Life is what happens while you're busy planning it. Two days already into official summer! It feels like just days ago that winter cold and snow were upon us, just weeks ago when I began my sabbatical in December 2007 that led to my departure from Lafayette Clinic. A lot of changes!
My morning routine has stabilized. For a while, no longer having to get up early to prepare to leave the house for work, I slept late. With daylight arriving earlier in the spring I began waking up as I used to when I had to drive 70 miles to Lafayette. I take my shower, do some yoga and meditate, then get my cup of Senior's coffee at McDonald's, visit in the garden for a while, maybe take a few photos with my small Lumix, then come back inside to start working at the computer. I break for lunch after one o'clock, fix the meal, sometimes cooking enough for leftovers for supper on another day, watch Charlie Rose or a cooking program on Create.tv, and start doing tutorials or working on photo or video projects until six or seven. I take my walk or go to the gym for a couple of hours. Alas, Bally is closing today. I bought my membership there a year before my condominium was finished in 1986. I've been going there for 23 years. I am sad to see it go but the change also opens up opportunities. I prefer to walk outdoors in the summer anyway. I might inflate my exercise ball and start doing weights at home again. I stopped weight training three years ago. Every morning in the shower I look at my wasting muscles and think I should do something about them.
The sabbatical was to explore doing professional videos. I had taken a certification class in FCP in the summer of 2007. Instead I found myself going into digital photography. I shot my first model in May 2008 after a trip to the Amalfi Coast in southern Italy. That was the first trip I took without my usual travel companion, my older sister, Merma. Shooting Kaleb was an eye-opener. Shooting landscapes and travel scenes is one thing but to have a live person in the studio (the shoot was my first using studio lights) was an inexpressible joy. My video camcorders gathered dust.
I started using the small Sony consumer camcorder again early this year but didn't shoot anything significant until I shot Babu and Visha's Jain guests this past weekend. I started learning iMovie '09 last month and am halfway through completing my first video in two years, a travel documentary of our Adriatic Sea cruise in 2007. For starters, I am doing just a portion of the cruise, the stopover in Dubrovnik. My next project is editing the interview with the Jain nuns. The more I work with video-editing, the more ideas come for other shoots I'd like to do. Travel videos have a commercial potential although I would have to shoot better videos first to produce professional videos that I could maybe market to tour members or tour companies. Next I want to do a documentary on the spiritual lives of ordinary people. I already have three video shoots for this project. These clips are a little better than the travel clips. Shot indoors, I've used a tripod for the camcorders so the clips don't need to be stabilized, a vital feature of iMovie. I'd like to be working in Final Cut Pro Suite again before summer is over.
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