Feb 11th is Victory of the Revolution Day in Iran

snow as high as her head

rigorous disco of doom

an 18-person dance democracy with three endings, explosions & fireballs, a futuristic wedding, a sex-crazed priest, two killer pigeons, zombies (of course), and a bounce party intermission show. i’m speechless.

jazz hand job – providence dance troupe
st. ferdinand church
fringe fest, new orleans
12 november 2009

día de los muertos

[blahhhhg: personal confessional time]

last night i felt disappointed in myself as i photographed–or rather failed to photograph well–the day of the dead parade in new orleans. maybe i built myself up too much, getting excited for weeks to take photos of this event. maybe i should have gone in more relaxed. maybe i shouldn’t have had those two extra beers that made me have pee so bad.

i felt discoordinated the whole first half of the parade, beginning at the iron rail and heading through jackson square. i fumbled with exposures, with my wireless flash getup–which doesn’t work well outdoors i figured out–and realized i needed my wide-angle lens and not this heavy zoom that ached my wrist.

but now i’m editing and learning. i wrecked what would have been many great shots, getting mis-fires from the wireless flash and under- or over-exposing photos. and even though i keep telling myself to take more close-ups, tight portraits, etc., i don’t. i shy away from the confrontation thinking people will get annoyed with me flashing in their faces.

what i’ll take from this is the few shots that worked: finding the right exposure for shooting with a fill flash, and figuring out the disadvantages of hand-held flash in one hand and a heavy lens in the other. and of course, shoot more, more, more.

difficult, but better here than tysons

from the narrow canals to the open seas

ELIZABETH CITY, NC – it’s been a couple weeks since i posted last, and a couple weeks of pushing currents, ebbing and flooding tides, motoring & sailing, hours of reading & sleeping, losing land on the horizon, pushing out into the atlantic, riding big waves, feeding the fish, hugging hungarians, baking bread, and sun rising…sun setting. we motor/sailed much of the ICW, from mile marker 575 (savannah, ga) to 75 (elizabeth city, nc), except for a 30 hour jaunt out into the atlantic ocean from cape fear to the outer banks, nc.

we have had little connection to computers, cell phones, or even other people, spending four or five days at a time on the boat without touching land. we anchor out in protected nooks along the ICW (Intracoastal Waterway) or find a port and ride the dinghy into town for provisions and public contact. it has been difficult to live on a boat for weeks; it feels like long stretches of time to me–although i know others do it for months at a time. i get cabin fever, eager to go for a walk or ride a bike. the pace of life on a boat is slow: the fastest you can expect to go is six or seven knots (a little more than 5mph), and you might wait a week for good weather. i was eager to get out to the ocean even when there were reports of big waves–three to four feet–until i discovered that even two foot waves feel like a roller coaster that doesn’t stop rolling. i didn’t think i’d get sea sick, but i was wrong. i’ve been on all kinds of boats, but never over night and not in this rolling, bobbing, pitching and yawing kind of way. it’s nauseating.

we floated over a hundred statute miles from cape fear to the outer banks, nc in a little over thirty hours. we weren’t lucky enough to sail it the whole way for the winds were light and sporadic, but the pace was good and we didn’t get hit with any foul weather. upon sailing out of port in cape fear, we jotted down a schedule for lookout assignments: rotating four-hour shifts assuring one of us would always be on deck, steering and keeping an eye out for other ships, especially large freight barges that could wipe our little blip off the radar. unfortunately, three out of four of us became incapacitated by motion sickness and spent much of our time laying horizontal with our eyes closed. after dark, i would steer occasionally for thirty or forty minutes before hurling my body over the lifelines, vomiting in to the dark, undulating waters, the boat drifting pilotless. someone would usually wake up to the sound of me heaving up rye crackers and digestive juices and they’d take over at the wheel. we kept our course of east by north-east fairly well, and by morning, i snapped some photos to remember the best sunrise yet. i took a nap and around mid-morning woke up to go to the head; i looked out the porthole and saw waves that looked like we were floating on clouds. we all decided it would be best to treat our sicknesses with a swim, and it did us good. the water was more blue and clear than i have ever seen.

on the outer banks, one of our ship mate’s family was having a reunion among old friends, most of them former members of a hungarian dance group they started in the seventies. we anchored in silver lake, a port of ocracoke, nc, and arranged a ride up to waves, north of cape hatteras. here, we ate goulash and played card games, took boogie boards to the waves and slept in. we laughed and enjoyed our time off the boat, the sea sickness fading into memory. two days later, we headed back to our dinghy and boarded Willow with two boxes and two bags overflowing with provisions–leftovers from the refrigerator at the reunion.

i am sitting in a coffee shop in elizabeth city, nc where we found free public boat slips in the middle of town. welcome flags fly along the dock and fading murals on brick building sides portray old ships in harbor. tomorrow we head to our first lock along the intracoastal. it should be two or three days to virginia and then up the chesapeake bay in search of an affordable dry dock to set Willow high and dry for the winter. more photos to come, of course, but it may be a week or so before that time. there’s nintey+ photos on flickr now, so take a look…

heart, nicola.

towards the atlantic ocean

after a nine-hundred mile jaunt to chapel hill–stopping by the waffle house in greenville, south carolina to pick up a meandering train-hopper–we arrived in north carolina for a couple days to see family and buy provisions for a sail boat adventure up the atlantic coast. the next day we would be stepping off of a dock in savannah and onto the 35-foot sail boat that will be our home for two to three weeks. i was invited by a friend from years back; we worked together at HOPE in st. bernard parish. he was finally replacing the engine on his sailboat after being stranded in north georgia three months ago. i rceived his call out for a crew a few weeks ago and decided to take time away from new orleans and fulfill my summer ambition of sailing, something that hadn’t yet happened as i hoped it would on lake pontchartrain. i was joined on the trip by a new orleans friend and we hope to make it as far north as maine, if not by boat then by other means.

from chapel hill to savannah by overnight train, we slept outside the amtrak station after our arrival at four-thirty am on a black fleece blanket, waking up at six to see our ride waiting in the parking lot. “you two still want a ride into town?” we loaded into the amtrak worker’s ford suv and took off towards downtown savannah, listening to some dirty south hiphop song i think i’ve heard before, feeling excited and sleepy.

there are four of us on the sail boat, which is comfortable. the boat can hold six, but with a tiny galley (kitchen) and an even smaller head (bathroom), the space is well suited for this balance of two and two. the boat’s been docked for over four weeks, the first three for a brand new engine installation, and now the last week and a half for much maintenance. the new engine turns the opposite direction as the old, so we needed a new propeller. unfortunately, we discovered there isn’t a propeller that fits our propeller shaft in this hemisphere (the boat was made in tawain and originally sold in england). a machine shop is currently making us a new shaft while a wooden plug is holding water out of the hole in the boat where the shaft used to be. pulling out the old shaft underwater and plugging the hole was our high-tension adventure in boat maintenance yesterday.

we’ve been making gourmet meals every day (the boat dock lives behind a grocery store), taking trips into savannah, playing card games, and dumpster diving the goodwill trash every night (i already have a package of treasure ready to mail home). the propeller shaft should be ready by tomorrow and we hope to get out to the ocean by this weekend. coming adventures lay ahead at our port stops in south and north carolina, and we may dock for the winter at virginia. all this downtime has allowed me to read up on rigging sails and the history of sailboat design (this boat is a full-keel bermudan cutter weighing in at 11 & 20/100 tons, suitable for cross-ocean journeys). next summer i might practice on a dinghy, a small sailboat with a single sail, on lake pontchartrain, or perhaps seek out a captain crossing larger bodies of water. we’ll see.