Places, People and a Rainy Walk

Morning routine. Edited and posted a studio photo of Joey. Journaled Sunday. Weekly review and next week's plan. A new Locations project. Studio cleanup. Walked to Suds in the rain.

From a red-gel portrait to a rainy walk to Suds

Events and activities that occurred on Monday, November 9, 2026

Monday began with a single photograph. Last Thursday, after the Fall Fashion shoot, Joey and I stayed on for an art session in the studio. From that session I picked a frame lit by a red gel against colored drapes, and I took it from a flat starting point all the way to a finished image. Most of the work was in the color: easing the reds so they glow rather than shout, then lifting the face and the edges of the drapes with careful masks until the light seemed to come from inside the frame. It needed a name, and "Ember" was already taken by an earlier post, so it became Vesta, after the Roman keeper of the hearth fire. Choosing where a picture like that should appear, and with what words, takes nearly as long as the editing.

I skipped the usual coffee-shop morning and did the weekly review at home. The one-line read of last week was honest: a balanced, full week, with a real creative high point and good time with family, run on a body still short of sleep. My own observation was smaller and more useful. I held my own all week except on Thursday and Friday evenings, when I simply ran out of gas and shrank. The plan for this week came together around a single idea. I have a backlog of planned experiences that have been waiting for decisions: hotels for Antarctica, the guest list and menu for Thanksgiving, the final shape of a December trip to Mexico, and a reflection on New Zealand that I have owed myself since spring. Clearing that backlog would be a bigger win than any single project.

The way I keep track of places got a new shape during the day. I have been recording where things live in the house, down to the shelf, and on Monday that grew up into a project of its own: a gazetteer for every location that matters to me, with the house itself split into the building and the yards around it. The agent system I'm building at home got simpler too. I replaced a design in which agents bid against each other for work with a single dispatcher that plans and assigns, because a simple worker shouldn't have to compete just to answer a simple question. One rule from that work stays with me: when I ask for something, the request itself is the approval, and nothing should come back to ask permission for the obvious.

Between those sessions I cleaned up the studio and put the photo gear away. There is still plenty of tidying to do before Thanksgiving, and before the next studio shoot on the eighteenth.

Late in the day I found myself turning over the idea of ageism. It is the one prejudice aimed at a group that everyone eventually joins, which means an ageist holds a bias against their own future self. Most of what I meet is not policy but in-person social stereotyping, the quick sorting of a person into a category. A recent remark helped me see the difference between a no and a verdict. A no is a boundary, and anyone is entitled to draw one. A verdict is a judgment about a whole category of people, delivered to one of them. I want to turn that into an essay, ending with the simplest antidote I know: when you look at an older person, you are looking at a version of yourself.

The afternoon closed with the walk to Suds in a hard, steady rain. I talked with my phone most of the way, sending requests through to the agent at home and filing ideas as they came, and the first round trip from the sidewalk to the house and back took a little under two minutes. Tim, Brian and Jack were all there, and a Turkish coffee stout was on tap. Tim had heard back from the Antarctica cruise about a hotel night in Ushuaia, which put one of this week's planned decisions right on the table. At the end of the evening Brian gave me a ride home, sparing me the climb up the hill in the wet.

The day had a theme I didn't plan. A photograph named for the keeper of the fire, a week's plan built around decisions I had been putting off, and a map of places brought up to date: each was a small act of tending. The essay on ageism belongs to the same family. It is about looking clearly at what is coming and deciding to meet it as a friend. Walking home through the rain would have been fine too, but a dry ride and good company made a better ending.