Category: fresh ideas!

Disorganized Organization

Since this week’s Theme Thursday is the word organize, and since this blogger is anything but organized, I present a few photos for my entry into this week’s game.

Here’s a few more beauty shots of the fresh veggies on display in my cafeteria at work.

Who knew a simple, well organized pile of veg could look so darn enticing!

Not me.



Lovely, prickly artichokes (a personal fave)




Wait, I thought all carrots were those perfect small baby variety?




Leeky!





Photos by Karen Fayeth, Copyright 2012, and subject to the Creative Commons license on the far right column of this page. Taken with an iPhone4s and the Hipstamatic app.



Eek! A Monster!

Oh, but it’s such a cute little cross eyed monster.**





Look at him all rawr with all the nose holes and the rectangular mouth.

I just want to pat his little growling head and feed him raw meat. Yes I do.

I suppose I should actually find a way to tame this little beast because he’s about to climb into my backpack so we can board an airplane.

That’s right folks, Oh Fair New Mexico is set to hit the road. Or rather, fly the skies.

This time we’re going *international*.

Whew! Very exciting times!

I’m a embarrassed to admit that in my little life, the only times I’ve been out of the US was the many occasions dancing back and forth across the border in both Juarez and Matamoros.

And of course, I spend every day at work calling every country code you can think of. I travel the globe via telephone lines, but when I was hired this was to be a non-traveling position. Ah well.

I’ve had a passport for decades and even had to renew it. But I’ve never, not once gotten that bad boy stamped.

Well that’s about to change. The Boss Man and the Big Boss Man have seen fit to put a ticket in my hand and a Bon Voyage banner across my tuchus.

Next week, I’m headed to Singapore. I’m going for work but I’m as excited as though I was having a vacation.

The Good Man was able to rearrange his schedule to come along so it should be big fun (when I’m not suffering the slings and arrows of my employer).

Actually, the work part of the trip should be fascinating too. I’m attending an event put on by one of our biggest suppliers. They are bringing local in-country reps from each of their offices across Asia. So people from Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan, India, China, and so on are flying in to meet…well…me.

My company gives their company a lot of money, and I will be the senior representative in attendance, and oh I also run the entire program (i.e. I control the money) so I guess I’m worth meeting? Weird. Really, very weird.

I suppose if I’m the one in charge (a concept that should worry you endlessly) then I’d better behave myself.

That’s going to be really, really difficult.

Geez, I even went out and bought professional clothes for this event (I work in Silicon Valley, “professional clothes” is a concept no one cares about).

I am alternately nervous and so freaking excited I can hardly contain myself.

There! I’m going to be there!! Yesss!





**In case my little monster is unfamiliar to you, it’s a universal power adapter.

Singapore image found in seveal places across the web. If it’s yours, please do let me know and I’m more than happy to either take it down or give you credit.



Everything Old is New Again

Take a look at this photo. It’s not my photo. I came across it yesterday and I kind of liked it.




It’s got that color saturation and green tinge that you see in a lot of these new square format apps for the iPhone and Android (my personal favorite is Hipstamatic).

Actually, I like this photo a lot. But I didn’t heart it on Instagram. I didn’t like it on Facebook. I didn’t re-Tweet it either.

Because this photo was found inside a frame and mounted to a wall at the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University.

This photo is part of their Walker Evans show.

This weekend, my photography group took a field trip to check out the exhibit. Going in, I knew very little about Walker Evans other than he had captured a lot of powerful black and white images from the Depression. I purposefully didn’t study up before my trip because I wanted to learn about the photographer through his photos.

Well. Knock me over. I was really, seriously and deeply educated by the time all was said and done.

First of all, Walker was a writer, and then moved into photography. He did both for most of his life. So take that you scallywags who say an artist should pick a medium and not dabble. Feh! Also, I really came to appreciate Walker’s sense of irony. You have to get up close and look around the frame of his photos to find it, but it’s always in there.

That said, the part of the exhibit that gave me the “holy crap!” moment of connection was at the very end when I saw the photos tucked away on the back wall.

It seems that in his early seventies, Walker Evans was left tired and uninspired and found himself unwilling or perhaps unable to create.

And then he got himself a Polaroid SX-70 camera and an unlimited supply of film.

“I bought that thing as a toy, and I took it as a kind of challenge,” Evans explained. “It was this gadget and I decided that I might be able to do something serious with it. So I got to work to try to prove that. I think I’ve done something with it.”


As I stood there looking at the photos, I was at first jealous. Jealous of that “unlimited supply” of Polaroid film. I am completely devoted to the Polaroid camera and used several different versions growing up and well into adulthood. I shot Polaroid until the film was no longer available.

Thanks to the Impossible Project, it’s still possible to buy Polaroid film, but at almost $24 a pack, that easy carefree snap-whatever-you-feel-like and just buy another pack mentality has to be reined in.

So I stood there feeling jealous about having all that free film on hand.

And then…my hands came up and framed either side of my whaaaat? face as I realized…

I have access to an instant camera and unlimited film. But in a different format. Sames tools, different age.

I have Hipstamatic on my iPhone. And Instagram. And a bunch of other toy camera apps.

All of these beautiful color saturated photos. They can still be made! I can still snap with reckless abandon! Oh dear god I have this gadget and I might actually be able to do something serious with it.

Oh my goodness. Oh. My. Goodness!

This realization left me dazed and confused and happy. So happy.

And inspired.







Top photo, “Untitled, 1974 Unique Polaroid” by Walker Evans and used here under Fair Use.

Quote from The Ongoing Moment by Geoff Dyer.

Bottom photo, “Power” Copyright 2012 Karen Fayeth, and subject to the Creative Commons license found in the far right column of this page. Taken with Hipstamatic app for iPhone.



And The Wheel Goes Round

To get the ol’ creative juices flowing, I’ve been working a little, here and there, on a lesson book of painting techniques. I’m pretty comfortable working with a brush and craft quality acrylics, but now I’m learning methods to create an image from scratch using real big boy paints and brushes.

It’s a big deal!

Today’s lesson was to paint my own color wheel. At first, I thought “Meh. A color wheel? Boring.”

It turned out to be a really interesting and useful exercise, and helped me learn both the paint and my new (fancy) brushes. When my work was done, I fell a little bit in love with my hand crafted color wheel.

And since I can’t seem to separate my High Arts from my Craft Arts, when I was done, I noticed the little bit of imperfection at the center of my wheel. That place where all six colors meet? There was paint overlap and some small white spaces.

So I did what any good crafter does. I hid it with rhinestone. Fabulous!




Copyright 2012, Karen Fayeth. Subject to Creative Commons license.


I must have colors and color theory on the brain. Here’s a photo I snapped earlier today:




Copyright 2012, Karen Fayeth. Subject to Creative Commons license.



6 Writing Tips From John Steinbeck

It would appear there is an internet meme going on lately concerning writing tips from classic authors. So far I have come across 10 Tips on Writing from businessman David Ogilvy and Henry Miller’s 11 Commandments, both very worthy reads.

Yesterday, I came across an article in The Atlantic titled 6 Writing Tips from John Steinbeck.

This is the advice that really resonated with me…which is odd because I have such a love-hate relationship with Steinbeck.

My first foray into Steinbeck was in High School where I was held down against my will and forced to read Grapes of Wrath. I *hated* Grapes of Wrath. Loathed. Jettisoned the book across the room in disgust more than once. I found it over the top, preachy and that alternating narrative about the Joad family interspersed with expository about the Depression and the Dust Bowl was dreary and overworked.

My next read was The Pearl, which I read grudgingly because it was Steinbeck, but I actually enjoyed in spite of myself. Then I read Of Mice and Men which I found to be a cruel, sad book, but the writing was solid. Then, because I liked the movie, I gave the book East of Eden a whirl and found it to be only so-so.

So I’d given Steinbeck a chance, didn’t like his stuff, and from High School on, I read zero Steinbeck. I wasn’t having it, unh-uh, no way.

I was vocal and insane about how much I WOULD NOT read Steinbeck.

Enter my multi-talented and fabulous cousin. Two years ago, he was in town and we went to Monterey to celebrate his birthday. While there, he asked if I’d ever read Cannery Row and I said no. Then I issued my overworked rant about Steinbeck.

He said, “You should give it a try, I think you’d like it.”

Well that was that. If my cousin said try Cannery Row, then by god I had to try it.

I went to the library bookshelf and plucked the slim tome from the pile and gave it a read.

I loved it. Every word, every story, every character so utterly perfect. I really actually truly loved and adored a Steinbeck book. Magic!

So when I stumbled across Steinbeck’s writing tips, I paid attention.

My two favorite books on writing are Ray Bradbuy’s Zen in the Art of Writing, which saved my life during my first real and profound battle with writer’s block, and Stephen King’s On Writing (which my rock star cousin gifted to me, because he’s so right on like that).

The little list of Steinbeck’s advice is pasted below…this now goes in the favorite pile too.

Here it is:




From The Atlantic.