Category: make it work

Can’t Handle The Pressure

The celebration of New Year’s 2011 was an interesting one, at least from my perspective.

It’s no secret that times have been a little rough for the past, oh, three or so years, but on December 31, 2010, there seemed to be a lot of optimism.

The general tone of the tweets, articles and conversations I experienced was that 2010 was over, and expectations were very high for a good 2011.

Even I fell into this category, being as suggestible as I am. It felt SO good to cast off what was, but a most accounts, a crappy year and turn my face to a new year that could hold so much joy, healing and peace.

Wipe the slate clean. Start again. The market is coming up a little. Jobless rate is going down a little. It seemed like more people had jobs and a bit more money to celebrate the holidays.

These are all good trends. Heck yeah, 2011! Bring us something good!

Today, the seventeenth day of January, it feels like folks have become a little impatient.

Where is my something good? Bring it to me already!

The credit card statements are rolling in, and those fun holiday celebrations are demanding they be paid off.

A few more people have jobs, but I can’t see that any more people are particularly happy with their jobs. It is, after all, still called “work”, as much as I’d like to get up in the morning and go to “fun” all day long.

Then there was that horrifying event down in Tuscon which not only ripped apart a community, but also became fodder for the harrumphing heads (<--like a talking head only wind-baggier). The news doesn't seem happier. People don't seem happier. Things are improving, but slowly. This weekend I started looking around at my fellow man and realized something. Everyone is pissed off. There is rudeness abounding, people saying shitty things, and today at the grocery story, something went down between the checker and a customer that ended up being taken outside. At the grocery store. Ay god. Then we came home from the store to see a police car sitting on our block in front of a neighbor's house. What the f--- is going on around here? I'd like to blame my own neighborhood and say "eh, it's just turning bad" but I'm not sure that's it's just happening here. I think people are fed up. Maybe, just maybe, we've put too much pressure on 2011 to be the panacea for all of the residual worries, anger and sadness from the great recession. One month into one year cannot fix all that came before. Maybe let's give both 2011 and each other a break, ok? We've got a lot of days left to go in this year. Who knows what 2011 has up its sleeve for, say, April? Or August? Ya just never know. I still believe in you 2011. You won't let us down. Right?



Oh The Indignity!

Do you know what I had to do today?

It’s….it’s…a shock!

I had to SCRAPE ice off of my windshield so I could drive my car to work.

I know! Startling!

Back when I lived at a mile high, it was pretty standard stuff to walk to my car and have to deal with all that the frost laying on the windscreen (<- that's for my UK readers). I remember it well. Oh those were the days....I'd fire up the engine, get the defroster blowing some heat then I'd take a firm hold of my deluxe long handled easy-to-use ice scraper. While shivering in my long coat, work clothes and nice shoes, I'd scrape that bad boy squeaky clean. I was rather proud of my ice scraping capabilities back then. Heck, I don't even own an ice scraper anymore. I think I held on to that deluxe ice scraper for about two years after moving here to so-called sunny California. I remember cleaning out the Jeep and lobbing my scraper into the trash with a satisfied "I live in California now, dammit" smile. Let me just say this....an ice scraper doesn't help much with the fog. I simply traded one road hazard for another, really. So this morning, my lack of ice scraper ownage was never more apparent. I looked at the thin but sturdy layer of frost, and sighed. It was time to make do, and my library card was placed into service. Maybe later today I should go to my local library and check out "Call of the Wild” just to remind myself about what being really cold is all about.

(Thank you Albuquerque Public Schools for making me read Jack London so I can reference it now…. From great literature to a blathering blog post in three easy steps.)

There I was, shivering in no coat and my work clothes with nice shoes cursing and fuming as I scrape, scrape, scraped the frost. My old skills came in handy as I quickly knocked down the road hazard and got on my way.

What a way to start my Monday.

Can I get a pobre cita?

No? Fine. I’ll be a grownup today. But I’m not going to like it!






It appears that I’m derivative of myself. It was a year ago that I discussed this same topic. Only back on that day, I was in the haughty position of having parked my car in the garage. No such luck today, The Good Man got the good spot. *sigh* Love AND marriage.


iBienvenidos! Welcome! Come on in!

Snacks and beverages are over there, games and fun stuff are out in the backyard.

Please, come in! Friends, family, casual passerby, you’re all welcome to the brand spanking new home of that venerable ol’ blog called Oh Fair New Mexico.

Thanks for helping me move, I owe ya one!

After almost four years and a thousand posts, I decided it was time to move to a self-hosted blog. All the cool kids are doing it.

Heck, the New Year seemed like as good a time as any to launch my new address.

To help get this blogwarming party started, I wanted to give my readers a gift, and so I decided to read another New Mexican folktale as my first post in the new location.

Readers of the original Oh Fair New Mexico will recall that I did my first folktale reading back in June. I had so much fun, so I decided to go again.

This selection is called “The Orphan Boy” and is taken from the book Cuentos de Cuanto Hay, Tales from Spanish New Mexico

The story collection is published by University of New Mexico Press, and was edited and translated by Joe Hayes.

So, without further ado, I welcome you to “The Orphan Boy”, as originally told by Porfirio Roybal of Jacona, New Mexico.

If you’d prefer to just read the story yourself, click here.

Or, to listen to my read, click below. It runs just over ten minutes. Player opens in a new window.

Karen Fayeth reading The Orphan Boy



Story was recorded using Garageband with some relatively low-tech gear, but it gets the job done. If you are an audiophile, I guarantee this recording will make you nutty. Read the .pdf instead. Let me know if you have any technical issues.




Perthpective

What’s that old platitude, something like “you’re not the best judge of your own work?”

The more I give over to my creative side, I keep learning that lesson over and over. I think I have a good eye for editing my own work, and of course I’m usually wrong.

I’ve also learned that the best way to really see something objectively is to give it time.

Time is the great mediator.

(wow, I’m chock full to brimming with platitudes today!)

Anyhow, I got to thinking about this recently while sorting through my iPhoto library. As an amateur photographer, I take *a lot* of photographs. This is the advice of my friend, mentor and teacher, Marty Springer, so I follow her advice.

But this means my iPhoto library fills up fast with fair to middling to downright awful shots. Since all of this dreck was slowing down my iMac, I decided to save the photos elsewhere and start again.

Oh, and also…my New Year’s resolution is to get better about tagging all of my photos as I download them so I can search more quickly.

So in cleaning out my old photos, sifting through the pile, I came across the shot at the end of this post.

The Feline had climbed into the laundry basket that was lying on the ground, so I grabbed my camera and took a few snaps. I considered them throwaway photos. Less than throwaway. I downloaded them to my iMac and never looked back.

But something about this photo…it really works. It was taken probably two or more years ago when I was just learning my camera and had no idea about depth of field. And yet, the depth of field is what makes this photo interesting. It’s not a perfect photo but it’s also not bad. A little imperfect Photoshop adjustments and I’ll be damned…not too bad at all.

Because not only with time comes perspective, but also…I can learn some lessons from three years ago me. The one just learning about photography. The one who just snapped and didn’t think.

A careless shot can be magic.

I guess that’s why my photography teacher tells us never to delete photos. “You never know” she says.

click photo if interested in seeing a larger size

Photo by Karen Fayeth and subject to Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

2010 Word of The Year

Every year in December my local paper, the San Francisco Chronicle, solicits reader suggestions for the word of the preceding year.

From those suggestions, the staff picks the annual word with an eye toward choosing the word that best sums up the year in news.

In 2009 the word was Tweet. In 2008 the word was Bailout. In 2007 the word was Subprime.

Getting the trend here? Something popular, perhaps overworked by the media. The word on everyone’s minds.

This year, the staff of the Chron went a little less global and a little more local.

Here’s the back story:

The San Francisco Giants baseball team has an award winning local broadcast team made up of former SF Giants pitcher Mike Krukow and former SF Giants shortstop Duane Kuiper, known together as “Kruk and Kuip.”

Neither of these men had stellar baseball careers, but in their retirement gig as broadcasters, they have really made their mark.

These two are colorful, fun and knowledgeable. They are revered here in the Bay Area.

At the end of every game, the television broadcasters (usually Kruk and Kuip) and the radio broadcasters (usually Jon Miller and Dave Flemming) will get together on the radio for a post-game wrapup.

It’s their chance to talk about the game, pick their favorite players of that game, and generally cuss and discuss. These post game shows have become very popular, mainly because the style is very casual and conversational. The listener feels like they are sitting in at the table with these four guys (and sometimes former first baseman JT Snow) having a beer and discussing the day’s work.

Over the course of the 2010 baseball season, it wasn’t always a smooth ride for my lowly Giants. They played in a lot of tough games that were often decided by just one run.

Out of eighteen games over the season with the Padres in 2010, eight were determined by one run. In the month of May, the Giants had ten games decided by one run out of 28 total versus all opponents.

At the end of April, just the first month of the season, the Giants had lost two games back-to-back. The Monday game was a ten inning loss, and the Tuesday game was a one hit game lost on a walk off run by David Ekstein (who had so plagued the Giants in the 2002 World Series).

It was emotionally taxing.

So, when Kruk and Kuip hit the air that next day for the third game of the series (in which the Giants were ultimately swept), Kuip used the San Francisco Giants own PR slogan in an exasperated way.

The long running ads had proclaimed, “San Francisco Giants baseball…(pause)…there’s Magic Inside!”

On that day in April, Kuip said, “San Francisco Giants baseball…(pause)…Torture!”

The phrase resonated with weary fans and the word Torture! was applied to every game, every moment, every second of agony we endured…including every single game played in the post season.

Torture became the theme of our World Series winning season. An anguished cry. A rallying cry.

And so the 2010 word of the year from the San Francisco Chronicle is…you guessed it:

Torture

What a lovely way to suffer.

(for the record, from the SFGate: “”Vuvuzela’ and ‘hacktivist’ finished second and third. ‘Refudiate’ and ‘patdown’ were the other finalists…”)

Trophy image taken by a corporate photographer from my place of work and used with permission.