Four little people at Metro Cafe join me to launch this blog into summer retreat mode

Readers who were with me then will recall the great water battle that Kalib and Jobe got into when they stayed with us over Memorial Day weekend, when the temperature rose into the upper 70's. That kind of heat has not struck us again since. We have had days in the 60's and other days that never rose out of the 50's but no 70's.

Yet, yesterday was sunny and bright and pretty hot - upper 60's I'd say - and by the time I had pedaled my bike to Metro Cafe I had worked up a good sweat and so ordered an icy mocha frappe with a touch of raspberry, which I consumed outside on the patio, because it was entirely too hot to drink hot coffee and it was entirely too hot to sit inside.

On the patio, I was joined by these four: Reagan, Charlotte, Isabel and William.

"What's the matter, tough guy?" little Reagan challenged with a grin as he saw me sweating and drinking my frappe. "Can't handle the heat? Can't drink hot coffee? Got to retreat to a frappe?"

"We'll take ours black! Black and hot!" little Charlotte shouted out to Shoshana from her place in the stroller, next to Reagan. "We're real Alaskans!"

Shoshana then brought them each a 24 oz. hot, black, coffee. They each then lifted their coffees to their mouths and guzzled down every steaming drop in just 2.8 seconds.

"Another round!" Isabel shouted to Shoshana. "And make it hotter this time!"

The second round was guzzled equally fast.

"Good stuff!" William exuded. "Ten more rounds of black - and one more frappe for the sweaty guy!"

"Oh, dear!" their mother, who genuinely did tell me that she brings them to Metro at least once a week, sighed. "So many diapers!"

And with this, I launch this blog into the retreat of summer, 2011. I do not want to. There are few things that I enjoy more than blogging and the old world of print publishing is rapidly dying for me. I need to figure out how to do this.

So I don't want to retreat, but I have no choice. The burdens weighing upon my time now are huge. For the rest of the summer, I am going to try to restrict this blog to one picture per day, possibly two, perhaps three.

Except maybe once a week, or once every ten days, or twice every two weeks, I might see if I can work in a full-fledged post of many images - just to keep the idea alive.

Through this retreat, perhaps I can make it to fall, and maybe by then I can figure out how to start this blog and my online picture-story telling presence into what I want it to be.

With just one picture, there is no point in doing a slide show, but when there is only one picture, a simple click on the image will reveal a larger copy.

No car, computer going down at worst time - but that kid George has talent!

I am now in my third day without a car. Once again, Margie has gone off to town to help take care of Kalib and Jobe, this time because Jobe fell a little under the weather for awhile and Jake's job took him out of town. I am a person who likes to drive, but, whenever Margie has gone to town for a few days I have not really been bothered by the lack of a car.

I have my bicycle, and this time of year I bike every day, anyway.

So I just get on the bike and go.

When I get to Metro Cafe, that means I go inside instead of through the drive through. I suppose I could go through the drive-through and then drink my coffee as I pedal my bike, but I don't want to.

So I go inside. And once there I shoot serious, brilliant, studies like this one:

Looking out the Metro window from the inside, Study #3671: Claudia pays for her coffee with a credit card.

Within 8 minutes of posting this, I expect to receive a call from MOMA in New York, offering me $42 million if I will just let them hang a print of this in their hallway for three days. That ought to take care of a few problems I face, and allow me to blog full time and make my new electronic magazine.

Branson always wants to ride my bike, but he is too small for it. Today, Carmen told him to stay off it because he might scratch it. "This bike is already scratched up," he answered.

It's true, too.

Yet, today, I absolutely needed a motor vehicle. I had to take this computer to the shop and see if I could get it fixed. I have been working on layout and writing tasks lately, but now I must switch gears and get into photo processing for CMYK offset reproduction.

My computer has lost all its power and speed. When I am working in Lightroom and in Photoshop, It grinds to a near halt and the Mac color ball spins and spins and I just about go crazy waiting for it. And I will be working with large, high-resolution files - 100 mb each.

This morning, after drinking coffee and working through the night, I went to bed at 6:40 AM, then got up at 9:53, borrowed Caleb's truck and hauled my big, heavy, Mac Pro over to Machaus.

Then, after my afternoon coffee at Metro, I pedaled my bike back home, exchanged it for Caleb's truck once again and headed back toward Machaus.

I had to be there before six and I thought it would be no problem, but then I came upon this cop in the road, directing traffic because the stoplight was out. Maybe that lineman in the background above is trying to fix the problem.

The cop was not nearly so efficient as the light is, when it works, and after five minutes, I was still sitting there. He had sent the oncoming left-turn traffic through twice and everybody else at least once, without even letting us move. So I was worried that I would not get to Machaus until after 6:00, but I got there at 5:55, so it was okay.

Bruce at Machaus did find one thing that he fixed and it helped, but he did not charge because he had a feeling the overall problem was not yet fixed.

He was right. This computer is still dragging like crazy, especially when it comes to Lightroom and Photoshop. And I have over 300 images to prepare for offset. And if this computer malfunction costs me an average of 10 or fifteen minutes wasted time for each image - which, in fact, it is doing and sometimes more... well... make that times more than 300 and you see the problem that I am up against.

I do not know how I am going to deal with it.

It is time for a new computer, I think, but I don't have the money at the moment and even if I can find it soon, which I believe I can, rumor has it that Mac is about to release a brand new, top of the line, powerhouse computer with the pending Lion operating system and it would be stupid to buy a new computer just before that one comes out.

What do I do?

What can I do?

Nothing but slog through it, I think.

Day and night. Slog through it until its done.

All the time, wondering why I have to get stuck inside during the time of long light?

This is George Rasputkov, the aspiring young photographer, and I first met him when he was a boy and I would be out walking our now deceased dog, Willow. George was one of a group of children whose parents were immigrants from the countries of the former Soviet Block and they all loved Willow.

"Willow!" they would shout when they saw us coming. Then they would come and pet Willow and wrap their arms around her and she loved it.

She was an attention hound, that dog.

Tonight I met him again as I was out pedaling my bike home from the Little Susitna River.

Now he is grown and he loves photography and wants to become professional.

He showed me a few of his pictures  on his LCD and his iPhone and he is good. He has the talent. I complimented him on what I saw. "I give the credit to God," he told me. He said he is Christian. I do not yet know the history that brought his family and so many others here from the old Soviet Block, but I think that has a lot to do with it.

Now we are Facebook friends, so, when I get the chance, which won't be until I get this project out of the way, I will give his work a good study. Surely, I will look at it right away, but study will have to come later.

Yet, generally speaking, it really only takes me a glance to determine whether or not I like a photograph. My first glance at George's work proved pretty positive.

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When on the ice, always look before you pee

I now take the reader back a bit over one month ago, either to the final minutes of May 10 or the opening minutes of May 11. I am unsure which day it was, I only know it was right about midnight, so it could have been either one. It is true that my camera stamps the time shot into the metadata of each image, but it is also true that I have only had this camera for about four years and so have not yet found the time to set the time.

Anyway, it was right about midnight, May 10 - 11, the final full night of my last trip up north. I was in the Saggan whaling camp of Edward Itta, Mayor of the North Slope Borough, and I realized that it was time to visit the latrine.

The people who know the ice will tell you that when on it, you must always be alert and prepared for polar bears. You, or someone nearby, must always have a good rifle or slug-loaded shotgun handy, just in case. I did not have a weapon with me, but this was not really a problem because everyone else in camp did and their eyes are sharp and they are always looking.

As noted, I had to go, so I left the spot at the blind where I had been with the others, watching for bowhead, and walked to the latrine, which was located in the cracks at the base of one of a multitude of ice upheavals. I didn't think much about anything, but just got straight to business.

About three-quarters away through my task, it suddenly occurred to me that had I done all this without even bothering to look about for polar bears. So I raised my head. What you see above is what I saw.

The thing at the bottom of the picture is the windscreen of a snowmachine.

I was in no real danger, because as noted, those whom I was with are sharp-eyed, well-armed, and always looking and even though their attention was focused primarily in the opposite direction, from which a whale might come, they, too, had spotted the bear and began to call out to me, just to be certain that I knew there was a photo opportunity in front of me.

The bear spent some time studying us from various vantage points, pooped, and then moved along to the northeast.

Within an hour or so of when I took these pictures, the wind had turned to the southwest. Ice was advancing, the lead was closing and we had to pull back.

The happenings of the next 30 hours or so are among the most frustrating happenings of this year for me ever in my career. In the hope that a whale would come to this camp, I had already delayed my departure by a couple of days over my plan. I needed to get home, prepare a few things and then head to Tok and Fairbanks to cover the honoring of Ahtna elder Dr. Katie John, but I had held off pushed my departure back to the last moment.

Twelve hours after I had left Barrow, the lead had reopened, conditions had become good, a bowhead came to the Saggan crew and they accepted its gift. For them, for the Iñupiat community of Barrow, I was happy and grateful.

For me, I was devastated. Absolutely. Devastated. Crushed, you could say. No one can know when a whale will come or what crew it will go to. Sometimes, several seasons can pass by without one coming to where you wait. Yet, this time, if I had stayed one more day, I would have been there when the Saggan whale came.

Then, of course, I would have missed Katie John receiving her honorary Doctor of Laws degree and that would have left me devastated as well. 

Sometimes, there is no winning, even when you do win - because I absolutely did win. To be there for all of Katie's honoring was a win... it was a special, once in a lifetime - a long and great lifetime - event, and I had to be there. I just had to.

But I still feel sick inside to have missed the Saggan whale.

What a beautiful, special, event that would have been and how honored I would have felt to have stood as a witness of it.

Originally, I had planned to post coverage of what I saw and experienced that trip to Barrow to the same degree that I posted Point Hope. Although I missed the final event, I none-the-less got several pictures that I believe many readers would have found amazing.

But I did not anticipate how long it would take me and it is just too late, now. Soon, I will be back in Barrow and at the rate I have been going I would still posting my last trip and people would think the snow never ever melts in Barrow, which it does, as you will soon see, right here, on this blog, if I but move along and stay in the present.

So, except for this bear and at least one people story I will yet work in, I am going to drop that coverage for now.

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A brief, incomplete, look at Father's Day just past - furry Jim and Furless Jim

My documentation of Father's Day began in the morning, as I returned home from my walk by coming in through the back, through the remnant of now-dried up marsh and woods. I found Jacob, Kalib and Muzzy in the back yard, Jacob pulling old stumps and such.

Kalib was wearing a red t-shirt that hung nearly to his ankles and gave him kind of a mischievous, sleepy-angel look and he wanted his dad to walk off into the trees with him.

His dad did not want to stop what he was doing and so told him grandpa would walk with him.

Hence, Kalib walked into the trees and I followed, taking pics as I did.

I think I captured something unique and special on that short little walk, but readers will not find it in here, at least not today. A read of yesterday's post will reveal the kind of problems that I am currently experiencing with this computer.

Once it takes a few minutes to figure out where it is and what program it is, the computer can handle word processing and basic internet tasks just fine, but when it comes to photo editing and photo processing tasks, it turns into an absolute nightmare.

As simple click that, when the computer is working as it should will result in almost instantaneous completion of the task can now result in ten minutes of doing nothing but watching the Mac colorwheel spin. It is not a bug, it is not a virus, but something has gone fundamentally wrong with this computer - maybe in the RAM.

So, it would probably take me an entire day - certainly half the day - to sort through the photos of that walk in Lightroom and then open them up in Photoshop just to complete the series that I believe is in the photos from that walk.

And I took many other pictures - Lavina barbecuing meat and veggies to all of us - and there were many of us - gathered around the backyard picnic table where we began to eat, but then it started to rain and I didn't care but everybody else did so we moved inside.

There, I took more pictures. I knew I faced an impossible editing task, so, when I took this one, I said to myself, "I will run that one and that can be it for the whole blog."

It is furry Jim sitting on the lap of Furless Jim while Muzzy sits out on the porch, wanting to get it, wanting to get at the beef and pork that Lavina had barbecued.

"Furless Jim," longtime readers will recall, is Jim Earnshaw, Charlie's dad. He and Cyndy came out and joined us. So all the kids were here (although Caleb slept through it all in preparation for his nightshift), grandkids and Charlie, who I also consider to be one of the kids these days.

Furless Jim is a genuine cat person - and dog person, too. Furry Jim knows this and took full advantage of it.

Shortly after I took the one picture that I marked for today's blog, Jobe came by to communicate with furry Jim as he rested on the lap of Furless Jim and I thought, "what the heck, these two pictures are right close together and so I will add it in, too.

So here they are, Jobe, furry Jim, and Furless Jim.

Although at this point I do not know where the money is going to come from, I have made up my mind that I am going to return to India in November for Soundarya's one-year memorial - and if the timing works out, for Sujtha's wedding as well. That will take me away at a bad time, because Sandy's death came on Lisa's birthday and it will also be Thanksgiving weekend, so I was talking to Lisa about that and she decided to come with me.

She can't afford to do that, but not being able to afford something is not always a good reason not to do it. So it looks like she will be coming with me. I hope so.

Jim and Cyndy brought some excellent potato salad and some celestial rhubard/blackberry cat; Charlie baked cookies and prepared black coffee, which we took late with the pastries.

Superb.

People began to depart a bit after 9:00 PM, with Melanie and Charlie the last to leave, shortly before 10:00 PM. Since they were the last, I figured it would not be that huge of an editing problem to go to the very end of my take and include this picture of them driving away, waving goodbye, on today's blog.

I then faced a minor writing task that I figured would probably take me until 3:00 or 4:00 AM to complete, but I needed a little exercise and some air first, so I got on my bike and pedaled off into the rain.

As I was nearing home, a little before 11:00 PM, some neighbors who are among the many who migrated to Wasilla from the former Soviet Block as it came apart and who live down the street, around the corner, down that street and around another corner, pulled up alongside me.

They matched their car pace to mine, rolled down the window and asked how I was doing.

We had not seen each other for many months, maybe over a year.

I told them I was doing good, and asked how they were doing.

They were doing good, too.

As I pedaled and we conversed, I shot a few frames, not looking through the viewfinder but just pointing my camera in their general direction.

That made this the last picture of the day, right next to Melanie and Charlie departing. So I decided to add it into the blog mix. 

I arrived home about 11:05 PM and found Margie on the couch, alternately watching Law & Order and dozing off for a few minutes. She was exhausted. So I sat down with her until the show was over.

Now I figured it would take me until 4:00 or 5:00 AM to finish off that minor writing task and I was tired.

I said to hell with it, I've put in too many all-nighters in my life and that probably has a lot to do with why I live in an almost perpetual state of brain-fried exhaustion.

I decided just to go to bed and do the writing task today. That means I cannot take my computer into the shop until tomorrow.

Oh, well.

Everything will get done and we will survive - perhaps not in grand fashion; maybe we will have to sell the house and move into a small RV and live on the road, but we will survive.

And I got to sleep a little bit.

I still feel tired, though. Brain-fried and exhausted.

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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!

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