takgoti

Favorite Photo of the Moment

I’ve been stressing out over life a bit lately. The potential of a cross-country move and a handful of other things have left me a bit tightly wound, and it’s taken a toll on my overall mood. So, when I had a little four day jaunt in San Diego to check out the school that was possibly going to take me to the west coast, it didn’t seem surprising to me that the region’s supposedly perfect weather had turned gray and overcast.

On the second day, it rained.

On day three, my last full day in the city, I awoke determined to make the most out of my time there and see as much of things as I could. Once I’d looked around a bit and eaten lunch, I decided, on a whim, to drive up the coastal highway to check out Encinitas, a small-ish beach town just north of San Diego.

Just as I reached the city limits, with the latest Linkin Park album bumping through the speakers, this song [linked for your convenience one entry away] came on and the sky opened up. Truly, it was a magical moment.

Encinitas was gorgeous, but having so many symbolic gestures combine just when I needed a little moment of grace is going to forever propel it ahead a few notches in my mind.

Favorite Photo of the Moment

Every year, I keep meaning to go to one of the many apple orchards in the area and…you know. Pick some apples. Make a pie. I never get around to it, but since I don’t know when I’ll be back for my favorite season in Virginia, I had to do it this year or live in potential regret.

After doing some digging around online, I found an orchard in Purcellville, VA that looked like a potential winner. I forwarded the information along to some of my friends and a few weeks later we found ourselves making the long-ish drive out to the farm.

The weather was beyond beautiful - the quintessential autumn day; sun shining brightly but the temperature mildly chilly. Making our way through the rows and rows of apple trees, we began to realize that we had arrived rather late into the season. Many of the apples had already fallen to the ground and begun to wrinkle and blemish on the branches.

After walking past many past-mature swatches of trees, we began to scratch our heads. Upon our arrival, we had seen plenty of people coming back with buckets that were brimming with apples. Where had they gotten them? We soldiered on.

At some point on the path, we turned a corner and were met with a small empty clearing across from some beehives. Because it’s how I roll, I asked everyone to put our empty buckets on their heads and snapped this picture.

As luck would have it, we ran into a group returning with a large apple bounty and held them at gunpoint until they told us where they had gotten them from.

I’m kidding. We took their apples and ran.

I’m kidding.

The day ended in an apple-filled victory. If you would like to see the rest of our orchardventure, please click on through.

This picture stands out as one of my favorites of the lot. The bright green of the trees, the clarity of the sky, and my friends with some slightly smelly buckets on their heads. When we finally start that band, this is destined to be our album cover. For now, it simply chronicles the brilliant weather and a day I will cherish in my memory until the dementia finally gets me.

Favorite Photo of the Moment

Georgetown is an area of Washington D.C. that is often rife with the rich and the pretentious.

And yet.

To quote that show [Friends] that I seem to be able to quote in any given situation, “maybe a little pretension never hurt anybody.”

There is something undeniably exciting, for anyone who loves to shop, about walking down M Street and being greeted by storefront after storefront of exquisitely designed window dressings. This line of retail bliss, which credit card holders eagerly queue up to snort, is broken up only by a number of restaurants and specialty eateries which guarantees that you can easily spend hours in this relatively small pocket of the district. Georgetown is about the closest thing that we get to an outdoor mall on the northern edge of this coast; something that the Californians have mastered but we have little need for as the temperatures drop and otherwise harmless weather can turn nasty without much warning.

There is an aura about Georgetown that I have not seen duplicated anywhere else to date. It seamlessly mixes together romance and metropolitan sophistication with hints of the Old World and cutting edge modernity. Taking an afternoon stroll down to the Potomac with a Baked & Wired cupcake in hand, ducking into Birreria Paradiso to grab a beer or two in front of the fire while snow begins to coat the brick sidewalks, or meandering through the airy space of the Paper Source to pick up some fun projects for home; these are all things I have done in Georgetown.

In my early twenties, however, I discovered Cady’s Alley.

Cady’s Alley defines what I call the Interior Design Wing of the M Street drag. In its own little section, away from the bars and the underground mall, it typically remains unvisited by the majority of Georgetown walking traffic and therefore retains a sense of quiet tranquility. The prices range from expensive to astronomical, but if you want to see what designers are using to mold those impeccable images gracing the glossy pages of house and home magazines, this is the place to visit. Be warned though, familiarizing yourself with retail fronts like Ann Sacks, Bulthaup, or Waterworks may leave you with an incurable sense of longing.

This picture was taken during a trip I went on with my BFF Aki to gather ideas and inspiration for her being-built-now townhouse in Maryland. I have always appreciated a beautiful interior, and as I am about to go to school to throw myself into the profession I am beginning to look at interior fixtures and furniture with new eyes.

The lighting in this particular store, Boffi, is dramatic in the best kind of way. It shows you just how much the angle and intensity of a spotlight and its ambient counterparts can highlight, focus, and affect the mood of a space.

As a girl on a nearly nonexistent income, I can enjoy and understand the value behind repurposing, reusing, and making the most of a tight budget. However, I will never, ever underestimate the power of quality, and there is something about superbly designed cabinetry or a breathtakingly gorgeous bathtub that will always make me yearn.

Favorite Photo of the Moment

I can remember when N64’s used to be hot shit. We weren’t allowed to have game consoles [my brother and I], so whenever my friends had them I would always try and get as much face time in as possible when I was staying over. The day when one of my best friends in elementary school introduced me to the original Super Mario Bros. was the day when she realized we were never going to play with Barbies again.

In the case of my brother, he grew up never really caring about video games and continues to maintain minimal contact with technology, aside from watching the visualizer on iTunes whilst placing his music on shuffle. [I will cop to this being addicitively mesmerizing. I recommend both the iTunes Visualizer, and Jelly.] In the case of me, I currently own a Wii, an XBOX 360, and a PS3. Apparently, about 19 years of video game squelching could not squelch the gamer out of me.

Anyhow, the N64 is a system that was released right about when all of my contemporaries and I were hitting puberty. This means that “hanging out” at boys’ houses suddenly became something that had connotations requiring double quotes. If a girl was going over to a boy’s house, she wasn’t just going over there to shoot the shit and play Ninja Turtles. She was going there to do something far more nefarious. Something that none of us yet fully understood.

I only had a handful of female friends who were in the possession of an N64 system [or the soon to follow Dreamcast system] and that was because they had male siblings. The girl geek had yet to become a “thing” in general society, and believe me when I say that other girls did not think it “cool” when you came over to sit around and read Teen Bop and discuss boys and you ended up playing Mortal Kombat and Mario Kart with their brothers. It’s not that I didn’t find reading articles about Jonathan Taylor Thomas appealing. I mean, let’s be real, I was a teenage girl during the height of his popularity and to this day the initials JTT make me shriek internally just a little bit. He was our Bieber. Our Pattinson. Just better looking and far more justified as a teen-girl crush, in my opinion. But I digress…

What? Sorry, I was watching the iTunes visualizer.

Anyhow, all I really remember playing a lot of on the N64 were Mario Kart and Mortal Kombat, and even those I didn’t get to play that much. So, when we were over at Cyrus’ friend Charles’ house and he had this bounty of games strewn across the floor in his room, the adolescent geek girl inside me squee’d just a little bit. I don’t remember why Charles had all these N64 games. I think he’d gotten them off eBay or Craiglist or something? Regardless, I was a little excited to see what I’d been missing during my teenage non-gaming days.

The answer? Apparently not much. You know how the original 8 bit Super Mario Bros. remains cool in a charming, retro sort of way? I guess that if I had ties to most of these games they would retain more of a nostalgia for me, but man. The N64 holds weird control schemes, some poorly thought out games, touchy camera controls that started to make me sick after a bit, and graphics that make the Wii look like blu-ray. I did get a laugh from having to blow out one of the cartridges to get it to work, and there was a rather heated debate about whether Slippy Toad is a boy or a girl. [That is one confused amphibian.]

I took a picture of the pile of games, partially for posterity’s sake, and partially because it was just cool looking. In a burst of trite inspiration, I decided to doctor it up in Photoshop a bit to give it that sepia’d, fuzzy, vignette’d look we equate with oldness.

So the N64 gaming night wasn’t met with as many fond memories for me as it was for all the boys who had grown up with the systems. It was fun, though, and at the very least I went home with a new appreciation for our current generation of gaming.

And also, a new appreciation for just how terrible a game Turok: Dinosaur Hunter was. We gave up on that one after approximately five minutes.

Favorite Photo of the Moment

Where the hell has this month gone? I logged onto tumblr thinking it’s only been a few days, maybe a week, since I last posted and the internet was all, “Ha HA! More like two weeks!” July is flying by at the speed of a cheetah with its ass on fire and it’s all I can do to hang on.

So, given my delinquency I’m going to go ahead and post another picture up here. This was taken out on the deck during the week that Cyrus and Sasa stayed over at my house because their air conditioning was blown.

For those who have not suffered through a summer on the east coast before, you should know that things don’t just get hot out here. They get humid. The difference between a dry summer and a humid summer is the difference between sweating through your tank top and sweating through your tank top whilst sitting in tepid bath water. Air conditioning isn’t a luxury; it’s a necessity.

Unlike the considerably more temperate west coast, things don’t cool off here at night. The dewpoint hovers somewhere around the 10,000,000 mark and so far as I’m concerned, that moisture heats up throughout the day and then emits the absorbed heat ALL NIGHT LONG. In the same way that wind chill can make a day go from cold to I’m-so-numb-right-now-you-could-punch-me-in-the-face-and-I-wouldn’t-feel-a-thing, humidity can give you this sticky, I’m-sweating-without-sweating feeling even though the thermometer says it’s only 85 degrees outside. And this is what it’s like just south of the Mason Dixon line. I cry tears of perspiration for our neighbors further south.

The point of all this weather-ranting is that when we get a nice evening in Virginia, we carpe noctem the shit out of it. Deck furniture gets dusted off, grill covers are removed, and even the most timid summer dwellers are sipping beverages of choice outdoors.

We were graced with such a night shortly into what would turn into a week of house-guesting whilst Cyrus and Sasa waited for the air conditioning guy to come around and make their house suitable for human life again. So, we lit some candles, poured some wine, brought my iPod dock outside, and set up their hookah on the deck.

I love these nights. Comfortably warm with a light breeze, glowing lights softly splashing across faces, and laughter drifting into the trees as friends kick back and appreciate each others’ company. It’s taken me a while to get accustomed to the humidity out here [twenty-six years, actually], but it’s still these nights that I will carry with me. When time suspends itself and the warmth gently caresses your skin. When everything is at peace and the blackness of the night offers a void of possibility instead of uncertainty.

Favorite Photo of the Moment

The engine in my mom’s car burnt out on the highway during an eight hour drive back from Ohio, so my parents had a decision to make. After a minor cardiac arrest over the potential repair bill they decided to cut their losses and buy a new car, which led to the purchase of a brand spankin’ new Honda Civic hybrid. It’s gorgeous, and all the new technology features also mean that I’ve been explaining how to use said car for the past month or so. [I think she’s got the hang of it now.]

About a week after getting acquainted with the new wheels, my parents thought it would be a good time to take it on a solid ride and so I found myself joining them for a jaunt up to Annapolis, Maryland. Annapolis, for those not in the know, is mainly known for its crab. As an avid non-eater of seafood, this means that I was there for mostly the scenery and to take a few pictures. We skipped past the art and dining district and headed to the harbor, which is about as touristy as it is dirty - not so much that it makes it unpleasant, but enough that you notice. The harbor is a smallish area, and you can loop around it rather quickly. It was also blazing hot outside, so we quickly convened and came to a consensus that the trip was going to be a short one.

On the way to search for a restaurant [and air conditioning], I saw this scooter parked on the curb and I knelt down to get a shot. In the midst of attempting to capture the angle I wanted, a flock of seagulls went shooting by overhead and I swear to Thor, y’all, I came this close to coming face to feces with some seagull scat. In my frantic leaping after seeing the splat, the camera got tilted at a rather severe angle and this was the result.

They say that getting poo’ed on by a bird is a sign of luck, but I’m going to say that my real luck was both in narrowly missing said poo and hitting this angle, which I love. Sometime I may go back and edit it, as I suspect it may look good in black and white, but for now, I’m appreciating the composition [accidental as it may have been] enough to throw it up here.

Also, I am appreciating having made it back home, as I additionally suspect that my mother may not have let me back in the car had I actually been shat upon. New car smell > daughter’s well-being. It’s how we roll.