Vines & Spines

On a sunny restaurant patio in 2013 an idea was born. A group of women sat chattering about the books they've read. Several took napkins and started writing down titles. One brilliant woman suggested we start a book club and Vines & Spines was born. 

That brilliant woman was me by the way! I just threw it out there and wasn't sure this group of ladies would jump on board but they did. 

A night was picked, and we were off. The plan was I'd create a list to keep track of who's pick it was. Our first couple of years we had 6 members. We didn't want to get any larger. That meant each person would pick 2 a year. Whomever chose the book also hosted the meeting - that also included dinner. With everyone bringing something to the dinner. 

The Original Vines & Spines May 2013

We did great for a couple of years. The books picked where more hits than misses. Yet every one had their own opinions, and weren't afraid to share them, about each book. The discussions were real. We did discuss the books even though some menfolk accused of not doing that and just drinking wine. 

Ahh the wine. We certainly had that along with dinner. In fact, one night I think every one of us brought a bottle. The hostess that night dubbed that we were a drinking group with a reading problem. And that stuck. 

A drinking club with a reading problem

I've been tracking book club since it started. I mean, you're not surprised right? An opportunity to do a spreadsheet and collect data? Yes please. 

Here are some very unimportant stats: 

• 121 Book club meetings
• 2 cancelled - though I'm sure the books were read and discussed in the next one
• 12 don via Zoom (thanks Covid)
• Combination of 9 members - Several have come and gone for their own personal reasons. 
• 4 of the original members are still going strong
• Not a single personal glass has been broken

I wish I would have been tracking how many bottles of wine were consumed in those 9 years. I can assume at minimum two bottles per meeting on average. 

What I have loved most about book club is the camaraderie. This group of ladies are the ones that have been with me through most my adult life. All "family" to me. Well, two actually are. The third is an honorary Wraspir. We do talk about the book, but we also spend time chatting about everything else under the sun. I've learned a lot about these women over the years at book club. 

The other thing I've loved the most is the type of books we've read. We've read every genre I think. I cannot even begin to list the books I never would have picked up that turned out to be my favorites. And THIS is why book club is so exciting to me. It opened my mind. It extends my interest. 

The nonfiction one

For example, our first book "Unbroken" by Lauren Hillenbrand, a WWII book, I never would have read. In fact, most the books Janet has picked I never would have read. Janet loves nonfiction and often picks historical type books, along with biographies or autobiographies. This is not a type of book I usually pick up. I've learned a lot about history thanks to the books she's picked. I'll admit there's been a couple I just didn't read. They weren't interesting enough or were not great writing. My top three favorites that she's picked: 

1. Hidden Figures - a story about women in NASA in the late 50's early 60's who were smart and who were there to help the men do their job. I mean, it's about more than that, but that's how I felt about it. Men thinking women weren't smart and the women showing them wrong. 
2. Unbroken - I love WWII stories. This one was heartbreaking like so many stories of WWII
3. Becoming - I love Michelle Obama and this story of their lives in the Whitehouse was very interesting.

Kathy tends to pick more light hearted books. Looking at her books though she is all over the place. She's picked light hearted, historical, and biographies. I have three favorites she's chosen:  

1. Where'd you go Bernadette? by Marie Semple - Her first pick for book club. It was lighthearted, funny, and quirky. 
2. Five Days at Memorial - This book was about a hospital staff during Katrina and how they managed. The decisions they had to make were heartbreaking. The lives lost because of poor leadership or communication was astounding. 
3. Where the Crawdads Sing - Probably my favorite overall. Such a good story and full of twists and turns. 

Sherrie is the 4th long standing book club member. She is sometimes all over the place too, but she loves mysteries. Which is good because I don't often pick mysteries. I want to know whodunnit sooner than most mysteries let you in on the scoop. I tend to read the last chapter of these books so I can see whodunnit and then see how the author writes to that ending. It's a very controversial move for me to make, but I do it all the same. My top favorites for Sherrie includes on that was hard to read. 

1. If You Tell by Greg Olsen - This book is about a woman in Raymond Wa who abused her children beyond belief. It's a true story and that was what made it so disturbing. I watch enough true crime that it only made me flinch a couple of times. But it was a hard read just because of the content. 
2. Echoes by Maeve Binchy - Maeve Binchy is one of my favorite writers. This book drew me in and I fell in love with the characters. In fact, the day after I finished the book I found myself wondering what some of the characters were doing today. 
3. Me Before You by Jojo Moyers - Just a lovely story about acceptance and love. The sequel was just as good. 

Which brings me to our rules. Yes we have rules. Over the years we've added to them because we discover we need them. 

The first rule was nothing over 400 pages (unless approved by all members). Because we read one book a month 400 pages can be too much depending on the time of year. 

Second rule, no series. I chose a book early on that ended and we were all like, what? That's when I realized there were 3 more books in the series. So if you wanted to know how the story ended you had to read all of them. 

Third rule, you don't have to read all the books. If you don't finish by book club then there will be no holding back on the story. Spoiler alerts are aloud. And if the book isn't your cup of tea, don't read it. There are a handful I didn't read and I'm ok with that. I am among the few that I know who are ok with putting down an unfinished book and moving on to a more interesting one. I feel like there's too many good books to read to spend my time reading one I'm not interested in. 

And jokingly we said we may have to take a break from WWII books. We had a run of WWII books for a couple of years. There's a lot of books about WWII that I still need to read. 

And so here we are in our 9th year of book club going strong. We still all love to meet and get together to discuss life and books. Sometimes we pull up questions to discuss. Sometimes we wing it. It has always fascinated me how each of us see a book so differently at times. We each get something different out of it. I see no reason book club will ever end. Some of the members who were once a part of it and stepped away may come back, but if they don't that's ok too. We'll carry on without them. We'll keep reading. We'll keep drinking wine.  

Photos, photos, and more photos

I think anyone who knows me knows I love to take photos. Ever since the day my Dad handed me the Pentax and showed me how f-stops and apertures worked I was hooked. Though admittedly I didn't really understand what he was saying. I just turned the knob every now and then and pushed the shutter button. I focused more on whether the picture was in focus. 

Fast forward to TASIS, I had an opening in my schedule my senior year so signed up for a Photography class. Unfortunately, I signed up too late and it was a popular course. My good friend made it in though and she shared with me what she was learning. 

I still wasn't fully getting it. Yet, I carried that Pentax around with me and shot photos as best I could. Most turned out ok. Every now and then I'd get what I deemed a "good shot".

This was in the 80's and digital wasn't even a thought yet to most of us. We had film. We had to be very selective about what we took photos of. We had a limited number of shots in that roll of film. And you didn't know how you did until you got it developed. At TASIS, I saved all my rolls of film and brought them home with me and had mom and dad develop them. It was only weeks or months later I'd see how the photos turned out. 

In college, I had a smaller film camera. Still no digital, but I was the one shooting photos of everything we did. Still not a ton of photos, but enough to remember the college days. Certainly no Ansel Adams but I got by.

When digital became a thing, Mom was the first in our family to have a digital camera. She was techy that way and anything new with technology she was first in line to buy it and learn it. Her first digital camera she out grew when the next better one came out and I inherited her first digital camera. It had something like 2 MP or something ridiculous like that. It didn't have anything fancy other than you could see the photos right away. Still had limited capacity on how many you could save on a card. It was more than 24, but less than 100. And frankly, the photo quality wasn't great. 

Sometime in the late 1990's I decided to take a photography class at Lake Washington Voc Tech. The instructor looked EXACTLY like Santa Clause, and the man knew his photography. He explained things in a way that made sense to me. We had homework each week and so I knew I needed to dig out that old Pentax. 

I took the camera, several rolls of film, and a coffee out each Saturday and started trying to learn photography. It did not come easy to me. 9 time out of 10 it felt like luck when I would get a good shot. I wasted a lot of film in those days. But photography is all about trial and error on so many levels. 

Each week, we'd bring in our photos and he'd "critique" them. We had to record what our Aperture and f-stops were and what we were trying to convey in the photo. And that's when it hit me. 

Photography wasn't about getting a great photo, it was about telling a story with a photo. 

Composition was what I needed to think about. Prof Santa pointed out that I wasn't thinking about photo taking from the perspective about what I was trying to say. I was attempting to be a photographer by the technical aspect, not by the "feeling". 

I started to focus on the "feeling" of the photo and what I was trying to convey. And wouldn't you know it, things started to click into place. 

Prof Santa also gave me the best piece of advice that I still say today. I was trying to figure out how to take a photo with an object really in focus and the background blurry. Friends who were also into photography would say things like, "fix your depth of field". Huh? What does that mean?  Well, Prof Santa told us that the way to get the blurry background is to have your shutter open all the way. Again, what? The aperture had to be the lowest number. And in my brain I was thinking the higher the number the more the lens would be "open". Turns out it was the other way around and he said, "Light is the enemy of focus." And he explained how the aperture was like a funnel flipped upside down. Where the higher the number was the smallest part of the funnel. The lower the number was the wider part of the funnel. 

Why that made sense to me but nothing else did, I couldn't tell you. But that was liberating. I now understood. It didn't mean I was great at it, but I understood more. 

After that class I took photos on and off. I stopped really working on the craft and went back to taking photos with the instant camera. 

In 1997 I attended my 10 year class reunion. One of my good friends on that trip had a Canon DLSR. She let me play around with it and I was immediately in love. I came home, saved up some pennies and bought my first Canon Rebel. I loved that camera. It had everything I needed. I even bought a telephoto lens for it so I could get those far away shots. 

I lugged that camera everywhere with me. It was always in the car. You see, this was before cell phones and we had to actually carry a camera with us. I got really good at photography. I spent a good part of my free time out and about taking photos. And now with digital I could take as many as I wanted. 

In 2000, I dated a guy who was way into photography. He and I would go out again and shoot photos. Then we'd take the rolls to Costco and compare the photos after. I learned a lot from him. Then we started this little photography group with other friends (The Photo Gods). The group would pick a topic and we'd head out and shoot on a Saturday or Sunday.  We'd share our photos online somewhere and we'd leave comments for one another. There were photographers in that group that were well beyond my skills and their feedback was welcomed to me. 

Then over the years I bought bigger and better Canon Rebels. I bought bigger and better lens to go with it. I lugged that thing all over the world. I had special backpacks for my camera gear. It was a lot. 

Gradually over the years, technology in phones caught up and the cameras in the phones started getting better. I still kept my camera on hand and still used it the majority of time. 

Most of my big trips I took I'd take somewhere between 2500 to 3000 photos. Most of those photos was just me playing and trying to get the perfect shot. 

In 2014 my Mom and other family members were going on a big cruise in the Mediterranean. I still had my big camera and the advent of the Internet meant I could do some research on how to shoot photos in some of those areas. In doing that, I realized I could search on a specific topic and view other photos that people took of that topic. This was game changing for me. I could research shots and have them in mind when I traveling and I could see things differently. 

This isn't cheating to me. This is researching. I was doing research about the areas we were visiting in general. Learning the history and what not. This photo research was just an added layer. And ever since then I do this every trip. 

In 2017 we went to Ireland and that trip changed my photo taking. I met a man who had what I now consider THE perfect camera. It's a small, handheld Panasonic Lumix with Leica glass. Upon returning from Ireland I bought that camera immediately. I hung up my Canon and never looked back. It sits in the closet taking up space.

I still took thousands of photos though. Remember I also scrapbook so I wanted to be sure I had enough to tell the story through scrapbooking. The majority of the photos I took I never used or look at again after I scrapbook them. 

So why am I telling you all of this? Because this last trip I took a different approach and I gotta say, it was just right for me. 

I averaged 2500 photos each trip I took. This trip? I took 800. Yes, that's right. I took 800 photos. And the kicker, I used my phone 99% of the time. I had my Panasonic with me, but only used it the day we floated down the Rhine to see the castles. And I used it then because I needed the telephoto quality. 

It took me WAY less time to review all those photos and to post them. I focused on the story still. What story did I want to tell in my scrapbooks? Those were the photos I took. 

In the past, I'd enter a cathedral and start shooting anything and everything. I didn't really think about what I wanted to really remember. 

This trip, I'd enter the cathedral and I'd sit in a pew for a moment and just be. I'd just sit and look around. Listening to the sounds. Looking at the lighting and thinking about what it was that made this cathedral so special. Then I'd get up and shoot some photos. Not too many though. In most cases I'd come out of the cathedral with less than 20 photos! 

What I learned from all this is that being in the moment has to be balanced with the photo taking. I have spent many a trip looking at the trip through the lens that I was missing so much more. I didn't feel the urge to have a photo of everything I saw. Instead I had the urge to just exist with that I was looking at or experiencing. I'd take the photos I wanted then put my phone back in my pocket. 

It was liberating. And honestly, I doubt I'll go back to my old ways. I most likely will bring the Panasonic with me, but that phone camera really does take fantastic photos. 

I'm thankful that I went through all the stages of photography that I did. I'm thankful that Dad put that Pentax in my hand and showed me the basics. I'm thankful for all the friends who helped me hone in my skill. And I'm thankful for technology to allows us to all be great photographers.