Another realm for my creativity is scrapbooking.

I’m a prolific photographer when I travel and there are thousands of pictures locked away on my laptop. My current challenge has been to print recent trips and assemble albums. Last month, I completed a double album project I’ve been working on for four years that covered three vacations I took with my dear friend. Making two identical albums was rather challenging, but I love the Canyon Album (so named because our travels were to points in the Southwest US & Mexico).

So, I’m on to our trip to France in 2010. I plan to design and print out digital pages, not just individual pictures. Hopefully, this will make assembly easier and we can enjoy our albums soon!

The trip to Santa Fe included visiting Georgia O’Keeffe’s ranch. I’ve wanted to visit her studio since I was at the art college. I remember seeing a retrospective at the Chicago Art Museum where her huge stone-cloud painting greeted me at the entrance. Her work always had a velvety dream quality to me. It wasn’t until now that I was struck by the similarities of my subject matter (ladders, rocks, simple interiors) to hers and our shared interest in rock collecting.

She also knows how to put travel into perspective: “I have no yen to go anywhere. But I go around the world anyway to see what’s there, and to see if I’m in the right place.”