Kira

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The English Club visited Amissos on a cool November afternoon. The the wintry sunlight was fading fast, and slid golden over the twin tumuli atop the hill above the old harbor, slowly fading to twilight blues as it sank behind the coastal mountains. The air was cool, a faint breeze blowing in from the sea. Situated  to give panoramic views of the Westwards from Samsun, the city seemed, for once, tranquil in the Black Sea dusk.

Amissos is the name of the ancient settlement which preceded modern Samsun. It was a trading port in Hellenistic times, and famed as belonging to the homeland of the Amazons. Samsun’s modern citizens use the name mainly to mean the site of two tombs and a modern cafe somewhat East of the city, and also to denote the otherwise invisible historic forebear of the ramshackle modern town.

The tumuli are named Kalkanca and Baruthane, according to the Directorate of Culture and Tourism’s Samsun handbook, and may have been used as lighthouses; from a certain angle the two mounds align and only one is visible, apparently indicating an ancient harbor entrance. Claims have been made that the hills were used as temple spots for Roman dieties as well.

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Originally published at Seeking the World's Soul. You can comment here or there.

Long time since I posted anything on here. A wordpress upgrade broke the old “Options” theme I was using, and I’ve been fiddling with making the blog presentable again since then, on and off. Mosty off as I was spending a lot of time job seeking, then getting ready to move, and finally moving from Minneapolis to Samsun.

Samsun is a small city on the Black Sea Coast of Turkey – friendly, middle class, full of observant Muslims, and a bit dull. I’m teaching English at a private girl’s school outside town, and my husband is doing the same at a boy’s school under the same management. People are friendly, the food is *great*, there’s nothing to spend money on, and a year here should let us recover economically from the debacles we’ve had to deal with since leaving Moscow.

I’m going to be posting a lot more travel writing and catching up on older photographic work, so do want to find a good way to present all this material… which I guess means fussing with Wordpress more.  I’ll try to post more often, anyway.

Originally published at Seeking the World's Soul. You can comment here or there.

Well, first off apologies for not writing much lately. Been paying more and more attention to Facebook and neglecting LJ... not that I like Facebook more; it's a very shallow level of communication there! It is faster and easier though, and more of the people I know face-to-face are using it now. I've made my page public and it can be read at http://www.facebook.com/kira.hagen .

I love watching art restoration work in progress, especially when the technicians are actively working on things. These statues were in a wing of the Louvre that was undergoing repairs and covered in a great deal of dust. The plastic draped over them made me think of bridal veils.

In other news, I’m updating this site with a new theme (my old one broke) and upgrading to Gallery3 from Gallery2 – not exactly a painless process so far; it’s still in beta and I’m jumping the gun a bit…

Originally published at Seeking the World's Soul. You can comment here or there.

Sorry I haven't been posting much; been using facebook more and more lately and neglecting LJ. Life is muddling along. Put some more job apps in today, wrote a Craigslist ad looking for governess work and had the damn site lose it after I spent almost an hour getting the wording right... hate that.

Spring's coming along slowly. About half the seeds I've planted are up now.  I'm getting better at harping. Got my bike back from home but someone's lost the lock and I can't afford a new one yet. Might meet up with Dave and walk over to Dinkytown later, if the weather stays okay. He's dieting and trying to get more exercise.

Guess I don't really have a lot to write. 

Happy Spring, everyone!

About flippin' time. Arg. Imbolc actually means something in other areas; here it's just an excuse to go sledding or have a barbecue in the snow.

Been feeling a bit down lately. This winter just drags on and on and on, the snow won't melt and it's warm one day then frigid the next and have I mentioned I AM SO SICK OF WINTER.

All Snakes Day/ St. Paddy's was okay, had some people over, lots of food and bad movies... missed the old crowd, missed my parrot that died five years and a day ago, missed being employable and having money...

Been fighting depression, my own and my husband's. Feeling ineffectual and confused a lot, indulging in avoidance behaviors, working on creative projects unlikely to go anywhere, trying to get up to speed with some computer design languages like PHP and CSS, which is an exercise in frustration anyway. Arg. It's winter's rotting end, when the dog shit and dead things surface.

I should go to bed. This is just self destructive, staying up this late and...

So anyway. Planning on getting out to one of the river parks Saturday, do some observance, hope not so much for a "sign" of some kind as for a bit of perspective. Or at least a reminder I won't always be stuck in a stuffy house with all the blinds pulled so that would-be robbers can't see inside.

This is my favorite shot from the Gorodets living history festival in 2006. It always makes me think I should title it, “No shit, there I was…” The guys fighting are mainly college students who do this as a hobby. It’s live steel, dull weapons but otherwise real. My husband joined the group and got to find out exactly how authentic Viking re-enactment combat can be when he took an axe direct to his shin bone and had to be carried out of the woods on his shield.

The really annoying thing about that… I mean other than the four months following of bringing him beer and coffee while be propped up his cast… was that we’d just watched “300″ before he went out to the event. And I quoted Queen Gorgo to him as he went out the door, “Come back with your shield, or on it!”. Sigh. And now he’ll never, ever let go of the bloodstained thing.

Originally published at Seeking the World's Soul. You can comment here or there.

Just read this article on Truthout, and wanted to quote a bit from it:

Wealth is Well-being

Wealth is seen as the well-being of individuals, society and the earth. Wealth is already present in nature; it is not "created." Clean air and water, strong communities and fertile soils are inherently valuable because our well-being depends on them - independent of markets.

    In this view, to "do good" is a form of wealth preservation. We can see this with a form of common wealth that we all depend upon - the air we breathe. The logic works like this:

1. Wealth is anything that creates well-being.

2. Clean air increases well-being, so it is a form of wealth.

3. Dirtying the air reduces well-being, so it is a loss of wealth.

4. Keeping the air clean is preserving wealth.

    Put another way, as progressives we recognize that even the hardest working person will starve if there is no food. Conversely, we believe that the Good Life is about more than money (beautifully depicted in this video by Free Range Studios).

Nice. That definition of wealth suits me a lot better than "wealth as material accumulation" - especially given how much having things anchors you!

I think this photo is just extraordinary. Saw it in a list of good wildlife photos.

Please excuse a bit of stream of consciousness here... I just finished a somewhat uninspiring shoot and am feeling a little fried...

Tony's at work, Adrian and Carus are off playing vampires... I'm sitting around, guess I could download tonight's pictures... drinking wine - got a bottle because it's the civilized thing to do when you're doing a shoot, but the model barely drinks, was driving tonight anyway, and her makeup artist was (sigh) underage and some sort of straight edger. Oh well. More for me! It's good wine, too - "Releaf" organic cabernet sauvingnon. I recommend. It's full bodied and spicy - a little more like what I think of as being good merlot traits; I tend to find cabernets somewhat thin sometimes.

Charisma is the thing that really sets out good models, I think. Charisma and vivaciousness. Actual looks don't matter nearly as much. Clear skin is really important, though - I don't want to spend 20 minutes on each picture cleaning up zits, moles, and scars. And knowing how to move a little - tonight's model was a nice girl but had no idea how to pose. Also, it sounds like the other photographers she's worked with were skeezy guys, so no wonder she wasn't terribly good at moving. I asked her if it was okay to move her hair and she said she's had guys "rearrange" her breasts without asking. Yuck.

Of course, I get those semi-regular requests from 50-odd year old gentlemen asking me to shoot them in the nude... I tell them fine, but it'll cost and my husband is going to be assisting me on lights. No "okay"s on that yet, thank the gods.

I think I'm coming to the end of doing "trade-for" work, other than the Photo-Op stuff - doing that again on the first, mainly to network. It's a good networking event. I'm pretty happy with my portfolio - need to update it a bit, but I've got the shots I want to update it with already.

Oh gods, going through these prints... Ok, anybody reading this who models: if your face is badly broken out, just don't try doing a shoot. A couple spots, no big deal. Half your face crusty with concealer? Dear gods, how much photoshopping am I supposed to do? This is photographer abuse.

Wish Tony wasn't working. Maybe I'll go downstairs and work on the jacket I'm sewing. Bored...

Spent the weekend in Ely, up by the Canadian border in Northern Minnesota. I was the “prom photographer” for the Mukluk Ball – buy prints from the event at my PhotoWorks Storefront if you were there! The day after I spent half an hour (far too little time, but people were waiting for me…) photographing wolves at the International Wolf Center. The one in this picture is a yearling pup that was enjoying the sun a great deal! It kept rolling over and putting its legs up in the air to sun its belly.

My favorite photo from the day is this next one, of the alpha wolf, Shadow, walking past the den with a big chunk of deer spine in his mouth. However, I’m not sure that my viewers want something that bloody on the front page so I’m including it lower down here…

( Read the rest of this entry » )

Originally published at Seeking the World's Soul. You can comment here or there.

Pretty much set up for shooting Saturday. I'm going to the Mukluk Ball in Ely, put on by Will Steger to benefit some global warming project. And their regular photographer canceled so I'm going to be handling that, which ought to look pretty good on a photographic resume... I've got my lights, I got a roll of dark green paper for backdrops, and today I got 100 business cards with the "charging horses" photo on them printed up. Need to make a paper up for people's email addresses; I'm going to be shooting for free and then offering prints for sale via my web gallery, I think.

Missing Tony a bit, though, feeling a little bit lonely. Well, this is a good opportunity, and fun, and spending a week at Mom's place means halving the food budget for Tony and I... and a bit of time away from each other periodically - especially when we're both largely unemployed and seeing far too much of each other day to day - helps our relationship. Or at least reminds me that he doesn't ONLY make me crazy. Also, he puts off lots of body heat, and the room I'm sleeping in isn't so warm. Sigh. Of course when he gives me grief I like telling him that my very cold toes are missing the backs of his knees.

Anyway, I should hit the sack. Got to do laundry and track down a swimsuit tomorrow, charge batteries and so on and so on...

Had a little bit of a January thaw today - it actually got up to about 50F/ 10C (ish. I'm really not that great at converting.) Michael and I went over to Dinkytown and had chai lattes. We both wanted to go down to some park and bask in sunlight but we didn't get together until three, so wasn't going to work out as the sun's still setting before 5 and I'm recovering too slowly from this flu. But it was nice to go out with an open jacket and no hat - a reminder that there is life and promise beyond the cold. Have I mentioned how little I like cold weather? Going outside and not having the air bite you is pretty sweet.

That said, I think I'm going up to Ely. Mom got tickets for the Ely Mukluk Ball for her and Dad, and a hotel room, and it's looking like Dad's not going to be in the country long enough to go with her... I would really love to get up that far North, anyway. The trees are amazing, all covered in bearded lichen - swamps of tamaracks and hills of 4 billion year old stone, the roots of glacier-scraped mountains long since ground away. Waterfalls, icefalls, and Lake Superior in all her crystalline winter glory... The North Woods are really deeply wilderness, and beautiful.

Really ought to go to bed. Only half packed though. My mind's wide awake and my body's exhausted. Annoying. Bloody flu. Guess I'll hit the sack anyway.

So my friend Dave used a mobile phone with video to take a clip of Jesse, Rachel, and I to show off his real life friends to his Second Life friends. And he introduced me as the avatar of wanderlust...

I'm trying, I'm really trying. I'm avoiding travel websites and magazines and mainly just working on model photos. I'm barely glancing at the ESL boards. But it's hard, and Jesse went on at length about Korea's charms at the little Midway restaurant he met us at, and it would be so easy to move there... schools even offer free airfare most of the time.

Missing Moscow... not the city itself exactly, certainly not the air or weather, but very much the feeling of being valuable and valued. Of having skills that were in demand. Missing Berlin... sitting on a summer evening in the park across the street, drinking strawberry porter and listening to the happy people and the wind in the trees... Tallinn, damp winds and golden leaves on medieval cobbles, the warmth of the little cafes with their mulled wine and cheesecake... Paris, where even the ugly things are touched with grace; Reykjavik, where it feels like the old gods wrap their arms up around you and everything feels so safe; even Bucharest, with her dilapidated but luscious charms... The road, stretching out to a world full of pain and beauty and potential, where anything might happen and often does.

But I do have things I want to do here, even though I don't know where I'll get the money, and I've told people I'll stay through the summer. How this is going to work out when we're making almost exactly the same amount of money as our rent costs, I don't know. At least here we're not alone in being broke, and we have family and the wonderful camaraderie of old friends here.

And there's a part of me that still feels exhausted from the last few years' stress, and doesn't want to go seeking all that again quite yet.

So, yeah. It's not like I do "stable employment" that well anyway.

And most of my skilled and talented friends are also unemployed right now, so here's a general outline of what I'm thinking about: we have photographic, CMS, web design, and marketing skills together. I can do headshots, real estate, and product photography; I also know Wordpress fairly well and have a basic familiarity with Joomla and Drupal. So on my own, I could set up basic promotional websites for people or small businesses. A lot of people are trying to sell themselves or their skills online, one way or another, and doing it with some pretty lousy pictures of themselves.

I can do photographer's websites, with full photoshelter integration if they want/ can afford it. I can do artist's websites, or model portfolios. I could do a small business' e-commerce site on a wordpress installation. I'm working on a networking portal for my dad's sustainable development work right now, and a page for my mom's music services.

My living expenses are really low right now. I don't need to charge standard rates - I could do promo prices for a few months until I can get a studio, at least, preferably for cash.

I'm thinking $25 for a photo shoot aimed at some decent headshots for online profiles. For product photography, probably $50 for the shoot plus $5 per item? That's less than half what I've heard recommended to photographers looking to get into product photography, but again, my costs are very low right now and I want to get some actual business going. I could set up wordpress for someone for about $50 for a basic site - more if it needed extensive galleries or integration with other sites.

So pretty much just brainstorming here - what do you guys think? Anyone have any collaboration ideas? What do you think of the prices I mentioned? Too low? Too high? Thoughts please!

Feeling sort of low today... Dad's in Haiti on an agroforestry project and I'm trying to help figure out a couple things for him. Wishing I was out doing interesting things in interesting places now. Right now I'm just stagnating.

Anyway, the soil there is badly depleted of phosphates and I'm trying to figure out useful permaculture solutions. This is going to be a big agricultural issue for the whole world before too long unless we start composting all our toilet wastes, btw - a solution that has its own set of problems (most medications that people ingest go right through them, don't break down easily, and are not at all good for the environment).

So... this is me more or less thinking out loud... it looks like phosphate uptakes from depleted soils are done mainly by mycorrhizal fungi, which live symbiotically with plant roots and help in nutrient and water uptake. Biochar as a soil addition has been known to increase mycorrhizal fungi by over 500% in the soil, *but* excessive charcoal harvesting is already one of Haiti's big problems. Now biochar doesn't have to be hardwood charcoal by any means - peanut hulls and crop wastes are probably the best choice there. Any organic matter you can dry and then burn without oxygen, and if you collect the gases coming off the burn you can use them to cook with or generate power.

Need to figure out an income stream. Starting to give up on employers - wonder if there's something all my talented and underemployed friends and I could do together.

Just signed up for the "Creative Job Agency" discussions on Facebook, supposed to be networking for people in creative fields. I've been using Facebook a lot more recently, btw, so feel free to connect to me there if you want to.

Anyway, there was a open discussion for photographers to post a link to their websites and a brief bit on their works, and I think what I wrote is my most succinct profile bit yet, and since it amused me I'm reposted it here.

"http://kirahagen.com

Historical sites and environmental photography; travel photography: Russia, Estonia, France, Italy, Tunisia, Latvia, the Seychelles Islands, Romania, Germany, and USA (Minnesota); model portfolios; portraits; headshots.

Willing to chase Russian rioters and be charged by wild horses in pursuit of good photos. Already done both - what's next? Love to travel.

Based in Minneapolis. I speak English, French, Russian, and some German and Italian, in that order of fluency."

In other news, I have awesome friends here. I was feeling really down about losing the first job I'd gotten since April within about a week... arg... and Adrian took me out for French silk pie at 3 a.m. and then Michael took me out for a lovely dinner with wine today. I wrote a poster of Craigslist about a job making djembes and other drums (fingers crossed), priced out some mid-low end flashes, and am generally feeling a lot better than last night.

I love my husband. He brings me comfort chocolate when I really, really need it. A whole French silk pie would be ideal, but a nice cup of high end hot chocolate is pretty good too.

So, yeah, that nanny job I got last week evaporated already. No fault of anyone's. A school the kids had been on a waiting list for, for over a year, had two openings suddenly. No more job.

There are days I wonder why I ever left Russia. At least there the money was good and there was always a promise of travel.

Moscow was dirty and big and pushy and frantic, but I made a dignified living there and almost never worried about being able to afford groceries. We've been living on eggs, potatoes, pasta, granola, and onions for six months. I want some fruits, I want some greens, and they're unaffordable and will continue to be so for the forseeable future. I just read through gardening catalogs and fantasize now.

I am so sick of everything. Especially this run of "luck" that's been going since about the day Tony broke his leg.

There's photography work on Craig's list that I can't take because I don't have a flash or lights. There's retail work I think I could have had if I'd applied there after I talked to the store manager, but I went for the nanny gig instead and I suspect it's been filled by now. I don't know if my health is really great enough to sell plasma but that's the next thing to look into.

I wish I could just go away from everything for a while.

Chocolate helps. Wish it was Jameson, though.

7.5 hours with two small children. Going out for booze now. Sort of feel I need coffee though.