Fallen

Elaine and I went to the Fallen Fashion show last Sunday. Just like the last one I took altogether too many pictures (over 280). I spent a good chunk of yesterday evening, somewhere around 2 hours, paring that down to about 180 postable ones, cropping, adjusting histograms, and whatnot. Hopefully I'll get them all posted between when I get home and when I have to leave for a family dinner with Elaine's extended family.

One nice thing about this Sunday was in addition to not having to leave early because of work the added weight of worrying about spending too much was lifted. On Saturday Elaine and I had gone to Duncan to visit my mother for her 74th birthday and she's going to let my skip a payment on the money I borrowed to keep up with expenses carelessly dumped on me last year. Pardon the moment of bitterness, but I still get angry thinking about the number of times I asked the person doing all the spending to go through the bills with me and work out a budget and the thousands I borrowed as things spiralled out of control. The skipped payment will give us an extra $750 to spend on our trip to New York. Yes, it means an extra month before I am square with mom, but it's going to make a big difference to how much we can do in June.

Anyway, back to the fashion show. I really preferred the choreography of this show to the last one. Having the models make two passes each really helped with photographing all the outfits. Unfortunately my vantage point was not quite as good as last time, which brings me to my fist gripe of the evening - it was too damn crowded. I had what should have been a good spot at the end of the runway but found myself being jostled by drunk yahoo normals and tripping over bottles left on the floor by people who either couldn't be arsed to find somewhere better to put their empties or were so loathe to leave the floor (and lose their spot) that it was the best they could do. It actually got to the point were people, photographers and otherwise, were sitting on the catwalk because the crowd had pushed in so far. I ended up for the most part uncomfortably crouched down so as not to be in the way of the other photographers and videographers behind me, trying to get decent shots despite the fact that the angle I was stuck with had me looking right up at one of the red flood-lights. And while the water-pistols were a cute idea, trying to photograph someone and shield your lens from water at the same time is isn't so fun. It would have been much, much more pleasant if there were an area directly in front of the catwalk and about a metre on either side roped off just for photographers. A little space around the catwalk might have made it easier for the rest of the people behind to actually see as well. Not that I seriously expect such an area to be respected by the sorts of yahoos that were pushing us forward in the first place.

In the end I finished the show with sore legs and virtually deaf in my right ear from one yahoo in particular that I was right on the verge of hurting by the end of the show. So, sore and annoyed, but with a couple hundred pictures to show for it, I headed to the bar for a much needed reward. I returned to the table that everyone was around with a freshly poured double in hand. I put said double squarely on the table, a fair distance from the edge, and turned to chat with people and snap a couple pictures. Mere seconds later, while stepping back to frame a photo I found myself stepping on ice-cubes... the ice-cubes from my full drink that had been knocked from the table. Interestingly nothing else on the table seemed to have been moved, including the glasses my drink had been sitting beween, and the only person sitting at the table was an individual who has a vendetta against me based in her own bitterness and connivances. But since most of this occurred to me in retrospect, at that point I simply shrugged off the annoying loss and went to the bar for another drink. Even now though, in further retrospection and given what I've learned of this person's (lack of) character over the last couple years, such a petty act would not be out of character in the least. Should a similar situation arise I think I'll forgo my usual inclination to take it in stride and instead take it as an opportunity to let this blatherskite know what I think of her. Whether the spilled drink was her fault or not, her behaviour in general remains an annoyance I'm growing tired of.

Despite that, however, the evening had another big plus to it: the sudden supprise repayment of a debt over two years old, along with a package of cloves as "interest". It caught me completely off guard. Again the timing couldn't be better, this adding pleasantly to my vacation fund.

Now I should get to posting those pictures while I have the chance.