My Stolen Moment

I've been running on a treadmill of ceaseless errands and carpool runs and playdates and appointments and writing and blogging and trying to fit in six hours of sewing a day since January. On Monday, I reached a point where my brain craved a breather.

I wanted silence and pretty pictures. Luckily, I found both.

My stolen moment is brought to you by Hipstamatic, the iPhone app I had absolutely no business uploading yesterday. It was the best $1.99 vacation I've ever had.

You can choose between different lenses, film types and flashes to create ambient, otherworldly images of the most commonplace of objects.

A fake styrofoam bird plopped into a vase of flowering branches becomes imbued with the moodiness of a modern Old Master painting.

A wallet and pair of sunglasses carelessly tossed onto a counter are given a beautiful sepia wash that make it look a bit like a postcard for a sale at Paul Smith.

Hipstamatic gives the most conventional of events a profundity that far outweighs the situation. Here, Twiglet exudes a trenchant intelligence which belies the fact that he's merely waiting for me to feed him.

A trio of containers over the stove reminds me that we're almost out of sea salt, and so I snap a reminder.

A cheese dome from Fortnum and Mason reminds me Luca needs more Jarlsberg for his lunch tomorrow.

Changing the lens to one called "Kaimal", my dining room takes on the aspect of a salvaged photo from a distant time. Very Retronaut-ish, actually.

Going outside, the magnolia tree appears to have blanketed the entire back garden with its glorious pink hues.

Changing the lens again (to the "John S.") gives the same scene a more stark, Wuthering Heights feel.

My pale silvery-gray tree looks as though it's cocooned in moss, a dream I've long harbored but know is unsuitable for a Hollywood climate. Through Hipstamatic, my fantasy comes to life.

I pick up my current book, V. S. Pritchett's "Complete Collected Essays." I've only recently discovered him and can't stop dipping into his short, incisive book reviews. He appears to have written about practically every English author under the sun (Evelyn Waugh, E. F. Benson, George Gissing, Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope and about a thousand others) and his essays provide a wonderful launch pad for further reading.

I have an hour before carpool duty beckons, so I sink into a wooden rocking chair and flip to a page at random (it's that kind of book). I land on an essay about "The Remembrance of Things Past"...

...which is entirely appropriate given the fact that tomorrow my brief idyll into indolence will be but a distant memory and I will be hard at work again.

But I'll have the pictures.