Childhood Books

God is America's King, She thought: Americans won't obey any king on earth. Americans are free. That means they have to obey their conscience. No king bosses Pa , he has to boss himself. Why (she thought) when I am a little older, Pa and Ma will stop telling me what to do, and there isn't anyone ele who has the right to give me orders. I will have to make myself be good.

Her whole mind seemed to be lit up by that thought. This is what it means to be free: It means you have to be good. "Our father's God, author of liberty-" The laws of Nature and of Nature's God endow you with a right to life and libterty. Then you have the right to be free."

-Laura Ingals Wilder, Little Town on the Prarie (My most beloved and treasured books of all time)

Lauging with Lauren

I just got off the phone with Lauren, a friend from Tallahassee that I have not spoken to in quite sometime. I do not have a beautiful, flattering photograph of this beautiful, flattering young woman, but I must say we had some beautiful, flattering times together back in the hick, redneck bible-belt and sorority girl filled land of Tallahassee, Florida. (I mean no offense by any of these terms by the way)

We had a deep and meaningful discussion together about the atrocities of facebook. I asked her if she prayed for hours by candle light for my feelings on facebook. She responded with an "Oh, Jo Anna I miss you. I don't even know what to respond to that but I miss you."

These conversations are what makes Laughing with Lauren so great. I miss that too:(

A typical conversation with my spouse

Isaiah and I had been driving already for a number of hours. I was being lulled to sleep by the droning of our car on the pavement and the faint sound of the radio, when the song: "Raindrops keep falling on my head" began to play. I smiled, because logically, that particular song makes me smile. I sort of rolled over, just enough to hear Isaiah casually say "The man who wrote this song tried to kill my father." I looked at him with my eyes half shut. "oh" I said, then I turned and went to sleep. He kept on driving, and that was the end of our conversation.

(This photograph was taken on a rainy day in Glacier National Park, Montana, on top of a trash can.)

Let the fun begin

Isaiah and I have had an interesting and exciting past month or so. It all began with this:



I made this cheeseburger for Isaiah and Benjamin James, who came gladly to my rescue after I was exhausted from photographing Luke and Lori Hamilton's wedding on July something or other 2008. They had a pot-luck Barb-q and I was oh so hungry but oh so busy to eat.

But, in all, boys are usually hungrier than girls and they seem to forget to eat if girls don't tell them too or if they aren't having food made for them. So, I gladly made them these cheeseburgers and they both devoured it, and I took a couple of meager bites.

Photographing weddings can be fun but it also leads to potential exhaustion and hunger, and sincere and incredible business after the event is over.

None the less, this event (the wedding) marked for Isaiah and I the beginning of a month long wild adventure. Most of which involved no sleeping, high volumes of interactions with other people, 104 degree heat and lots of fun and good times.

I can't wait to share more about this adventure, but I must wait for now. I have saved that project for a later period in time.

Hungry.

Isaiah and his Baby Brother Benjamin are bringing me a pizza. I truly and unconditionally hungry at the moment, but amazingly enough, I am so tired that I don't believe that I can get out of this chair and get up to eat the pizza when they come. Maybe I will sit here all night and continue to ramble on about ridiculous thoughts for the sake of me having to not get up out of this chair. So here I will sit, hungry and sleepy, and never get up.

And anyone who reads this will either be bored, delighted, or confused. Or all three.

This is the first time I have really been truly and unconditionally hungry since June 15, 2008. On that dreadful day, the temperature exceeded 103 degrees.

On that dreadful day, and also the dreadful day after that, I stayed outside in the wretched heat the entire dreadful day (minus my exedus to the REI for air conditioning) and supported Isaiah and Andrew at their show.

Sitting here, on Sunday afternoon, the temprature is below 85 degrees, and I could never ever be more happy, sleepy, tired, hungry( in the most fufilling kind of way), and thankful for the people that love me in this life. God has his ways of showing his his goodness that are beyond our comprehension, beyond our understanding and not the way we always want him to show us his goodness. For this, I am thankful.

I am sorry if this doesn't make a whole bunch of sense. But maybe I will write something more sensical tomorow.

Good night!

This is my grandmother. Her name is Nila, otherwise "Tita." I don't know why that we call her Tita, I am sure that there is a great big story behind that.

When I was a child, I would visit Tita, and this woman set me loose in the Grocery store and told me I was to get whatever I wanted. I did not EVER have this luxury at home. An hour later I would come back with my cart full. Full of Cheese and Chocolate.

We had such fun visiting my grandmother. She rose early every morning and made us breakfast: Chocolate filed and Cheese filled Croissants, Bacon, sausage, baby bell cheese, eggs with Cheddar Cheese, Easy Cheese, and everything else that you can imagine that could possibly give you a heart attack at the age 10. Boy was I happy.

Grandma would take us to the beach every day, and then to Aunt Audry's pool.

Now I am all grown up and have my own life and live on the other side of the country, where the is no beach and people do not believe in eating easy cheese. Somehow when I look at this photograph, I feel as though I have captured the essence of Grandma. I almost can hear her voice and feel the way it feels to get a hug from her.

And I can almost smell the beach.........

I miss these people.

Computers.....Blech

I am particularly fond of this photograph. So much so that I made the effort to post it here on this blog. I decided it is my delight to photograph children. They are much fun.

Today I am sitting on the computer. (Not literally). I wish literally, because I do not enjoy computers much, and fancy that it would be much more of a fun thing to do to sit on them than to use them for the purposes of editing photographs and e-mailing. I would prefer to have my old notebook and pen and paper on hand and just write the old fashioned way. But I think that for now I will sit here, AT the computer and do my duties. Meanwhile I will dream of tropical Miami and sitting in the back yard with cold key-lime aid, while breathing in the aroma of barb-qing meat and swatting mosquitoes.

I am not sure where the Miami thing came from but I think that I find rest from my strife in daydreaming of the place I call home.......


Full of palm trees................

Dan

Dan is in his late fifties and has not walked since he was 17 years old. Two weeks before his graduation from high school he was in an automobile accident which paralyzed him from the neck down. He now has only limited use of his arms.

I can remember many nights going to his house to keep Isaiah company while he put Dan to bed, cleaned his wounds and fed him dinner. We would laugh and watch weird things on TV and it was just a swell time.

We miss Dan.

July 6th will be our wedding anaverssary. This is not a picture of us, but a picture of my freinds Jessica and Bradley. (I couldn't find a decent picture of the two of us fast enough, so I decided to use a picture of Jessica and Bradley in place of us. )

Marriage has been wonderful so far. Most people say that the first year is the hardest and I believe them, but that's because you get into car accidents that cost tons of money; because you can't hold a job because you have a medical illness, and because you give all of your money to the DMV and to medical bills, and a multitude of other things that come creeping up just when you think things can't get any worse.

Yes, this year has been stormy and difficult. But I can't believe how good it has been all at the same time. People have helped us out in hard times in unspeakable ways. Our love for each other has not been stricken down, only improved. And that's what counts when things get hard.

I don't think I am actually in the mood for typing right now. I just suddenly, however, felt a burst of exclamation come out of me and decided to blog about it, since I am kind of bored, or rather, I am disorganized with my time:)

....And the butter melts.

I don't know this little girl's name. But she brightened my day on Sunday of last week at a wedding I showed up at and photographed. I didn't know I was to photograph the entire wedding until I got there.

I love this photograph because it makes me think of my childhood, for I have a picture of myself doing the same thing at a family reunion. There's nothing like being free to stick your finger in a cake and lick the frosting at a social gathering. I am glad that there are little people who just don't care. I was going to blog a lot tonight, but I think I should hold off 'till tomorrow. Good night!

WARNING!

The computer I am typing on says:

"WARNING": YOUR DATA IS NOT SAFE ON THIS COMPUTER."

I suppose, this means, of course, that I should not apply any sort of data to this computer, because the data is therefore not safe. It may cause a bacterial infection, or a tumor, or an addiction to drugs, or WORST......A violent TERRORIST attack.

Be very careful about the data on your computer. You never know what it might do to you.......

A tribute to my mother (That she will never read)

Hello.


Yes, it is a Sunday today. A day of rest, a day for spending time with friends and family, and of going to church.

And yet I found myself in Delta Gama Sorrority where I served brunch for a total of 120 sorority girls and their mothers. We made cucumber, egg salad and chicken salad tea sandwiches along with chocolate dipped Strawberries and lemon bars. Everything looked beautiful.

Yes, everything looked beautiful including all of the Sorority girls and their mothers as they flooded the dining room with every kind of aroma of every kind of perfume known to man, fancy frilly dresses, mounds of makeup and their noses turned up at the sign above the dish bin that states: "please rinse your own dishes." (This is a sign that was put up to help alleviate the amount of crusty dishes that appear in mountain sized stacks in the morning that take an hour a piece to wash because of whatever was left their the night before that they did not rinse off their plate.)

As usual at work, I silently observe the madness around me as I frantically attempt to get all of the food in it's proper place at the proper time. This morning I came to a different understanding of the sorority girl life.

I want to talk about their mothers. The mothers who probably all drive BMW's and wear suits to work and call themselves career women. The kind of mothers who are driven to make money so that they might give their children the luxury of paying for their college expenses along with their sorority membership so that they can get fed every meal without lifting a finger, and their house will be spotless all the time due to the relentless work of Mindy, the house cleaner.

These are the kind of mothers who want the best for their daughters- the best kind of food the best kind of luxury, the best that all this material world can give them.

Well, I'll be darned, I love my mother the best. I think about her: the mother who never held a job, who worked hard all her life for things that money cannot buy. The mother that barley wears makeup except for special occasions, who has a beauty that is more deep and rich and meaningful than makeup and fine things can bring. She is the woman who'se hands have been withered by years of creating beautiful pieces of art; the same hands I remember often being covered with flour and kneading dough.

She is the mother who quietly waters her lawn, bakes cookies, and rides her bike to the seaside to sit quietly by herself to think and just be, who drives a 1997 Ford explorer and shops at thrift shops, who loves sitting and talking for hours with her family.

Every pain I have felt because of my mother has been a profound experience that has caused my life to be richer and deeper and more meaningful. (I feel this way about alot of different types of pain I have gone through, but for now I am just speaking of my mother).

I think about these sorority girls and whatever pain they might feel inside toward their mothers. They have one great thing that is different than I have had in my life: They can cover up their troubles with money.

During my stormy adolescent years, I had friends, I had other family, I had God and church. I did not have money.

I am not sure how to end this, except to say that my mother is by no means a perfect person, but I came to realize today how grateful that I am that I have the one that I do. And that I hope that people with money can find meaningful ways to spend it.

Grrrr

Hi.

After three years of silence in the painting arena of my life, my friend from college has asked me to paint him a real painting. I am now staring mortified at this piece of wood that is to become something beautiful, or rather powerful and spectacular. (He asked me to do something having to do with the resurrection of Jesus.) It seems as though I have lost all capabilities to paint. I am waaaayyyyyy out of it. Like totally out of it! I have to paint this, because the money he paid me was the last bit I needed to buy my camera lens. (Which I have really only had the chance to use one time to shoot a married couple in an orchard). So.....Pictures to come, eventually!


I just needed to vent about this and the computer was on, and my man went to the bank to deposit a bunch of checks into our banking account. I am going to go now.

Bye Bye!

Camera Lens

I should be receiving my new Canon 24-105 L lens in the mail today. I am so excited that I feel like staying home from work just to wait for its arrival. I have been saving up since October of 2007 for this very day. It was the scariest thing in the world to spend that amount of money on one thing.

Anyway, I don't usually enjoy subjecting people to these types of ramblings, but I am excited about something new, and very useful to me and I can't hold it in. That's why I turned the computer on to share about this phenomenon.

Dear Dear reader

Isaiah and I have decided to join the teachings of herold camping.......Okay well Isaiah just told me that I musn't say this because random people might look up his website and believe that we have gone nutty. I was merely trying to make a joke of somesort....... But I guess he is right, not everyone in the whole world will understand my humor on a blog.

Anyhow, Harold believes that the lord Jesus Christ is going to return to collect his redeemed on October 11, 2011. The only problem is that his redeemed are the ones who follow the radio station "Family Radio" which in turn follows a strict interpretation of biblical understanding to which only Harold can translate. To top it all off, he believes that all churches are not really Christian and that we all have to abandon them and follow the radio station only.

Anyway, I think Isaiah doesn't know why I am writing this blog. He wants me to get off the computer, and he is letting me know by reading his comic books. I should go now. It has been fun writing this and all, but sometimes the husband just needs a bit of attention at times when you want to write a blog, and you have to recognize what's really more important.

Snow Day in Eugene

Oh no here they come again!

Don't worry Baby, Mamma will protect you from those scary men.
Maybe we'll run away and join those hitch-hikers over there.

But then again there is a scary homeless man waiting on that bench near the hitch-hikers. Oh wait, that's Jo Anna's husband!


Wow, it looks like he is leaving anyway. He is getting into the car with the early 90's due. (the one where African Americans shaved all sides of their head and only had poofy curls ontop.)

Eugene in January?