About

About Pickles & Unicorns!

Enter blog writing.

Why not take the polar opposite extreme, right? I have to follow all the rules and then some when I write for work, so in the bloggersphere, I choose to break all the rules and then throw a middle finger at them just to be crystal clear.

Hey Word, read between the lines, bro!

It turns out, this writing style works and people actually read what I write and that’s so awesome and humbling to me that I’m feeling a little frog in my throat and some tears building up in my eyeballs as I write this.

This blog wouldn’t be worth shit if no one read it. And that’s invaluable beyond words.

And I owe its loving creation to my dear friend Carol, who is sadly no longer with us. I remember sitting at her kitchen table while she told me she wished she could write a food blog (guys, she totally could’ve). And she stopped dead in her tracks, looked me in the eye and said, “YOU SHOULD START WRITING A BLOG!”

I argued with her, but Carol had this beautiful way of convincing people to be fearless.

And great. Now those damn tears are back.

Carol coined the term “scream laughing,” which she used to describe a blog I wrote about waiting in line at the DMV and it appears in my writing from time to time.

God, I miss that lady.

At first my blog was about being married…which was cool until I wasn’t married anymore. So then I rebranded it “Pickles & Unicorns!” because divorce really brought out my weird side and that’s about as random as I could get. “Pickles” because it’s a funny word and “Unicorns” because of the majestic creature.

Duh.

And the rest is history…I think? Sorry. Cheesy.

Anyway, that’s the writing part… …but wait, there’s more!

About Pickle Pants Photography!

Thanks to COVID, I decided to actually learn how to use the Canon EOS camera that sat collecting dust for several years.

Learning to be a photographer-type has been a big deal because I don’t like to be seen doing things that make me vulnerable.

Walking around downtown Salida with a camera in my hand feels pretty fucking vulnerable for some reason. When I write, no one sees it and I can pick my nose and talk to myself and look around the room as I try to think of the right words. But walking around taking pictures is definitely a much more public way to create art.

What if someone who knows what they’re doing with a camera sees me making mistakes? What if people are judging me?

Seriously ridiculous stuff to be worried about, right?

The next very important of this puzzle piece is my mom.

So I overcame that dumb trauma and now I suffer from almost no anxiety about walking around taking pictures in view of other people.

So huge shout-out to my mom for being my inspiration and also an irreplaceable mentor through this process, which is ongoing whenever I go places with cool shit to photograph. She is my mom, so obviously my work makes her proud, but she really knows what she’s doing, so her suggestions are always excellent and helpful and necessary. Because of her, I’ve learned tons about content, framing, cropping, and editing. I even figured out how to use Adobe Lightroom because she told me to. And of course, she was damn right about how helpful it is in making my dumb mistakes look a lot less dumb.

I didn’t really know what I wanted to do with my photography stuff…I’m not really expecting to make any money with it, but I thought it should be shared. Here’s my favorite picture so far (and yes, momma helped A BUNCH with this one).

So as a nod to my dear friend Scott, who named me “Pickle Pants” because of a blog I wrote a few years ago, I decided to dive into photography face-first and name it Pickle Pants Photography.