The centerpiece of October, as has been the case for the past decade, was our annual Staycation. I plan on writing more about that later, but it was a welcome break from work since we hadn’t had a day off since Labor Day. Holly had a couple rough work weeks leading up to our Staycation so she really appreciated 10 days away from the job.
The other big news and big distraction from the month is that the Phillies, somehow, made the playoffs and are in the World Series. It added an additional fun element to our time off. We’d go out to brunch, see a couple movies, go out to dinner, and then come home and watch baseball (at least until we couldn’t stay awake any longer).
Photography
After a summer of not taking many pictures, I find myself behind in posting about my photography adventures. I hope to get caught up on those post-Staycation. It has been a nice autumn so far, and I’ll have more to share later, but I did take a few fall photos with my Samsung Galaxy S9+.
Not exactly photography, but I’ve started getting interested in making videos and experimented with a few just using the aforementioned Samsung.
Because of this interest, I started watching an Adobe Premiere Pro Essential Training tutorial from LinkedIn Learning.
Not sure where this interest will lead, but I’ve enjoyed this preliminary dabbling.
Drawing
I finished another Skillshare tutorial, The Creative Sketchbook: Start Your Daily Sketching Habit. The course was good, and I really liked the instructor, Imran Mughal, but I wasn’t all that pleased with my own drawings from the tutorial. The only one I liked was one of an ink bottle.
Reading
Books
I had started Imogen Sara Smith’s In Lonely Places: Film Noir Beyond the City quite a while ago. My slow progress was due to my wanting to watch a lot of the films she covers in her book. Urban settings are often a key feature of noir, but Smith analyzes those that do not take place in cities. Although I have been a fan of film noir for ages, reading this book exposed me to many movies I hadn’t seen before: His Kind of Woman, Where Danger Lives, On Dangerous Grounds, Pitfall, Sudden Fear, Shadow of a Doubt, The Big Steal, They Live by Night, and Clash by Night.
I’ve seen Smith discuss films online, especially on The Criterion Channel, and always found her insightful so I had been meaning to read her book for a while. Although I generally loved In Lonely Places, I felt that she really stretched the definition of noir to include some of the films she did. This was especially true when discussing westerns.
I also read 2 Kindle First books: At the Quiet Edge by Victoria Helen Stone and Well Behaved Wives by Amy Sue Nathan. Amazon Prime Members get 1 (and sometimes 2) free Kindle books a month. I usually try to pick some out in order to read books I would not otherwise have been aware of. The choices mostly feature genre titles which I don’t usually read so it’s been an inexpensive way to broaden my horizons.
At the Quiet Edge is categorized as a “domestic thriller” and “psychological fiction” and Well Behaved Wives as “Historical Literary Fiction” and “Women’s Domestic Life Fiction.”
A lot of the time, I select a book not because it’s particularly appealing but because it’s less not appealing than some of the other choices.
I wound up mostly enjoying both these titles. I mainly chose Well Behaved Women because it is set in Philadelphia where I live. I didn’t pay much attention to what it was about and was surprised that, like At the Quiet Edge, a key part of the plot revolved around helping an abused wife escape her husband.
Books Read in 2022
So far in 2022, I’ve read 30 books:
- The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien
- Book, They Might Be Giants, Paul Sahre, Brian Karlsson
- All About Me!: My Remarkable Life in Show Business, Mel Brooks (Kindle book)
- The Photographer’s Eye, John Szarkowski
- Harlem Shuffle, Colson Whitehead (Kindle book)
- Our Country Friends, Gary Shteyngart
- My Name Is Asher Lev, Chaim Potok
- Crossroads, Jonathan Franzen
- South of Somewhere, Robert V. Camuto
- The Promise, Damon Galgut (Kindle book)
- A Visit from the Goon Squad, Jennifer Egan
- After New Formalism, Annie Finch, ed. (Library book)
- The Candy House, Jennifer Egan
- The New Woman Behind the Camera, various authors
- Sea of Tranquility, Emily St. John Mandel
- Joan is Okay, Weike Wang (Kindle book)
- East of Eden, John Steinbeck
- Free Love, Tessa Hadley (Kindle book)
- Bleeding Edge, Thomas Pynchon
- Norwegian Wood, Haruki Murakami
- Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller
- The Trip to Echo Spring, Olivia Laing
- Crudo, Olivia Laing
- As You Like It, William Shakespeare
- White Noise, Don DeLillo
- The Art of the Travel Journal, Abbey Sy
- The Sweetness of Doing Nothing, Sophie Minchilli
- In Lonely Places: Film Noir Beyond the City, Imogen Sara Smith
- At the Quiet Edge, Victoria Helen Stone (Kindle Book)
- Well Behaved Wives, Amy Sue Nathan (Kindle Book)
This Creative Midlife Posts in 2022
- December 2021 Update
- Canon AE-1 with Ilford Delta 3200
- Canon Rebel 2000 with Kodak Color Plus
- Christmas Light Box Photos
- January 2022 Update
- Minolta Autopak 450Ex with Lomography Lobster
- New Nikon Z fc!
- Schuylkill River Trail Outing with my Nikon Z fc
- E.M. Cioran on Aging
- February 2022 Update
- Long Birthday Weekend 2022
- Year Two of Pandemic Life
- First Film Photos of 2022
- March 2022 Update
- 2022 Camera Inventory
- Minolta Hi-Matic 11 with Ilford Delta 100
- Canon Rebel 2000 with Lomography Color 800
- Planning a Vacation
- April 2022 Update
- Minolta XE with Lomochrome Purple
- Olympus XA in Carmel California
- May 2022 Update
- The Arizona Part of Our Vacation
- 2022 California Vacation Part 1
- 2022 California Vacation Part 2
- 2022 California Vacation Part 3
- Did My Olympus XA Survive Vacation?
- June 2022 Update
- Canon AE-1 with Kodak Pro Image
- Favorite Photos from the 1st Half of 2022
- August Walk with My Canon EOS 5D Mark IV
- July and August 2022 Update
- Olympus OM-1 with Fomapan Classic
- Olympus XA with Kodak Pro Image
- Minolta X-700 with Kodak Tri-X
- September 2022 Update
- Two Medium Format Rolls
- Setting Up My Traveler’s Notebook for Staycation
Disclaimers: Comments are moderated. Some links, such as those to Amazon, are affiliate links, through which, I may gain a small commission.
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