Current Music: Richard Marx – “Hungry Eyes”

(Well, the Internet’s working fine today, knock on wood…)

And they caught Saddam Hussein! Wow! I think everyone had sort of given up. It was just a typical Sunday – I had been up for a while and around 12.15 I just flopped back into bed for lack of anything better to do… and then S came flying into the room and flipped on the TV. I got up, put on my glasses, and saw ‘breaking news’. “What?” was all I needed to say.
“Apparently they think they’ve caught Saddam Hussein.”
”What?!”

So they really do have him. Awesome. I was SMSing everyone, telling them – M was in the library and she called me asking for the story. Exciting stuff. But still… hiding like a rat in a hole. And he even had a gun on him at the time he was apprehended. I would definitely have thought he’d kill himself before letting us find him. S keeps claiming it’s not that easy to do. I keep asking him how he knows. :) Because if I were Saddam, knowing that not only could I never return to power but that I could never venture freely into public again – that my entire life as we as humans know it was gone – well, I would have just shot myself months ago and been done with it. Better than living in underground holes for the rest of your life. But that’s me.

I’m trying to charge the battery to this digital camera… do you guys suppose that a blinking yellow light means ‘charging’ or ‘something’s wrong’? LOL! I can’t find that crappy little American converter that I brought, so my laptop’s running on battery now and I’m charging through that converter. Hope it doesn’t take longer than, say, two hours, otherwise my laptop will run down. Anyway, I’m just realizing that it’s December and I may have a kick-butt scrapbook and a lot of pictures of Auschwitz and Utrecht and stuff, but I don’t have any pictures of my friends, and those are the ones I’m going to cherish most. My problem is that I wish I could be behind the camera and in front of it at the same time! And that my spiffy camera less cumbersome was. Because I –

((Um, wait. Is that English? *think* …No, it should be ‘and that my spiffy camera was less cumbersome.” Sorry guys – I was just watching a Dutch TV program, and that’s some of the grammar sneaking in. Weird. I don’t think I’ve done that before.))

Back to what I was saying. Because I love photography, really love it. And my big camera takes amazing pictures; the clarity is like nothing else. A couple of those Utrecht/Auschwitz pictures – the ones that I stuck in my scrapbook – look honest-to-God professional, like postcards. But dragging it around everywhere sucks. I wish I could, though… but when I get into one of my ‘artsy’ moods with cameras, look out! I’ve been like this ever since I got my first ‘real’ camera, my gray Canon (which I still use) when I was around eleven. (Catie, remember how I used to make you pose for me? In the tree and stuff?) And I’m definitely in an artsy mood now. I downloaded a bunch of new MSN … um… afbeeldingen, what are those in English? Those little pictures that you can stick on the side of the message window. You know. Anyway, one of them is a closeup on two people, a guy and a girl, with their cheeks pressed together, so half of the face of each person is in the picture. Got my creative juices flowing. I want to take a nice picture of me and P, and one of ‘the Boswell foursome’ (me, M, A, and C), and one of me and L (I know I already have a couple, but I mean a good one), and ones of P (the Utrecht one) and M and D and, oh, just everyone!

…But the problem is, I want to be in a lot of those pictures, and I just don’t trust other people with my big camera. It’s not that I think they’ll hurt it or take a completely out-of-focus picture (you can switch it to fully automatic, after all) but when I have a picture in my head of how a photo should look, I have to be the one to take it or it just won’t come out right, it won’t match my ‘vision’. And half the time it still doesn’t, even if I do take it. When photographing people, I have a preference for close-up pictures, I mean really close ones, with just people’s faces in them. And all too often, when people take pictures for you, they make them ‘nice and neat’ zeg maar, with the heads and shoulders and upper bodies of the people all there, and a good portion of the background. And that’s a perfectly nice photo, and sometimes that’s even better. I have countless pictures like that.

But imagine how much more dynamic it would be if you had just the faces? If you get it right, it makes a picture jump out at you, sets it apart. Like that pic in the ‘foto’s’ section of me and Catie. I always get comments on it. And that one of baby D, where all you see is her face? Wish I had that one on the site. I had to edit that one on the computer to get it like I envisioned it, but it came out so well. Some of you have seen it. Those kind of pictures, when they come out just right, really grab people’s attention. But the point is, other people can never exactly match what you have in your own head, never. Unfortunately. So you just have to hope for the best. Or do it yourself. Or edit it on the computer. But then you lose the crispness when you print it out… you just can’t win.

((I wish I had a telescopic lens… I saw some baby photos once where the photographer focused only on, for example, the baby’s mouth, or eyes. You had to see them – they were gorgeous. But I can’t do that even with my amazing camera. Oh well, maybe that’ll be a present to myself someday.)) :)

Okay, I am really rambling now. Anyway, I’ve had a basically non-productive day – glued to the TV like the rest of the world, and trying to do a little research to find one of the articles on the list so I can use it for my paper. The problem is, none of them seem to be online. Which means I either have to hit the library or get permission to use one of the articles I did find, which are not on the list. Neither possibility has me dancing and singing.

Speaking of singing! I need to SMS P… the Ilse de Lange concert is in two days, and he practically worships her so I gave him a pair of tickets for his birthday present. I think he found out the ‘verdict’ from work sometime yesterday night. It’s most likely a ‘no’, which means he’ll be in a foul mood – not only because he can’t go, but because he promised the tickets to his parents. Haha!

Time to go to sleep…