Checking back in

Hey All,
I unplugged myself from the list on Tuesday because I was too busy to
read most of the traffic and too overtired and stressed to be patient
with some of what I did read. So I decided I needed a time out.

I had intended to stay off the list until after next Friday, the
18th, which I'd been told was the submission deadline for one of the
group shows I'm preparing for. But while I've been working I've gone on
thinking about some of the questions that were under discussion when I
checked out and want to say more about those while I'm thinking about
them and before the topics grow too cold.

In the meantime it's been a crazy week, as one thing after another has
gone wrong. It's a pretty funny story when all is told, even though in
the end the joke is on me. As my original plan fell apart (couldn't fix
the light leak in the pinhole camera, couldn't get the glass on such
short order, etc etc) with the deadline looming 9 days away, I dropped
back to a default plan: shoot 35 mm and make the gum prints on paper.
But things went wrong even with that backup plan. The tripod I use for
35 mm broke, the paper that I'd been waiting for from Daniel Smith never
arrived and when I called about it they said Arches had sent them such
bad paper they weren't shipping it; the guy who was going to process my
color film broke his leg, I broke a tooth and had to spend time seeing a
dentist about that, it just goes on and on. By Thursday I couldn't stop
laughing, because disaster tends to amuse me, at least when it is
happening to myself. (My mother said that when I was a baby learning to
walk, I would laugh every time I fell down.)

A any rate, yesterday I found myself with no images and no paper, a
week from submission deadline. Sometimes it seems like the universe is
trying to tell you something and you have to pay attention. So I went to
tell the gallery that I may not have anything for them by next Friday.
But instead, I learned to my surprise that the submission deadline had
been moved back to March 1. They had sent me a letter about the change,
but I hadn't had time to go pick up my mail for a week, and it was
sitting at the post office. Turns out some of the other invited
photographers had complained about the time frame being too tight, so
they'd given us more time. Too bad I didn't know that, it would have
saved me a lot of stress and grief.

So now I'm stopping to rest for a couple of days and regroup and figure
out how to proceed from here. Anyway, hello again.
Katharine Thayer
Received on Sat Feb 12 10:00:49 2005