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Ten on Tuesday!

01-17-2012

Ok folks. Buckle up. This is THE inaugural “Ten on Tuesday” blog post. That’s right people. That means that if you read this, then somewhere down the road when everyone who is anyone is talking about Ten on Tuesday you can say “I was there from the beginning!” How cool is that?!

Alright, I know there are only a few of you who read my blogs so the above scenario isn’t likely to happen but I do hope that you’ll enjoy this new series. Every Tuesday from now until I decide I’ve had enough I will be blogging about 10 things. It might be my 10 favorite books of all time or maybe 10 things I did over the weekend or 10 items I have in my purse. It’s my way of letting you guys into my life a bit more and see who I am outside of a photographer. As an extra bonus, some of these Ten on Tuesday’s will be video’s. Yep! You’ll get to hear my voice and see how crazy animated I can be in person.

So without further ado, here is the very first installment of Ten on Tuesday with Ten Things You Might Not Know About Me. Enjoy!

1. I can speak Japanese.  Well, not fluently or even just a little bit fluently but I know some words.  My Mom had an AFS student live with her family for a year when she was in high school. My “Aunt Yuko” was from Japan so when the opportunity was there to take Japanese as a foreign language in middle school my Mom said I should. And since my Mom said I should I did. I took it in middle school, high school and college. Unfortunately, it’s one of those languages that if you don’t use it you lose it and so it’s pretty much lost.

2. I have really weird vivid dream. For instance, last night I dreamed that I needed to find a baby sitter for my adult brother and sister before I went on a road trip. I made arrangements for Jasmine Star to watch them and she arrived just as I was making zucchini bread and no-bake cookies to take on the trip. I took her to the upstairs of my house to show her the room where she’d be staying and as I reached the top of the stairs the second level ended up being a neighborhood of duplexes. Which of course didn’t seem odd at all. As we looked for her room, er duplex, I told her about how I followed this girl Bianca on Twitter and one time I saw her picture and told her that she looked JUST like a photographer I followed named Jasmine. (Turns out they’re twins. Duh.) Then I left her in control of my siblings and left for my road trip. See…weird.

3. I’m scared of bridges. Once when I was in high school my family went on a vacation and we went over this huge bridge in Alabama. (I tried to find it to show you but I got to this link and started hyperventilating so I stopped my search.) My Mom thought it would be really neat to not tell us until we were on it so it would be a surprise. I just remember her saying, “Girls, look outside. This is the longest bridge in Alabama!” to which I glanced up and promptly sank in my seat with my eyes closed tight.

4. I was born with club and pigeon toed feet. From the time I was 6 months old to a year I wore casts on my feet to straighten them out. I still have the casts. They are teeny tiny and super cute.

5. I might be a hoarder. I have only caught a few of the actual shows about hoarders and when I do I’m always kind of glad because then I feel like I’m not that bad. Maybe a better term would be “pack rat”. I just can’t seem to get rid of anything. Ever. That’s something I’m hoping to change this year though. A friend of mine recently told me that letting go sometimes means bigger and better and brighter and SIMPLER! I loved that! Also, I’m currently reading 7 by Jen Hatmaker which is making me want to completely get rid of it all.

6. Speaking of Jen Hatmaker…I have a wee little girl crush on her. Ok, that’s a lie. I love her. I really really do. I started following her on Twitter last year. I’ve never met her in real life but I call her my friend Jen. As in, “My friend Jen wrote this book and you NEED to read it.” I am completely aware that I sound like a stalker which is not really like me at all but whatev. I just love her honesty about how living for Christ is just down right HARD sometimes and I read about how she’s doing things to change and it’s still hard and I just love that. I mean, not that it’s hard for her. But that there is hope for me. I kinda wish God would tell her to move to Stillwater, Oklahoma. I know she’d do it. And then we could be REAL best friends.

7. I can wiggle my ears. Like, without putting my hands on them and moving them. We were in a car with our soon-to-be step-dad when I was younger and my Mom said, “Guess what Johnnie can do! He can wiggle his ears!” I said, “That’s easy. I can do that.” So I did.

8. I’ve been hit by a car. I was a chunky little girl who hated exercise. (Actually, that hasn’t changed much. The chunkiness or the hate of exercise.) I was riding my sisters bike home from my piano lesson and in an attempt to avoid going up a big hill that required effort I took a different route. I was going straight through a neighborhood intersection when some people on a porch yelled at me to watch out. They totally freaked me out, and then I noticed the car coming that would have hit me if I’d gone straight. This put me on my normal path and so I turned left to go up that stupid hill, still thinking about how lucky I was that I didn’t get hit by that car and then BOOM. Next thing I knew I was laying on the ground next to a tire. I’d been hit by a little old lady. Other than ruining my clothes in the freshly laid tar, demolishing my sisters bike and twisting my ankle when I fell I was fine.

9. The first concert I ever went to was Conway Twitty and the Twitty Birds. I was at Cheyenne Frontier Days with my Dad and Step-Mom. They wanted to go in and see him. I didn’t. My Dad bribed me by saying he’d buy me a light up visor. I pretty much HAD to have that visor. Totally awesome. So I agreed. We went in and found a seat, Daddy bought me a hat, Conway and his birds finished their song and just like that it was over. 1/2 a song and I got the visor. Sweet!

10. I have this quirk. My husband and family would probably explain it more as me just being a freak. Whatever. Anyway, here it is. When seated, I have to have someone or something on my left side. At all times. Always. I’ve been known to push my way to the front of our party when being seated at a restaurant to ensure getting my preferred seat. My biggest fear when flying is that we won’t get A boarding and I’ll be forced to sit on the right side of the plane. If there isn’t a wall or partition that I can have directly on my left, then I use my husband. If the kids end up in the big sanctuary with us on Sunday morning and try to sit between me and the hubs, I will crawl over a pew to get to where I need to be. This is normal. Right?

Reevaluating : A personal post

01-09-2012

Re-evalute or reevaluate: verb To consider again, especially with the possibility of change: reconsider, reexamine, rethink, review.

The new year always brings a lot of evaluating naturally. As someone who has a history of making extravagant plans to change and then failing miserably, I’ve learned not to start the new year off with all sorts of resolutions that are bound to be broken within a few short weeks. However, my plan to not make plans has resulted in me having absolutely no plan.

I don’t do well with no plans. I really like plans. I need plans.

So if you follow my blog then you know that I recently totally put myself out there by entering the Wedding Weekend thing with Zach and Jody. Well, actually I guess my kids put me out there. Because all of my attempts to record a video sort of failed. (Not until after I spent waaaay too much time thinking about it and letting it completely stress me out though.) The photographers chosen to attend the weekend were announced today and sadly I’m not one of them. I’m not going to lie, it hurts. For real. I felt like I really had a shot of getting picked and was so looking forward to meeting the Gray’s in person and getting recharged.

You see, I feel like I’m stuck. I feel as though my photography has become redundant and isn’t growing. I need guidance with the business aspect of madigan.e.photography. I desire to learn new techniques with lighting and off-camera flash. I want to stay true to why I chose this path and not feel like I need to compete with every single person who just got a new camera for Christmas and has now decided to start their own photography business. I love what I do and want to be the very best I can be for my clients and I know that in order to do that I need to learn and grow. The problem is that I have a really hard time balancing that with the rest of my life. Voice lessons, piano lessons, dance lessons, band practice, choir rehearsals, youth group teaching, doctors appointments, exercising, dinner plans, photo shoots, gallery editing, laundry, grocery shopping, house work, Bible study, and on and on and on. How do I stay on the path that I’m to be on when my mind is a million different places at any given time. I feel like I need a personal assistant with me at all times just to keep me on task. Anyone want to take that position? I can’t pay you but it’s sure to be entertaining.

The fact that I wasn’t chosen for the workshop has me really thinking. I know that it didn’t work out for a reason. And as bummed as I initially felt, I’m really ok with that. But I’m not ok with the stirrings in my heart that it has brought on. (Actually, I guess I’m ok with that too because I know eventually it will all make sense. Right now though, it’s just hard. So hard.) I guess I just kinda thought that I would be going to Seattle later this month. I’d spend the next couple of months passing the days thinking about that. Knowing that I would learn and grow while I was there and then come back home with a plan! Remember, I like plans. Instead though, I wasn’t chosen which means now I’m still wondering where to go with my business and what direction to take and with nothing like an impending trip to Seattle to help distract me some underlying issues that can’t be ignored anymore are now very apparent.

So I’m reevaluating. Reevaluating my business. Do I want to focus on one aspect of photography? And if so what? I don’t shoot a lot of weddings but when I do I absolutely adore them. I can’t very well give up shooting seniors, they are SO much fun. What about newborns and my hopes of doing more birth photography. I can’t NOT do that anymore. (I know, double negative. Forgive me.) If I don’t give something up then can I continue to make it work?

Then at the root of all of this are those “underlying issues” I just mentioned. You know, little things such as my longing to do what God has intended for me to do with my life. Woah. After the laundry list of all I try to balance you’d think it crazy of me to even still be considering it but the call of adoption is still burning wildly inside of me. My other blog has been quite ignored during the last several months. But when I go there and see that I started that blog with the About Me section reading: “I am a wife, a mother, a daughter, a sister and friend. I am a believer, a lover of Christ, saved by His grace. I am on a journey. I am ready for what He has in store for me. I am interruptible.”

But really?

How interruptible have I really been? I’m afraid my desire to do God’s will for me is buried somewhere underneath a whole bunch of as-soon-as-I’m-done-with-this-project’s and when-I-get-enough-time-to’s and a slew of other excuses. This place of being where I see how many ways I can ignore the true problems has gotten old. I don’t want to do it anymore. I don’t want to go through every day just doing the motions and being numb. I guess it boils down to the fact that I don’t need Zach and Jody to guide me. I need God to do it. I’ve got to let go and give it to Him. And then, and only then will I be at peace.

Hold me accountable for these ramblings friends. Pray that these revelations won’t end up like countless other resolutions I’ve made, swept away after a few short weeks only to be brought back out again next January.

Feeling really really blessed

12-31-2011

So, back on December 6th Zach and Jody announced that they were going to do a 3 day wedding weekend with CreativeLIVE. As I read their announcement, I got more and more excited. Especially when I came to the part about how they would be choosing 6 photographers to attend the workshop.

Um…me Me ME!

I read the entry rules and decided I would most definitely send in a video. My brain started thinking about all the ideas I could do for a video. I needed something exciting. Something that would really grab their attention and make them remember me. Something exceptional. I started planning and it seemed that “the video” was always on my mind. And when I say always I mean it pretty much consumed me until the 22nd.

It was Christmas time. Which means I was also consumed with getting galleries and sneak peeks and card designs to all my clients in time for them to be sent out. I was also thinking about how my family was going out of town for over a week so I had laundry and packing and cleaning to do for 6. Plus, I hadn’t finished my Christmas shopping which was getting increasingly more stressful because you know…I needed the PERFECT gift for each person on my list.

Then December 22nd came. “The video” was going to be filmed the next day right before we were planning on doing our Christmas before leaving town until January 2nd. After a completely overwhelming day and going non-stop and feeling like I hadn’t accomplished a thing I found myself at Wal-Mart to get pizza for dinner. I stood in front of the pizza’s and tears stung my eyes. Know why? They were out of Canadian Bacon and Pineapple. Now what? That’s the one we always got. I had to make a decision. I had to make a choice and all of the sudden, I couldn’t.

A little voice whispered in my heart saying “Him” and tears fell down my checks while I repeated it over and over again. The day before I had followed a link from my friend Jen’s tweet. (I might add that I’ve never actually met Jen. I’m pretty sure we’d be friends if we met though. I think.). The link took me to this blog post and I read it thinking it sounded awfully familiar. In front of the pizza that night though, I realized that all these choices and distractions I’d been dealing with we’re ruining the season for me. And by focusing so much on all of that I saw that I was ruining it for my whole family too. Not. Cool.

That’s when I decided “the video” wasn’t going to happen. At least not the one I originally planned on making. I figured if I had a chance to make something while we were traveling then I would but I would focus on spending this time with my family and Him.

Last night Madi helped me start my video. After a couple attempts we ended up with a 3 minute video that we described as “too preachy”. I decided to take a break and try again later maybe. Then Madi took over and she and Eli finished the video.

They presented it to me this morning and when it was over I knew that even if Zach and Jody didn’t choose me I was still a winner. I feel so blessed to have married Brad and been given these 4 beautiful children. I would absolutely love to attend the wedding weekend in January. I could certainly use the help with organization and working with my couples and building my brand and workflow and LIGHTING! Hopefully I’ll be chosen. If I’m not though, I’ll be watching from my home in Stillwater. With my family supporting me all the way.