The Sort of Hope Who Needs Your Votes! :D

Never thought I’d be the sort of photographer with a photo in a contest… yet here I am!

This photo has been entered into Rodposse’s  Photo Contest … 

5th RPC- 22nd Challenger- Theme : LINES.

Would love your votes! Click the link and click LIKE for Natalia and I please!

RODPOSSE PHOTO CONTEST : LINES

What’s one more click in your day of endless clicking? and hey, maybe someday, you’ll need me to click something for you… 😉  { a you click my link, I’ll click yours sort of thing!}

We thank you muchly, friends. ❤

http://rodposse.com/2013/01/30/22nd-challenger-confusing/

(if you’re more of a copy/paster  ^)

365 Challenge- Day #26 Guest

Day #26- Guest.

Meet Lisai. Stunning and dark. Robust. Like a great cup of coffee, she is!

Stark contrast to my fair ginger, Natalia.

So when the snow started to fall, I simply had to get them out there together. Could not have been more pleased with the results. The camera loves Lisai! I just wish Lisai loved the camera as much as it loves her.

2snow

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365 Challenge #15 Confusing

I promised myself that this year I would try to learn as many new things as I could.

To push my brain to it’s limits.

RSD patients can be found to have  damage to the same parts of their brains as stroke victims or Alzheimer patients. Part of my testing for my ketamine infusions made me all to aware of just how far my condition has messed with my brain. Part of the very reason that we have RSD at all is because the wiring in our brains has some how gotten all messed up and the pain signals have become confused somewhere along the way. Thereby making the simplest little tasks sometimes very challenging.

This little project took me almost 3 hours. Interrupted by making dinner, but three hours nonetheless. I was so confused while I was trying to do it. But I did it. And my brain held up. Now I’m just exhausted. It’s not perfect nor exactly how I really wanted it, which was the hardest part for me- allowing myself to say something was finished before I considered it “perfect.”  Nonetheless, I was so proud of myself when I finished it. Though it was very difficult for me to complete this task, very confusing, I did it!  Just don’t ask me to do it again 😉

 

– PS- I should get “bonus points” – because this photo is of my teenage daughter and though she is beautiful and I love her, teenage girls are nothing if not confusing!!

 

Day #15 Confusing

Confusing

The Sort of Hope Who Played on the Tracks

teryn7

I finally got to do something nice for a young lady who is part of a family who has been so very nice to me over the years. Taught myself 2 new editing techniques, too!  ( … if only I could get paid to do nothing but take pictures and edit *sighs dreamily*) Cold weather is challenging for healthy people. Cold weather can be all but deadly for some people with RSD/CRPS. (our nervous systems don’t adjust well to temperature changes, so once we start to shiver, or get cold, it is sometimes near to impossible to get our body’s core temperature back again. ) But Teryn was tough, so I had to be too. She’s a seasoned competitive athlete-a real gamer. I figured if she could stand up on the top of a train in what she was wearing, I could be brave and all bundled up down below. ( and believe me, I *was* as bundled as movement would allow for.)

Beautiful girl and a fun day.

Some days it really is good to be me.

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365 Challenge: #_Optimistic

Told you all I wouldn’t make 365 consistent posts.

I was out after day 2. Thank you sickness. At least I know my limits 😉

But I am trying to play catch up and now I’m just kind of lost.

Hollywood

This is my older sister Holly. I knew I wanted to use her for “Optimistic” but I couldn’t remember what day # optimistic  was. I still don’t know?

( Lost a few memory chips in my sickness haze…. )

My sister Holly and I are only 16 months apart and were raised almost more like twins than sisters as I was always a bit taller and she was always a tad smaller. She barely reaches 5 foot now. (unless you count her hair.) Mom liked to dress us alike, give us identical outfits ( just different colors). We always shared a room. Shared friends. Sometimes could share clothes, but not shoes Holly is very tiny. And contrary to many men’s wishes, never boyfriends- we have very different tastes.

Anyway, Holly has always been that certain light in my life that everyone needs. Everyone looks for. Fittingly, Holly loves all things sparkly and glittery, just like her- things of light. We could not be more different in that way. Or in the way that we dress. However, many times I wish I could be more like her, more expressive, more free, more ‘perky’. I tend to be a bit too conservative.

Holly spends her days making other people feel good about themselves, making them beautiful, too! And if that isn’t “Optimistic” , I don’t know what is.

The Sort of Hope Who Has A Snow Angel

“When it snows, you have two choices, shovel or make snow angels” ~ unknown.

look which we picked!

 

The Sort of Hope Who Should

I should be shopping. I should be wrapping. I should be writing Thank You notes. I should be talking to my brother. I should be petting my dog. I should brush the cat. I should strip the beds. ( oh their embarrassment!) I should dust. I should be scrubbing the shower. I should phone a friend. I should take out the trash. I should sort the mail. I should be baking Christmas Cookies. I should be editing photos. I should be putting laundry away. I should be *doing* laundry. 

I should not be writing a blog. 

I should figure out why this is typing in blue….  stockingswerehungIf memory serves, my younger sister Rachel emailed that cartoon to me back before I even had a fb acct. ( now that’s a long time ago.) It  just never gets old for me. Must be the balls 😉

Though my most recent photo session with Kevin of Soul Imagery looks more New Year’s Eve than Christmas, I still felt like sharing it with my favorite Christmas cartoon. I get so excited when I see his name on my messenger list. That part feels a bit like Christmas. I love to see the results of our work together.  Just got 2 more photos back from the day we spent at Adrienne’s Inn at Center Park. Still hoping to get to shoot there again~hopefully while I still have these long locks!

Hope” But if you’re thinking

about my baby,

it don’t matter

if you’re

black or white    ~ Black or White, Michael Jackson

Hope

I should go to bed. 😉

http://soulimagery.zenfolio.com/portraits/h4f081874#h4f081874

The Extended Sort of Hope

I can’t believe it’s actually come to this.

I’ve got to spell things out for people.

Senseless tragedy in the world and people in this small little town have nothing better to do than speculate as to how much I’ve paid for my recent treat to myself.(answer a whole lot less than you can possibly imagine~!) I drive a 20 year old car and people are bent out of shape because I went and did something to make myself feel better. I have some nerve!

I wish I was as curiously involved in one tiny little modicum of other peoples’ lives as much as people seem to be ingrained in the daily happenings of mine. Over what I am wearing, what I am doing, what I’ve purchased recently. ( which is not much, actually).

It’s so odd to me that people think that once they’ve held a fundraiser to assist with your medical bills that it somehow now gives them carte blanche to judge everything and anything that you do for the rest of your life. I swear I don’t understand people. As if I make no other income, only what I gathered at the fundraiser. As if I should never do anything else again.

Hope

I’ve gotten static about the photos I’ve posted. About how much I payed Soul Imagery to take my photos… and not that it’s anyone’s business but I will answer this…I met Kevin in a photography group. I model for him. Kevin is my friend that does photography. I’m very proud of his work and I simply love to play dress up. We work very well together. He has taught me an awful lot.

Soul Imagery Website

Playing dress up affords me a few hours of escaping my reality.Reality with a chronic disease can sometimes really suck. It’s a reality that consists of a disease that is rated higher on the pain scale than any other disease known to man. A reality that consists of intense muscle spasms that render some of my body parts useless from time to time. A reality that makes eating difficult and digestion sometimes near to impossible. A reality that makes it too painful to sleep on my ears or to stay in one position for any length of time. The realities of my disease are too numerous to list and too upsetting for most people to read or comprehend let alone for me to even mention, so I usually don’t. And unless you are my husband, or my family or a very close friend, you won’t hear me complain, either.  But because I go out of my way to look good when I leave this house, people fail to see me as sick. Let alone grasp my reality. Hope

Because I go out of my way to appear as “normal” as possible, people just don’t understand. I honestly think that some people would prefer to see me looking like death, hunched over in wheelchair, swollen, discolored and writhing in pain. To them, then I would actually *be* sick.  They only see the “best” of me because that is all I allow people to see. I don’t allow people to see me at my worst.

I allow people to see me taking photographs at my childrens’ sporting events. I don’t allow people to see me the 2 or 3 days afterward that it takes for me to be able to use my hands again properly. I allow them to see me in photos but I don’t allow them to see what I look like on days I am really sick.

This week I decided I needed a change. I haven’t been feeling my best. So, because I have access to a full compliment of womanly wishes (with wonderful employee rates) where I work part time, ( it’s a hair salon),  I decided I’d see if I could stand extensions. We were afraid they’d hurt or I wouldn’t be able to stand them for long, but it’s been almost a week and so far so good. Except they itch. A lot. So they may end up being short lived. Which is a shame, because I really like them, and I’d love to play dress up while I still have them.

natural light + new hair

I don’t think I will ever stop people from being in my business and I’m not sure why they feel that it’s ok to be so nosy and so judgmental.  Some of my close friends think I should feel flattered that people find me that interesting. I’m not flattered. I feel sad for those nosy judgmental people.  Sad because I can’t imagine what they must be lacking to be so concerned with what others are doing.  Sad because if they are so interested in me, they must lead very boring lives. People like that usually only want to feel superior to you for one reason or another, be it jealousy or be it a quality that you possess that  they can’t seem to cultivate. They will sit on their self made throne and judge you,  but in reality you know that they are only judging you for some inadequacy they have found within themselves.

I simply have no room in my reality for people like that any more.

The Autumnal Sort of Hope

“Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns.”
― George Eliot

Me too, Mr Eliot, me too!  This is my 2nd blog entry about autumn. I simply can’t get enough of it. I want to surround myself with it’s colors, it’s smells, it’s light. Today was no exception. I wanted to capture the beauty of today forever.

Thankfully, I have someone who indulges me when I get a thought like that stuck in my head.

I hope you enjoy the beauty of today as much as I did.  Thank you for allowing me to share it with you. 

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~and to quote Anne of Green Gables ” I’m so glad I live in a world where there are Octobers!”

 

The Sort of Half of Hope

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=coR3JtCeBqk

I hope you took the time to watch that. I’m sure most of you didn’t.

Sometimes I feel like my disease leaves me with only half of my former self. Only half of what I used to be able to do. Half of the mom I should be, the wife I should be, the friend I should be,even half of the human I should be. Then I read a post from a fellow RSD’er that reminded me that our disease holds one of the highest rates of suicide that there is among chronic illnesses and I am just thankful that I never felt quite that desperate, that alone or felt quite so mad at my condition. Sure, I get sad. Sure I get mad. {I get mad a lot!} Got mad at myself yesterday when I did something really stupid because of my disease (it hurt!).  I get mad when I lose my balance easily or drop things because I can’t hold them. I get mad because I can’t go to my kids things if it gets too cold or even too windy or too hot or if it’s going to be too noisy. I get really mad when I have to cancel dates with my friends.  And I get even madder that this disease has cost my family our life savings. “Stupid disease!” I get sad when I can’t eat the things that I used to love or wear the things that I used to treasure all because of this thing that has changed my nervous system and how my body functions until the day that a cure is found.  I’m sad because *that* half of me is gone. But if this new half is all I’ve got left to give, I’m going to fight to make damn sure it’s the best half I’ve got to offer. Fortunately for me, I get to do it surrounded by some of the best family and friends any single  person was ever blessed with, people who certainly don’t seem to mind the half that is left and usually they are enough to  make me feel pretty whole again.

RSD can be very isolating so sometimes I just need to remind myself of one of my favorite quotes. It never fails to make me get off my bum and get moving. Half or not.

A ship is safe in harbor, but that’s not what ships are for.
–William Shedd