I'll be off the grid starting Friday morning around 9 until about noon on Saturday while I'm moving and having internet access set up at the house. I can still get email (info@mattnicolosi.com) on my iPhone or you can call 214-621-4264 if you need to reach me. See you on the other side.

It's a good thing I'm taking most of August off from photography anyway. Otherwise, I'd have a whole lotta rescheduling going on right now. My right shoulder (a.k.a. my "shooting" shoulder) started hurting a couple weeks ago after a flag football game. A little sore for a couple days, but no biggie. Then after throwing all game last week, the pain got a little more biggie. It got worse each day this week to the point where I was loadin' up on Ibuprofen multiple times a day (we're talkin' a steady snack of pills throughout the day), but it was helping less and less. Yesterday and today I couldn't raise my arm above elbow height. One word. Pain. Ful. As a grown man, I'm not afraid to admit I nearly shed a tear on a couple occasions when I inadvertently moved the wrong way. I finally sucked it up and listened to Kylie and made a doctor's appointment today since the I'm-a-man-and-I'm-stubborn-and-I-don't-need-no-stinkin'-doctor-'cause-this-thing-will-get-better-on-its-own approach that I was employing clearly wasn't working. DIagnosis? Calcific Tendinits. If you're medical terminology deciphering skills are as rusty [read: non-existent] as mine, that means calcium has built up in the rotator cuff tendon where it attaches bone causing inflammation in the tendon. Further layman's description = oouuuucccchhhhh.

The silver lining here is that no surgery is likely req'd. I was a bit nervous about that since it kept getting worse by the day and all I could think about was that recovery time would trounce all over upcoming photography sessions starting in September. The extra polished silver lining? I was partially right in my this-thing-will-get-better-on-its-own diagnosis. Turns out no one's really sure what causes this to occur, but in most cases it eventually works itself out and the body dissolves the calcium in a matter of weeks or a month or two and replaces is with healthy tendon tissue. In rare cases, arthroscopic surgery is required to seal the recovery deal, but that's typically unlikely. (Hmm... since I started that last sentence with "In rare cases..." the "but that's typically unlikely" seems a bit redundant an unnecessary, doesn't it?). Generally doctors just try to make the pain more manageable until God's design kicks in and the body heals itself. So, I got a big ol' shot of Cortizone in the shoulder today. The physician's assistant spewed some more medical jargon at me that - when I asked her to give it to me in English - she basically said it's not uncommon for some people to have a temporary adverse reaction to the shot where the pain actually increases for a day or two before it gets a lot better.

Maybe I'm a bit naive and looking for more of a medical miracle here when i heard the word Cortizone, but I was expecting to be able to pick up my 5lb camera & lens a couple hours later (hey, that kinda healing happened in Varsity Blues, why not me?), but so far not so much. The doc also said to lay low on the shoulder use for a while. Umm, I'm moving into the new house this weekend. Oops.

August is probably the slowest time of the year for me because I usually take most of the month off from photography while everything is boiling outside in Texas and then pick it up again in September. I generally take this time and do a little business house-cleaning and plan what I want to do for the upcoming fall/holiday/spring seasons, and I was looking through images from the past when I ran across this beauty and couldn't help smiling.

This is a group of girls who are friends of mine that have established a girls night crew and fondly refer to themselves as "The Queen B's" where once a month they go out as a group and do something fun together. Each month, 2 different people are responsible for planning that month's night out, and they've done some pretty unique and ridiculously fun things. Generally this is a no-men-allowed gig, but one night a while back they rented out a studio in downtown Dallas and asked if I would come down and photograph each one of them "B'ing" themselves and then do a couple group shots. Each girl's assignment was to think of a single word that describes who they are or something about them and then dress accordingly. Pretty cool, eh? Make's me wanna start a guy's group to do something out of the ordinary once a month, but - being men - I'm not convinced any of us our organized or motivated enough to coordinate such a thing. Or, more likely, we'd run out of ideas after the first month and sit around having the following conversation: "Whadda you wanna do?" "I dunno, whadda you wanna do?" "I don't care, whatever everyone else wants to do." "We're just hanging out here again watching a game again, aren't we?" "Probably." "Works for me."

Day 3 with the house, and change is already underway. The priorities right now are 1) one of the spare bedrooms, 2) the photography gallery/client room, and 3) the dining room. The reasons are 1) that's where I'll be sleeping until Kylie moves in after the wedding in January, 2) this is where I'll meet with clients to talk about their session and/or show their session images, and 3) it looks like a court jester right now. I'll be moving in mid-August and likely won't have all 3 rooms finished by then, but I'm going to strategically pile furniture/stuff in other rooms until they're ready for their final destination. First up is the dining room. How did the dining room move up to the first slot? Good question... well, ya see it goes like this. We had a painter come out to do an estimate on several rooms, and before we knew it, he just took the liberty of seeing how easy the wall paper would come off in the dining room by tearing a sample piece smack dab in the middle of the wall. 'Thanks for the eye sore in the middle of the room' I remember thinkin' to myself. 'Ya couldn't have tested that, oh I dunno know, in an inconspicuous corner or somethin'?' Here's a quick refresher of what the dining room looked like when we first saw the house. Lovely, I know.

Here's what it looks like know after Kylie and I spent most of the afternoon de-wallpapering it. Above the chair rail was a breeze. I thought we were the best de-wallpaperers ever. Below the chair rail? Not so much. What a beat-down.

And here's a down and dirty quick Photoshop job showing one of the ideas we're thinking about for the final facelift. Imagine a cool rug, a dark wood table and chairs, and some artwork on the walls. Oh, yeah, and that chandelier's days are numbered, too.

We're still working on the shade of blue and whether we're doing same color gloss stripes or not and whether we're going to add in some chocolate brown somewhere, but you get the idea. Fortunately there's no wall paper in the spare bedroom we're getting ready to start. Unfortunately, there's lots of it in the photography gallery room, and none of it is coming off very easy. Good times.