'Be good, Santa's watching!'

The three older Ms, taking heed of the sign and hamming things up in their naturally hammy way. What do you expect from a 10, 11, and 12 year old?

Still working through the England and Vancouver trips photos between the client photos. My eyes are tired from the heavy-duty photo editing but they’re holding up, and I’ve been been fortifying my system against the onslaught of viruses with Cold FX and vitamin C — the ol’ body is also holding up! But barely… Go immune system!

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Simona Fielding

My mother-in-law, Mona (Simona Fielding), lives in northeastern Pennsylvania. She is more-or-less a shut-in, constantly connected to a very long oxygen tube that lets her move around her three-story home without disconnecting from the machine which chugs loudly in a corner. She is very reliant on her oxygen supply, especially in the summer when the air is thick and heavy and taxing on her lungs.

The machine has been a part of her life for a few years now. She has COPD — Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disorder — after a lifetime of smoking. If you smoke and lung cancer does not scare you enough, imagine spending years hooked up to oxygen because your lungs have lost all their elasticity. As Mona says, her quality of life is greatly diminished by this disease.

Simona Fielding

Simona Fielding

Although Mona is wearing her tube in these photos below, I like them because she’s talking animatedly (thanks to the boost of air) and it’s more documentary style. It’s more her. You can’t see Mona’s hands waving around as she’s talking because I’m shooting at close range with a prime lens, but the hands are definitely not idle in her lap as they are here.

a quiet moment

telling stories

telling stories

telling stories

Today there’s cause for all the hand-waving: Mona’s air conditioning system went on the fritz on Friday. Despite numerous house calls from the repair department between Friday, Saturday, Monday, and Tuesday, she still doesn’t have A/C!

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Thanks to pneumonia and the side-effects of antibiotics, I took a record low number of photos on this recent trip to Vancouver. Although the medications helped my lungs and bronchial passages, what I didn’t expect was how much it demotivated me to take photos or even propel myself out of my sick chair. I was like a sack of potatoes — a sad sack of Yukon Golds — gasping for breath and waiting for a mash. I didn’t know what to do with myself, the camera felt like it weighed a ton (it does, but that didn’t stop me before) and even picking it up seemed like a chore.

I never thought I’d say those words! Clearly, I was unwell! It is the strangest feeling to be trapped inside a body that won’t cooperate, to fight for enough breath to say just one sentence and have it come out so weakly that I needed to repeat myself. The medications worked well enough that I was fooled into thinking I was myself, but after a couple of days I could’ve sworn I was someone else — someone with only vague thoughts of photography. Was it the illness or the antibiotics talking?

It’s time to post some photos, even if just to prove to myself that I didn’t lug all my equipment to Vancouver for nothing. The photo above was taken at Mt. Seymour in North Vancouver, which is a Christmas sledding tradition for the kids if the weather cooperates and dumps enough snow, which it did — in spades. My father took the twins swimming by request (they didn’t want to go sledding), and the three older Ms went up the mountain with the three of us. It was one of those instances of “be careful what you wish for” because we didn’t see a speck of snow until we reached the top of the mountain, and when we arrived up there, it was whiteout conditions.

Maddy created some one-of-a-kind bracelets, manufactured in her little bracelet factory, and I showed her how to display her product line:

The big hit, present-wise, was Melissa’s remote control helicopter:

All the kids wanted a crack at it, and I was surprised it lasted more than a day considering all the delicate moving parts. One too many crashes took its toll on Day 2, which was immensely disappointing for Melissa but there were other things to play with, such as the newly-gifted Wii and Wii Sports for the family. Oh, the fights that ensued…

Finally, a photo of my father, who will be 74 years old this spring.

Decided to upload a smilier picture of him, since he’s more like this:

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This is the traditional dress for my father’s region in the Philippines, taken recently at a Filipino cultural gathering up at SFU near Vancouver. My brothers took loads of photos, too, which I’ll link to later.

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Chelsea, 3 months. I shot this in Vancouver two months ago, she doesn’t look like this anymore!

Today’s random thoughts while editing: whoever coined the phrase ‘sleep like a baby’ either didn’t have a baby or had a nursery rhyme baby that went magically to sleep at the sound of a music box and woke up exactly eight hours later. If we all slept like babies we’d be waking up every few hours to eat and maybe check for messages, then fall asleep again in a pram pushed by someone else after the umpteenth feeding of the day. Imagine how our days (and nights) would change!

I may sleep less than the average person due to my nutty schedule but at least all the slumber I do get is top-quality and I’m generally not cranky when I’m tired. I just get a bit punch-drunk (or slap-happy, as one person told me). I’d rather be the Sleepy dwarf than the Grumpy dwarf.

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Miss Maddy at Earls Cove (Sunshine Coast, BC). The top shot is mine, the bottom shot is Allan‘s.

Madeleine is now eight and a half years old, and is the middle child, like me. There are all sorts of theories about a supposed middle child syndrome, for being the middle of three (I couldn’t seem to find an example of being the middle of five), and also for when the middle children become adults. There are also those who don’t believe this syndrome exists. I think a few of the characteristics ring quite true (articles say the middle children turn out to be quite creative), but I don’t know if there is really a behaviour pattern between the middle children I know.

In any case, it is interesting to watch happy-go-lucky Maddy grow up and show her personality in front of a camera. She is such a character!

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In the spring of 1985 while moving to BC from Winnipeg, three of us in my family were in a single-vehicle accident along the Trans-Canada Highway, near the Alberta/Saskatchewan border.

It was the middle of the night. My dad was driving our beloved Volkswagen campervan when it blew a tire and rolled on the highway. I was fast asleep in the bed at the back and got tossed around like a sock in a dryer. Alvin was wearing a seat belt and asleep under a blanket in the passenger seat, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t adjusted for him but for my mother, which is how he ended up in the ditch.

Our belongings were strewn all over the highway. A semi truck drove by without stopping to help us, crushing our things before continuing along its way. I was not yet 13 years old but I remember the scene quite clearly, how angry I was at that truck. Then another truck came but this one stopped, and the driver helped my dad bring Alvin from the ditch to the cab. Alvin’s thigh was swollen like a balloon and they had to cut his jeans to release the pressure. A Greyhound bus filled with sleepy passengers came next and took us to the nearest hospital, which was too small to handle our situation. An ambulance then took us all the way to Regina General Hospital, where my dad was bleeding profusely from his head but was in too much shock to notice.

No major injuries, but Dad needed stitches in his head/ear, and Alvin broke his femur and needed stitches in his chin. The most I got was bruising and my glasses broke. Alvin ended up spending a month in traction, and I was bored and blind (no glasses!). The good people at the hospital let me make crafts (see the clothespin wishing wells?) and paint cartoons on the walls. I remember painting Garfield and Transformers. Even back then I was very myopic, painting wasn’t easy! But I had time.

Everyone was super-friendly, and Alvin had a great nurse — a really funny guy whose name escapes me. He shared a room with a kid about the same age who was hit by a car while riding his bicycle and in much worse shape than Alvin — he was lucky to be alive! The two boys were both strung up by wires and cables; they entertained each other during their long stay.

Alvin spent his 10th birthday in the hospital, so I believe the accident was early April 1985. After a month in traction, he came home to Winnipeg and spent a month in a body cast!

Even after a rather traumatic episode, I remember Regina and the hospital and the staff with fond memories. They took an awful situation and made it more than bearable.

Thanks, Regina!

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I love getting stuff from the Ms (my nieces and nephew), whether it’s a drawing or two or three or four — usually five. Today it was a Christmas card that smelled like gingerbread and some magnets of the kids’ school pictures. Melissa, who’s now 10 (!), phoned me and we talked about our cats and how crazy they are. What a cute conversation, filled with grown-up-sounding words from Melissa like “cautiously” — oooh, adverb! — and lots of giggles.

The wrapped gift wasn’t part of the mail, though, it was from a Christmas party I attended this evening, hosted by the agency that found me the part-time job at The Firm. I wasn’t feeling 100%, but I wanted to introduce a couple of friends to the agency, and thank the consultant for helping me land this position. It’s a perfect fit and I’m very grateful to her for the matchmaking! If you live in Toronto and are searching for a personnel agency to represent you, send me a gmail [gailatlarge] and I’ll put you in touch with her, she’s great!

Oh, and it’s time for some music, like I promised:

I’ve featured the Quebec band The Lost Finger before, but they deserve more exposure. I’d love to see them live — their live performance looks like a lot of fun! Check them out in Madrid, playing the ’80s tune “Fresh”:

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http://www.sweetflour.ca

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A bunch of my favourite M2 pictures:

Two years old, at Laity Farm in Mapleridge, BC.

Nearly seven, at Mace’s on the Sunshine Coast, BC.

Aged seven and a half, with Kermit in BC, Spring 2008.

And my favourite cameraphone photos of us back in 2007 just before his seventh birthday:

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