Scary Jim

It was Halloween. Jim scared the hell out of everybody.

All creeped out on Halloween

Mark, the four year-old son of Woodrow Oyagak and Sherlene Kagak, gets a little creeped out by a Halloween spider in Atqasuk. I took the picture October 12, as village recreation coordinator Arthur Bordeaux was just beginning to prepare a haunted house for this holiday.

I wanted to include a picture in Uiñiq and so I narrowed it down to two and chose the other. I didn't want this one to go to waste, so here it is.

Boo!

July 4, part 4: iPhoning it at the cookout

My hiking shoes are pretty good, but they seemed to have gotten a little bigger than the last time I wore them and my feet slipped around inside quite a bit. This had been particularly bad coming down and so my feet were sore when we got to Lavina and Jacob's.

I took off my boots and went inside. Next time, I will try to wear two pair of socks with them, the inside one being thin, flexible, skin-tight and a moisture wicker. Then I think my feet might not get so sore. I felt as though I never wanted to put those shoes on again.

There was no one in Jake and Lavina's house when Melanie and I unlocked the door and stepped inside. So we went to the back deck and this what we saw before us.

The battery in my camera had completely died, by the way, and so had my iPhone. I did not have my iPad with me, so I had to borrow Margie's iPhone to take these pictures.

Good thing, because her iPhone is still pretty new and the lens is not nearly so smudged up as mine.

"No, Daddy! No Daddy! My turn, Daddy!" Kalib screamed as he ran to use grandpa as a shield. 

Jobe got into the pool. It had been a warm day.

Now it was turning cool. Jobe's mother called him inside so she could dry him off and put dry clothes on him. Or maybe gramma did that. I'm not sure.

There's my bare feet amidst his tiny footprints.

Lavina, barbecuing.

Jobe, eating his barbecued corn. We all ate and it was all scrumptious - as is all food that Jacob and Lavina prepare.

Lisa and Bryce came, too. Lisa had wanted to go on the hike, but wound up babysitting some dogs for ten days - including the entire weekend of the Fourth - and so had to miss it.

And that's it, folks. I've been dabbling at this blog on and off all day long. I just want to get on my bike and not write another word or place another picture.

If you go to the slideshow view and just see little squares with the words, "Thumbnail Processing" inside, go ahead and click through anyway. The slideshow images will still show. Squarespace is forever misfiring and malfunctioning, causing me headaches and wasting my time in 1000 different ways and this is how it is doing it tonight.

I have been working this in both Safari and Firefox to try and get this solved, but it just won't solve. Although, in time, it probably will. Maybe by tomorrow. So, if you go to the slideshow and see genuine thumbnails with images, just ignore this rant. 

Squarespace does that to me. It is the most exasperating program I have ever used.

Anyway, I have now displayed my Fourth of July, in four parts.

View images as slides

I seek a July 4 photo of American freedom for a civilian-mass audience* of Greece: Part 2 of 4: The Wasilla parade

Note: Sometimes strange and unintended things happen when publishing online. I posted this about three hours ago and from my data I know it had some visits. Then, without me ever unposting it, it came unposted. So now I repost it. (5:17 PM, July 5, 2011)

As it happened, I think I took my favorite parade picture after the parade - when I was in Melanie's and she was driving us toward the Chugach, where we would take a hike up the Twin Peak's Trail. As we passed through the main part of Wasilla, these kids came rolling by, going in the opposite direction.

I had not seen them in the parade, as we left early. I needed to meet Melanie and one poor grandmother was exhausted from trying to keep two rambunctious little boys safe and secure while her husband chased marchers and floats around.

Although you see only one picture here, this is a 23 picture post. It's just that I do not have time to include the other 22 here, especially considering that I still have two Fourth of July posts to go.

So, to see the other 22, you must go to the slide show. There you will find many flags, a couple of cute kids and dogs, soldiers decked out in combat gear, boy scouts, various politicians in search of votes, pretty girls dancing and cartwheeling in the street, people on motorcycles and horse, children waving at a hearse and things of that nature.

Among the politicians will be one dressed in red, one hand held up in waving gesture, a Vietnam veteran hat on his head. This is Verne Rupright, Wasilla's current mayor now campaigning for reelection. I post neither for or against him, but as a couple of his political competitors are identified by signs carried in their parade entourages, I figured it only fair to point out that this is the man they seek to beat.

*My friend, a civilian-mass audience has let me know via a comment that he does not want me to find a photo just for him, but to just go about things as normal, giving him no special consideration and he will keep coming back.

One must respect such a request, yet I cannot change the fact that as I shot yesterday's take, I kept wondering when a particular photo might appear. It did appear and when I get to it, I will let you know but I will not say it is just for Civi, but rather is for everybody and I just happened to be thinking of a civilian-mass audience when I shot it.

I did not take that shot at the parade, although I did take a number of decent Wasilla Fourth of July photos.

23 image slide show of Wasilla's July 4 parade

Happy Father's Day, Son!

Lavina had a health fair to do in conjunction with the Chickaloon and Knik tribes at the Palmer fairgrounds, so Margie and I went and picked her up when it was all done, about 4:00 PM. Jacob and the boys came out about two hours later. The boys were asleep when he arrived and so we left them that way.

We took turns peeking into the car to see when they might wake.

Jobe woke first. He reached for me, right away.

In the past on this day, I have paid tributes to the fathers from whence we come. Today, I pay tribute to the fathers who descend from us and since one of those is my oldest son, I focus that tribute on him.

Here he is, yesterday evening, tossing my middle grandchild Jobe into the air.

Now he shows him the first frog of the season. It used to be that our yard teemed with frogs - one could hardly walk without stepping on one.

Now a frog sighting is an occasion to take note of.

Jobe does take note. 

As for the oldest grandson Kalib, he still sleeps in the car.

In time, Kalib wakes up and comes back, too. The frog is still hanging out nearby, so Jacob shows it to Kalib. He invites Kalib to touch it, but Kalib is wary.

To demonstrate that this frog poses no harm, Jacob gives it a kiss. 

A bit later, Jimmy begins to wander too far away for my comfort, but I am entertaining Jobe and Jobe does not want me to leave, so Jacob goes and hauls him back.

Well, I took a lot of pictures last night and my computer is acting up big time - it is headed to the repair shop tomorrow or Tuesday and if I could afford to I would just replace it because I am spending maybe 30-40 percent of the time that I work with it - and sometimes, all of the time for an hour or two straight - watching the spinning color wheel go round and round and suffering mulitiple freezeups and forced shutdowns, so it is just too exasperating to try to look at the photos I took.

It was possible to navigate my way through the spinning color wheel and crashes to the toss and frog shots, because they were clear in my memory and I knew just where to find them, and the two shots that wrap up this series were at the end of yesterday's take, but it is too much of pain to search through the others.

This one, however, just popped up on my screen as I was swearing and cursing at my computer and it was so damn cute I just grabbed it.

There are some serious people within the photographic community who dismiss cute photos as irrelevant and facile, but, damnit, cute is part of life, too.

Please take note: I am a very serious photographer and this is a very serious photograph of real and true life.

More serious stuff - my son, the dad, with his entire family, his wife and three children. Jobe is taking an ever greater interest in spatulas.

Wait a minute, the astute reader protests... your son Jacob has only two children, Kalib and Jobe... why do you say, "three?"

Remember when Jobe quit breast feeding and I noted that Jacob and Lavina had been using the breast feeding method of birth control and it would soon become apparent how well that worked out?

See that little bulge in the tummy, right behind Jobe?

That is how well that worked out.

Very well, indeed!

So here is my son, the dad, with his wife, his two children that the light now falls upon and the one that is scheduled to make a first appearance in the light of the delivery room in October.

Happy Father's Day, son!

I don't know how you ever got to be such a good dad. You didn't have the greatest example to follow and you were kind of wild there, for awhile. Yet, an excellent dad is what you have become. A little overindulgent at times, perhaps, but overindulgence is love, and infinitely superior to neglect. These kids of yours are pretty damn good kids and that didn't just happen.

I love them.

You make me proud.

And so does Lavina. Even though this is Father's Day, not Mother's Day, it has to be said.

Happy Father's Day!

To all you good dad's out there!

Young dads, old dads, dead dads like my good dad - all dads.

Happy Father's Day to you all!

View images as slides