Monday!

Today has been a bad day. In fact, bad seems like an understatement considering the way that I am feeling right now.

It started off around 2am when I woke up in the middle of the storm that was raging through Grahamstown feeling like I had been stabbed in the stomach. I couldn't figure out what the pain was, and it refused to go away. I tossed and turned for hours waiting for the pain to subside and hoping that it wasn't appendicitis! Eventually, Grant felt so bad for me that he offered me some of his pain killers, which I took gladly despite my aversion to taking pills (what with my terrible gag reflex and all) and a while later, the pain was gone and I managed to get to sleep.

A few hours later, I woke up to my alarm going off. It was time to get up and get ready for work. I took a look at my phone and noticed that I had received an email in the middle of the night. Curious as to what it was, I opened the mail, only to find a message from a "friend" that I cut all ties with last year. Over the last few months this "friend" has liked posts that I wrote on mutual friends' walls on Facebook, as well as liking my photography page, has somehow managed to get my number and message me on my birthday as well as missed call me at 2am randomly and now has sent me an email. I am starting to get incredibly freaked out, and with few hours of sleep, this was the last thing that I wanted. I didn't know how to respond or if I even should, since what I really wanted to say was "Bugger off you creepy stalker", but in a nice way. I decided to leave that alone for the moment and just deal with the rest of the day of half-awakeness as it came.

I arrived at work and settled in answering emails, dealing with clients and all of their issues and trying to ignore my own. It was going pretty well until halfway through the morning when I got a call from Paul Mills. You see, I am doing my first wedding shoot on Friday, and after visiting the wedding venue this weekend, I was feeling very nervous. I had already known that I was going to need to borrow a wide angle lens, a wedding photography necessity. But what I hadn't realised is that I would also need to borrow and off-camera flash. I am not used to flash photography and it is not something that I enjoy doing. I find that, particularly with an on-camera flash, everything becomes far too harsh. But unfortunately the wedding venue does not have too much lighting, and a flash is definitely going to be needed. And so, I dropped Paul a message asking if I could borrow a lens and an off-camera flash. Paul has been my saviour so often, and was my last hope for this request. And he got back to me this morning telling me that he couldn't spare them, as he has a shoot on Saturday morning. I held back the tears as long as I could while I got through the phone call, but when it ended, I was a wreck. What was I thinking taking on a wedding when I don't have the gear for it, nevermind the experience!

I crumbled around 1pm, becoming a shaking wreck of a person as Grant drove me from photography store to photography store trying to find somewhere I could rent a lens and a flash to no avail. The woman at Fujifilm was lovely, trying her best to find someone who might be able to help me out, but Kodak was absolutely useless and I wonder how they've stayed in business as long as they have when they don't offer the services or the customer care that other Kodak's around the country do and that even Fujifilm in Grahamstown does.

Anyway, not all is lost. I have found a flash to borrow, and I have decided that not having a wide angle will not be the disaster that I have imagined. I also have a visit from Ashlea to look forward to this evening, so my day has been picking up slightly, but I still have the weight of the wedding on my shoulders and a stomach and headache that refuse to end. Here's hoping that tomorrow will be better!!