Normal schedules are hard to come by; I have yet to learn what one of those things might actually be. There was a time (when I first met Tara) when a normal schedule existed seven hours ahead of the time-frame I had grown accustomed to keeping in Chicago. It was a schedule informed by the bouncy, jiggly, poetic qualities of spoken Czech. Upon my unwilling return to the shores of Lake Michigan, schedules involved moving heavy things with names like I-Cat and Panorex and corporate identities such as Takara-Belmont. Schedules were fast and flimsy, and they smelled of truck fumes, grime, rust and the occasional gyros. Now, schedules involve a shifted work week. Weekends exist on Mondays and Tuesdays and the normal weekend days are simply days like any other. In other ways, schedules follow the rhythms of fictional stars: the birth/rebirth of birds known, in the most prosaic sense as phoenixes, or gods that look more like duck-billed dinosaurs. Yes, somewhere amid crazy work-day schedules, I found time to pen tales of…well…phoenixes and non-divine, pseudo reptilian gods. More on those later in the gallery. The oddity that is my schedule has received pleasant interruptions: poetic emails sent to me from Russia and from the Czech Republic. Pavl has a haircut and Victor is in Khabarovsk for reasons he vehemently dislikes. Pavl’s haircut is not an unexpected thing, nor is Victor’s journey to the banks of the Amur River. And right in between a Czech guy getting a haircut, and a Russian guy…well…going east, Tara had a birthday, and now that I’m in the process of catching up with Russia and the Czech Republic, it’s high time that I catch up with Tara’s birthday. I took this photo, on Tara’s birthday: give or take a couple of hours. Central Standard time in the USA demands a two hour shift in one direction or another, and so with a two hour shift, this photograph occurred on Tara’s birthday. It’s a surprise photo, a stationary attempt at the spin-and-jiggle technique I’ve grown quite fond of, a technique that Tara has learned and modified. There was no spinning in this shot. There was no jiggling. There was simply… …movement. I liked the end result and through strange work hours, rakishly-poetic emails, and displaced weekends, the image remained in my camera. It showed great patience, and now, it sees the light of day: at least digitally, and it’s a marker of a birthday as well. I chose this photo for Tara simply because I like it. There’s movement, an implied story. It’s a Chicago shot on a night that evolved into spinning and jiggling, before finally ending in a flourish of sliced tomatoes and avocados, sprinkled with Mexican cheese. It’s a belated birthday blur, and as belated birthdays and blurs are something of a specialty around these parts of Chicago, it’s only fitting that I dedicate this to the friend I first met (here on Renderosity) when days and nights took on trans-Atlantic significance. And so: HAPPY BIRTHDAY, TARA! Enjoy the blur.