Work has been crazy lately... as you can see from my lack of posts. I was two hours away from a 100 hour work week last week. The project is almost done and I find myself motivated by the thought of never having to touch it again.

The whole experience has made me think a lot about what I want out of life. I have never really thought of my jobs as work. It isn't that they aren't hard or sometimes painful, but being in an art related field tends to lend itself to not thinking of a job that way. I have an ambition to create and would be doing so even if I wasn't getting paid for it. Work seems to provide a good opportunity to do that. The thing about being an artist is that you are one all the time... I don't just put on my artist hat when I go to work. Because of all this, I often turn all my effort towards it without feeling like a work-aholic. It has kind of snuck up on my that way. I find myself "making a living, without having a life" to steal a quote from George Carlin.

I have promised myself to get back to living. : ) I am planning a road-trip after this project ends. I use "planning" in the loosest sense of the word, as in... I am making time for it.. and letting the wind take me where it will ( though I do have some ideas ). Hopefully I will get to take tons of photographs. Photographs never ever feel like work... I could do that 24/7. Sometimes I feel like I missed my calling... though at the same time ... I am kind of glad it isn't my job.

Its only three more weeks until freedom. There is always this part of me... it reminds me of owning a dog.. I have to take it for a walk once in a while. : )

Not that it has anything to do with this fish. For some reason it just seemed like the next picture to post after the smoke stacks. I guess it kind of resembles the picture I took of fish in the ditch where I grew up which was in sight of the smoke stack of the power plant.

A snap shot from the car on the way back from somewhere.

A picture I took years ago on a memorable day traveling along the North Shore of Minnesota. We arrived in Grand Marais just at sunset during a heavy fog. Along the shore people often set up the rocks in this manner.

This is one of my favorites. We were on our way to Spokane, and saw the Rockies for the first time. Driving through the middle of them, we went from a dry brown day into a snow storm. I say storm, but it never really hit us. It just touched the tops of the mountains. It was massive and silent. We began listening to audiobooks of The Lord of the Rings to pass the long three day trip. My impressions of the story are now fused with seeing the rockies and vice versa.

I spent a lot of the time during the trip setting the metering on my little camera while driving with my elbows, nudging ocala out of sleep, handing her the camera and saying, "Get me a shot of that". Poor girl. : )

I took this on a break as I was heading out the front door. The tinted glass gave the grass behind it an abstract quality I liked. Well maybe abstract isn't the best word... it felt like a screen print to me, at least near the upper portions of the image. The silhouetted grass in the upper blue part is my favorite part of the image.

I liked the texture of everything I was shooting that morning. This is from the same Malibu camping trip last year as a few of my other posts. It was early so everything was a little damp, and yet it still had the abrasive harsh quality of the desert.

When the sun set in Malibu it was bright red. It shot a harsh warm line as it went behind the hills.