FREE!!!!!…ish

For the first time since April or May, I don’t owe anyone any photos and I don’t have anything coming up in the next few weeks.  I am FREE!!!

Well, not entirely true.  I owe family photos from the Fourth of July that I will probably do tonight.  And I have plenty of my own stuff to do, but I am out from under the giant pile of backlog that I’ve been carrying around since late June.

And then, over the weekend, I agreed to do another solo wedding in early October, even though I said I wasn’t going to do another solo one.  And I won’t do it entirely solo.  I will definitely bring a second shooter.  And I’m definitely going to buy the lenses that I should have bought months ago.  I wanted them at the first wedding I shot, and they were definitely needed at that last wedding.  I will buy them this week so that I have them in plenty of time.

But I am free, free, free!  For right now, anyway.  I can finally salvage something of this summer, even though school starts back up for my mother this week and all the University students are flooding back into town.  I swear that won’t stop me, though.  I don’t know what else I want out of this summer, but I’m going to make a list and then go through with it.  Swimming is on that list.  I need to go swimming somewhere before Labor Day comes and all the pools close.  And I need a couple more barbecues on the schedule.  I’m overdue on barbecue.

OverDUE on barbeCUE.  It’s like poetry!

I have been diligent about seeing summer movies, at least.  I have seen nearly every movie that I had any interest in: Iron Man, Wall-E, The X-Files, The Dark Knight, Pineapple Express, and we went to Tropic Thunder over the weekend.  It was more than slightly ridiculous, but it was ok for a summer movie.  Pineapple Express was better (but I was the minority opinion holder on that topic in my particular postal district).  Wall-E was the best movie all summer, hands down.  But when doesn’t Pixar pull through?

Meanwhile, I went through the first season of Lost on DVD while finishing off my post-processing.  I had not seen as much of it as I thought I had.  The first three or four episodes, I’d watched live, then I’d given it up until I started watching it again at the end of the first season, but only the last one or two episodes of the season.  I’ve pretty regularly watched it since then, and I guess I just wanted to catch up on all the little bits here and there.  Then I watched a couple of the first episodes of The X-Files, which I had never seen.  I mean, I’ve seen a lot of episodes in syndication, but clearly they did not include some of the first season.  So that was pretty interesting.  Scully and Mulder were just so young in those first episodes.  Way too young to be believable, really.  The characters should have been in their forties rather than what appeared to be their twenties.  Seriously!  Anyway, I had to go rent all of those discs from actual video stores because of Netflix’s little hiccup last week, which I’m still ironing out because I went and rearranged my Netflix queue while they were down and then they sent me a bunch of duplicate discs after they went back up at the end of the week.  Once I’ve finished off the X-Files discs I rented, I should be back up to speed with Netflix.  God, I watch a lot of TV, don’t I?  We did watch hours of the Olympics, but that was all on TiVo so we could fast-forward through the bullshit and get right to the events.  Not a fan of the melodramatic newsmagazine stories, are we.  And I like specific events, so I can zap through eight hours of TiVo’d Olympic coverage in about an hour or so, depending on the events, and see just what I want to see.  TiVo is, seriously, the best invention in modern times.

It’s funny that after spending all those hours this summer working on photos, my first inclination is to go out and shoot some photos this weekend!  But going out to shoot photos like that is all about the doing something and going somewhere aspect of it, and I never have more than a handful of shots when I’m done.  It’s not like the portait/wedding stuff, where nearly everything has to be handed over at the end.

Anyway, I am free!  And I am going to party by taking a walk in the woods this weekend!  Awesome!  Woo!