It’s kind of hard to take photos in Washington DC and not be cliched, I mean it must be one of the more photographed cities in the world (at least parts of it).

You know how everyone gets pictures taken in front of monuments? Here is the picture before that picture.

And here is that picture.

Washington Memorial in scaffolding. It kind of looks Saran-wrapped to me.

Slightly closer view.

Not sure what she was interested in.

Little brown bird on a window.

Lock Keeper’s House. There used to be a canal running through the area, this is where the lock operator lived.

I’ll post a few more of these tomorrow. I also have film to develop, but I would like to finish the roll I have in camera first.

I’m not biased at all.

My niece, Cierra, was in a play put on by the Ypsilanti Youth Theatre (The Final Frontier. It was complete chaos, making it perfect for children.) She played a photon named Ped and a Darlek (no, not a Dalek, a Darlek). The Darlek pictures didn’t work at all, but the photon ones are pretty funny.

I hope she does more, she is a natural.

And here is Imani, who is, quite simply one of the most delightful human beings to grace the earth.

She’s graduating high school in a month.

I’m not even going to try to explain. Ok, yes I am, it’s been a crazy 3 months of starting a course of web development classes and I have taken almost no pictures at all. But. I have the summer off before diving back in so we will see how it goes. I do have a few digital photos though and a roll of film riding around in my purse (which I might someday have time to get developed).

Let’s start with my nephew, Isaac.

He insisted on having his picture taken with the headphones. I don’t know why. And yes. Green hair. I was so proud I could barely spit the words out. The color has actually mostly faded away, leaving an odd shade of yellow from having been bleached to within an inch of its life. I think he should go with pink next, mostly because it will give my brother a heart attack.

I hate Valentine’s Day. I hate how, when single, we are made to feel less than the coupled. I hate that when couple, it sets up some crazy test, that without chocolate, roses, and/or diamonds, you are not loved enough. To which I say “Pffft!”

On the other hand. This is one of my favorite quotes about love, it’s from a piece I heard many years ago on NPR, it was a conversation between Matthew Broderick and the playwright, Wendy Wasserstein. They were talking about broken hearts and Wasserstein said this at the end: “I do find the thought that two people can fall in love really humane. I remember, when I was writing The Sisters Rosensweig, that was my thought that here was this woman who was all closed up, and someone comes into her life and that she- It just seemed terrible human-” I love that thought, that love is humane.

When I was in junior high or high school, my dad was going to teach me to develop film. I never got beyond the winding-film-onto-the-reel stage, winding 35mm on is hard (120 is much easier). If you don’t get it right, you get unusable frames. Unless….

So weird.