Ongoing Adventures in Semi-Conciousness

Dear Steve

You are a lazy fucking asshole.  I hate your guts.  Have fun in September when you have no staff, you cock-sucking douche bag.

Have a great day!

PS I quit

Feeling like crap today I took advantage of Xan's long nap and took one on the couch while Tempest had her quiet time, and then through her game time.
I felt better after, but alas... now it's 3:30am and I'm not tired.

So instead I went through the backlogged photos from my camera.

( This is all I do lately )

Random thought:
I left that photography forum that I joined ages ago and got stuck with because I paid for it (mistake), but I did enjoy the ability to ask business related questions to people in the business. However, once you passed their tests you had to pay for the privacy of that area. There's a good reason for that: you're talking about sensitive information, like marketing and client interactions - if your clients randomly found these posts it could make life difficult.

But paying up the ass for it sucks, and overall the people there were kind of fucking obnoxious.

I know I have some photographers on my list, or at least ones that read, so here's a question for all of you who are currently running, or prepping to start running, a business with it (in other words not a hobby photographer, and not MWAC).
If there isn't a group like this already in existence, would you join a FO group for the business aspects of photography? This would piss some people off, because there would be a bit of required elitism for the reasons mentioned above.
Things like having a website for your business, or at least a pro portfolio and some proof that you've had clients (or PBing clients) would be required for entry. Everything would be FO and no one who was "just interested" would be able to view. hence the pissing people off part...

I'd only make the group if there was significant enough interest. I was kind of hoping for an area to discuss things like client relations, pricing, marketing, advertisement, etc etc. It's not a showoff forum.
Alternatively, if there's already one of these groups running successfully on LJ please point me to it so I can join. I don't want to pay $55 for a few months of 20% of helpful stuff and 80% homophobic, conservative ranting. Thoughts?

Taking the risk that this picture is so awful that it may end up on icanhazcheezburger one day...

( A good reason why almost no professional shots of my dad or mom exist )

Today at work, I brought in the papers as usual.

Also as usual, I scanned the front page and something caught my eye, so I started reading.

I got to the fold and reached for my mouse to scroll down, when my jaw suddenly dropped and I realized that I could no longer live on this planet.

I am too much of a retard.

Days ago:
Warm sunshine is a happy Babs. I love summer.
I had the huge photoshoot two days ago with ten people (two grandparents, their two adult children and their two families with two children each). It was at an incredibly stunning park I had never been to before.
I ended up writing down the wrong time and was there over an hour too early, so I had plenty of time to zip around looking for locations and generally checking things out. It was crowded, but gorgeous. When I took this picture and checked it out on my LCD it nearly looked like a mild HDR: I was most impressed by the mid-day light.



Texture play.



Yesterday:
The heat makes me lazy, but I still love it.

I've been thinking a lot about marketing, brand, all that stuff related to business. A huge majority of photography businesses fail inside the first 1-2 years; it's harder than you'd think and involves a lot more planning then "give people a CD". You lose a lot of money and hard work if you keep your prices rock bottom and things away.
I spent many hours out of the last two weeks organizing my receipts, tax folders, digital archives, contracts and client folders.
I think there's a weird part of me that is somehow sexually excited by extreme organization. After I finish a project like that I want to sit back and stare at it for hours. It's like OCD masturbation. Then I want to run off and jump Curtis. I do the same thing when the house is clean, particularly if he's done the brunt of the work.
Housewife erotica is a man doing the dishes. There's just something sexy about a clean house and a sweaty man.

We keep forgetting to get Curtis his medicalert bracelet for his blood clotting thing. The severity comes and goes, but it's worth having a notification over due to the need for a platelet transfusion in the event of injury or surgery.
I can always tell when his count is getting low because he breaks out in a billion bruises. All he has to do is get poked a little roughly to get a nasty looking bruise.
There has been a matching pair of hideous looking bruises along the outside of his thighs for months, they run down about 1/3 of the length of his upper legs. Neither of us could figure out what the hell had happened to him in such a strange spot. Plus, they were never going away. He couldn't remember getting kicked or hit, he hadn't fallen or bumped into anything, and nothing sits at that level. They were a mystery until an evening at a friend's housewarming party where the lubrication of alcohol led to interesting conversation and we suddenly realized that the bruises lined up perfectly with my knees and leg pressure while we were having sex. I found this revelation hilarious.


Today:
I was interviewed again by the paper. This time on a tape recorder thing attached to a giant karaoke microphone. I am not good at this kind of thing. I sat with my head down, fumbling and mumbling, wringing my hands. I hope to god they can edit it down to something sensible that doesn't make me sound like the clod I appear to be.
Curtis has gotten me hooked on Full Metal Alchemist. Which is totally different from what I thought it would be. I'm only about six episodes in so far, but it's rocking my socks.

In two days Tammy gets here! Almost nothing is worth writing about until that.

( Family portrait shoot. )

Links of the day:
Another fun JibJab animation, this time about the presidential campaigning. Unicorns for change!
The coolest gadget ever for kids anyone interested in astronomy. Pretty much everything on that site is worth a link of the day bump.