The EF 16-35mm f/2.8 L II USM

“Your judgment or your taste has never been in question. You buy seldom, and when you do, you leave wasteland on the credit accounts.” (G about my shopping.)

Most of my big winter projects are nearing completion. This is also the only time in the past few years that I have more money than I can spend. That is to say, I have no money and absolutely nothing I would need. This makes me nervous. Usually I am more feminine than that and can always think of something important I cannot live without. If I had several grand on my account, that trip to Mongolia would probably come bobbing up again, along with all the arguments for and against. What savings I did have, General took to buy me a new computer, tired of me throwing things around the room for having a crap processor and graphics fit for a fifteen year old phone. A few grand would also lean steeper into a purchase of a Mac already, but no. I like the computer that I have. Even if it is eight years old and sound like it has an old diesel locomotive falling through it. The gentleman in the store explained that the comp we were looking at establishes it’s Windows in 4.3 seconds once you turn it on. I can relate to that. I can have 4.3 coffees before Windows start working in mine.

So, between what I would do if I really had a lot of money (go on a long trip, publish another book, start looking at real estate…) and having just a little money, which I merrily waste on books, chocolate, make-up, books, coffee dates, books and books, there’s this.

My next lens.

This is a wide-angle landscape or, as I like to call it, street-photography 2.8 L series USM, not a prime, granted, but a beauty nonetheless. Oddly enough, I cannot find primes that would serve me better – Canon either has a 17mm/ f/4 tilt-shift, overpriced, a 20mm/ f/2.8, which doesn’t really excel in anything or a 24mm/ f/2.8, which is already dangerously close to my kit lens. (Kits are not dark horses, but they do prove to be extremely, well, wide-ranged in their practicality.) Considering I am not really a street photographer (yet), that is less to do with my lack of a motivation than it is with an actual lack of a street. Oh, I do have a street. A very noisy street. It’s right down here. But this is a small provincial town. Street-wise, nothing ever happens that would grow above the need of a 50mm.

So, as investments and ambitions go, this is now on the top of my list. Its right between important and fun, trivial stuff. As the thing about the lenses, they tend to inspire beautiful hunts.

Small fires and large rain

Woodworks Saturday morning. There are so many broken trees this season that getting a truckload is just a matter of menial labor. Not to mention there is something wildly erotic about a large man splitting logs with one blow. We had such good sex after we got home, I was trembling well into the evening.

I forget how much I love the woods. They are my opposite of deserts. Deserts, flat and timeless are my favourite scape, but as far removed as they are from urban jungle, their opposites are calm, airy, uncomplicated forests – the kind that offer all the protection and threaten no harm. Something fundamental binds me to these places, perchance a former life. I’ve felt at home in them even as a small child. Going in my hearing gets better, my sense of smell, my sense of presence; I become intuitively aware of the rough terrain and my step is more voluminous as opposed to pavement-walking, room-crossing linear. I notice the contrast between a human smell and the smell of bark, soil and blueberries. Not a bad smell, just very complex and commanding. Instantly I get the urge to run, not stroll and to hunger, not diet. Elements come pounding in, like tamable wolves at the door.

We were six and we actually got plenty done – a lot more than we expected and a lot more than G feared once the saw broke. Without him taking over was easier, as I tend to make the better taskmistress (have almost a lifetime of experience and usually see the broader picture – shall we recall the infamous millstone incident?), but for obvious reasons five men will never listen to a cunt in such surroundings. The ensemble was textbook group dynamic – a lover, a colleague, a child… these all have matching ambitions from different directions, so if it was up to me, the process would have been even smoother. But of course, once I opened my mouth to assign work, I was instantly called a bossy bitch. Even if three out of six have never before actually cut a trunk in half and don’t really know much about trees. Hard to explain to a bunch of city self proclaimed alphas that no, the spruce bark beetle doesn’t crawl onto beeches after they’re left aground. Only spruces. Different bark altogether. Still, for all their mockery and bitching, they achieved heaps in a relatively short time.

The whole while I was pretending we are building a house. Well, a woods cottage. Somewhere very far away, somewhere very beautiful. I have a deep passion for large rain and small fires. Summer storms, when the canopy of trees are swinging wildly, and small bonfires or fireplace logs embering crackingly… Where best to live a life of these tiny wonders than in a vast forest? That I could do. Exist in solitude, as a weird witch, making food from what he brought home from the hunt with berries for dessert and keeping two fat sheep for wool. I think that is the third on my list of heavens. To be healthy and young and married to a man who can strangle a bear and yet still deliver butterfly kisses to my face every evening. I don’t think that sort of existence would be dull at all. Not at all ambitious, but perpetually engaging and simplistic. Terribly intimate, too. With a pinch of adventurous. In fact, we’d get pretty fucking far if he listened to me more when it comes to organized menial enterprises. 

Know what I mean?

()

Well, this was depressing. Watched the first half (only half I'll watch) of the Nymphomaniac. If Antichrist was angst porn, this was just plain porn. Depressing porn. Suddenly I no longer have any desire to photograph nudes. If I see another stranger’s penis, I will freak out. I walk with my va-j-j so tightly locked, my knees rub. I pity the actors and seriously cannot see the point of this movie. Like any woman who likes sex is mentally unstable and any woman who refuses to love is mortally full of self-pity. So, to show two hours of a young girl fucking (and I mean actual fucking, not sort of kind of artistic fucking), for every coitus scene, you get to see and hear a beaten, lifeless woman giving her confession to a fly fisher. The fly fisher is, oddly enough, literal.

The oddest bit is that earlier I watched a ShowWhite and Seven Dwarfs porn on the net and it was really fun and erotic and arousing. That one I’ll watch again. I’ll have to, if I ever want my libido to come out from under the wardrobe, where at the moment it’s hiding in horror. 

Walking dead – The Grove

Finally a good episode. I've stopped watching TWD somewhere mid previous season, bored, basically, and tired of all the whining faces and really weird subplots. The pilot to this show – I still think that was the best pilot to any show, even better than Breaking Bad, The Bridge or any of my other favorite shows. The rest… Not so much. But there was lotsta noise about the Grove and now I can see why. It was really good episode. Awfully haunting, terribly depressing and almost no zombies in it, just how a good horror is supposed to be. (World War Z anyone?) I know that the original graphic novels are ridiculously gruesome and tragic. Carol never makes it this far, but in the show, she is a favorite. Her inner turmoil is almost as good as those of Shane, just in the opposite direction. (He went from a righteous, good man to a selfish alpha to a crazy person and carol went from an abused wife to a child-less stump of a cut down tree to a really scary decision maker. And executioner of those decisions – something Rick needed whole seasons to achieve at times.)

Few years ago I saw a good Mel Gibson movie, the Edge of Darkness, and in it his character is asked if he came out of the war a changed man. He replied, and this is something I firmly agree with to this day, that you come out pretty much the same you went in. The fact that some come out nuts and broken is because they were gonna be weak without the blunt face-on violence fairly equally, just in a pampered environment. Lots of boys cry for their mommies when shit hits the fan. With or without wars.

This is the subject matter of the Grove (what a pretty word indeed). Lizzy was always going to be a psychopath, the end of the world just brought it out of her illustriously. Sooner or later her parents would have to face the fact she’s offing all the puppies and drowning her sister and pulling plugs on old people, and they’d either put her in a nuthouse or prison. In the good old world nobody would consider euthanizing her. Kudos on Carol to pull that one off. Doubtfully anyone else ever could, despite the speeches. I guess the remaining few people of this show noticed what happens when you stubbornly insist on the happy ending when they started running out of family members.

The damndest thing, the toll Carol now has to carry. In the end all people die from either goodness or sin. Goodness cause they can’t be cruel to be kind and sin, because they made the ugly decisions to spare the good. No disease or machine ever killed as many people as people killed people.  

.... Is it just me or it never rains in this show? 

LOL, I've dreamt I'm climbing - literally -the walls of our stairway. Climbing is starting to be such swell closures of otherwise shitty days. And they are re-applying texture to the stairs in the stairway, so you basically have to climb around them. Don't ask what I do with the dog.

... I was gonna write something else, but I'm basically still asleep and have to work on other things. I'll be back later.

Spent five fucking hours waiting with dad for him to be released from the hospital. I got so tired and depressed I nigh wept. I started being rude to nurses, which is a fucking no no, but we were getting truly worn thin. Please don't patronise me. Fucking hate that. I actually set one of my semi-business dates in the Neuro ward and luckily the sexy minx I'm making the video for has a sense of humour and didn't find that weird at all. Also, she showed me a shortcut under the building as opposed to alllll the way around the entire hospital, to get to the main gate. Hospitals are freakishly large buildings. I navigate better through a nuclear power plant than all these mazes and walkways. Ultimately I just had to leave dad there to run to the train station and kiss G, because I probably won't see him again today :/ And I wouldn't fucking mind if they just told us: the papers will be ready at nine in the evening. Fine. No problem. Just don't tell us 9am and then leave us sitting in the hallway like we're lifeless fucking bums.

Even mum, who had to have gone through this ordeal yesterday, no longer argues when I tell her this town's hospital is a bad joke.

Changes :)

I've radically changed my hair colour, somewhat mayhap to mourn the dead and somewhat, because spring is ... springing and I am so used to my old that by the time this one grows dim and I reapply red, it will seem like a whole fresh new me :D In bloom!

But yaar, spring is officially here! Pretty much all the hairy monstrums in the house are in mating season, cats humping the furniture and one another, the mutt starting to act like a nymph, me... Well, not that I am not in love in winter, but I go positively insanely madly deeply in honey with my hubsies in March, planning and plotting his birthday surprise and buying him more yummy chocolate than any human can survive. (It's just how I express my affectionate stupidity. Slowly killing my darlings with sugar and cholesterol.) These days we are both so overworked, that I barely get to see him and when I do see him, he is so tired and I am so tired, we're just two melting marshmallows, stuck together, warming each other under a snuggie. Watching Hobbit 2.0

The list of my errands is absurd - not to mention having to run around, taking care of parents' deals, as two days ago my dad lost a boxing match over a parking space and he's being kept in the hospital for observation... Of course they have found all sorts of things wrong with him, old brain scar tissue, poorly healed broken stuff, those sort of minor anomalies one just ignores in one's body... Nutty old sod. Well, I have to get him home today, before they exhibit him as a medical wonder. In between business dates.

I've sort of almost finished the video for Tinka's hubbie's band, half finished one for the dancer we did along the way, wrote the texts for the bio farm website (more to must), sent them photos to use under it, I almost finished the picture book, negotiating the library code, always fun, ate myself into a week-long tummy ache at the nephew's party yesterday, skipped climbing, had dinner with my bestie Maja, drew additional frames for the Fr. revolution project, ordered a new battery for Marki on-line, party job scheduled in two days, have four dates in the next two days and a menial labour weekend. General is in school, so I keep busy not to miss him too badly. I think I wrote four pages of the new book. Maybe five. I also know I am forgetting something important, I just can't remember what.....

... And this is what my hallway looks like. Under construction.

.. and yes, I hear every hammerfall in detail.

I got an interesting offer for a studio, which I may actually take. Very fond of photographing nudes lately, the problem I have is that all my nudes ooze intimacy too intensely, so unless I elevate it to a more rigid, frigid form, I'll fail to achieve the standards of the ambition (for an actual exhibit) and just end up showing what I do for fun as opposed to what I can as a professional.

From Niko's shoot.

... Oh, fuck me. Now I remember. I forgot to shoot the winter sequences of the Shards movie! Bloody hell!

Ye, well, and then mum casually mentions dad was in a fistfight, got his nose broken and had to be taken to the ER, all this because of a parking space confrontation. Just one of those visits to the town for them, y'know?