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.

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I seek a July 4 photo of American freedom for a civilian mass audience of Greece: Part 1 of 4: Breakfast at Abby's

I had wanted us to be at Abby's Home Cooking right at 9:00, so that maybe we could be her very first customers. But, when you are a sleepy person on a Fouth of July morning and you and your wife have two little kids to get ready to take with you - well, it just takes longer to get ready than you think it will.

So it was closer to 10 when we pulled in.

As we got out of the car, Kalib suddenly said, "taste of home."

I don't know how he came up with such a thing, but he did.

On the third of July, my friend in Greece who I have met only in a burning place online made a comment wishing all his friends in the USA a happy Fourth. Civi is an amazing guy, full of goodwill to just about everybody, but life has been challenging for him in Greece lately - as it has for his entire nation.

So I told him that on this fourth of July, I would find a picture to take, just for him.

Maybe I would find it during breakfast at Abby's?

We had barely sat down when my nose caught an aroma wafting through the air... and it wasn't home cooking.

It was Jobe. Margie had changed his diaper just before we left the house, but he waited until we all sat at the table to drop the bomb... and it was a smeller!

That's not Pepsi Kalib is drinking for breakfast, by the way - it's apple juice.

We placed our orders - eggs, bacon and hashbrowns for me, biscuits and gravy for the Margie and scrambled eggs, apple juice and toast for the boys and then dashed back to the car and off to the house to pick up a diaper for Jobe.

For some reason, I had imagined us having a nice, peaceful, relaxed, breakfast, but it wasn't working out that way. Neither boy wanted to sit still - they just wanted to jump up, run around, roll around, crawl beneath things and cause chaos. 

One kid would take off, I would catch him, sit him back down and then the other one would go.

I had my hands more than full and could hardly touch my camera, but I squeaked this one off. 

Paulie Parkhurst, the sister of Abby, came to the rescue. She took both boys from me and led them to a place where a play area had been set up, just for people in our situation. Paulie was very good at this, and Kalib loved her immediately.

Outside the window, Abby gestured to what I believe was a friend or relative, coming to check out the new restaurant on opening day.

It seemed to me that it should have taken Margie maybe eight minutes to get to the house and come back with the diaper, but it felt much longer than that. MUCH longer. But maybe that's all it was - although I do not think so.

In time, she returned and we commenced to eat breakfast.

Margie took charge of feeding Kalib.

I took charge of feeding my little man, Jobe. Everything was now peaceful and calm - for about three minutes. Then those boys were rambunctious again.

When I eat breakfast out, I generally ask to have my toast served after I have finished everything else, so that I can slowly eat and savor it as I sip coffee.

When my toast arrived, Margie took the boys so they could walk towards home. "You can enjoy your toast in peace," she said.

I hated to see them go, but, indeed, I did savor and enjoy my toast in peace.

And I got a little bit of a chance to visit Paulie, Abby and Abby's husband Andy Hammond. The morning of July 4 might seem an odd time to open an out-of-the way restaurant, but they had their reasons.

Abby and Andy first met in Canada, 20 years ago on the Fourth of July.

They got married in Dawson City, Canada, where the Mahoney's have a ranch, one year later - on July 4. At the wedding, they served a pig and a bear leg and then danced on a platform that Andy and Abby had made.

Since that time, the Fourth has been a doubly special day to them, a day of taking on and trying new things.

Hence, they opened their restaurant on the Fourth of July.

"We had a wild time," Paulie remembers.

Given the fact that there was a parade going on in town, and people were out camping and fishing, shooting off crackers and rockets and doing Fourth of July things, there weren't many customers on opening morning.

In fact, most of the time we were there it was just us - which, given the circumstances we faced with our energetic and rambunctious grandsons, that was probably for the best.

But, here is what I have to say - although I did not really get to savor it, the food was good. This is a real, genuine mom-and-pop and brothers and sisters and children and friends of children operation.

I know - down on the Parks Highways where everyday cars pass by by the thousands - this time of year, tens of thousands, I suspect - there are many good restaurants to stop and eat at - everything from sushi superb to some very excellent Mexican cuisine.

And for breakfast, there is IHOP, Mat-Su Valley Family Restaurant and Denali Family Restaurant and maybe somewhere else too and you can get very good, satisfying and filling breakfasts at all these places and they are right on the highway, which is not Main Street but is Wasilla's main drag, and is a very busy place.

But, I urge you, if you are in this area and you are hungry, turn off the Highway at Church Road, drive about 2.5 miles down until you reach the corner of Church and Seldon.

There you will find Abby's Home Cooking.

Give it a try.

Margie and I will be back... I think without the boys next time, unless Jacob and Lavina are here with us.

When I stepped out the door and got into the car to leave, I discovered that Margie and the boys had not gotten far.

So, I stopped and picked them up.

"Want to go see if the parade is still going?" I asked.

I'm pretty sure Civi will enjoy these breakfast pictures - yet I did not yet feel that I had gotten my special picture just for him.

I wanted that picture to speak of America and the idea of freedom, which at times we speak always of how free we are enjoy more than we do at other times. Indeed, I would say that in starting out this little venture, Abby and Andy are acting in the best spirit of the freedom we Americans seek and boast of

Even so, and although I am pretty certain Civi will be impressed by this family and what they have, I still felt that the the special American Fourth of July freedom picture that I wanted to take just for him had not yet appeared before my camera. Maybe I would take it at the parade.

I will post something from the parade within the next hour or so and you can see if I succeeded.

And don't anyone worry - Metro Cafe will always be the coffee shop where I go every afternoon when I am in Wasilla and sometimes mornings too.

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iPadding it: with Jobe, Kalib, Margie, Chicago, Jim and Pistol

I have been wanting an iPad since they first came out - mostly, because I want to see the capabilities for online magazine and e-photo-book publishing, but until now I have not been able to justify the expense. I justify it now because I had pretty much resigned myself to the idea that I was going to have to purchase a new computer that would cost many times as much as the iPad, but now that I don't have to, then an iPad seems a good investment.

Of course, the iPad comes with a built-in camera. The resolution is low and the quality less than the iPhone, but I love any camera I can get my hands on and I worry less about technical quality than if I can use it to capture a feeling in the picture.

So, all of today's images were taken with my new iPad.

I started out with Margie and me.

Jobe and me next. He and Kalib came yesterday afternoon and will be here through today, maybe into tomorrow. I'm not sure.

Kalib, eating peanut butter and jelly.

I went to bed about midnight and, as always, when these boys overnight, Kalib slept with me and Jobe with Margie in the guest room. I spent an hour reading, Miss New India, a book that I first heard about from an Alan Cheuse review on NPR and he convinced me that I must read it. It is the first book that I will have read on an e-reader - in this case, the iPad.

It was fun, because I did not have to turn any lights on and page turning was instantaneous. At first, I thought I preferred reading a paper book, but after I had been at it for awhile I began to change my mind. I wouldn't want to read a book on an iPad while soaking in the tub, though.

In the morning, when I woke up for good sometime after 7:00 AM, I found Kalib sleeping like this, and so picked up the iPad and shot.

The light was dim in the room. This would be approximately the equivalent of shooting at ISO 10,000 or so.

Chicago had slept on the other side of my head. Here she is.

Chicago and me, in the early hours. 

My hand, before I get out of bed.

Me, still in bed. I have to wear that damn thing on my nose if I am to breathe and get any sleep at all. Looks likes its time for a haircut and beard trim again, especially since I will be heading back into the field shortly.

Jim was looking out the window.

Jim - as captured in the early morning with my iPad.

I went into the next room, which was even darker. Jobe woke up and came to greet me.

He was still tired, so he collapsed at his grandma's feet.

Soon, Jobe and I were out in the front room. Kalib slept on. Margie was coming to and would soon join us.

You did not see Pistol in the bedroom because he did not want to share the bed with Kalib, so he pouted and slept in the front room by himself.

Jobe scurries across the living room, carrying the two golf balls.

You can't see them, but this is only a second or so later, so he is still carrying the balls.

Now he is eating them.

Margie and Jobe, immediately after a diaper change.

Gramma and grandson.

Grandson and gramma.

Jobe gets down.

Jobe is ready to go. Gramma is not ready to let him go.

iPad still life: half a small cup of coffee. When Melanie and I went to India for Soundarya's wedding, Murthy gave me a set of small coffee cups. In India, they tend to keep their cups small. Drinking from a small cup helps me to not overdo it.

Plus, I like the cups.

Margie feeds Jobe some Oatmeal Squares.

iPad still life: Artificial flowers on the kitchen table, flanked by math.

But then, isn't math everywhere?

That's what my kindergarten teacher would always tell us, whenever we complained about the difficulty of the latest calculus quiz she had given us.

"Math is everywhere!" she would say. "Around and inside us - in the number of times a bird flaps its wings as it flies overhead - and how many times does your heart beat per minute... how many bites can you take out of a cookie... how many decibels in the croak of a frog...?

"It's all math, students," she would say. "Math is everywhere."

Jobe dumped the garbage on the floor, found the diaper his grandma had just taken off of him and gave it a toss. It took .9128999999999999999999 seconds for the diaper to plop onto the floor.

Sorry I can't be more precise than this. My math skills have been on the wane ever since I graduated from kindergarten and left behind the most brilliant mathematics teacher I ever had.

So ends my first experiment with iPad photography.

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Following a week of aggravation, the day turns good - the cake is baked, the candle blown out

The previous week had been one of exasperation and frustration. There were the computer problems that I have already whined about. While I had completed a load of billable work, I had run into a red-tape glitch that took weeks to work out and had been unable to invoice and so we had gone completely broke, with all the aggravation and frustration that brings on.

Among the bills that went upaid was cable TV, so we lost our TV service. This does not really bother me because I don't watch much TV, but Margie and Caleb miss it. Technically, Caleb was supposed to pay the bill, but he managed to go broke, too.

And then Pistol, who had been abused as a kitten and came to us with some bad habits that took a lot of time, patience and love to undo, had suddenly reverted and had peed several times in our bedroom, in this office and on the foot mat by the front door, making a very bad smell and giving us a whole new, very complicated, problem to deal with.

Then, yesterday, an amazing thing happened. The day began in aggravation as I struggled with this computer to pull up, process and post the three pictures that appeared in yesterday's blog, but once I got that out of the way, everything changed. 

I had a ton of undone work backed up, but, with this computer malfunctioning, there was nothing I could do about it. We had no money, but there was plenty of food in the house and Jacob, Lavina, Melanie, Charlie and Lisa brought more with them when they came to celebrate Caleb's birthday.

I had two happy grandsons, scurrying all about, laughing and having fun.

As there was not a thing I could do to remedy the aggravations, I just placed them all aside and forgot about them. And the day turned out great. I relaxed. I laughed. I enjoyed my children and my grandchildren and cats. The food, fresh off the barbecue grill, was delicious, so much so that I over indulged and so, late at night, I took a long bicycle ride and paid a visit to the Mahoney horses, then stopped at Grotto Iona and on the way home stopped to visit and photograph some friendly neighbors, Joseph and Ruth, brother and sister to the young photographer, George, who appeared in this blog last Thursday.

So when the day ended, I felt quite happy and content.

I did face a major problem, though - a potential great aggravation. I had shot  A LOT of pictures. Given the state of this computer, trying to take even a superficial look at them would be a terrible aggravation and would waste tremendous time. So I would only go for one picture. Which one?

As explained yesterday, we had celebrated Caleb's birthday without him. He did come home earlier than we expected but went straight to bed, so he could get some sleep before going to work. But he did wake up for cake. So of course, that had to be the picture. 

Knowing that it would take my computer hours to transfer the RAW images off the card, onto the harddrive and for the thumbnails to appear in Lightroom, I set the process in motion just before I went to bed and let the computer deal with it as I slept.

The task was completed this morning. I grabbed the Lightroom slider and scrolled down through the thumbnails, all of which appeared as gray rectangles. About three quarters of the way down, I stopped scrolling, hoping that I would have stopped not too far from the cake pictures. 

I then waited a few minutes for the computer to fill in the gray with pictures. I had stopped right on the cake pictures! I would not have to suffer the aggravation of searching for them. Having had that kind of luck, I figured I might as well go for three pics. 

So here they are: Caleb holding Kalib as his birthday cake is brought to him and people sing, each in their own unique key, "happy birthday." the CKaleib's blowing out the candle, and Kalib cutting the cake.

Before today is over, I expect to have money in my bank account. Now I must get out and do some serious computer shopping - because I have a huge amount of work to do and I am behind schedule. 

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Ice cream is spilled, lips are kissed; a cop helps out; Jobe rests on the couch

Readers who were here yesterday will notice that I have slightly retreated from my summer retreat in which I have resolved to post only one, two, or three pictures per day and have instead posted four. It is because of these two. I did not expect them to appear in my life yesterday, but they did.

It is hard to limit my posts when they are here.

I could easily make this a 15-picture post, all pictures devoted exclusively to these two, but, given the fact that I am in summer retreat and worse yet that I am dealing with such a computer nightmare, I restrain and hold the total number of images to four.

Somewhere around 8:00 PM last night, Lavina called to say that, due to a mishap in the improvements they are putting into their house, they had lost their flow of water and could we take Kalib and Jobe for the weekend?

We agreed to meet her and the boys in Eagle River,  a little more than half-way between Wasilla and Anchorage. I had too much work to do to go and was going to let Margie go by herself, but then I thought about ice cream. I thought about how, if I went, we could stop and get four ice-cream cones before we returned to Wasilla.

What great fun that would be! The boys, Margie and me, all eating ice cream as we drove home, taking in the scenery.

So I put my work aside and I went.

But when we found them, the boys were already eating ice cream. Lavina had bought it for them at McDonald's in Eagle River. Or at least one of the boys was eating ice cream. The other had been, but had apparently had his fill of it and so had discarded it.

We transferred them from their mother's car to our car. Then their mother kissed them goodbye. We drove off, then stopped at McDonald's where Margie and I bought two ice cream cones, one for her and one for me.

The life of a freelancer being what it is, that ice cream about flattened our bank account and we are now fending off angry calls from creditors. But I expect to receive a good check Monday and everything should be good for awhile after that - I think I have enough work lined up that we will be fine for the remainder of the summer.

Fall will be another question. By fall, I must have the foundation laid to begin to make a living from an online base, for I expect my old ways of making a living in paper publishing to be completely dead by then.

That's what this retreat is about - not about relaxing and getting rest. This retreat is a retreat to work hard, to do what needs to be done now and to figure out what needs to be done in the future and how to do it.

On the way home, we passed by this scene. Someone had experienced difficulties and by all appearances the cop was helping them out. The LCD dash screen is a little hard to read at this size (easy at slide show size) but it states that is 9:10 PM and the temperature is 72 degrees.

Yes - after my note yesterday that we had not seen anymore 70 + degree days following the memorial weekend, yesterday really heated up. The sun blazed down upon us. It was damned hot and we sweated like crazy. I don't know how hot it got, but by 9:10 it would have cooled off a bit so I think we might have made it to the upper 70's.

Today, it is raining. My iPhone says it is 62 degrees in Wasilla.

I feel bad for all the people of Minot, North Dakota. How unbelievable are the pictures coming out of Minot?

And here is Jobe, at the house.

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