Did you miss me while I was gone?!HA! Yeah, right!
Well, it has been one hell of a couple of months! It seems like forever since I was last here. Okay, so it’s been almost 3 months. It’s not like I have this interesting life that everybody wants to read about anyway. Proof of which will now present its self to you all.
In February a co-worker of mine came up to me and asked me if I’d like to go on a photo shoot with her as a second photographer for March 3rd to help her photograph the Marina California Pony Little League. I told her sure, but warned her that I wasn’t all that great. She said that it was pretty straight forward and simple and that she’d provide the camera for me. “Well, okay then. Count me in.” And I was getting paid for it! Sweet!
Since then I have now gone on a total of four Little League shoots, one of which on this past Saturday she sent me out to East Palo Alto to photograph on my own. I go back to EPA on the 12th of this month for the re-take shoot to photograph the kids that missed last week. I took my brother with me on Saturday to help assist me with all the parents, to make sure they had everything filled out and what not while I was photographing the kids. That didn’t quite work out as well as I’d hoped, but it was nice to just have him there with me so I wasn’t alone. I’ll be going it alone on the re-takes.
So yeah, I’m now a “Professional” photographer! HA! A professional faker maybe. But I’m getting paid to take pictures, so it’s not all that bad. The money I’m making with the sports photography I’m putting away towards the Nikon D80 that I’ve been coveting since it first came out. I’m almost $400 dollars closer to it than I was 3 months ago. Woohoo!
Speaking of money, the beginning of last month was the beginning of a nightmare. I had gone to the ATM to take $20 buck out. It was after putting in the $20 for cash wanted that I was greeted with a “Do you still want to take that money out even though you may be overdrawn?” I’m like, “WHAT THE FUCK? What do you mean I’m overdrawn?!” I KNOW I’ve got money in my account, because I haven’t paid my bills yet. I check my bank account on line and sure enough, I see that there was a $502 ATM withdrawal at the B of A main branch in Oakland. MOTHERFUCKER! And on top of that there was $150 worth of over draft fees from me using my debit card everywhere.
What ensued after that was a call to my bank to file a claim for my ATM/debit card being cloned. Then waiting for them to mail me the affidavit to file as well to verify the claim I placed over the phone. All in all it took me a little over 2 weeks to get that $652 credited back into my account. I had called and talked to the girl who actually processed my claim, and apparently in the past couple of months there have been an on going amount of ATM withdrawals from B of A’s all over the place from cloned cards being cloned onto like old hotel card keys. And there was an Albertson’s over here in San Lorenzo that had one of the credit card terminals used at one of the self checkout stands that was swapped with one tracking everyone’s card and PIN numbers who used it, for a month. For a month! Can you imagine all the card numbers they got in a month?! It makes me scared to use my damn card anywhere, as an ATM purchase anyway. Fuckers!
I have also got my own domain name now for my photography. www.teenamariephotography.com for those of you who may be interested. Don’t get too excited though. I haven’t had a whole lot of time to do anything with it except get my host and get a page up that says coming soon, but it’s a nice coming soon page. I used one of my angel photographs, Grieve Not, and used her for my home page and my business cards. My individual project photo lab class will be over in a few weeks, so hopefully I’ll have some time here soon to work on the site. I’m still not entirely sure of how it’s going to look, but I have a general idea of how I want it to look. Whether I can get it that way or not is another story. I’m a little confused how the CoffeeCup html editor that I got and the ftp and all that shit works, but I’ll figure it all out eventually like I usually do. It just takes me a little bit of playing around with it to figure it all out. If not, y’all will be hearing from me asking for help real soon! So be fore warned!
Uuhmmmm, what else…?
I found a really nice cemetery up in Santa Cruz last month. It’s called Evergreen Cemetery and oh is it ever green! It is absolutely beautiful! I must have spent close to 3 hours there just wandering around. From the front it doesn’t look all that big, but if you walk in through the main arch you can see the walkway continues back and up into the mountain side. It is surrounded by evergreen’s (some redwoods) and a whole lot of vegetation and ground cover (ivy, lily-of-the-valley, calla lilies, ferns, etc.). I even happened upon a banana slug which was freaking cool. Yeah, I’m a dork, I admit it. But I’ve never happened upon a banana slug out in the great outdoors other than when I went to Muir Woods and they had one out to show everyone what kind of critters are natural to Muir Woods. I took a lot of pictures with the digital camera, I just haven’t had any real time to sit and go through them all yet. You can be sure that I’ll post quite a few of them once I do…including the banana slug!
I don’t know if any of you remember me talking about the stray cats that like to hang out in my back yard…one in particular is a female cat that is not fixed, naturally! Well, last year she gave birth to a good sized litter, as did another female stray that hangs out in the neighborhood. Because I have a soft spot for cats and didn’t want the mama cats to go hungry I started feeding them, which of course once the babies all got old enough, they too started eating the cat food. Well, out of all the babies from last year there are 4 of them that still hang out in the back yard. Out of the four, two of them are females. And you know what that means… I’ve now got 3 pregnant cats hanging out in the back yard. Just last night I heard babies crying and went to check it out. One of the babies had her babies in the play house, but I think she is a different one than the three that hang around. From the sounds of it she may have 3 or 4 babies. Times that by 4 and I’m going to be having a lot of freaking babies hanging around. I think it time now that after the babies get weaned that I start trapping them and see if maybe get the babies off to the animal shelter for possible adoption depending on how feral they get, and get the mama’s fixed. It just pisses me off that I feel like I’m the one that HAS to do it. I know that if I don’t know one else in the neighborhood will, which really pisses me off because that first mama cat from last year…I know she has to belong to someone. I’m just real glad I keep my two girls in the house. They’re fixed, but I can just imagine the fights they’d get into with all the other cats. That is a vet bill I am happy to see gone.
Speaking of the back yard, now that it’s spring and all the rain…I’ve got one hell of a jungle growing back there. Since I’ve got a free weekend this coming weekend I think it’s going to be spent with the weed whacker. It’s definitely time for a little bit of spring cleaning of the back yard. I haven’t seen one of the Big Guy’s (one of the male strays) lately. I hope I don’t run across him as I’m whacking down the jungle.
Hope this find you all well.
“There is a reason that all things are as they are.” ~ Bram Stoker Dracula
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