I sent letters to some twelve members of the City Council, Zilker, Parks and Recreations, and Mayor Will Wynn. The letter was cosigned by a number of members of my professional photography group, ApNet.

Stuart Strong, the acting director of Parks and Rec, simply said the fee was a way to “monitor and control” our use of the gardens. He did not address my request for an annual pass.

Some of you may have noticed that last Thursday, the Statesman ran an article on how the city is now proposing to charge fitness trainers who host running classes or yoga or even the “stroller mom” groups who jog together with their babies a $500 annual fee for the right to train in parks or on the trail.

I understand the city is strapped for cash, but the amount of money they make off these fees is so insubstantial when you add in the processing and personnel to do it. And the cost to the goodwill of the citizens of Austin and their view of their city and parks is enormous.

I’ll be speaking to the Austin Professional Photographers Association in a couple weeks in hopes they will join forces with my own group to fight the city. I’ve been communicating with the Statesman reporter about this as well. Even if we lose, we’re going to make some noise, and help ensure that sneaky measures get attention before going through, and to ensure the new City Council members (the run off election is June 14) take a good long look at how they are eroding the quirky, open, fun reputation of our city.

We are having a GREAT time in the bluebonnets! They’ve been slower to bloom than last year, but they are coming all the same.

I have opened up a second weekend for portraits. (Click to see schedule.) I haven’t even photographed my OWN girls in the flowers yet!

These shots were all taken last weekend. The photograph of the triplets has been rendered as a painting instead of a simple photograph, one of my favorite techniques with bluebonnets. I inserted a close up as well, so you could see the detail. These make ideal enlargements for fireplaces or dining rooms or entry ways—classic, timeless, and a sweet memory of our children when they were little.

A little history: the bluebonnet officially became the state flower in 1901. The name comes from its resemblance to a woman’s bonnet. The two primary species of bluebonnets grow natively in Texas and nowhere else in the world.

Bluebonnet seeds are carefully made by nature to only germinate 20% of the time. This way, if one year is bad for the blooms, the majority of the seeds are still waiting in the ground for the next season. This is why the patches cannot be predicted. Too much rain in the spring is actually bad for bluebonnets, as they rot easily, although extra rain in the fall is exactly what the seeds need. Fall rain is a better predictor for a good patch than spring.

Scarified, or specially treated seeds, can be germinated in ten days for those who forget in the fall, but it is too late and too warm now for them to bloom. Buy your seeds in September, rake a sunny spot, and lightly cover the seeds with 1/2 inch of soil. Don’t just scatter them as you will be feeding the birds!

And here it came! I didn’t even mind getting out in gale winds and a downpour this morning.

If you’ve never seen the images I take at Bull Creek–you’ve gotta go look. It’s an amazing location. I even held a Nature Write In there with some fellow NaNoWriMo novelists last November that was featured on About.com.

The special is $95 and includes a portfolio of images that you get to keep. It runs from March 8-20 and April 18-20. There are so many options at Bull Creek–towering rocks, the creek itself, long sections of grass, and of course the waterfall.

Go look at the appointment schedule and find yourself a slot!

1. Started submitting writing again
2. Got my studio un-Christmastized and shot my first sitting
3. Located a company to manage my emails to you guys (they are going to be so much prettier and more functional as well as actually getting to you–your spam filters dislike me even though you end up calling woefully about missing specials.)
4. Identified the coolest web gallery software EVER where you can “sticky” images and put several up at a time to compare images. Go look at a sample gallery! (Just click on any image to make it big, then drag it around.) I’ll be redoing my Fun Prints Web Site from the ground up starting next week.

But I only have one actual New Year’s resolution this year–and I’ve done it every single day even though Elizabeth is miserable because of it. Here it is:

I hereby resolve, on this 1 January 2008, to make my youngest child, Elizabeth, age 5, eat one vegetable every single day, no matter what it takes.

So far so good (well, depending on if you’re sitting next to me in a restaurant–not so good on your ears.)

But she’s eating green things. For the first time since she was TWO.

Your resolution may involve eating less. Mine–eating MORE!

Well, this year it is *supposed* to be my Ho Ho Ho props. I saw these on a Christmas card last year and loved it. And since I had already created the elaborate Not-Frosty snowman out of grapevine for the outdoor shoots (and some families will opt to use him outside the house), I thought I would keep it simple for the studio shots. The Ho Ho Ho was perfect. Families could do it. Big kids could do it. Even babies. Cute all the way around.

Until I started working on the prop.

Arrrghhhh!

First was the massive search for just the right H and O. Big, but not too big. Sturdy but not heavy. And most of all, I wanted to be able to glue the H and O together to make it easier for small children. The original shot I’d seen had them separate, with a child holding a letter in each hand, but with my age clients, we’d probably see as much “OH!” as “HO!” 

I finally spotted just the right thing at JoAnns, but with “Halloween” taking up many of the H and Os, I had to drive all over town to find three sets. Then I had to search for paint (I wanted them red and sparkly). Just today, a mere 48 hours before my first scheduled shoot, did I finally assemble all the supplies.

And nothing’s working. The H and Os won’t stay together. They’d never survive the kids who would handle them. The paint is too thin, not glittery enough. It shows all the flaws in the letters. It doesn’t pop the way I want them to for hand tinted black & white, which is how I envision the final images. I’m giving up for the day, well aware that if I don’t finish them tomorrow, they won’t be dry in time for Friday.

Humbug!

I’ll cheer myself up with a couple of my favorite images from all the outdoor shoots. I’m remembering now why I love photographing babies and kids–they don’t worry about backgrounds, props, perfect pictures, or that Christmas card shot–they just have fun. I’m lucky that I get to play with them almost every day and most everybody comes out of their photo shoot laughing.

But two days ago, when a black cat took the trouble and danger to dart in front of me on Bee Caves Road, I admit to feeling a chill. As his sleek little body dashed across the four-lane road, he actually turned to look at me for a moment, as if to say, “Fear me!”

I immediately began counting the bad things that happened.

Remember how happy I was to find the box that just fit my contest entry, therefore making me feel positive and happy about submitting the book?

The day of the black cat I went to the post office to mail off a second entry, this time a novel. I picked up the flat rate postage box, same as a few days before, but when I tried to shove the manuscript box inside it, it DIDN’T fit.

I then noticed an almost identical box next to it, same markings, slightly larger, which didn’t say “Flat Rate.”

I had a terrible feeling I had done something very stupid.

The post office lady confirmed it. I’d mailed a regular postage box with a Flat Rate label. I had underpaid by probably $4.

I asked her what would happen. She was very sympathetic, because if the box gets returned, the contest deadline will have passed and I won’t be able to submit it–therefore wasting all the paper and printing and postage. “Well, if you’re lucky, no one will even notice,” she said, plastering labels on a pile of photography portfolios. “The minute I saw these new style boxes, I knew this was going to happen–people would do exactly what you did–mix up the flat rate box with the regular ones.”

She expertly flipped the envelopes over, already noting they were photographs and stamping “do not bend” all over them. “But the good thing is, the people who empty out the parcel slots aren’t trained for the windows, so they probably won’t notice either. It might get through.”

“What if it doesn’t?” I asked.

“I will sit postage due for ten days at their post office, then get returned.”

“Too late to send it back.”

“Yep.”

I thanked her and left the counter.

On the way back home, in almost the exact same spot on Bee Caves Road, a fuzzy white cat darted across the street. I slammed on my brakes and couldn’t believe it. Another cat? Another dash across a huge road?

I drove on, wondering about this, if the white cat negated the black cat. Or if the white cat meant my luck had turned back to good.

It’s been six days since I mailed the first contest entry with the wrong postage. In the next week it will either be returned or I will get the post card saying it was safely received.

NOW you can wish me luck.

Yesterday my day got off kilter when I dashed across town to help a friend find her passport so she could get to an interview and fill out her I-9 for a job. (We found it after an hour-long search–where? Under a saddle!) To get there, I had skuttled my plans to make a couple minor changes to a book I wrote many years ago and ship it off to a contest.

The book has long lain dormant. A writer friend told me about a novel contest. As I looked over the rules, I realized they also took Creative Nonfiction/Memoir. I remembered this book, which is about my first year teaching in Houston, and decided to submit it since the deadline was so close and it had been ready for years.

I got delayed by the passport search, and at the end of the day had to quickly make the changes and toss the pages in a too-big manuscript box since I didn’t have time to track down something more its size. I had planned to put the box inside a shipping envelope and run it to the after-hours postal machine.

But the box didn’t fit in my envelopes. It was too large by a quarter inch.

So I hunted through the racks in the post office self service room, trying to find a bigger envelope. They had nothing. I was late to a meeting already. I figured I just wouldn’t ship it after all. A man walked in and I moved over to a table covered with scraps left from someone hurriedly tugging the backing off sticky labels. “Is the machine working?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I haven’t even tried it.”

“Oh. It’s been broken for two days. All the machines have been.” He gestured around to the stamp machines, all, I now realized, had “Out of Order” signs on them.

“I doubt they’d fix one and not the others,” he said and walked back out.

Great. Even if I DID have an envelope that fit, I still couldn’t have shipped it.

I was bothered by all the curling label bits everywhere, so I began picking them up and tossing them into the trash can at the end of the table. Underneath was a Priority Mail shipping box. I picked it up. It was unused, and it appeared as though whoever had left all the curling labels had been using these, and had one left over. I looked over at the rack again–none there. Only the too-small envelopes.

I tugged the box into shape to see if the manuscript box would fit inside. It did, exactly. I locked down the ends, putting the labels on the outside. Who would have thought that the only box left in the room, hidden beneath a mound of trash, would be the perfect fit?

I turned back to the machine. I had forgotten about it.  You have to use these machines for large boxes, as it takes a snapshot of you for security purposes. I set the box on the scale and the screen flickered at me. “How may I help you?” it read.

“You can work!” I told it, and hit the button for “Accept weight.” We went through the steps for postage, and then it asked me for my credit card. I expected at any moment for it to quit working, but it accepted my card and spit out a perfect rectangular label.

As I peeled back the label and pressed it to the box, I felt like I were in a haze, some bizarre filter fuzzing everything around me.  Even later, after I’d dropped the package in the parcel slot and returned to my car, I felt strange, other-wordly, as though some veil had parted just for me.

I don’t think this means I will win the contest, or that good fortune is necessarily beaming down its happy rays. But I do think it meant I was supposed to get back in the saddle, keep writing, not give up. And just a few days before, this is exactly where I had been. But I’m reminded this was a good book (you can read an excerpt if you like), and getting it out again was a good thing, contest win or no contest win.

You don’t need to wish me luck. I think I’ve already gotten it.

The fun part of October is to watch the seasons change, as always happens during this fall special. We start out in the 90s, families sweating in their long sleeves to make their holiday cards look right (even though we could very well be wearing shorts for Thanksgiving.) Then it always happens that just before the final weekend of the special, we get a cold snap. And today was it!

I’ll find out in the morning if I need to cancel my Tuesday shoots at the park due to rain–cross your fingers that the weather tidies up just a touch. We’ve had lots of rain this year, and hopefully that means a beautiful bluebonnet season again in the spring.

But here are lots of examples of some of the images I’ve taken so far at the special, some at people’s homes, some at Bull Creek, and others nearby in a neighborhood park.

Thanks to all the families who’ve been coming. We’ve really had a lot of fun with the shoots and phooey on Zilker–who needs the crowds, the hard time parking, and certainly the unexpected $50 fee to shoot there. Yes, it’s lovely, but so is most of Austin. We just live in a beautiful town.

Baby Kayleigh got a surprise shower (of course she didn’t see a thing, still in Mama’s tummy!) The games at this shower were, well, a little different than anything I’d played–other than the “guess how big a string will go around the mama-to-be.” Which I always win. And did this time. Ha! I have a foolproof method.

But they had a “smell the diaper” game to guess what was in it…I scored rather poorly, only getting “chocolate” and “jam” correct. (I SWEAR there was vinegar in one.) Then four lucky friends got to have a race swilling apple juice from baby bottles. And let’s not forget the blindfolded baby food spooning contest, where couples fed each other. Sam and Lisa were *not* to be denied that prize and shoveled apple sauce as though their life depended on it.

And of course, Kayleigh herself made an appearance finally! She’s a beauty!

Our friends Sean and Tessa had their baby Kate baptized this past Sunday at St. Katherine’s Catholic Church. We know it was a bittersweet moment without Corey, but so many family members, coworkers, and friends came to see little Kate on her big day!

Otherwise the outdoor pictures for the Fall Special are going well and I’ll post some when I get a chance! I’ve been a bit swamped with a run on “First Steps” images. But I’m not nearly so busy as I’ll be when the Holiday Portraits start.