Regular Life

He set his tiny feet on the first rock and wobbled against the water rushing over his knees. I stepped onto the downstream side of the same rock and braced against the cold and the current. Standing firm but paralyzed, he turned his head and looked up at me, but his words weren’t needed.

After our first day at Dinosaur Valley State Park, when I could no longer resist my somnolence in the face of the awful Battlefield Earth, I lifted the sleeping boy from next to his mother and tucked him into the pallet we had made on the floor, then climbed into the hotel bed.

Despite the time change overnight, Benjamin woke me in his usual 6-7 a.m. range asking, “Daddy, will you play with me?”

I got dressed and took him downstairs to scope out the coffee situation. The breakfast buffet, a $10.95 “convenience” easily skipped, did not distract me from the free coffee (despite its inferiority to the fresh-ground I brew at home).

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Opportunity. She knocks, yet too many don’t bother looking through the peephole, and spontaneity isn’t even given a chance.

And to think, they could have walked in the footsteps of dinosaurs.

At 8:30 on Saturday morning, Benjamin and I had spent about an hour and a half building with Wedgits, eating breakfast, and just hanging out.

“Would you like to go hike a trail?” I said. It began innocently enough.

“Yes.”

“Please go tell your mommy it’s 8:30.”

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(Click to enlarge)

I ran and grabbed my camera and took a few shots through the boy’s bedroom windows. My subject moved a few houses down the road. “Hey, Benjamin, I need to go outside for a better look. You want to come with me?”

“Yes.”

“You need to put on some shoes.”

“Well, I’ll just watch you from here in my room.”

I dashed outside, but before I got to the right house, I heard a familiar voice from behind me. “Daddy,” Benjamin whispered. I signaled for him to come along, but quietly.

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The photos I post on this site are un-cropped, unless otherwise noted. All three of the images today are versions of the same picture I shot through my son’s bedroom window.

I’m a firm believer in saving time by composing the shot on the front end rather than later, and the purist in me is a bit obsessive about it. My first 20 years of learning photography, the only cropping I got was whatever the lab needed to make it fit the print size proportions, and that got frustrating at times.

To get the full frame as I shot it, and to avoid unwelcome adjustments to light and color made during printing, I started shooting my “serious” stuff strictly with slide film. Gone were the days of the lab staff (or the printing machine) deciding what I intended when I tripped the shutter. This helped me learn.

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If I show you what’s in my couch, will you show me what’s in yours?

The contents of a couch can tell a lot about a home’s residents. The oldest piece in our living room, our couch has supported us through nine years in four houses. A black mesh covering its underside, however, has become detached along the front edge and hangs loose like the roof liner of an old car. As a result, various items work their way down through the spaces between the cushions or by bouncing up from the floor to rest in the concealed hammock.

Each time I reach under the couch to retrieve one of Benjamin’s toys, I wonder which lump inside that mesh finally will hatch and come out at night to eat us all.

The day after Christmas 2009, I decided to flip the couch and finally end the mystery.

Here’s what I found (photos and conclusion after the jump):

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I’ve always been fascinated by the art of making cotton candy. In fact, at a fair or carnival, or at a sporting event, I’ll stop to watch for at least a few moments as the vendors spin sugar into pure delight on a stick.

I imagine the size of the vats used in factories and my head spins right along with them.

Compared to most other fair fare, cotton candy is healthy. If my child asks for cotton candy, and it’s a good time for him to have a treat, I snatch some up rather than wait for him to ask for funnel cake. He already gets his one donut per week when we make our father-son trip to the local dough fryer.

(click pic to enlarge)

Technical:
Nikon D50
Nikon 200mm f/4 AI (1977-1981)
f/4
1/160 second
Manual Exposure

To see other Wordless Wednesday participants, please go here:
http://www.wordlesswednesday.com/

Considering yesterday’s gold medal hockey match featured the USA vs. Canada, I found this timely.

Until three weeks ago, I had never been to a hockey game. In fact, besides back in 1980 when the USA defeated the Soviets, I had never watched one at all.

Always anxious for an excuse to take pictures, I snatched up two free tickets to the Allen Americans, a fairly new Dallas Stars farm team. The wife quickly cleared a guys’ night out and I frantically dialed up a couple of local friends. One of them is an avid hockey fan and even has his own skates and stick. Both of them are fellow shutterbugs.

(click any pic to enlarge)

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Alone in my hotel room on a rainy Monday night, I set my Canon PowerShot to manual and snapped a few pictures of my view, which for some reason garbled the Bat Signal. The following Thursday my co-worker and I saw our flights canceled due to the huge snowstorm that dumped a foot of snow on parts of the Dallas metroplex.

Finished at the customer’s site, we hit the road at about 1:30 p.m. and arrived at Dallas Love Field at 6:30 (where my car was parked). Not bad, considering we drove the final 60 miles through a blizzard.

While on the road, I missed the fun back home, wherein my son and wife made snow angels, a snowman, and snow ice cream. Their creative juices flowed so easily, no doubt, because the outside temperatures hovered just above freezing all afternoon and evening. Shannon captured a few choice pics, but I’m saving them for later.

The snow came so hard and so fast, however, that it still piled up to nine inches in our yard. The thermometer dipped below freezing for just a couple of wee morning hours — just enough to cancel area schools and give me a work from home day.

My busy day kept me from frolicking in the snow with Benjamin, but neighbors invited him to play. The following sunny day we hit the 50-degree mark and all but the shadiest of spots said goodbye to the snow. I’m talking about literal shade, not some mysterious uncle’s favorite bar.

I learned on the Houston trip not to put off taking pictures of intriguing places. The result is the opening pic and the one that I snapped of the unconventional street signs found near the Galleria. Sorry, no NASA, no palm trees, no jazz bar featuring a huge blue saxophone with a Volkswagen Beetle as its bottom “u” bend.

I started blogging when my small family and I moved to a place a minimum 6-hour drive from where we had ever lived. Rather than sending long missives and online photo album links in e-mail, I could just publish the text and images (and more) out here.

It was the perfect outlet for a reporter/photographer who had left journalism but still had the bug.

I quickly ramped up to between three and five posts per week, often mining my past for a “Drama in Real Life” approach. When that wasn’t enough I created my own drama by making a music and voice-over video of cups that had spent an inordinate amount of time occupying a street drain. In addition I occasionally wrote serial fiction, publishing each chapter on my story blog as I wrote it, often falling asleep at the keyboard.

I was way too busy.

Unexpectedly, Regular Life became part of a multi-blog community where I got to know several people — some of whom I have met in person more than once, one of whom I barely missed in Boston. I even helped one guy move, and that’s serious.

Others have fallen by the wayside, and once they disappeared digitally they became unknown to me. In a few cases it was a bit like losing a friend but having no closure.

A few I maintain contact with via methods outside this space, including e-mail, phone, and, dare I admit, FaceBook. That last one, I suspect, is responsible for the veritable ghost towns that now inhabit so many personal blogs’ comment areas.

Apparently reading 15 words from dozens of people is better than reading 415 from a few.

I also have added several local friends to those already here when we moved. Nothing can substitute for breathing the same air in the same room.

On top of that, I am making an effort to turn my eyes away from the computer screen, which I already stare at all day in my job, and around which too many of my hobbies already revolve.

I say all this not as a farewell, but to let you know why I might not be out here as often as in the past. I hope most of you have my blog in your RSS Reader. For sporadic publications such as this, RSS is a much less frustrating way to stay current. You avoid checking the site and seeing the same old thing you saw two days ago.

Here’s to stops and starts!