stay-at-home-gypsy's photostream  

I just found and set up FlickrTab, which is a new flickr-app for showing your Flickr photostream on your Facebook. Here's
my flickrstream on my facebook!







I am aViolet
What Flower Are You?



-----///\\------Please
----///--\\\----put this
---|||----|||---on your
---|||-- -|||---profile if
---|||-- -|||---you know
----\\\--///----someone
-----\\\///-----who is living with, survived
------///\-----or has passed away from
-----///\\\----cancer.
----///--\\\---Thank you

OK, I'll try to describe relevant bits of myself in this little tiny box, since I still haven't loaded a decent editor on my Mac.

First off, the most important thing about me is that I work on my photography while listening to Jai Uttal.

Born and raised in Albuquerque, fourth generation native but anglo New Mexican. Grew up in the Southeast Heights, in "the house around the corner", where my daughter now lives. Graduated from HHS just before Woodstock.

Went to Prescott College, majored in Anthro, specializing in SW Archaeology. Was hired on as the Assistant Photographer for the Center for Man and Environment for some strange reason. My boss, Paul Long, hated working in the darkroom, and I hated studio photography (i.e. photographing all those potsherds and tools that we dug up). So I got to inhabit a state-of-the art darkroom all by myself for three years. Talk about spoiled!!!

Unfortunately, when I graduated, that was the end of the darkroom, and the end of the photography for a long, long, time.

For a bunch of strange reasons, my path took me to seminary, in Berkeley, CA. I didn't mean to become a minister, but my denomination was all excited about having more female ministers, so they successfully recruited me. I should have just stayed at the Graduate Theological Union and kept with "Religion and Society" which was what I was really interested in.

So I tried to be a UCC minister in Champaign, Illinois, Minneapolis, and Flagstaff. By 1990 I was working in Flagstaff restaurants while also working on Native American Land Rights and Environmental Issues. Sinking deeper and deeper into serious poverty, loving my work, and hiking the Grand Canyon.

So then I moved back to Albuquerque, with my three-year-old daughter in tow, and helped my dad set up his post-retirement business as a certified consulting meteorologist. I worked with him on weather- and climate-change-related stuff, until he suddenly died in 2007. I'm still picking up the mountain of pieces he left behind.

I had taken over his 1973 Minolta (manual controls and all) and started taking lots of pictures with it during the 1990's, which is why I have eight albums of Balloon Fiesta pix on my shelf--since we did The Weather for it. But I really longed to do my own processing, again. So when digital came out, I jumped into the point-and-shoots.

My daughter was a figure skater, so I started doing the club website, and putting up galleries of billions of pictures (mostly not taken by me, but totally edited by me) from all the competitions.

Still couldn't afford a DSLR until last year, when I finally got my Rebel XSI, and it has taken me a year to learn how to use it and also get a computer that can handle the software. I had to sell my grandmother's house, which I had just inherited, in order to do it.

I also photograph Manzano del Sol, the retirement center my mom lives in, doing cards and calendars via their trees and gardens, and various events there. It's quite place to do photography. Haven't put much of it up on Flickr yet.


My dad and I had agreed that I would, among other things, use photography to document the effects of and responses to global warming in the Middle Rio Grande bio-region. I'm still working on getting the technical stuff figured out.

Which is why I have joined way too many groups, but they have become my "university," so to speak.

So that's who I am and what I'm up to, sort of. Which is why I call my occupation, down below, "Reinvention."

Don't try to email me. I still haven't set up the email on the Mac, and it's all piling up on my old PC. I've completed two months without email. Uh-oh!!!