The other day at Metro Cafe - a bunch of serious, intellectual, studies

Now that I am riding my bike to Metro Cafe most days, it is hard for me to shoot "Through the Metro Window" studies because I am mostly inside. Still, I can shoot studies of various inside kinds. Studies are, by definition, intellectual works of art and some might think it would be easier to shoot intellectual works of art from the outside and that is true, but when one is shooting intellectual works, "easy" does not factor into it.

One must really work the brain, and it is hard and challenging. Still, I am up to the task. So, I now present you with a bunch of serious, intellectual studies that I shot the other day after pedaling my bike to Metro Cafe:

Serious Intellectual Study from Inside Metro Cafe, #222: Study of the young writer, Shoshana, Branson and Diane, #4: The place was hopping.

Serious Intellectual Study from Inside Metro Cafe, #422: Study of the young writer, Shoshana, #670: Carmen puts earrings to her ears. Branson strikes a serious, intellectual pose. 

Serious Intellectual Study from Inside Metro Cafe, #622: Jeweler Leah, of Leah's Designs, who brought her work to Metro Cafe to put on display and sell. She did pretty good, Leah said.

Serious Intellectual Study from Inside Metro Cafe, #822: As Carmen struggles to get all the ladies present to pose with Leah for a group picture, Nola gets distracted.

Serious Intellectual Study from Inside Metro Cafe, #1022: Just before we were ready to shoot, Carmen had to put a scarf on the Young Writer, Shoshana, Study #12.

Serious Intellectual Study from Inside Metro Cafe, #1222: After a great struggle that lasted 2.46 hours, the serious, intellectual photographer succeeds at getting all the participants, including the three on the TV, to pose seriously and smartly for the study.

Serious Intellectual Study from Inside Metro Cafe, #1422: Branson and his dad, Scot, who had just returned from the Arctic Slope.

Serious Intellectual Study from Inside Metro Cafe, #1622: Branson poses with his red-headed friend known to the world as "Cash"... as in, "Hello, my name is Johnny Cash." I am told that this Cash has been a big fan of that Cash since he first became conscious of such things. Cash's grandma was one of Carmen's wedding attendants.

Serious Intellectual Study from Inside Metro Cafe, #1822: Through Nola's lens - Branson and the red-headed boy.

Serious Intellectual Study from Inside Metro Cafe, #2022: Through Nola's lens: Branson.

Serious Intellectual Study from Inside Metro Cafe, #2208: Cash.

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Metro Cafe - six studies from breakfast: the barista, the banker, the young entrepreneur, entrepreneur's mother, the church and the mountain + Carmen, of course

Caleb had just returned from his night shift at Wal-Mart and had already turned the TV on when I got up. I thought about cooking oatmeal, but the only way I can truly enjoy breakfast at home is if it is very quiet in the house and I can sit on the couch near the backdoor window and glance out at the woods every now and then as I eat.

This does not happen very often, because Margie and Caleb are morning TV watchers and one or the other of them usually beats me to the living room and even when I am first, the TV often comes on before I have taken more than a bite or two.

That's one reason that I really like to breakfast at Family Restaurant - there is no TV there. There are people walking in and out, fragments of conversations drift through the air along with the clinking of silverware against ceramic and  sound of waitresses laughing even when the jokes are not funny.

Then, of course, the Family breakfast is just plain good.

As Margie has been in town all week to care for Jobe, I had so far eaten breakfast thrice at Family and once at home - yesterday. Yesterday, I simply had to eat oatmeal. My body demanded it.

Today, I decided to have the simple Metro Cafe breakfast - a sandwich with ham and egg, a bagel with strawberry cream cheese and, of course, the best coffee in Wasilla.

Through the course of my breakfast, I shot six studies. The one above is the very last of the six studies that I shot, but, as it is a study of beauty, so obviously backed by intelligence, and everybody loves to look at beauty, it is the study that I will begin with. Hence:

From Inside the Metro Cafe, Study #72,629: Nicole, the morning barista, whom I never see during my regular afternoon coffee stops.

From Inside the Metro Cafe, Study #6.2: Nicole and the banker. Yes, I am told, the man at the window works as a banker, for Wells Fargo.

From Inside the Metro Cafe, Study #4698: Mitchell Slater, the young entrepreneur.

Mitchell, who will soon turn 18 and will also graduate from Home School, has already begun his own advertising business, which he calls Alaska's Affordable Advertising.

Some time back, he discovered Metro Cafe, fell in love with the place, the coffee and Carmen (as does just about everyone who discovers Metro and then gives the out-of-the-way-place a chance) and so decided that he would her promote it. Now he is helping Carmen put together a coupon promotion.

I will save the details for him to advertise in his promotion.

From Inside the Metro Cafe, Study # 10: Carmen discusses coupons with Mitchell, the Young Entrepreneur, as his mother, Nancy, and Nicole, the barista, observe.

From Inside the Metro Cafe, Study #9, #9, #9, #9,#9, #9, #9, #9,#9...: mother Linda admires her son, Mitchell, the young entrepeneur as Carmen smiles at him and Nicole, the barista, studies a draft menu made out of the goodness of his heart by Jim, the man owned by the dogs who showed up at the drive through window in yesterday's post.

From the parking lot of the Metro Cafe, study number 96: A car and two churches, one made by the hands of man, the other by the hand of God.

Still pending - the Metro study series that I shot as seen through Nola's new camera. Although the series is now history, I will still run it, because it is a fun series - and it is history and history should be told.

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The week so far in catch up: girl sled boats in meltwater; school bus adventures; Oscar's bike ride; Jobe is ill; Studies of dogs eating biscuits

Thanks to my three part series covering Jobe's first steps stepping out party Sunday evening, I have neglected to post anything about the week since as it has unfolded so far. Truth is, while it has been a week of furious and relentless activity inside my head and flowing through my fingers into the keyboard and then my computer, visually it has not been a week that has given me many images to post.

I have basically spent it right here, at my computer, day and night, typing and mousing, picking cats up off my keyboard and putting them on the floor only to have to them ump right back up so we can do it all over again.

Still, I have a few images to post. I will start with today, a day that has begun very lazily for me for the simple fact that this morning at 3:00 AM I finally finished up the task that I had hoped to complete by last Saturday night, but which proved much more time-consuming than I had reckoned.

As all my tasks seem to do.

I then went to bed exhausted, yet wired up and so lay awake for about two hours, after which I slept sporadically and then got up about 9:00 AM, determined to take this day off and relax.

I found that it was snowing, and the wind was blowing.

Pretty normal for this time of year.

It is also not unusual this time of year to have the image of spring appear before you, to have people say, "this is really it, this is spring," even though everybody knows that this a very foolish thing to say because, even though for Alaska our climate is fairly temperate here, spring still means something different in Wasilla than it does in most of the more populated world.

So late Monday afternoon, when I pedaled my bike back home from Metro Cafe and saw this girl, using ski poles to propel herself through a huge puddle of melt water, it certainly looked like winter had given up altogether.

Yesterday afternoon, I pedaled by there again. The puddle had refrozen. The yard behind was again blanketed in snow. I thought about taking a picture to prove it, but I did not want to stop and so I just pedaled on.

When Margie stays in town to babysit, I tend to eat breakfast at Mat-Su Valley Family Restaurant. So that is what I did Tuesday morning. As I drove home, I saw these students, waiting for their school bus.

A bit further down the road, I witnessed what might have been their bus, turning onto Church Road. It was a damned exciting sight to see.

Then up ahead on Church, I saw another bus, stopped, stopping the pickup behind it, stopping me, so that these three students could board and head for class.

And in the afternoon, post-Metrol Cafe, I came upon this four-wheeler.

Wasilla forever teems with exciting activities.

In the evening, I went to Anchorage to pick Margie up and bring her home, but first I stopped at the Anchorage Museum of History and Art to take in an ASMP slide show titled Nomadic Photographer presented by Oscar Avellanda.

Oscar's roots are in Columbia, so in January of 2010, he got on his bike and with his sister and a friend pedaled his bike from Anchorage to Whittier. There, they boarded the ferry and traveled to Bellingham, Washington and then he and his sister continued on and pedaled all the way down through the West Coast, through Mexico, El Salvadore and into Columbia.

As you would expect, he took pictures all along the way, although not nearly as many as he had anticipated, as the work of pedaling a bike often took precedence over photography. The picture that stands out strongest in my mind is a black and white of his little tiny bike parked near the oceanside in southern Mexico, with a gigantic cruise ship looming large above it in the background.

This what the online ASMP announcement had to say about Oscar:

"Along the way, Oscar was attacked by a dog, underwent treatment for rabies, became engaged, discovered his roots, and redefined his conceptions of material necessities. Mr. Avellaneda’s artistic photographic images and stories have redefined his role as a photographer while challenging the social norms of his industry."

It is a much more complex story than that, of course, but I think for now, I will that suffice. In time, I suspect, Oscar will produce something that tells the story in depth.

I then went over to Jake and Lavina's to pick Margie up, but Jobe had taken a turn for the worse. He had vomited. He was running a fever. Margie decided to stay, probably until Sunday, when Jacob, Lavina and family depart for a workshop in New Mexico and then a vacation in Arizona. She will help them out until they go.

Yesterday, for my one break in a very long day, I again pedaled my bike to Metro Cafe at coffee time. There, I shot this series of three Metro studies:

Through the Metro Window from inside, Study #410: Carmen offers a dog biscuit to Loki. Loki sniffs the biscuit, but does not take it.

Through the Metro Window from inside, Study #63: Jim, the dog's pet human, takes the biscuit. Loki then takes the biscuit from his pet.

Through the Metro Window from inside, Study #7,895: Jim takes a second biscuit from Carmen and the dog, Coda, takes it from Jim.

And so goes the world.

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Cat on screen, cat on desk - big day for blog leaves me discouraged but not defeated; four studies of the tiny hockey player

In terms of numbers of visitors, yesterday was a pretty good day for this blog - and that kind of discouraged me a bit - it kind of made me feel like this whole blogging effort touches on futility. I must assure you that this is in no way a signal that I am going to retreat or quit blogging. No - I aim to go bull-headedly forward just as I have been. But still, yesterday was a mighty discouraging day for me as a blogger.

Saturdays tend to be my lowest visitor days of the week. Typically, on Saturdays, my readership drops off by more than 30 percent. But yesterday, Saturday, my readership soared to about three times the weekday average - somewhere between four and five times the usual Saturday average.

How could this be discouraging?

It happened because of one thing - these three words in my headline: "Sarah Palin's buick."

Actually, the word, "buick" was but a small part of it. It could have read, "Sarah Palin's dog... Sarah Palin's frog... Sarah Palin's duck... Sarah Palin's mop... Sarah Palin's oatmeal... ... etc. etc." The result would have been the same.

Oh well. Life is what it is, I am what I am, and will continue on as I have been until I find the time and means to do as I want and then I will all but ignore Sarah Palin, except as a teaser now and then to see if her name will still draw hordes of extra readers into my blog.

One good thing about this life is cats. Yesterday, I entered my office to find that my slideshow screen saver had been activated. Melanie's Diamond was on the screen and Pistol-Yero sat by the keyboard. When he visits, Kalib loves to watch all these grand cats scroll across my screen when I step away from my computer.

Also, please note the little contraptions sitting on my desk to the left. What you see is docks and harddrives. I can move harddrives in and out of those docks at will. I have more harddrives in the computer, and more harddrives stuck in old-fashioned enclosures lying here and there.

The three you see here are eacg two terabyte harddrives. There are several more 2 TB's sitting in a drawer beneath my computer.

A while back, I had an extremely bad hard drive nightmare and one of my good-hearted readers suggested that I pick up one of those little plastic-encased harddrives that can hold a terabyte and thus solve my information management problem.

I got a good chuckle out of that one - although I definitely appreciated the thought and concern.

I have a number of those little plastic hard drives. They are what I take into the field.

I shoot a lot, you see, and I shoot high resolution files RAW. I don't throw any images away, not even the blurry ones. It would take too much time. Plus, I have discovered that I can pick up a take a year or 20 after I first shot it and find that some of the images that I rejected are actually better than the ones I used.

I go through harddrive space like you would not believe. Tomorrow, I plan to buy two more two terabyte harddrives, but I really need to buy four or five more, if I could only afford to.

Yesterday, when I pulled into the Metro Cafe drive-through, it was Branson, the tiny hockey player, who came to greet me. He wanted to pose for a study. So here it is:

Study of the tiny hockey player, #242: Branson wears his Metro baseball cap as the young writer, Shoshana, prepares coffee in the background.

Then Branson decided that he wanted to do a study without his cap, so he took it off. His mom hurried right over to touch up his hair for the picture. So here it is:

Study of the tiny hockey player, #237: Carmen makes Brandon's hair look nice.

Study of the tiny hockey player, #239: Carmen admires the hair of her tiny hockey player.

Study of the tiny hockey player, #241: His hair looking good, Branson poses for Study #1.

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Branson, Metro Cafe's 38 pound hockey player, knows how to score and celebrate; cat and baby at the door

Not long before I headed off on one of my Arctic Slope trips last fall, I promised Carmen that I would take some pictures of Branson, her five-year old son, doing some hockey stuff. Well, you know what happens to time. His regular season ended and now he is attending a hocky camp at the Mernard Sports Center.

He had sessions schedule for Saturday and Sunday afternoons and then one more on Wednesday. I was pretty sure I would not be able to make the Sunday session, couldn't say about Wednesday and so I decided that I had better go Saturday. I arrived with a little more than one-half hour of the session left.

Here he is: Branson, the 38-pound, five-year old, hockey player.

Branson was, in fact, the smallest person on the ice. And he was competing against some older and bigger boys - six and seven year olds who have been playing for years.

But you can see - Branson was skating hard.

Branson and competitor go after puck.

Who will get it?

They are fighting hard, now.

Now they are in front of the goal, Branson on offense, his competitor on defense determined to stop him.

Branson belts the puck past the defender.

The defender knocks Branson to the ice, but it doesn't matter: the puck he slammed is shooting right between the feet of the goalie and into the net.

Branson skates away from his successful goal shot in celebration.

Pretty soon, he does it again... and then again after that. 

He raises his puck in victory, but now he is also searching the bleachers for a familiar face. Could it be Mom? Is she there? Will he find her? Did she notice?

She is there and he does find her and she did notice.

After the scrimmage ends an adult skates by. "Congratulations on your goal," he tells Branson.

Branson, the hockey player.

Branson with his friends, Colin and Caroline. They do not play hockey. They play soccer ("football" to all my relatives and friends in India and the rest of the world).

Carmen is pretty proud. 

After I returned home, I came here into my office and went to work. I had not been working long before I heard a knock on the door.

Puzzled, I got up and opened it. Who do you think I saw standing on the other side?

It was Jim, my good black cat. "C'mon on in, Jim!" I invited. He entered and soon walked across my keyboard as I was typing.

Then I heard another knock. Again I got up and opened the door.

This time it was Jobe, who had just driven his mother and older brother out from Anchorage.

Jobe came in. Jim decided it was time to leave, jumped off my keyboard and walked to the door.

And this from India:

Feral street dog at Ooty tea farm.

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