It was a big day here today, but I do not have the time to edit the photos and do a report, so here is Charlie and Royce

Yes, Charlie and Melanie came out today - and they weren't the only ones. But, at the end of the day, even more left than arrived to begin with and now the population of this house is even smaller than it was this morning.

Unfortunately, I have something that I simply must get done before I do anything else, so this picture is all I can manage for this post.

Hopefully, I will find the time to put up a full report tomorrow.

I'm under a great deal of pressure right now, though, so I might not make it. And I am exhausted, too. I hate to make excuses, but it is just flat-out true.

I am EXHAUSTED!!!

Like a frog, who just swam across the Pacific Ocean.

But I will try to make that report tomorrow.

We will see if I succeed.

Poor Royce. He is growing so old, so fast! Charlie commented on how thin he is getting. He looks so ragged. And what a great cat he has been. I did not fully appreciate how great until I saw how lovingly and patiently he raised Kalib these past 19 months - even when Kalib got very rough, Royce was gentle and patient with him - always looking out for him.

I have never seen anything else like it. And now he is growing so old, so fast.

I'm back, exhausted, too tired to post

But, no later tomorrow night, I plan to begin posting furiously - both India and Wasilla. What a combo!

I get flipped off, wind up by the airplanes; get together with some of Alaska's best photographers

The driver of this car flipped me off; he had red hair, he was rude, and he did not know the rules and courtesies of the road. For just a little bit, my heart was filled with a stupid desire to run him off the road and knock some sense into him, bump him around a bit with my titanium prothesis.

After he let his bird loose, I wound up behind him at a stoplight, in the lane just to left of him, behind the vehicle that was momentarily stopped alongside him. I studied the scene and plotted how, when the light turned green, I could cut into his lane, zip around the vehicle that now blocked me from him, pull up alongside him and then force him over to the side of the road and give him a dose of sense; teach him some rules of the road and give him some instruction in common courtesy.

Then some sense came into me. I decided to take a picture instead. When the light turned green, he gunned it and I snapped the shutter. The vehicle that had separated me from him then started rolling again and I did too. I could have gone straight down Ingra, and continued the confrontation, but I turned left, onto Northern Lights Boulevard.

He probably thought me a coward, imagined that he had scared me off, but a flipped bird isn't worth someone getting killed over, and you never know when it will come to that.

It has happened many times around here.

This great drama took place in Anchorage, where I wound up wasting over three hours. It was all my fault. I needed to deliver some photo files to a client and I had misunderstood and thought that anytime today would be fine, but she had a morning deadline and I missed it. She then called the place in New York where she was going to send the pictures and told them my images would be late, so I burned a disk and skeedadled on into Anchorage, where I planned to attend a workshop that started at 5:30 PM.

So I dropped the pictures off a bit after 2:00 PM and then I had nothing productive to do. I bought a burrito at Taco Bell, then drove slowly around, listening to various programs on NPR, including Fresh Air with Terri Gross and All Things Considered.

Somehow, when I just drive idly and aimlessly about Anchorage, I always wind up at Lake Hood, where the airplanes are. Always. I don't set Lake Hood as a destination. I just drive and soon I am there.

So here I am, on the bank of Lake Hood, watching a plane taxi for takeoff.

Damnit. When will I get an airplane again? This blog can never fully be what I want it to be until I get another airplane. Probably right now, I could not even pass the medical, given the events of the past year and my still incomplete recovery. Still, I must get another airplane and I must finish healing; I must get my medical renewed, so that the skies over Alaska can once again be mine again; so that Alaska can be mine, as it was before.

This is Kevin Ames, the expert conducting the workshop that lasts through tomorrow. You can learn about Kevin and his expertise here. For blog purposes, I think enough to say that he knows much about aspects of digital photography and software that I do know a fair amount about, but need to learn a lot more. So here I am, at the workshop.

In the course of his lesson, he showed us a few of his images. Many were of exquisitely beautifully women wearing very little but tastefully posed.

I have never taken photographs like that.

How come?

The workshop is being sponsored by the local chapter of the American Society of Media Photographers. Long ago, I was not a member and then I joined, but I let it lapse. Finally, after more than a decade of being out there there pretty much all by myself, I joined again, at the end of 2008.

It is not that I have had any intent to do so, but my interaction with Alaska's photographic community has been limited. I am sure this has hurt me, because you always learn when you get together with people of like interest. Everbody that you see in this picture knows things about photography and this profession that I don't. I would be much better off if I did. So would Margie.

Some of Alaska's best photographers are right here, in this image. I won't name any of them, because there are some in the group whose names I do not know.

They are all my peers and it is time that I get to know them better, time for me to learn from them and to give something back, instead of just being the loner all the time.

I can be still be a loner most of the time, but not all the time.

The final Inaugural post is done, but I am not happy with it

So I will sleep on it and post it tomorrow.

In the meantime, here is a picture that I took today, right here, back home in Wasilla, Alaska:

Please click on it.