Spent most of the day glued to my TV and devices while I followed an eventful MLB trade deadline. This isn’t quite the vacation I wanted, but it’s the vacation I have, and I’m spending it how I want: lazily and at home. I should get my car tomorrow, but I’ll believe it once I’m driving it again.

I remember that back in May, I stayed up past midnight so I can see the aurora borealis for the first time in my life. I grabbed my bag with my camera in it, put on my sandals, and hit the road. I had no idea where I was going, but once I was on the road, I remember feeling both excited and free. I could go wherever I want, I remember thinking, and in a way, I did. I went down a road I’d never gone down before, I found a dark and secluded area, I parked my car, and I took some photos of the beautiful night sky.

I miss my car and the freedom and possibilities it gave me. I hope I get it back tomorrow.

On my way home from work on Friday, I saw the battery light on my dash turn on. My car drove fine, so I drove it home. I later did some research on what it could mean and what I could do. On Saturday, I removed the battery cover and checked the wires, making sure nothing looked frayed, and I checked the battery connectors, making sure those didn’t look corroded or anything. Everything looked fine, at least to my untrained eyes. I drove to work on Monday with the light on, and I drove back home after work with the light on, and everything seemed fine. This morning I took my car into Les Schwab and asked them to test my battery. They told me my battery was fine.

My alternator, though, wasn’t.

I had planned to leave on my road trip at the end of next week, and the soonest I can take my car into the shop is this coming Monday. I’m hopeful everything will turn out fine, that I’ll get my alternator replaced, that I can take my car on a planned 3,500 to 4,000 mile road trip next week, but there’s always that little buzzing at the back of my head when something like this happens, when the Universe looks at my plans and just laughs. I’m grateful I have good friends that have answered my pleas for help. I had to take work off today, but a friend of mine will be able to drive me to work this week, and I am forever grateful for her help.

For now, my beloved Jeep will sit quietly in the lot until Monday, and all I can do is hope for the best.

Another slow kind of day where I didn’t do much. What I did do was something I’ve been procrastinating on for a few months, and that’s processing the photos I took on my road trip from back in April. I shot a few thousand photos during the trip, and I only recently whittled that down to about 300. Before, my workflow would then consist of editing each RAW file in Capture One over many hours across many days (or weeks, in this case), and I just wasn’t feeling that anymore. I could even foresee how much this problem would intensify during the trip, as I invested in styles for Capture One that I hoped would make editing quicker, but there was something about them didn’t quite jibe with me, so I quickly abandoned that idea.

Because I was getting tired of editing, I began to finally play around with recipes for my Fujifilm cameras, and I quickly took to it. Like, almost immediately. This was exactly what my photography was missing, as I explained a bit in my post from when I went to Kerr Dam last month. Over the last few weeks, I’ve been playing with Fuji’s X RAW STUDIO app, and even though it is slightly buggy, I really like it. It’s very easy to create recipes with it and even easier to assign them to specific slots on my camera. If you put two and two together, then you can see where my head is at: I began to apply some of my favorite recipes for the X-T4 onto the photos I took during my road trip, and they have been coming out a lot better than I could have imagined. And what’s cool about the X RAW STUDIO app is that you can play around with exposure, highlights, and shadows and apply some nice edits to the photos. It doesn’t allow for cropping or straightening, which is a feature I would love it to have because then, I don’t think I would even need an app like Capture One anymore. And what’s cool, too, is that all this processing happens on the camera itself, so it’s kinda like I took those photos with those specific simulations while I was out and about. Not quite, but close.

I’m not finished processing these photos because, again, I’ve been lazy today, but the photos I have processed look pretty good, and that makes me happy and every excited to both finish and to head out on the road again. I’m super excited about that.

A lazy day at home. Earlier this week, I received this poster by Anderson Design Group, and I’d been looking at it on and off today. For a big part of my adult life, when I thought of traveling, I always thought of traveling overseas: Europe, Asia, Australia. During my road trip in April, however, I realized how much of America I haven’t seen and how much of it I want to see. So I bought this poster to remind me to explore America. On the wall facing this poster, I have more posters by Anderson Design Group that, in a way, tell my story. In order, I have city posters from San Diego, Los Angeles, Montana, Seattle, and Portland.

I now want to go east, and I think I settled on when: the first week of August. I don’t want to be around when my town hosts their annual Pioneer Days event; instead, I want to be on my way toward Chicago. I miss cities, and that feeling only intensified when I visited Seattle and Portland earlier this year. I’ve always wanted to visit Chicago, so that’s where I hope to be in a few weeks time. I’m not much of a planner, so the only thing I have to do next is to fill out my leave form at work. After that, who knows. I’ll hit the open road and see where the road takes me.