Mended computer; Shoshana study; the vandalized fence; young music producer Alan Drumsbarger

I back up to the day before yesterday:

The stress of the combination of being both without a working computer and the necessary capital to pay bills took its toll, so much so that once I found myself with a good working computer and funds enough in the bank to carry us for some time, I suddenly felt drained. All energy left me.

At 4:00 PM, Margie drove into ?downtown? Wasilla to shop for groceries and pay bills. I had her drop me off at Metro Cafe, so I could walk home. I would have ridden my bike, but I did not feel that I had the energy to pedal it.

That put me on the inside of Metro. There, I saw Greg pull up to the window. I often see Greg through that window, but usually I am in the car and looking at him on the inside on the other side of the counter. Somehow, Greg and I often wind up at Metro at the same time and he has appeared in a number of studies. Today, it was reversed - I on the inside and he out, looking in. Hence, the above study:

Study of the young writer, Shoshana, #6921: just after she handed a Rockstar power drink to Greg, he on the outside looking in, me on the inside looking out, and accepted his payment.

I had to pay Shoshana for my coffee and pastry of the previous day as well, because on that day I had not been able to scrape together even enough loose change but they knew I was good for it and so carried me for a day. Now I am flush and the summer ahead looks good.

Such can be the life of a freelance photographer/writer. You gotta love it to do it, and if you don't love it, you can't do it. To live this way, it must be the only way your soul will allow you to live.

I walked on the bike trail towards home. I had not gone far before I came upon this fence, newly bashed in several places. Alas, folks, this kind of thing is part of Wasilla, too. It really is. Most folks here are decent, I believe, but there is an element who simply have no respect for anybody or anything but would sure whine mightily were the situation reversed even slightly.

Somebody spends money, works hard, takes pride, and then someone who understands nothing of life comes along and does this.

Probably a kid or a couple of kids, and since we were all kids once, we must forgive kids of many things, but in a case like this, forgiveness should come only after a significant price is paid - including full restoration of the fence.

I walked a little further down the bike trail, then turned around to get a comprehensive view of the damage. I saw a stranger coming along.

It turned out to be Alan Drumsbarger, who is not a stranger any more. "Nice camera," he said, when he caught up to me about two blocks down. We then walked and chatted together for a few more blocks. Alan was born and raised in Wasilla and now runs a little music recording business, 49 State Records, along with relatives and friends. He has a studio in his basement.

He is also a guitarist and base player, and stands in with many bands.

As we walked and talked, he told me all about his studio, and the hard and soft ware that he uses to record and produce music. He told me many things, more than I can take the time to write here. When I asked him if the business was profitable, he laughed. It's an art, you know, and artists are driven by other forces first and profit second, or maybe third or fourth or fifth or maybe they don't even give a damn about profit, but it is just one of those evil necessities that must be figured out, just to allow them to survive and keep making their art.

He did not say it that way, but I know for a first-hand fact that is how it is with some artists.

You will notice that I once again have four photos, whereas I had set a time-saving limit of three.

Well, with this computer now running hot and fast, trust me, I prepared these four photos MUCH faster than I would have prepared three, before Bruce pointed me toward this fix.

Now, if only I could do something about the many time-wasting inefficiencies built into Squarespace, my bloghost, I could add even more images in the same time.

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Charlie types a prayer, computer gets fixed

I am reluctant to state it, just in case the thing should suddenly fly apart on me, but this computer seems to be fixed. I got my check late yesterday after I had gone to Machaus to shop out a new one to replace it with. Bruce, the Machaus tech wizard, felt very badly that I was about to invest about four thousand dollars into a new Mac Pro when Apple is likely to release the next generation within a couple of weeks - and it should be greatly improved over what I would have bought today and probably for about the same price.

So he suggested one more thing that I might try to see if it might improve my old computer just enough to allow me to limp through until the new release comes out. So I tried it - I installed Snow Leopard on a new harddrive, made it the startup drive and... BLAM! It is suddenly like I have a whole new computer!

Wow! Lightroom and Photoshop NEVER worked so fast for me as they do now.

In fact, I am coming to believe that my original harddrive might have been defective from the beginning, because I don't ever remember it being this fast. Maybe it was defective and just kept steadily declining, because this is quite incredible, how fast it is now.

So I am back in business now. I have lost most of the last two weeks, and wasted a whole lot more time slogging through long before that, even, but now I can zip.

I chose this photo to run with this story for a very special reason. I have spent the past few weeks working up a Kivgiq Uiñiq - and it has been a dreadful, dreadful, frustrating, aggravating slog - because of all the malfunctions that this computer went through. I cannot even describe the aggravation that it has been - to try to scroll through thousands of frames only to have stop and watch that colorwheel spin and and spin.

To try to open a photo for processing, only to have it take so long that I could go out, fix myself a snack, come back and the find the picture not opened yet.

That is what I have been facing.

This is Charlie Brower and wife Jan fun dancing at Kivgiq, with North Slope Borough Mayor Edward Itta dancing right behind them.

Just about every day, Charlie leaves a "like" and a comment on my Facebook link to this blog.

Yesterday, his comment was this:

"Praying for computer to fix itself!"

The computer got a little help from Bruce and me, all right, but, after weeks of struggle, it was on the very day that Charlie typed in that prayer that the answer came. So there you go.

Furthermore, in a very real way, the computer did fix itself. I put in the new $200 harddrive and the Snow Leopard CD and gave it the command, but after that, the computer took that information and did all the work to fix itself.

So there you go, again.

Charlie Brower - thanks for that prayer!

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. 

View images as slides

Four-wheelers tearing up and down a grassy hill; Jobe sleeps, spinning color-wheel drives me to brink

I was pedaling my bicycle home last night about 10:00 PM when these young hell-raisers zipped past, raced up the hill ahead of me, shot back down again and then disappeared in a cloud of dust.

This is our own youngest, already-out-of-the-womb, young hell raiser, Jobe, gone down to sleep through the night.

I wonder... 

if, in a very short while...

...he and his brother might themselves be on four-wheelers, tearing up the tax-payer planted grass of local roadside hillsides...

...?????

This is pretty much how I have spent the last several days - watching this damn color wheel seem to spin 'round and 'round forever and on to infinity as I have sat at my computer desperately and futilely trying to complete my project so that I can send it to press. I had anticipated having all the photos completely processed and converted to CMYK by today, then I would go to Barrow tomorrow, fill in the missing text blanks, get everything tweaked and proofed by the end of the week and be to press by early next week.

Instead, I have been watching this damn color ball spin - and when it spins my computer won't do anything else. I am not even close. And despite all efforts by Machous and myself to fix the problem, it will not be fixed. Not today, not tomorrow, not ever. It just grows steadily and steadily worse. This computer is done for.

Last night, somewhere between midnight and 1:00 AM, I just gave up. There is no point of even trying to finish up on this computer any longer. I simply must replace this computer. Until I do, I am stuck, I can't accomplish anything.

So, as soon as I get my next check, hopefully tomorrow, money that I had planned to put to other uses will go into a new computer. I have no choice. I have to do it.

Maybe it will make things better for this blog, though.

Regular readers have undoubtedly noted the exasperation that I have felt now over the past weeks... months... with the amount of time this blog has been taking. They have noted me cutting back, and promising to cut back more.

I think this computer has been in decline for awhile, wasting a bit of time here, a bit of time there, time that I dismiss but that cumulatively adds up until finally it has reached the point of unbearability.

Take this post, for example. It is now 2:16 PM, Sunday. When I got up, I knew it was going to take awhile, so I opened Lightroom and then let it begin to import yesterday's take of 416 RAW images while I went off, cooked and ate breakfast and twice chased Jim into the woods when he thought he was finally about to fulfill his lifelong dream of becoming a mountain lion.

If this computer were up to par, that transfer of RAW images from card to harddrive with thumbnails on display in Lightroom would have taken somewhere between five and ten minutes. 

After doing all that I have described, the task was barely half-way done.

When the computer is up to speed, I can edit and begin processing the early pictures that pop up on my screen even before the download is complete. Now, I do not dare, for things will just completely bog down and nothing will ever complete.

Finally, though, after a couple of hours, the pictures were thumbnailed and on display in Lightoom.

However, if tried to look at them all, each time I switched from one to another, I would get a spinning colorwheel that would last anywhere from two or three to ten to fifteen or 20 minutes.

So I did not look at my take. I went right to the fourwheeler shots, grabbed the one that appears here without looking at the others, then spent about half an hour struggling to get it through the RAW to jpeg conversion process and then did the same with the other two.

And then it took forever to load the three into Squarespace. Once here, I can type at a normal pace.

Still, it has taken me a bunch of hours to put up this three-picture post. For this blog, I do my pictures "quick and dirty." And it has taken me this long. For Uiñiq, I take my time, try to get it just right (although I never quite succeed as I would like). So you can see what an impossible task I have faced.

It is good thing that our house does not sit on the edge of the cliff. I am so exasperated at the moment that I might jump right off it.

Rumor has it that in July, Apple will release a new, improved, faster computer to replace the Mac Pro series of which I have one of the early releases. It will just fry my brain to no end to buy the current model and then the next week find that Apple has just released the new and improved, swifter version for about the same price. But I cannot wait. I need the computer NOW!

And even if it is not as good as what will be out in a week or two for the same price, it will still be the fastest and best computer that I have ever used. So I can't wait. I must buy now.

Just as soon as I get my next check. Hopefully, tomorrow.

Today is Caleb's birthday - 35 years old. The whole family is coming out to celebrate. Except he won't be here. He just took off to hang with his buddies. He did not tell us he had plans but he did. We did not tell him we were going to celebrate, but just took it for granted that he would know.

Oh well. I think it is good for him to build up his social life.

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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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