252/365 Routine

'Routine Breakfast"

This week is all about photographing the details of daily life - both the ordinary and the extraordinary.  The above shows how we begin almost every day - well, how we begin after we smack the snooze on the alarm a few times, stand in the shower in an effort to become coherent, get dressed wearing clothes that hopefully match and finally stagger out to the kitchen for that first cup of coffee.  The coffee is accompanied by vanilla yogurt topped with Cheerios and blueberries - sometimes fresh and sometimes frozen.  I suppose there are worse ways to start each day.  f it weren't for the alarm, things would be pretty damn near perfect.

I realized today that I am not very good about photographing the everyday details of my life.  I think about them; I just don't take pictures of them.  This week I am going to try to be conscious of all that makes my life "my life."  I can't carry my big camera to work with me so I suspect that many of the week's pictures, like the one above, will be taken with my phone.  It is routine for me to have my phone with me all the time so I suppose phone pictures tell a significant part of the story as well.

Changing gears . . .

We were in Portland for a NOAH (National Organization for Albinism and Hypo-pigmentation) Adult Weekend over the past weekend.  We had a great time and I took some pictures.  Two of them were my daily pictures over the weekend.  The others are still safely stored on an SD card - that I left in Portland.

On Saturday night we stayed up super late talking with a group.  Because I did not want to miss posting a picture, I stopped by the hotel business center on the way up to our room to use a hotel computer to post.  (I forget to take the card reader for my iPad so I was a slave to the computers in the hotel.)  Anyway, it was so late and I was so tired that after I posted my picture, I felt that the task had been accomplished and I went to bed - leaving my card in the computer.  It didn't dawn on me that I had done that until the next morning when we were on the train on our way back to the airport.  As is often the case, the love of my life took pity on me and called the hotel.

The hotel clerk that answered the phone was very helpful.  He took Weber's number and said that he would send someone up immediately to look for it and call him right back.  He did and they had found it.  I am so lucky!  During the few moments before the hotel called saying they had found it, I was kicking myself for not having the secondary card in my camera set to backup rather than overflow.  Who needs an overflow card when the primary card is a 32GB card.  Really . . .

The clerk said that he would have housekeeping call Monday to set up a payment method to ship the card.  A payment method?  For an SD card?  Surely they can spring for a stamp and an envelope.  We didn't even ask for our sheets and towels to be replaced while we were there.  Surely we saved them the 46 cents that the stamp would cost.  

They called us back on Sunday afternoon while we were still in the airport waiting to leave Portland.  As it turns out, the hotel will only ship FedEx or UPS so the 46 cent stamp is a moot point.  The shipping costs will be charged to 'the card number on file."  Oh well, I haven't had a chance to even look at most of the pictures that I took so I would have hated to have lost them.  Hopefully I will receive the card sometime this week.

Knock on wood . . .I have yet to lose completely a card with unprocessed photos.  I came the closest that I would like to come this weekend.  When I get the card and have a chance to process the pictures I'll share them along with a few stories about our visit to Portland.