Pictures for Pam, Day 157: Macro Monday: Knives

(+4 insets)

Ok, so ever since daylight savings time arrived, I've been slowly losing the battle to get up as dawn lightens the sky. There's just no way to keep up! It's now getting light at about 6am and I'm sorry but that's called "0-Dark-Hundred" in my book.

Times have certainly changed though. There was a time when my normal wake-up time was 10:30am. Seriously. I'd stay up until 4:30am and sleep until…ok, I'm lying about 10:30…I sometimes slept in until noon. Really. It's kind of shocking to think about to be honest. My defense was that I was up the same number of hours as everyone else, it's just that I was a night owl and my hours were much more favorable to Dracula than to Robin Red-Breast!

There really isn't anything the matter with the hours a person keeps--except if it doesn't mesh with your true desires. I always hated the "holier-than-thou" attitudes of early risers who would look down their noses at me when I admitted not remembering my last sunrise and my near-noon wake-ups. Why is a person better or worse depending on when they get up? It's totally ludicrous. The world's greatest talent and brilliant minds can be found in both camps. Enough said.

As for me, there has always been an internal battle which got louder as I got older. I have always loved nature and on the occasions when I'd be awake when the sun was coming up, it was absolutely magical to me. Try as I might, I could not deny the fact that being up early felt "right" to me. I felt at home and at peace when I could experience dawn and the sunrise.

And yet, being a night owl also sat well with me. In my late teens/early 20's, I would go on my daily run at 1am in the beautiful residential neighborhood where my family lived in San Francisco. Few things are more awesome than breaking into a run and disappearing into the cool, foggy night, the mist sometimes so thick I couldn't see more than 100 feet in front of me. I always felt safe because even if there might have been bad elements around, they wouldn't have time to react to me emerging and then disappearing back into the fog, wrapped in a protective cloak of darkness.

After Steve and I moved up to southern Oregon, I kept my night owl hours for many years. One reason I'd sleep in was because I resented being forced to get up to go to work and so I'd sleep in whenever I could. But when my work situation changed to freelance, I kept my own hours. I slowly lost my resentment at being forced to get up earlier than I wanted to.

It literally took years but one day I began to get up earlier to beat the summer heat. My reward was getting to go on a beautiful morning bike ride before the summer sun turned the oven onto high. Riding in sub-80-degree temperatures was so nice and as I gradually got up a bit earlier week by week, it would be about 65 degrees when I took off.

Getting up earlier and earlier, I got to experience what it was like to listen to the birds waking up in the trees, filling the world with their cheerful song. What a joy! And then, I got to experience a lovely sunrise without being forced to get up. The peace and serenity of these special moments made me feel as one with the land around me, a part of it all. For the person that I am--whose heart is wholly bound in Nature's embrace--this is the time for me to rise and start my day.

However, there is a limit. The 0-Dark-Hundred limit. It's becoming clear to me that I can't keep pushing the clock back to rise with dawn because at some point it will be 4:30 when light cracks the darkness of night. I also have to be reasonable because my husband refuses to get up earlier than about 7:30, and that's totally fine! He usually rises at between 8 and 9, and if I am getting up at 5 in the morning, I'll be asleep in my soup at 7pm while he's still lively until 9. Thus, I must lose this battle to get up with dawn. I'm fine with that. It amused me to no end that I'm putting the brakes on my desires to get up before the sun rises! (By the way, I got up at 6:30am this morning and it was wonderful!)

Well, we all know what today is, right? It's Macro Monday, hooray!! :D The theme this week is "knives" and I knew exactly what I'd be taking pictures of! In the outfitting of our RV trailer, we bought many new kitchen utensils, including a full set of brightly colored titanium knives. They are so beautiful and sharp too. What fun to get to take some pictures of them for the Macro Monday theme!

My main image shows all of them in a circle and just their tips showing. What a wonderful rainbow of colors with sparkly metallic flecking! The insets show a couple of the knives with extremely shallow dof which fade off into bokeh. What fun. I am also sharing a couple of pictures from a past project for the "Bokeh Thursday" group when their theme was "Tools." I hope you enjoy the show!

Pam, I got a face full of "raspberries" when I searched for "knife" and "blade", but when I tried "sharp", I got an amazing group of results…that had absolutely nothing to do with "sharp" (except for focus, heh). So I decided to look at the thumbnails and pick one that delighted me first…and the winner is your AWESOME collage for "I'm Forever Blowing Bubbles…" What a gorgeous image. So much work to create this outstanding artwork, and I am so happy that I get to discover your past masterpieces to enjoy and give you some strokes. :) Here's hoping you had a nice day, all things considered! *BIG HUGS from southern Oregon* :D