My, my, my hikin’ shoes

Due to a catastrophic computer fail, and my increasing lack of effort and enthusiasm… I’ve abandoned the attempt to complete my first 365Project. I gave it the ol’ college try, but sadly, I just couldn’t sustain it.

Now, that I’ve dispense with that bit of distasteful housekeeping, on to my weekly photo hike. I will never give these up, they keep me sane…

Last time I tried to visit Saturday’s venue, I forgot my hiking shoes… I came better prepared this time, and even brought water and a change of clothes.

As I hoped, the pitcher plants at Tarklin Bayou Preserve were in bloom. This state preserve is one of the only locations, in all my hikes, that I’ve seen them. The fields were full of the carnivorous beauties, and I hope they were overflowing with pesky mosquitoes.

I also jogged (read: drove) down the road a short distance and stopped in at Big Lagoon State Park.

Both parks are close to Naval Air Station, Pensacola.

(Photos shot with a Nikon D60, using an 18-55mm, 55-200mm, 20mm f/2.8 wide-angle, 50mm f/1.8 prime lens, Nikon CoolPix S205 and/or iPhone4)

For more photos, please visit my Flickr photostream or my 365 Project Page.

To see other city scenes from around the world, check out Unknown Mami’s Sundays in My City. Don’t forget to show the love to Mami and the other City contributors.

Panic mode

When I sat down last night to edit my photos for this week’s SiMC, I had a full-blown panic attack… I feared that the above photo was all I’d get to share. My 4+ year old laptop is in her final death throes. While this is a First World Problem, I’m more than a little twitchy about the fact that all my photos, raw and edited, are stored on my curmudgeonly aluminum Mac… all 16,000 of them. And yes, you read that right – SIXTEEN THOUSAND.

The Mister set up my laptop to automatically back up to our external hard drive, but I’ve never tested it to make sure it was working right. Needless to say, I’m worried about saving my files. We have some work ahead of us today.

As for my Sunday set, I thought I could point out that I featured several photos from the past week in other posts:

Like Saturday’s recap of my 365Project shots, or my attempt at Conservation humor with Three Little Pigs. I got a smidge dark in Last Flight, but each post was illustrated by recently snapped photos.

On Sunday morning, when I tried once again to coax my Mac to cooperate, much to my surprise, she allowed me to move a select number of photos to a thumb drive. I didn’t want to be greedy, so I copied the raw images I meant to share today, and a couple more I wanted to use this coming week.

I have our home computer and my daughter’s old laptop to work with, but it’s just not the same. My beloved MacBook has seen me through some good and bad times. I will mourn her.

Here is my abbreviated Sunday in My City offering, taken on the drive home from a visit with my College Kid in North Carolina. I took all of these with my camera phone, so the quality of the images is not great. (If you follow me on Instagram, you may have already seen most of these too.)

(Photos shot with a Nikon D60, using an 18-55mm, 55-200mm, 20mm f/2.8 wide-angle, 50mm f/1.8 prime lens, Nikon CoolPix S205 and/or iPhone4)

For more photos, please visit my Flickr photostream or my 365 Project Page.

To see other city scenes from around the world, check out Unknown Mami’s Sundays in My City. Don’t forget to show the love to Mami and the other City contributors.

Week 31: back on the road

I spent part of this week visiting with my College Kid, so in about half of my 365, the images are at least different from what I’ve been photographing. It tells me that I really need to get out of my house more often than just on weekends. There is a lot of cool stuff “Out There” just waiting to be captured on a digital media card… I was going to say film, but that would date me.

How many of my fellow photographers have actually shot with black and white film? Can you even get 35mm Kodachrome anywhere?

Week 30: camera dump

This was a lazy week, I even seriously considered just packing it in and giving up. It’s not difficult to take a photo every day, it’s just that I exhausted my imagination weeks ago. I try to take different photos each day, but day-um sometimes it’s easier to simply snap a shot of the pets or lunch.

When I go out on my weekend photo hikes, I have a specific purpose. With this 365 Project, it’s been more Hit and Miss. I’m not always good at spontaneous, and can’t always take the time to be deliberate in what I photos I take.

Blerg…. I’ll keep plugging along, but I think this experiment will be a One Time Only sort of thing.

Week 29: running errands

Did a lot of errand running this week, so my 365Project images are more far-ranging than they have been lately. Still using food and pets as fall backs though, which I know are kinda boring.

I did find a great auto cling with a kick-ass message for cancer, and the beach was as beautiful as ever.

The “Apple a day” pic was featured on “One bad apple” post this week. My laptop is giving up the ghost and it’s making me twitchy.

Week 28: the skies have it

Living on the Gulf Coast means that with the exception of a few pesky hurricanes, the weather here is pretty spectacular year round. Winters are short and relatively mild, spring comes early, fall is lovely and really the best time to visit, and summer – well, summer can be fickle. The season, by far, is the longest and can include stifling heat and lung collapsing humidity. This year though, it’s been reasonable. I feel like I should apologize to my northern neighbors because they are getting much higher temps than we are.

And… we are getting rain. Soaking, lawn loving, rain. Nothing apocalyptic, no hurricanes (yet, knock on wood), and no weeks on end of wet stuff. A few days here and there of afternoon and evening showers, some thunder and lightning, and very dramatic skies.

I’m waiting for the proverbial shoes to drop. We still have four months left in the Hurricane Season, we could still get ours. For now, I’ll enjoy the milder days and cooling rain.

A version of ‘Sbux’ was the feature image for “Order is beauty,” my submission this week for Velvet Verbosity’s 100 Word Challenge.

Week 27: mulligan

Confession time: when I took on this 365 Project, I fully intended to complete it ~ taking 365 photos, one a day for an entire year. Then I realized that what I actually did was commit to a 366 ~ that’s a six, not five ~ Project. This year, 2012, is a Leap Year – who knew?

Still, I fully intended to make it happen. Then I reached the halfway mark, during a week when The Mister was out of town on business for eight days, the water department called to tell me a meter check indicated a possible leak, it rained (hard – thunder and lightning) nearly every day, and I couldn’t sleep for shit – I was exhausted.

Sunday, the beginning of Week 27, I planted myself on the couch around 6:30p.m. to watch some TV, thinking I still had plenty of time to snap a photo. Next thing I knew, I was waking up at…. 12:30 a.m. Monday… no photo.

So… this is the story I’m sticking with… Sunday was my mulligan. My extra day in this Leap Year. I picked back up Monday and will keep going through Dec. 31 ~ 365 photos.

Let’s not speak of this again…