My Cousin Visits; I Sell Some Stuff

After finishing The Grapes of Wrath a few weeks ago, I made an effort to rent the movie version this week and I watched it last night.  You know what’s a good book? The Grapes of Wrath.  You know what isn’t a great book-to-movie transition, despite being listed on the AFI Top 100 list?  The Grapes of Wrath.  I mean, it was okay.  I’ve seen much better movies though.  Maybe I should have waited longer between the book and the movie… maybe.

Hmm.

I had a fabulous weekend!  My cousin and his wife and three kids came to visit from Lawrence, Kansas.  We’ve been trying to make this happen for a year and a half, so it was very exciting to finally see them here.  The kids are 7, 4, and 2 (I think) and all cute as hell, and well-behaved.  We lucked out with a beautiful and warm weekend, and we spent most of Saturday outside.  Picnic lunch in Peace Park downtown, followed by a walk on Ninth Street to Sparky’s & Lakota (for ice cream and coffee, respectively), then to play at Flat Branch Park for awhile.  After that, we went up to Walk About Acres, which is a farm north of town that allows you to walk around and look at farm animals (but not pet them).  We saw pigs and goats and llamas and emus, peacocks and geese and turkeys and chickens, and even bees (though we gave the bees a wide berth), all while followed around by a couple of puppies.  It wasn’t a very big farm area, so it was exactly right for our excursion, and we had a nice time.  Then to my parents’ house to play on the trampoline and eat homemade pizza.

On Sunday, everyone came to my house for breakfast.  I didn’t do much in terms of cooking.  Panera bagels, fruit, juice, and some yogurt were the extent of it, and I made my sister bring the coffee because I am not equipped to make coffee for people who have opinions about coffee.  Since my brother started working at Starbucks a couple of years ago, my family has become a bunch of coffee snobs.  Everyone gets whole bean coffee and grinds it at home with their own coffee grinders.  My mom has a French press.  My sister has converted her officemates to fancy-coffee drinkers because she didn’t want to have to bring better coffee to work every day, while avoiding the freshly made grocery store brands at work.  I think it’s funny how quickly they’ve all adapted to the better coffee, but I am definitely a snob in my own right- I want juice with pulp (and the orange juice better be Florida’s Natural or Simply Orange or something else fresh-tasting) and wheat bread of a specific quality (the nuttier-tasting, the better).

Anyway, I didn’t do much cooking, but I did clean up the house a lot, or as well as possible under the circumstances (which include having a lot of extra furniture in the house, and boxes that are starting to pile up).  My cousin’s family has animals, so they know what’s it’s like to deal with the constant fur tumbleweeds, so I didn’t stress out too much, but the house ended up cleaner than it’s been in awhile.  We are good at the picking-up-everyday kind of thing, but we have become very lax at the major dust-the-corners, scrub-the-floor kind of thing.  So the house was in great condition, and the patio furniture was uncovered and cleaned off, and it was a gorgeous day so all the doors could be open.

The only problem was that Martha was kind of a pain in the ass.  She’s always super aggressive towards men, for whatever reason.  My dad thinks it’s because if a rescue dog has been abused in the past, it was probably by a man, but I don’t think that’s the case with Martha.  I’ve been around dogs that were abused, and I don’t think that Martha was.  I think she just reacts to the male voice or walk or phermones or something more innate than learned.  Anyway, she was so aggressive and so barky and even nipped at my cousin’s leg at one point that we finally put her in the garage.  Miracle of miracles, that seemed to work.  Often, when I put her in the backyard or in the dining room with a gate when men come to fix things at the house, she barks constantly and throws herself against the sliding glass doors.  But she was quiet and calm in the garage- probably because she couldn’t see what was going on.  So she will be spending more time in the garage in the future, for sure.

She was fine with the kids.  She’s fine with my dad, my brother, and my sister’s notboyfriend now that she knows them.  She was fine with the male petsitter who came last fall.  It was just the interaction with my adult male cousin that brought out the aggression.

Anyway, the house is still mostly clean and clutter-free, which is one of the best parts about inviting people over.  This weekend, we’ll start to remove even more clutter when Tracy’s lease starts at her place in KC.  I know it’s way early, but moving is always easier when you can make little trips with all the little stuff before you move all the big stuff.  So this weekend, we go up with the first loads, and we’ll make a run for cleaning supplies (which is also a chance to find the closest Target and grocery stores), and then Tracy is excited to clean her place, top to bottom.  (She is so excited about that.  I am sure that it will already be clean, but she just cannot wait to clean it herself.)  I will take that opportunity to visit a couple of antique stores that I wanted to see.  I’m still looking for something to hold my television- preferably a credenza or even an old turntable console- that will fit with my new furniture.

Oh, and the fabric for the couch arrived last week, and the upholsterer picked up the couch yesterday.  It has been in the living room for a few months (along with the other two couches), so the room is feeling very empty now.  The upholsterer said it would be four to six weeks- I hope that is correct, so that it won’t have to sit in the garage too long before the cats leave.  I would not allow the cats near the newly upholstered couch- they have destroyed too much already.  Little jerks.  I did decide on the bright blue fabric, the one I just loved, and I am certain it will look fantastic.

In photography news, I sold my first print last week!  My Big Sur images are now on display at Columbia Regional Hospital, which gets a fair amount of traffic.  They were up less than week before I had an email about purchasing one of them, which was just awesome.  Here is the print that was sold; I was kind of surprised that it was that one, because it’s not my favorite of the series (this one is my favorite), but the guy who bought it grew up in California and the ice plant brought back memories for him.  Anyway, woo!  I am excited that I sold one.

In addition, I was recruited to be part of this partnership between Flickr (the image-sharing site that I love so much) and Getty Images (a stock image agency) in late 2008, so I signed up and made some images available for review by Getty.  I worked about six images up, and then I started to get a nagging feeling of doubt and refused to do more, which turned out to be smart.  Getty didn’t even review those images for months, but they sat on their site and were under contract.  I sent Getty an email in March about it, and they promised that they would be up soon, and then I just left it alone.  Today I got another request from Getty to put in more images, and it turns out (and this is the punchline of this long involved story) that the images were made available as stock images in early March, and were actually sold!  I have had images published!  I made royalties!  This is a big deal!  It’s not a ton of money, but if I can make roughly that same amount for the next few months, I will not have any guilt about continuing my lawn service through the summer.  I swore I would save my photography money to pay for the lawn service (mowing & trimming), and if I didn’t make enough, I would have to cancel it because it is too much of a luxury.  But if I have actual royalties coming in, plus potential cash from doing weddings, I will get to continue having my lawn mowed by somebody else all summer long.  (You have no idea how much I love love love having somebody else mow my lawn.)

Actually, the statement is just for March 2009, and it shows that the same image (this one) sold twice, and both to international organizations- one in Germany (that was the big sale) and one in New Zealand.  I am going to look up the German one and see if I can find out how the image was used- it would be fun to know.

This gives me hope that I might have a future with stock images, which is cool.  Very exciting.

I should post this on my photo blog, and I might still do that.  Hmm.

Gosh, I’ve been chatty here, mostly because I haven’t posted in awhile!  I should post here and at the photo blog more often.