Well that settles it, I need a better light box

This weekend I was walking around and found a big mound of pea gravel at one of the near condominiums. I like that gravel. It always reminds me of home, traipsing around in creeks, playing in the woods, filling days with the wonder and curiosity of a child with far too much energy and enthusiasm.

I could stand beside a stream and peer through those rocks for ages, looking for interesting shapes and colors, hoping to find a cool arrowhead and never doing it. But always finding crinoids and being fascinated by them. (I found those last month, and now there’s something else to collect. I’ll try to do it without lamenting all of those that I put back over the years.)

Anyway, those rocks always make me think of summers and things I had and people I’ve lost and wishing for ways to get them back, if only in your mind and only for a moment.

And this weekend I found a few that had some nice sedimentary pieces. The color changes were interesting.

I saved the best ones for last, so keep scrolling.

And here’s the thing to notice here. Look how the photo quality changes.

These are all in a cardboard light box. You can see tons of DIY guides online, and I was just rushing through this today, but the point of a light box is quality and consistency.

This one isn’t getting it done anymore. And the rushing didn’t help. Plus, you’re always just working around an extra cardboard box.

Instead of all of that, I’m going to wind up making a more substantial, third version. Because the subjects in them should all look like this:

That rock is cool and that picture is great. The background blends right in to the page’s background, which is the point.

I know this is what you’re here for, random observations about half-baked projects, and pictures of even more random objects. I could have told you about today’s sweaty run or this morning’s Zoom meeting. Or the Zoom meeting that came after that. I wonder if I could run during a Zoom meeting. There’s always the emailing. I can get 300 words discussing email as easy as putting on a comfortable t-shirt. I could write another 450 or so words out of how many of them don’t get replies.

I started watching a documentary in Spanish! We could discuss that. And I’m looking forward to a bike ride tomorrow.

This evening was the highlight of the day. We had a two-hour Zoom chat with some of our students, just for fun. It’s so nice to hear from them and see them interact with one another and to watch them laugh.

The theme tonight was show and tell, and it was a big hit. One guy showed off a choice baseball jersey from his massive collection. Another showed a cool bat collection he has, including one he got at his bar mitzvah. Someone talked about a really cool plant, there was a camera and some celebrity photos. One guy showed us his grandfather’s sailing trophies, which was also really cool.

Show and tell, it turns out, is still pretty awesome. Give it a try. And if your crowd isn’t receptive to it, consider the crowd.

I didn’t show off these rocks. Maybe next time I’ll show off a new light box.

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