Three cats enter the season of light; four blurred basketball shots, Point Hope v. Klawock

It is official.

We have entered the season of light.

LIGHT.

Wonderful, wonderful, glorious, light!

Sweet, sweet, northern light.

Charlie and Slick in the light that pours into Melanie's house.

Slick, you should know, is also known as Bear Meech.

Diamond glitters in the light.

Melanie, Charlie, and Poof Cat - all soak in the light at what not so long ago was a very dark hour.

But now it is the Vernal Equinox - the Spring Equinox.

And on this day, everyone in the world had 12 hours of sunlight. 

People at the equator would have seen the sun pop right up in the east and climb high fast until their shadows disappeared beneath their feet at high noon. From there, the sun would have just dropped, fast, straight down toward the west.

People standing on either pole could have watched the sun skim the horizon all day long. At the north pole, at the end of the 12 hours, the sun would have risen low into a day six months long and at the south, slipped away to a long, extended, twilight, thus beginning the six month night.

To you to the south - our days are now longer than your's.

But not as long as Barrow's, where the sun will climb higher and higher each day, and each day will stay up for about 15 minutes longer than the day before until finally, come May 10, it will stay above the horizon all day and will not set again until August 2.

Here in Wasilla, there will never be a night that the sun does not set, but soon the darkest part of the night will still be a light version of twilight and it will be wonderful.

Not so long ago, Slick was a creature of the night.

Now he is a creature of the light.

I went to three basketball games today, the final being the 2A championship game between Point Hope and Klawock.

Just before the game started, I set my cameras to shoot at a shutter speed of 1/400th of a second.

Then the game started and some good action happened in front of me immediately.

But, somehow, a knob on my camera had rubbed against something in such a way as to drop the shutter speed to 1/20th of a second.

Basketball players can move significantly in 1/20 of a second.

I would shoot seven frames before I discovered the error and every one would be blurry.

So here is one of those motioned-blurred frames.

And here is another.

Plus a third.

You can see the action is good and they do work in an artsy-kind of way, but they will not work for what I want them to work.

I was very disappointed that I blurred the shots, but I took a lot more afterwards, so I will be fine.

They are still downloading and I haven't had a chance to look at any of them, other than these blurry ones. These were right at the beginning of the take, so they popped up right away. The rest of the disk is still downloading and when it is done, I have two more disks to download.

But it is 1:09 AM, I am very sleepy and must go to bed.

So I will wait until tomorrow to download the other two disks.

I return to Anchorage for the final Barrow Whaler games, then visit an under-the-weather Kalib and and a bright-eyed Jobe

I drove back to Anchorage today to photograph the final games of both the Barrow Whaler Ladies and the Barrow Whalers.

I simply do not have time right now to edit and prepare those photos, but I will share this one of Kalib that I took afterward. Margie had been babysitting both he and Jobe so that Lavina could go watch some ball playing herself.

Poor Kalib, though - he still was not feeling good.

When Lavina and I came back, he had just fallen asleep on the couch.

Lavina carried him off to bed.

Lavina, and Jobe. Intellectually, I know that babies do this, yet, it still amazes to see how much he has grown both physically and mentally in just over a month.

I suppose I can take just a little bit of time to add one picture that I took at the games, just as a contrast of a baby at seven months to Jobe's one. This is a Barrow baby and I was introduced to him and I memorized his name but I did not speak it into my cell phone and I have forgotten it.

Compared to Jobe, he looked downright huge.

I guess I will quickly grab, without taking any real time to edit or search through my larger take, one photo each from the boys' and girls' games.

Both teams played the consolation match for third place. Meimoana Havea looks for a shot as Dana Chrestman sets up a screen. I'm afraid the Whaler Ladies lost to Sitka, 24-53.

The Barrow boys, however, beat Mt. Edgecumbe, 66 to 46. Forrest Enlow makes it difficult for Mt. Edgecumbe to throw the ball into play.

This is Abu's mom.

And this Johnny Leavitt, who wants a copy of this picture, plus a few dozen more that I have taken of him at various moments in the past.

Here's this one, Johnny.

And here's June and Juko Aiken with a rowdy group of young fans.

I suppose, having gone this far, I cannot leave the Barrow cheerleaders out.

Now some of the smaller villages have their tournament, including the Point Hope Boys and the Wainwright Girls. I think I must stay home both Thursday and Friday, but I will go back Saturday, when I expect to see some of the village kids battling for their championships.

On the day that Lance Mackey wins his fourth straight Iditarod, I meet a husky, go to the Barrow Whaler girls game, visit baby Jobe; Pioneer Peak

In the morning, I took a walk and this airplane flew overhead. It felt like our poor excuse for a winter had ended. It was warm - in the 30's and would rise into the 40's come afternoon.

Shortly after the plane passed over, I saw this woman, walking this husky. Somewhere, I have both of their names written down from a much earlier meeting, but I don't know where.

Just before 3:00 PM in the afternoon, the nose of Lance Mackey's lead dog would cross the finish line under the burled arch in Nome, giving cancer survivor Mackey his history-setting fourth straight Iditarod win - and he has won that many Yukon Quests. No one else in the history of dog mushing has accomplished such a feat. If you haven't already, you can read about it here at the Anchorage Daily News or here at the Alaska Dispatch.

When Mackey crossed the finish line, I was at the Sullivan Arena in Anchorage, ready to photograph the semi-finals Class 3A basketball game between the Barrow Whaler girls and the Mount Edgecumbe Braves.

Five Barrow starters were suspended by their coach when they were caught drinking on a road trip earlier in the season. Most people figured that it was it for this team this year, but the younger, less-experienced players continued on and played hard and strong. They won the Western Conference Championship and a spot in the State Championship tournament. On Monday, they won their first game against Cordorva.

I was not there, but today I went to the semi-final. In the third quarter, the whalers were down by 12, but in the last two minutes came within three points of the Braves, but lost 34-29.

I took quite a few pictures and they are still downloading into my computer. I have no time to edit them for this blog post and so just pulled this shot from the pre-start huddle. I have not yet taken even my first glance at any of the action pictures.

Wasilla played at the Sullivan today, too - and won - and some may wonder why I did not photograph them as well - especially since three of my children graduated from Wasilla High.

I could only spare the time to go to one game, though and my community ties remain much closer to Barrow than to Wasilla. Plus, I have a little publication that I have put together that this will fit nicely into. The problem is, that publication is completely done and I am just waiting for my client to finish the review before it goes to press. 

I do not want to take anything more out of it than I already have, but I want to put the Barrow Whaler girls in, so I need to find a way.

After the game, I stopped and paid a visit to baby Jobe. I was amazed to see how alert he was. He studied everything, including me.

Kalib was home, too, but he was sick and asleep. I never got to see him.

I hate even to mention it, but this was also the day that a judge held a hearing and made the divorce of my beloved youngest son and the wife he so greatly loves final, save for a bit of paperwork.

So it was a sad day, but, as it always does, life went on and it will continue to.

As I drove back into Wasilla, I looked into my rearview mirror and there loomed Pioneer Peak.

Wasilla vs, Barrow; home team vs. home team

So there I was in Fairbanks, trying to photograph six middle school teams from the Arctic Slope as they battled their way through the Challenge Life tournament. It was crazy, because the tournament was organized so that three games were always being played simultaneously and whenever one of the teams that I needed to photograph was playing on one court, at least one more was playing somewhere else.

Sometimes three played at once - in three different games - and I needed to photograph them all!

I would do a quarter here, a quarter there, then run back here...

In one of the quarters, Barrow's Hopson Middle School Lady Wolves battled the Wasilla Warriors.

Three of my children were Warriors. Whenever I go to Barrow, everywhere I go, people say, "welcome home." I know the people of Barrow much better than I do those of Wasilla. I feel a sense of community when I am in Barrow that I do not feel in Wasilla, but I am completely comfortable in my Wasilla house, with my Wasilla family. In fact, in all the world, my Wasilla house is the most comfortable place I can be - but isolated from the community.

So who was I supposed to root for?

Wasilla (red) won the game and moved on to the championship playoffs. Dajonnae Harris is the Wasilla girl. I know her name only because she stayed in the same hotel as me and was standing directly in front of me this morning in the continental breakfast waffle line. By the time I complete my project, I will know the name of the Barrow girl, but right now I do not.

I shot many pictures and have not yet had time to even glance at them, but I wanted to run a frame from the Wasilla vs Barrow game, so I grabbed one from there real quick. 

Maybe I will run a few more pix from the tourney on this blog, maybe I won't. I won't do a thorough edit of them until sometime in December, but maybe I will grab a couple more at random and put them in here tomorrow, or perhaps the next day.

Maybe I won't. Depends on if I can find the time.