From the top: One World Trade Center is almost done, a tree on a sunny day in Prospect Park, a pigeon strutting his stuff, and flowers in the Shakespeare Garden in Central Park. Happy weekend!

Do you know about Mai and her blog Fashionist? It’s awesome San Francisco street-style eye candy photography. Back at Camp Mighty, she asked about my 50mm lens, so I brought it along when we hung out, and as we walked around the Mission, she snapped some photos with my camera. It was really cool to see the behind-the-scenes of a Fashionist shoot; the way she approaches people and poses them without being too intrusive is fascinating. It’s a skill I simply don’t have, but she manages with aplomb.

I then turned my camera on her and, inspired by her “take one knee” stance, tried shooting from a mid-point. It’s a different look I’ve since been trying on my own photo shoots, and the results have been exciting. Thanks for the inspiration, Mai (and for introducing me to Mission Cheese).

My grandmother house sold, finally.

It was a complicated process that was difficult to manage from a state away. The final countdown started cleaning all my stuff out of the basement with Rob. We’d managed to divorce ourselves, but the basement held a lot of our things still all married together and we had to slog through it.

“Why on earth did we have so much STUFF?!” I asked him, holding up not one but two nacho dishes and pointing to a fondue pot that never actually got used for fondue. Now that I’ve been living in a New York City apartment for a few years, a lot of it seems ridiculous to have bought.

He shrugged. “We were suburbanites. We had stuff.”

I groaned and went back to piling and re-piling stuff, unsure of what to do with it all.

“Just be glad you’re not cleaning this all out because your grandmother is dead.” He pointed out. “That would be worse.”

It was a truth held close for the reminder of the process, and it kept everything in perspective: Grandma is still here, and this is just a house. (Pro tip: if you have the misfortune of gaining an ex-spouse over the course of your life, at the very least aim for a kind one.)

It was made easier with help; a dear friend who lives locally broke into the house and did a last-minute dump run for me when my garbage removal plans fell through. My real estate agent called the water company for me to have service turned off and made sure all the taxes were paid.

In 2009, I got the flu so badly I wound up in the emergency room, an event that coincided with getting an oil company for the property. When they called impatient because I’d neglected to fill something out, I snapped at the secretary “I’m SICK AND I CAN’T DEAL WITH YOUR PAPERWORK!”

When I called back to apologize a few days later, everything was filled out and in place for me, and she told me she understood my bad attitude and not to worry about it. Because of this, I never changed oil companies, even when they no longer were the best deal, and when it came time to end my service with them, they took care of everything again for me one last time. I was so thankful.

The day of the closing, I slipped into the empty house alone for a final goodbye, remembering all of the things I could and cramming them into my heart, opening and closing certain doors to remember their sounds, stepping from very familiar creaky spot to very familiar creaky spot to hear their distinctive song one last time. This is weird: I said goodbye to the basement light switch; it makes this horrendous CLUNK! sound when you flick it on that has the strange honor of being one of the most distinctive sounds of my childhood. I looked at all of the dates and heights on the edge of the door in the back bedroom one last time; “March 5, 1965″ was marked with my mother’s name, and I’d spent years hoping to grow up to it. It finally happened for me around age 9.

I had a final sprawl-out flat on my back in the backyard. When it’s warm, the grass is the perfect nap spot, and as I was sitting up and pushing tears out of my ears, a red-tailed hawk flew low and slow right across the yard, making it the perfect goodbye.

For my entire life – 11,385 days that day; I totally did the math – it had been home-base, a safe-haven in a childhood marred by violence, a happy place where I felt unconditionally loved.

I know this is the right move, and I’m done being sad now and ready to tackle all of the other parts of my life that need attention and have been held in a sort of limbo, not the least of which is sorting through all this stuff that is now in my apartment. I’m seriously annoyed at Amber circa 2007 and her pile of housewares now taking up half of my office.

Does anyone need a fondue pot?

I’ve been dancing for a month to this remix of the Limousines “Internet Killed the Video Star”.

Maddie is one of those people I knew about because we have a bunch of close friends in common – for one, she’s the managing editor of A Practical Wedding (and a damn good photographer) – but I never got to sink my teeth into her properly until I went to California and Elizabeth and I drove down to see her. 
She and her husband rent a house on a horse ranch that has a huge field in the back.

I asked to take her photo for my Faces project, and then she wanted to take MY photo, too. Then we started doing our hair, and then she said, “do you want something more fun than a tee shirt to wear?” so I raided her closet and came out with a fantastic dress, and then we played with makeup before heading to the field behind her house. This is what happens when you put two photographers together in a California sunset.

A “production note”: Patrice was over while I was packing for this trip, and I held up my 50 mm lens before putting it in my suitcase. “I’m only bringing this and ONE camera!” I announced, and she laughed and said, “Wow, you’re REALLY going on vacation, huh?!” I usually want to pack two or three cameras and a few lenses when I go somewhere. It was a fun limitation to impose on myself, and all of my vacation shots are either with this lens or my iPhone.

First, fun news: I have an intern! She’s Alex, and has an enthusiasm for photography – and life in general – that rocks my world. I need to get a better photo of her face, but for now, enjoy her cool-girl photo stance and rockin’ blond hair patch.

On Friday, 3 May, I finally did what I’ve been hoping to do for about 18 months: I convinced an eloping couple that getting into the row boats of Central Park in their wedding clothes was an excellent idea. Since I had Alex to boss around help, she rowed, and I was able photograph them around the 22 acre pond from the stern of my very own row boat. Then I tried rowing, and she snapped some shots of me. It was so cool, like a scene out of Stuart Little.

It’s a career highlight, a Life List item I got to check off, and I’m pretty sure that I won a bet with Katie Jane over who can get newlyweds in a row boat first.

If you do this, I recommend going on a week day and slathering on a good sunscreen.

Love this one!

If you follow me anywhere on social media besides here, you’ve probably seen this goofy photo of me making the “OMG” face with straight hair; the photo on the left was taken in unrelated circumstances less than a week earlier, to show how perfectly round my hair was that day, and there it is on the right wavy, smooth and totes glam. (You will also notice I upgraded to an iPhone 5 after an unfortunate Water Bottle Incident in my handbag with the 4).

There’s a new, amazing salon in Oakland called Spruce. Elizabeth was invited to their grand opening and I was able to tag along to the party that included a sign up sheet for free spa services. I put myself down for a massage, and while sipping champagne and admiring their new space, Hillary, the owner, approached me.

“You only signed up for ONE free service! Not ok. What else can we do for you?”

I shrugged, because let’s be real. “Free massage” is just about the best thing you can say to this big-boobed migraine sufferer. But she insisted, and when I didn’t know what else to do, she figured she had just enough time to give me a blow out.

“Ok, but I don’t think it’ll work. My hair is too curly!” I said.

As a late teen I chemically relaxed my hair for a while, until it felt like a burden. It was the late 90′s, and hair care companies had started to make products specifically for bi-racial women like me, making it that much easier to give in to my natural hair texture. It’s been curly since, and I didn’t think anything would work without a bunch of chemicals in my hair.

But Oh. It worked. When she finished, I felt like a curvier, freckled Olivia Pope, and got kind of teary eyed at how pretty I felt. It was amazing. While I’m all about accepting who you are and rocking what you have, this was an amazing, sexy change, and one I plan on employing again when I need a jaw-dropping look for a special occasion.

Elizabeth opted for a massage and a makeup application, and then we were literally all dressed up (and wonderfully relaxed) with no where to go. We considered going to dinner or to a bar, but ultimately opted to go back to her house, sit on the patio, and open a bottle of champagne. We gave her new outdoor party lights a test run, and I snapped a these photos of her in the soft glow.

I have pretty friends.

At Elizabeth’s housewarming party in Oakland, Bridget and I did that thing where you meet someone and skip all the small talk because you just “click”; we talked about God and the minefield that is dating at our age – the real stuff. In the dusk, I pulled her out to the front lawn because I wanted to take her photo for my Faces project.

Ladies of the Bay area, she is single, rad, and clearly beautiful. You should date her. Look for the gal doing “the Elaine” in her OKCupid profile photos.

After sixty years of living in the same house, my grandmother moved. It is my house technically; in 2008 when she was selling it, I bought it to keep for “someday”, and she opted to live there in the mean time, but now “someday” is here and I live in New York, and that’s not going to change any time soon. So she had to move, and she’s excited for a change, and I’m excited to be unburned by a house I don’t live in – won’t live in – but it’s still been super hard.

There’s a lifetime of memories in that house for me.

I dial my grandmother’s number for the… what? Three thousandth time in my life? Four thousandth? Ten thousandth? Maybe. It is the first phone number I learned to dial; it has been the same since years before I was born, when the phone companies started using seven digits instead of five. A disembodied robot voice tells me the number is invalid. Invalid?

I double check to see if I’ve mistyped it, which would be weird because I never have in all the years I’ve pounded it into various phones. And I haven’t; my iPhone says that I’m calling “Gram”, but I am not. I’m reaching nothing.

I dial my aunt, who says, “Oh, yes, she has a new number now because she moved.”

The fuck?

She gives me a series of numbers to reach my Grandma that I don’t know by heart, that I haven’t dialed at least once a week since I was old enough to make a pointer finger and lisp a “Hello?” to whichever grandparent picked up the phone.

2, 6, 8, 4; a perfect diamond of a phone number I’ve been doing for so long that I usually opt to dial her phone number manually rather than look it up in my contact list, because it’s faster. It is one of less than ten numbers still committed to memory. It is – and I’ve never told anyone this – what I’m pecking out over and over when you see me nervously tapping on bar counter top; on the table right before the interview for my first job, on the desk in high school before midterms, on the bus seat in front of me en route to first grade.

“What happened to your phone number?!” I bellow into the phone, and then check myself and soften my tone. “You could have kept it.”

“Oh, it was an extra money to keep it, and I didn’t care.” she says, ever practical.

“But what about me?” I sigh, ever sentimental. “I care.”

She laughs. I laugh, too, because I know I’m being ridiculous, and we talk about her new house, which she loves, and I am excited for her. But then we hang up, and I dial the old number again, for the last time (bar stools excepted), just to check. It still doesn’t work, of course, and I wrinkle my brow at my phone. It’s all wrong.

But she’s still here, which is the important part, of course, and I’m glad.