Turtles

As far back as I can remember, I have always liked turtles. I'm not sure why, I can't explain it. And if the Buddhists' version of creation is correct, I was probably a turtle in a previous life.

But now I've realized just how perfect it is for me to love turtles.

In July, I had a nurse while I was in the hospital named Mihiri. She was originally from Sri Lanka. I had her as my day nurse for 5 days, so we got to know each other. I thought she was quite funny, and she was a good nurse. I think she enjoyed me as a patient too, because after the first couple days we would usually chat a little bit when she had to come in my room. She appreciated me being so involved in my care and asking questions. One day when my doctor was in the hall after just leaving my room, I remembered something. I called out there, she was still there, and told her a prescription we forgot to discuss. Mihiri commented, to my doctor, "Isn't she good? I love it, I love how she is not afraid to speak up and be involved." My doctor agreed, and said it was unfortunately rare.

So every time I go in the hospital, I take my stuffed animal turtle Bernie. He's the perfect size and shape that he feels like hugging a little pillow. I've had Bernie for... a long time. I can't remember what year it was, but it was the first time I had to be hospitalized at Cardinal Glennon. We had just switched doctors, because our insurance would no longer cover Children's Hospital, so I was a bit down about being in a new place with new doctors (new everyone, really) and on top of that I was sick enough to go in the hospital. The gift shop, at the time, was a tiny room on the way to the cafeteria. Mom, dad, and me went down there to get some food and I commented how cute that turtle was high on a shelf in the window.

Well, sometime later, my parents surprised me with a gift bag... they had bought me that turtle in the window. I named him Bernie and he's been my "hospital buddy" ever since.

Mihiri really liked my turtle, which I usually keep at the foot of my bed during the day; he fits perfectly down there and is out of the way. She was commenting about it and was saying "No, I'm serious. I really think I want to get one for my daughter." Her daughter, she had told me the day before, had graduated college and lived in Maryland. "It would be a nice little gift, just a little something different. A nice reminder 'Slow and steady.'" she said.

I can't get those words out of my head.

What a perfect motto for my life's journey with CF. When I get sick, it's a serious thing, and it's a long, slow battle back to health. Exercising... another great example. On Monday, I had a really hard time walking on the treadmill. It was discouraging. Tuesday was a little better, but I was really huffing and puffing trying to walk at a good 2.7 mph speed. Then yesterday: bam! I could walk 3.0 mph and I was NOT totally beat by the end of it. Slow and steady...

This is also kind of topical as the Olympics were this year. No athlete who went there magically became good at their sport overnight, or quickly. It took years and years of slow progress to get to where they are.

I'm dealt with setbacks all the time. It is SO hard to see the big picture sometimes and see that yes, I'm doing better than I was 3 years ago, and that that's a good thing to focus on. But I have to stick with my treatments, I have to exercise, there are no shortcuts for any of this. Because sure enough, slowly and steadily, I can continue to improve or at the very least maintain my health. I saw the best lung function numbers I've seen in years back in February. I could reach that again sometime.

Slow and steady...

Bernie.

16 Books in 2016

I was able to continue my theme of reading the number of books to match the year this year, and I play to set a goal of reading 17 books for next year! I even surpassed my goal this year, way back in the beginning of October. Recently, I've been slowly re-reading the Harry Potter books, and at this point I'm not going to finish all 7 this year. We've had so much else going on that I've barely had much time to sit and read.

But, without further ado, I give you my small reviews of my books in 2016:

Batman: The Killing Joke — Hailed as one of the essential stories in Batman and Joker lore, this graphic novel had great artwork and a great origin story to boot.

Modern Romance — I started listening to audiobooks with this one (adding audiobooks into the mix this year certainly helped me reach my goal quicker). It was read by the author, Aziz Ansari, and if you're a fan of his humor you will enjoy this book. It was comical yet poignant at the same time, and listening to the author read their own book is a nice treat.

It's A Long Story — This new biography of Willie Nelson was good. I'm not even the biggest fan of his music, but I thought his would be an interesting story. And it was. If you are a fan, this is a must-read.

10% Happier: How I Tamed the Voice in My Head, Reduced Stress Without Losing My Edge, and Found Self-Help That Actually Works — This book was all about meditation. But it was written in a no-nonsense way that made the topic very accessible. There was no fluffy voodoo crap, no stories of people sitting around going "Ohmmmmm", just straight-forward talk about this man's situation and how he came to use meditation in his life to control his anxiety and stress, and it was really well done.

Yes Please — Amy Poehler's humorous book... another entry in the obligatory "comedian writes a funny book about life lessons" category. It seems every comedian or celebrity feels they need to write a book like this, and they are all essentially the same. Aziz's Modern Romance book was slightly different, because he actually looked into research and studies about one central topic: relationships in the modern world. This book was fine, but afterwards I decided I was kind of over these types of books; I don't care how hilarious you claim Amy Schumer, or Chelsea Handler, or whoever's new book is, I'm done with this specific genre.

The Fellowship of the Ring — I attempted to read the LOTR books a long time ago and failed. This time, I made it through the first one, but I've been at a dead stop on page 20 of the second one. We re-watched the movies, which are great, and I am glad I am getting around to reading these, but it's been slow.

All the Light We Cannot See — As much as I wanted to like this book, I never could get into it. I'm glad I stuck with it, as the ending was at least somewhat satisfying, but it was hard. The writing style was too drippy-poetic for my tastes, sentences were choppy. Cut up. Like paper scattered on sunlit sand. (See what I did there?) I found the book at times confusing because I wasn't sure which character I was reading about, but mostly I found each character's story too dissonant. The loose theme of always coming back to everything being about light was thin at best and, again, mostly a bunch of poetic flim-flam I wasn't really in the mood for.

From Baghdad, With Love: A Marine, the War, and a Dog Named Lava — My cousin passed this book onto me, because she knows we both like dog books. It was an interesting story about a soldier who 'adopts' a dog while in the military over in Baghdad, and the hoops he has to go through to bring her home. Not bad, especially for a dog lover.

When Breath Becomes Air — I'm going to declare this my favorite book of 2016. It's a memoir from a neurosurgeon who suddenly ends up with terminal cancer. He is extremely introspective and reflective on what life is about, what makes life worth it, and other deeper musings. It was a quick read, but a really, really good one. Grab a tissue box. Even for someone who deals with these topics more often than the average person, it had me in tears more than once.

Little Bee — A slightly different book, but rewarding. It's hard to say what it's about, but I thought it was good.

Animal Farm — I'm glad I finally read this classic. Once again, as most distopian or satirical classic novels are, this book proved true in multiple ways. It was also especially interesting to take note of different things in the book and different things that happened during the election campaigns.

I Am Malala — Malala's story is an interesting one, and one worth telling, but I didn't find this book phenomenal like some people did.

Inside of a Dog — Fairly intriguing ideas and concepts, but I began to lose interest about 2/3 through. This book is extremely detailed and reads kind of like a psychology study published in a medical journal, so it's not for everyone. It was a tad too long-winded.

All the Ugly and Wonderful Things — A new book from a new author this year, this one was really good. The story is not exactly pretty, as it is about a child who lives with drug-addicted parents, but it was worth the read.

The Joker — This graphic novel was a darker take on the Joker. The artwork was simply stunning; one of the early pages with the Joker walking out of Arkham Asylum was beautifully done. The story was pretty good too, but the artwork was so great!

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks — This book got to be long-winded. The author weaved in her own story of investigating HeLa cells and the family of Henrietta, which I understand to a point, otherwise the book would have been too dry and medical. But the details upon details about the author's daily life were not needed. The audiobook version also became very grating with the voices the reader was using. All in all, just meh.

The Book Thief — Great book! It was creatively told from a very different voice and kept the story very interesting and enjoyable. 

And after that, I've been reading the Harry Potters. So there you have it! 

Photo Shoot: Lesson Learned

I've been sitting on the following blog for quite a long time, so I thought I'd finally publish it. Here goes:

I thought I'd share some thoughts I had after our photo session from last fall, in case you might be thinking of doing one yourself in 2017.

With everyone and their brother proclaiming themselves as photographers these days, there is definitely an over-abundance of choices for photographers to use for photo shoots. Being the person I am, I am very, very particular about photographers. I'm also a harsh critic. Most people are fine with almost all of the work that is out there, but truthfully there are a lot of mediocre photographers who don't really know what they're doing, which bugs me. It devalues the creative work of people, like myself, who actually know what we're doing—but that's another rant for another time.

Last year, I had my list narrowed down to three photographers whose work was seemingly up to my standards. One was significantly cheaper than the others, they had done my friend's wedding and their photos looked great, and we went with them. They had good photos on their Facebook page with nice outdoor backgrounds, on a piece of property they have set up specifically for this.

My first suggestion for doing a photo shoot is: Book early! Unfortunately, I put off contacting the photographers for a little while. I wanted a date in the fall when the trees would be turning—like lots of people, I'm sure—but they were almost all booked up and I was going to to have to push off our shoot until the spring. I learned that they are now more of a 'group of photographers' and we wouldn't have the woman who shot my friend's wedding. I jumped at the one open session, which turned out was with one of their B-list photographers. I realized later that the lady I emailed with to set all this up was the main family portrait person, the girl who did our shoot was not.

Our photo shoot was short and sweet, and we had a decent time. Our photographer seemed knowledgeable enough. I said I wanted some photos with just us, some with our dog, but I was leaving the rest up to her expertise. She was pulling up various poses on her phone for ideas during the shoot, which was fine with us, and we were done in 40 minutes and heading back home with Josie not too traumatized.

A few weeks later, we received our "preview" on Facebook, which is how this group does it. They posted about 8 photos of us to their page, and I shared the album with excitement. The photos looked great, but it would still be another month or two before we got all of them back.

I will say a small complaint right now about the photographers we used, and I know it's very nit-picky, but to me it was very evident whose photos they loved, and whose photos they were just doing their job. For some super cute families or couples, they kind of went on about how adorable they were, how much fun they were, what-have-you, and then for the other not-so-perfect people, of which I will lump in our set of photos, there was nothing. It was just like "Well, here's the photos of these people, they're nothing special." It kind of hurt, just a smidge. Like I said I know this is nit-picky, but it felt like a subtle way of saying "This isn't our best work, but here's your photos anyways." Either they should fake enthusiasm with all of their clients' previews, or just post them with no comments. I imagine I can't be the only person who's ever picked up on this.

The day came when I got our photos back, and it was ahead of schedule. I downloaded all of the images, super excited to see the rest of them.

And then... my excitement subsided as I started to arrow through them. They were not that great, and there were a few that were downright bad and I was surprised they included them in our final selections. Essentially, all of the good ones were the ones that were posted in our Facebook preview. There weren't many 'new' ones that particularly wowed me.

Jarrod and I sat down and marked which ones each of us liked, and there ended up being 12 photos we liked, 7 of which we felt worthy of getting prints of, and 22 that we didn't like at all. So here is the live and learn part...

Nope, never getting prints of this one.
Plus, the lighting is awful on this.

Most of the photos we didn't like were ones where we weren't looking at the camera. There were a lot of cutesy poses where we were gazing into each others' eyes, kissing, or just sharing a gentle smile, not looking at the camera. Some people might be a fan of those, but honestly I don't know who would get large prints of those to hang on their walls. This isn't an engagement photo shoot, I really don't need a bunch of lovey-dovey photos. I'm not going to hang a large 11x14 of the two of us kissing in my house, I'm going to hang up the family portrait of us and our dog. Furthermore, from a guy's perspective, Jarrod didn't care for those because he said "That's just not me, I'm not like that." And it's true. It's nothing against Jarrod whatsoever, because I would venture to guess that most guys aren't exactly movie-style romantics. So for him those seem very unnatural, and honestly they feel that way to me too. I didn't say anything during our shoot because I didn't realize just how many of them (photos not looking at the camera) we were taking. And, live and learn.

Basically, the next time we do this I want more traditional, portrait-style photographs. Some people want the cutesy photos, but now that I've gone through this, I learned I'm not one of them.

And, remember how I said I was really picky about photographers? Well, turns out their photo-editing skills are not as good as I thought, especially on their black and white photos. Take a look at the comparison I loaded on here. The top photo is their version, the bottom is mine.

Really, whenever we do this again, I just need someone to take the photos and to send me the raw files. I can do the editing myself, which I'd almost prefer seeing as how few people actually know how to do it well. I'm not even an expert, but I feel I can edit out some really natural-looking photos that look good. The black and white photos we received were not great, and after about 10 minutes in Photoshop, I had them looking way better. I did a blind test with Jarrod and asked which one he preferred, not telling him which one was mine and which was theirs, and he picked mine every time.

It's kind of funny because for this photo shoot, we had a good time with the photographer, but the photos we ended up with were just so-so. For our wedding, the photographer ended up driving us nuts, but we got some damn good photos from him. Maybe if we're lucky, next time I can find a fun photographer AND they know how to take great photos, haha!

My last suggestion is the most difficult. If possible, I would suggest hiring a photographer you know. Even if it's just a little. Picking a photographer is much like picking a name out of a hat, and that was certainly my case. Yes, they had photoed my friend's wedding, but it was a different person who only does weddings, not the actual photographer we got. Ironically, the same week we got our previews, I also saw a really neat piece about 6 different photographers who took a photograph of the same man. Each person was told a different story about the man, and it showed that photos are entirely dependent on the photographers impression of you, the subject. Check it out here, it's a short little fascinating video. With that in mind, if you can find a photographer who knows you, I would bet your photos are going to be even better because of it. They might know a tiny bit of your own life story that influences their work just enough to produce some really spectacular images. Next time I do this, I'm going to most likely choose someone I kind of know.