into the Wolf Camera by Travis’ office one day and see what the store is like today.
This is mostly just a rambling post…I do love using a digital camera, its easy and fun and you can shoot literally hundreds of photos, but film photography is getting to be a rare and lost art form. This is why I will never sell my Nikon N60 35mm camera, because I actually do still love shooting with film. Which by the way, have you noticed how many photographers are out in the world now because of digital photography? The market is saturated with children and wedding photographers, I personally don’t have the patience to work with children (other than my own or friends) and I’m too scared to mess up wedding photographs, however the style of digital photography in these subjects is quite incredible. Much more natural looking photographs…many more outside photographs and the wedding photography these days tell a story…the story of the wedding. I love the storybook wedding look…its very unique, but I have to wonder if one day people will look back at their photos and wonder if they really needed a close up of the pearls they were wearing or a close up of the high heel shoe that was worn by the bridesmaids…interesting yes…important enough for a lasting memories I think remains to be seen…I’m sure this post is starting to sound like I’m against digital photography, but I’m not…I just miss the art behind the use of film. In terms of digital photography however, I have to say that I love the use of metallic paper on digital photographs and I really enjoy Photoshop…there are so many things you can do in Photoshop its unreal! I will always love and miss film though…
Anya’s 1st 1st grade musical performance was this past Thursday night and she did great. I think my favorite song was the “Raptor Rap”; it was really cute. They sang about 6 songs, the whole program lasted about 30 minutes, but it was cute. I’m still unsure about the schools here…there are days I really think I’d rather be a homeschooling Mom, but I’m still new here so I’m still trying to learn all the little eccentricities about the school. The nice thing is Texas and especially the area we are in has a great homeschool co-op program so even if we decide to homeschool at some point we will have a great group of people to share and work with and a lot Anya’s age as well! Right now though we are just trying to be positive about the school and take our time…I just don’t like how competitive it seems and then they essentially do the liberal minded thing and give the credit to all the kids when some kids did work harder than other kids and they are being told that no matter how hard they work everyone will still benefit…there are times and places that this may be a good thing, but its very contradicting to a 7 year old!!!
Here’s some photos from the performance…her cold was just starting here so you can see she was not overly excited to be singing tonight when she wasn’t feeling that good! She performed so good though and we are proud of her…Arwen even cooperated through most of the show too!
And here’s a few goofy shots with Arwen and I…
And finally a few shots of the cuties up for adoption at our local shelter that I’ve been taking photos of…
