"Children Will Listen" (INTO THE WOODS)

Oh my, the day was a HOT one!! And since it was the end of a holiday week the train out to Long Beach was completely crowded for the first time this season. I thought that it was okay and that it would all kind of be spread out once we got to the beach. Well, when we arrived at the boardwalk it was completely covered with vendors for their annual bazaar. It was a trek just to get to the beach because we had to squirm through the crowd on the boardwalk, not a good sign. Anyway, with the blazing sun coming down, we parked it under the boardwalk where we had shade and relief. I was particularly happy about that because I had planned to park my big booty under shade and just relax. I did not sleep well the night before so I was already drained and knew I could just take it easy. They were going to try a doubles tournament like last week but a little more organized. It was not entirely the same group of people playing and we were spread out so it was going to be a problem to get it going, I could see that from the onset. They started sort of late because they needed to wait for a certain number of people to play and also the lines for the court. Once they got started, they ran into problems with people not being ready to play or not around the area so it got a little frustrating for Dee and Jay. Finally they just gave up on it and everyone just played in fours or doubles. People got tired a lot faster because of the sun and the really burning sand. For me, I just took a few pictures and sat my big booty on my neat sheet and slept. It was a good day. I'm such a loser because I did not even exert an ounce of energy doing any physical activity. Maybe I just needed a little break.

I'm passionate about volleyball and with the recent playing of softball and tennis which have been passionate past-times, I thought I would explore some of the other hobbies that make me happy and examine their origins. This entry I'll discuss the fascination I have with pictures. I discussed this a couple of entries back in a small paragraph but I'll elaborate a little bit more on it. Just simple photographs of loved ones and places of significance. I actually started a sort of semi-biography in pictures on my flickr page. I'm not exactly sure where my love for taking pictures, very amateurish as they are, but more importantly being in the actual pictures. I've always loved having photos around me whether in frames or albums. I even love looking at other people's frames and albums. This was before the digital age where film processing took days and yet I would sort through photos and put them in albums and/or display them. This is certainly not a family trait or hobby that was passed down. I absolutely love "posing" for a photo and have been doing that since I was a toddler as evidenced by some of the pictures in that pictorial biography. As a person who is not comfortable with their looks, I somehow found a way to feel a little special in pictures because it was your own individual mark captured in time. How could I not take advantage of that? I may not be a stand-out in the picture but at least I'm in the picture. As I got into high school, I started to take more pictures and realized how much I liked doing that, capturing people like I would want to captured. I take a picture with a little candidness but also with an idea of how it could be framed if I wanted it to. When I moved to New York, I kept a lot of pictures of my family around my apartment so I could feel like they were with me even though we were thousands of miles apart. I eventually got more frames and more photo albums as the years went by. I LOVE frames and buy them just to have them in stock in my apartment so that when I do have a photo I want to use, I will have a frame ready. I'm running out of shelf and wall space so I will need to figure out something. But with the digital age, I'm loving the fact that I can experiment with picture-taking and capture a little something special. Nowadays, I will snap about 120 pictures in a day of activities and go through them, edit, and then post them with some cropping and captions on my flickr page by the end of the evening. I have a quick turn-around with my pictures as far as getting them posted because I love working with the photos. Again, I love capturing that moment. I would not have considered it a hobby, it's just something that I do, second-nature and I love doing it. It makes me happy.