Me, in parts

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The final theme for Project Show Me is "you".
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I would have loved to use this shot again (which first appeared here, and which I think Robert suspected when he said "a self portrait; your hands; your feet (I know some of you will be all over this one!); a shielded view of you; any way you want to portray yourself will work here." but I'm trying to be a good team player and take a new shot especially for the project as requested. (Who'd have suspected that I was a closet rule-follower? Certainly not me...) It's still a favorite of mine though. Quirky, a bit different, irreverent. A lot like the rest of me in fact. (See how I just snuck it in here anyway without overtly using it as my "Show Me" shot? I'm so sneaky...)
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Since I can't use the feet shot and I'm both horribly unphotogenic (yes really, even my own mother says I look awful in pictures) and am wearing an old ripped up t-shirt and shorts with my hair up in a sloppy bun there is no chance in hell that you will get a proper self-portrait. Instead, you'll have to settle for an artist's rendering.

I think it looks just like me, don't you?

Just think, it could have been worse. I could have subjected you to this instead:

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Fish Therapy

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What, you didn't know that fish can need therapy? You'd need therapy too if you were stuck swimming in circles around a tiny glass bowl all day...

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Seriously though, I find watching fish to be one of the most therapeutic and relaxing activities there is. There's just something about watching them silently glide and dart that I find utterly mesmerizing. My family knows that taking me to an aquarium is a risky prospect, that they are in danger of being trapped for hours as I gaze in wonder at the teeming life in the depths.

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Right now we've only got this poor little zebra fish in an old bowl. He's been with us for about two years now. (He used to have a few friends, but they've, uhh, gone to visit friends in other fishbowls far away. Yeah, that's what they've done. Hey, I may like to watch them but I never said I was great at taking care of them.) My kids are agitating for some friends for our lonely little guy though, so sometime soon we'll either buy a new bowl and a few more zebras, possible with a beta fish thrown in, or else take the plunge and decide that we're ready for the responsibility of an aquarium of our own. Maybe I'll price a few just to see...

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In the meantime, Mr. Fish and I will just continue to gaze lovingly into each other's eyes.

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I kid. He's certainly not looking at me. This fish is dumber than bread. Half the time he doesn't even notice when we feed him. Ah well, perhaps it's just his own coping mechanism - if I ignore the big scary monsters staring in at me maybe they'll just go away again and leave me to my silent prison. Alone. Afraid. The last survivor.

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See what I mean? Sometimes fish really could use some therapy.

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Or a friend.

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Remembering Grandma

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My father's mother, my Grandma (not to be confused with Nana, my maternal grandmother), was born in Hungary in 1907, living there until she emigrated to the US in the late 1920's. (There is a great deal more to that part of the story, but that is not a story for today. Today I prefer happier memories.)
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She worked most of her life as a seamstress, eventually even designing evening gowns for a famous pianist's partner to wear to his concerts. Grandma was very much a European - elegant and well-put together, with a clear sense of style (which sadly seems to have skipped my generation). Even when she lay sick in the hospital she made sure to have a nurse paint her nails in the bright red shade she favored.
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When I was growing up I always wanted to be taken to my grandparents' home when I was home sick from school because Grandma would make me grilled cheese sandwiches cut into triangles with the crusts removed, so much fancier than the simple rectangles I received at my own house. She had art books, and design magazines, and fancy needlepoints of sad-looking pierrots, and a button box for her grandchildren to play with that would be the envy of every child for miles around.
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She had a very formal living room which contained the world's most unbelievably over the top gilded coffee table - which she hated. She'd been talked into buying it by her wealthier and even more elegant sister-in-law and had hated it since the day it was brought home, but it would have offended her sister-in-law terribly to have gotten rid of it, so there it stayed. It was partially redeemed though by the four-compartment candy dish which she kept on the table - fully-stocked with everything from chocolates to peppermints.
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In my jewelry box, right next to a gold ring with her name on it which came with her from Hungary, is a small golden box which contains my most tactile memory of my grandmother. The box contains Fiamma, a solid perfume from Princess Marcella Borghese. When I open the box I inhale my grandmother's very essence, a scent that transports me back thirty years in time. This perfume hasn't been manufactured in decades, it can't even be found by google, but somehow this little tiny box has kept its scent strong all these years, giving me one last sensory link to a woman I loved dearly and lost much too early.
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My grandmother's perfume, what more perfect sentimental object could I have chosen to show you today...

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Ruby Large and Small

The color red appears in numerous places throughout my home, like in the full vibrant red of my dishes (or rather of 2/3 of my dishes. The other third are yellow.) I love this mix and match set. They replaced a set of simple Corel dishes we'd had since we got married over fifteen years earlier when we needed durable, space-saving dishes which could follow us around to a series of early homes with tiny kitchens and no storage space. We got these last year. They're big, they're heavy, and each bowl takes up half the dishwasher, but they make me smile every time I see them.
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At the other extreme there are the subtle red accents in this handpainted ceramic bowl my husband brought home from Morocco many years ago. Coincidentally, the bowl is hung just to the right of my front door, so it's doing double duty as my Project Show Me offering for today. I'm sneaky like that. (Oh, and the tan triangles are apparently made out of camel bone, but I try not to think about that too much.)
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Now speaking of dishes, I really need to head into the kitchen and do some cooking.

Around My Island

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It's kitchen time today at Project Show Me. You guys already see a picture of my kitchen each time you visit (in my header for those of you reading this on a reader - go ahead, click through, it's a nice picture) so I decided that for today's project shoot I'd zoom both in and out.

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First, the overview. This one is fairly similar to the header photo (which is quite fuzzy now that I look at it), but taken this morning on my DSLR (a Nikon D40 if you're curious) instead of last year on my old point and shoot.

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In it you see where this and this happen(ed), complete with living proof of the former, as well as a great closeup of this (I love this one).

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And from another angle

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Here's a closeup of the cruets, of spilled olive oil fame - I managed to replace the broken one and now we have a matched set again!

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And a peak at part of my cookbook collection (yes, this is only part of it. What can I say, I love cookbooks.)

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And just so I can remind myself how far I've come (both in terms of my kitchen and my photography), here are a couple of pictures of what it used to look like. It was even worse when we first bought the flat - there were two steering wheel shaped (I kid you not) fluorescent light fixtures on the ceiling which through off a huge amount of blindingly white light which reflected oh so beautifully off those pearly white cabinets (a huge honking wall of them) to make you feel like you were sitting inside a flashbulb! (You guys are old enough to remember flashbulbs, right?) Seriously, it was blinding, and the overall look was not helped at all by the horrible black plastic knobs that we lived with for years before a realtor friend walked in one day and said "you know, it wouldn't be quite as awful with chrome fixtures." She was right too, we were kicking ourselves for not doing it ten years earlier. Still, it was a very happy day the day the contractors took a sledgehammer to the thing and paved the way for what you saw above.
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Those black and white tiles even manage to make my red Kitchen Aid look ugly. Then there was the microwave cabinet that was too small for our own fairly small microwave, the stove that had to swim in the too-wide refrigerator spot because our fridge wouldn't fit in the stupidly small hole, leaving the fridge standing alone on the opposite side of the room, the missing bit of counter at the far end where the previous owner had installed her washing machine, which had to be filled in with something that didn't quite match... It was hideous. Big I'll grant you, but my god was it ugly. Here, see for yourselves:

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Now quick, go back up to the top of the page before your eyes start to bleed!

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My mailbox, sort of

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Robert over at Thoughts of a Father has just launched Project Show Me - a very cool new photo project (his very first one too, so come show him some love and play along).

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For day 1, we are to show you our mailboxes. This one was a bit of a challenge for me, since I live in an urban hi-rise with an incredibly ugly bank of mailboxes (why couldn't he have started with tomorrow's challenge - kitchens - I renovated two years ago and LOVE my kitchen). Not to mention, for some reason my city doesn't have mail delivery. All city residents are given, free of charge, a post office box. All "regular" mail, and a fair amount of junk mail, gets delivered to the PO Box. The only things that arrive in the mailbox in our building are municipal tax/water bills, gas bills (no idea why, they just do), free local newspapers (weeklies, chock full of ads and local political rhetoric), and flyers. That's about it.

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The only things the building mailbox has going for it photographically are a) the fact that it is right here and not several blocks away (a definite consideration on a day when my schedule is already jam-packed as it is) and b) it is slightly (very, very slightly) less hideously ugly than the post office boxes, which are just locked little doors.

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Never one to shirk at a challenge I took my trusty camera downstairs and hoped for the best. Somehow I had to find a way to make this wall of metal look photogenic, and to do so without revealing my or anyone else's personal information. Easier said than done.

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Luck was on my side though, and there was in fact a local paper sticking out of the box, which gave me something to shoot other than nameplates and locks. I went for the black and white conversion to hide the overwhelming ugliness because what could be more fitting for a shot of a newspaper than black and white. (Oh, and mine is the mailbox on the bottom with its nameplate carefully hidden from view, not the one showing the grayed out name of a long-since moved away neighbor.)

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And now, without more drivel further ado, I give you...

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drumroll please

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...my mailbox!

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