Week in the Life | Thursday

Week in the Life is a week-long documentation project dreamed up and realized by the inspirational life-documenting goddess Ali Edwards. I've played along with this project for the past several years, you can see my albums from 2013, 2014, here on the blog, or check out highlights from both albums featured this past summer on the Ali Edwards blog. Over the next week I'll be sharing my photos and words from the previous day. I'm doing a lot of sharing on instagram, but not every photograph I take makes for a great IG post. So check back each day for updates on what my life here in East Lansing, Michigan looks like in the year 2015.

I'm running behind today -- hence why this post is going up late on Friday afternoon instead of Friday morning. I make no apologies, this is part of what my week looks like, and that's part of the story.

I'm liking the whole 'writing in the morning' thing. It makes it so much easier to check off the 'write everyday' box in my planner.

J has been studying for his first-year exams next week. He asked if we could take an early break and play some video games together. We opted for some Borderlands 1.5, which we returned to later in the evening.

USPS package arrived at the door. I go through the Flat Rate Priority padded mailers like woah. Also I love door shots, and looking down shots, and package shots, so snapping this one was a no-brainer.

It was finally time to pick a few of the tomatoes today. I wound up taking a shot of this tomato plant every day so far, I'm definitely planning a layout of the tomato progression. I love how this project works it way out into even more meaningful documentation.

I love this photo. I love the colors, I love the shapes, I love that the knife shows you how these tomatoes got the way they are, I love that the plate on the left is welcoming them over.

Sometimes I really suck with words. Don't get me wrong, I can be quite masterful with the prose when I take my time and put in the hard work. But if we're being real, I freeze up a lot, especially when I'm writing. I get nervous. Those words are out there forever. If I mess up, I can try to take them back, but it can't ever actually be erased. So I self-censor a lot. I spent a lot of my time editing myself in my head, on the page, through my words, and more. Which is why sometimes I really just love letting the photos tell the stories.

I spent some time this evening with the iPad browsing photos our friends uploaded from this past weekend in Traverse City. I took a quick shot of this one, which definitely captures that day perfectly.

My evening project was organizing the side space in my studio. It had become overrun with junk. The stuff it was supposed to be housing was under a bunch of other stuff and the bookshelves were filled with nonsense stuff that just needed to be filed away.

I laid in bed playing some iPhone games before putting in my headphones and (almost) finishing up Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets.

PS -- writing about yourself, and your life, and what you see your existence looking like is super difficult. If you're hesitant because you think someone else has it all together, throw that out the window and just start writing. No one's life is perfect. No one's life is exciting all the time. But everyone's life is worth documenting.