It's crazy that I haven't been updating the blog. With other stuff going on, it seemed more important to get things done and produce than to reflect on what was going on.
Summer was good, but crazy. The Tokaido Road experiment is still unfinished. I enjoyed it but it was both more and less interesting than I expected it to be. I thought I would see more amazing scenery, but I was just starting to move out into a bit more rural areas by the time I got to Totsuka. The funny thing is how I calculated how long it would take me by figuring out how many minutes it takes to do a kilometer and then adding a couple of hours to my travel time so I could take photos. A couple things stood in my way:
1. not starting early enough
2. walking even slower than I thought
3. photos taking longer than I thought
4. HOT weather. It was 38 C the last day I walked on Tokaido.
Then I just ran out of time. With two days left before departing to Canada, I realized I had to pack for my month back home. I planned to continue once the weather had cooled off. It is now mid-October so it's the perfect time weather wise. Now I just need to get out there!
The other thing that was tough was managing all the data. Once I got home, I had to upload the digital photos so I could have a clear card for the next day. The next problem was the writing for that day's journey. Because I was also doing Estello Project I was doing two entries a night. I also tried to process some pictures so that I could post them at the same time to add interest to the blog. Mentally it was pretty challenging. Physically, it was pretty tiring.
My trip to Canada was nice. I got to visit a lot of relatives and go to a conference in Dallas (RWA Nationals). I'd hoped to do more photography but since my license had expired I was dependent on others to drive me around. My brother and I had planned to do some "Gnome and Estello Rocky Mountain Road Trip Photos" but he finished work later than he planned so most of our trip was at night anyway.
Then one month after I got back from Canada, we moved to a new house. So the month before was spent purging the house of accumulated junk and packing. The month after was spent decompressing to fit into the new house.
I've started back at work (part-time) so I am a little busier. Not too bad, just needing to organize my time a bit better.
I feel like I haven't been so productive lately, I haven't even touched my novels. But I've been doing a lot of reading and research for clay animation and quite a bit of work to create a DIY macro studio and refining the off camera flash usage. I've also tried to focus a lot on the stock photo stuff so that's taken up a lot of time. I've also created a new clay character and did a story board for a short movie for him. Lot's of technical problems but I'm researching that too. I guess most of the tech issues could be solved by spending lots of money, but I don't have that option so it's off to research DIY methods. It's times like this that I really miss a good home centre like the big orange place. I've just never found a good home centre in the same scale in Tokyo.
Okay, there's my update and I guess a list of excuses. Now it's time to go and create.
