Remember When Things Were Fun?

All I had to do was say "Kaitlyn, stay out of the leaves!" Then it was the most fun thing on earth...I didn't notice how coordinating her clothes are--pink accents on her jeans and shoes. A little much for a 2-year-old?

Of course, I was hoping she would fling herself on the pile and roll around--I have a shot of Ryan doing the same thing a few years ago.

Fall came late to Texas this year--It was challenging to shoot this without getting the Christmas decorations in the background. Too many seasons wrapped into one picture would clash like Ghostbusters crossing the streams. Nevertheless, the last of the leaves were blown off the trees this weekend, and there I was: raking them as they fell. Is it shallow to take pride in the trees in my front yard?

Then there was controversy. New neighbors moved in next door, and while I was raking my yard I considered raking their yard, too. The fact is that all the leaves that are in their yard came from my tree, since they don't have any trees at all. On the other hand, it's a little assuming to groom someone else's yard, isn't it. You know, you sign a piece of paper one day promising your earthly possessions to pay for this house, and the next day the dude next door is walking around the place with a rake--it could be interepreted in an ugly way. However, my basic philosophy is that you should always do the nice thing if it's available. They could also be sitting in their house thinking "Oh yeah, he makes HIS yard look nice, while ours looks like the forest floor. Why should I have the pain of raking leaves if I don't have the benefit of having trees?" I know, I do this to myself...no one else thinks this way.

Things used to be fun, didn't they? Wish I could have just plopped down in the leaf pile with Kaitlyn...

The Scene in San Diego...

My sister, Melanie, has had a running joke that I am secretly some sort of international spy. She knows I speak a couple of languages, travel a lot, know how to shoot guns. My job is just vague enough and my travel schedule random enough that it is a little weird but explainable. Also: I went to the FBI Academy for a month when I was a kid--maybe I got brainwashed or something...

There have been times when I could have messed with her head--You know, "accidentally" dropping a comment or revealing an intriguing prop.

But I never really felt like a secret agent until last week when I was in San Diego--sometimes I laugh at myself for getting into these weird situations.

I previously mentioned that earlier this year I began to participate in a global, outdoor scavenger hunt called Geocaching. My son, Ryan, and I have found about 60 different hidden caches using a GPS receiver--it's a fun activity that we can do together outdoors, and it is a goal directed activity. I think that's one of the reasons that I can't stick to an exercise program--how do you know when you're finished? No matter how much you are working out, it just never ends. We've gotten to the point where we take one weekend here or there and go and find 5 or 6 caches hidden somewhere fun, like parks or landmarks. We've even done it as we've traveled around the country.

After a while, just finding the cache isn't fun enough, so there are little "games within the game" that exist--one of these activities is using a "travel bug" which goes from place to place--the idea is to transport it as far as possible. so we found one on a weekend trip and picked it up with the intention ofme placing it in a cache when I traveled to San Diego. I thought it might be fun for Ryan to see that I had moved something that we had found some 1100 miles across the US.

I was staying at a really nice hotel near the convention center by the docks--I looked up the address and plugged it into the map which showed all the nearby geocaches. I decided to drag this travel bug along and drop it off, so I wanted to make sure to get to it early in my trip before I started getting fatigued. I took my backpack, camera, and my GPS with the coordinates plugged in and took off along the boardwalk area which was full of tourists.

Pretty soon, I came upon the area and my GPS told me I was approaching. When it is cloudy outside, it is hard to pinpoint the exact location--the variance is somewhere between 10 and 15 feet, so I just sat down on a stone seawall and tried to look inconspicuous. I took my camera out of my bag and slung it around my neck, snapping a couple of quick shots which later turned out to be beautiful. The sun was going down and setting across the bay. To my right lay an impressive vintage aircraft carrier from WWII. Beyond that lay an even more impressive cruise ship--it dwarfed the aircraft carrier, and the booming horn blared over the whole city, the sound bouncing and echoing--it was probably of some sort of significance to the people on board or on shore.

A spiny bush lay along the wall, and my instinct from searching these things out told me that the container was wedged in this bush somewhere. The setting sun barely provided enough light, but the hard plastic of the camoflauged container glinted a little in the remaining sunlight and gave away the position. I wonder how many geoaches are inadvertantly found by maintenance workers?

While I was waiting there, wave after wave of tourists came by. One herd of people came by all dressed in some sort of conquistador costume and singing funny songs. I could hear one girl in particular chatting loudly and laughing at her own jokes. I had my camera ready, so I snapped a couple of shots of the marina and the pretty sunset which occurred as I sat there.

Behind me were photographers lined up with the actual purpose of photographing the scene. I'm not really sure what the significance of that exact location was, but there must be something to it because there were about five photographers with pretty extensive setups--tripods, multiple cameras and lenses, and assistants in tow. It put me in a relatively unfortunate position because I was actually west of them and a little in front of them, so they were in a position to observe exactly what I was doing--I didn't want to give away that I was geocaching, and in some cases people have found containers which have been raided, so I didn't want to be responsible for that.

Just when I was going to reach for it, three homeless men came right toward me. I was almost certain they were going to ask me for some money. I really hate going to the touristy areas because of panhandlers. I mean, is a dollar really going to help? How about a gift certificate for AA? Oh, yeah, it's free( isn't it)? The guy in the middle was nearly passed out, and the two others flanked him, holding him up. Their clothes were encrusted with dirt and were in tatters. They didn't speak to me.

I set my bag down on the other side of the wall and pretended to dig through it looking for something. I didn't look up to see if anyone was watching me. Then I reached down and grabbed the container which was exactly where I thought it was--I set it in my lap and unscrewed it, fishing out the log book which I quickly signed. I stuffed the travelbug from Texas in there (it traveled 1177.1 miles from Texas to this spot) and replaced the lid. I bent down and carefully put it back into the bushes, deep beyond the outer layer so it wouldn't be easily spotted, and while I was down there I placed my camera in the bag and zipped it up tight.

Slinging my backpack over my shoulder, I got up and blended quietly back into the crowd, my mission complete.

If you are on our Christmas Card Mailing List...

This is the picture you will be getting...

I told Fran "Great! Everyone is going to think our kids are Russian!"

Yes--we had snow last week. Here in Texas, we get a day of snow usually once every two years, but we've gotten it for the past three years (so much for the theory of global warming).

On the second day, I went out to my car and started to clear the snow off the windshield. It had already melted from our yard, but my car was in the shade so it was intact and sticking together nicely. I made a little snowman for Kaitlyn just to see what she thought, and she was so excited about it that she forced Fran to keep it in the freezer so she could share it with Ryan when he got home from school. It was a pathetic little snowman, but she loved it so much we had to take a picture of it...

Sliding

I had the weirdest dream last light.

I hiked off in the woods to be by myself and write. I came to a tall vista and sat down on a flat spot on the ridge of a cliff and looked out across the water--it was a beautiful scene, an overlook. I was writing on a pad and paper.

As I was sitting there, I felt the ground under me give way a little, and I started to slide down the cliff. The next thing I knew, I saw that I was on a slide, and that I was sliding down the cliff, not to the rocks below, but into a dark tunnel. I put my hands out desperately and stopped myself from going into the tunnel. There was water running into it and I was afraid that I would drown.

Stopping myself on the slide, I could look around and see that I was actually on a swiftly-flowing waterslide and I could see that the track extended around and around in a huge labyrinth. But I was hesitant to let myself go into the tunnel. I didn't know what would happen--maybe the tube is clogged somewhere and I would drown with the rush of water against me. Maybe the floor would give way and I would fall through. Maybe...I was terrified of letting myself get swept inside with so much uncertainty.

It occurs to me that I might just be frustrated with my writing. While driving around for work yesterday, I thought to myself that I hadn't written anything worth reading in several months.

Things aren't going to get better unless I can allow myself to become vulnerable when I am writing. Yet, I have a hard time visualizing letting myself get swept away.

Dental Health

I sat in the very comfortable waiting room completely alone, except for the distracted receptionist. It was the swankiest dental office I've ever seen--antique golf equipment, expensively matted prints, and shiny, dark cherry furnitue were accented by dramatic, red walls and thick upholstery. It flashed through my mind that I can't trust any recommendations from this doctor--he needs to cash in on any possible procedure to pay for all of this...

As I filled out five sheets of ill-thought-out forms (which asked for several pieces of exactly the same information to be rewritten in three different places), I got even more irritated--Extra charges for missing or being late for an appointment. I glanced at the clock--I had gotten to the office 20 minutes early and it was now 8 minutes beyond my appointment time. I had a desperate urge to walk up to the receptionist and demand $20 since it was they who were late. Then I envisioned having my dentist attack me with one of those sharp, curved, picky things and changed my mind.

Just then, the phone rang. Eventually, the half which transpired within my earshot caught my attention:

"Oh, I'm glad you are being careful."

"Yes, but it will definitely pass."

"Oh, not yet, then."

(nervous chuckle) "Well, I guess you could use rubber gloves."

"Yes, it does happen sometimes."

"Oh, I am sorry to hear that."

"It certainly will."

"I suppose you can search for it if you like."

"Okay, see you tomorrow, then."

She turned to a colleague who was walking by and said, "Mrs. Watkins will be in tomorrow. One of her crowns came loose during Thanksgiving dinner and she accidentally swallowed it."

Eight Minutes

That's how long I have to write before I have to run upstairs and wake up Ryan to help him get ready for school. He's been off for a week for the Thanksgiving Holiday (we used to get 2 days when I went to school), so he's off schedule.

We spent a lot of the weekend putting up Christmas lights and our tree. I'm the painfully sentimental one in our family, but Fran is the one who loves to decorate for Christmas. My job is to take out our Christmas dishes, which we use for a month each year as a change of pace. Maybe it gives our other dishes a rest, too...We still use the same Blue Peony dishes that we got for our wedding (15 years ago)--we've only broken 2 or 3 pieces in all that time...

I put together new vaccuum cleaner yesterday. I'm not sure why we've gone through about four of them in the past 5 years, but we have. As I was putting it together, Kaitlyn, my daughter who will be three years old in January, walks up behind me and says "I think you're missing a piece, Daddy..." She really cracks us up all the time.

Two weeks ago I went and taught a science class to Ryan's second grade class. First of all, I don't know how these teachers do this every day--Hyper 7-year-olds who seem to just blurt out whatever comes to mind randomly. That night, Ryan came home--according to him I received excellent reviews from his classmates--he had a stack of homemade Thank You cards which were a real hoot. Some of them had drawings of "me"--unflatteringly accurate as might be expected from 2nd graders. My favorite line: "Please come back anytime and do something different".

Eight minutes are up. I haven't taken time to write anything worthwhile for a while now, so thanks for sticking with me, here...

All No Work and No Play Makes Hiram a Dull Boy...

Fran's been checking out all these weird books from the library and reading them. She brings home a bag of 7-10 books every week or two, and reads through them quickly. I'm starting to be convinced that she's just run out of options and is scraping the bottomo of the barrel for something to read.

Currently on her nightstand: "The Shunning", complete with dramatic, swooning Amish girl on the front.

I asked her if the book ends with someone going nuts in the barn and hacking down the door with a butter churn....

The Small Stuff

Sometimes I wonder if my life is some giant psychology experiment like "The Truman Show" or something. I seem to get into funny situations which sometimes turn stressful--all from the best of intentions.

For Ryan's soccer team, I agreed to take action shots of the kids during the games--we did it last year and the kids were really happy to get dramatic, stop-action photos of themselves in the middle of playing--we handed them out at the end-of-season party.

Fran got a little irritated that I volunteered to do it again. Her issue was that it made me miss the game while I was messing around trying to get pictures. It also really got under her skin that no one really bothered to thank me after last year's party (which would have been nice, but I'm just glad that they all seemed to like them--I think most kids don't learn manners as well as we were taught them). The fact is that I really like the challenge of doing it--My original plan was to just take action shots of Ryan so I could make a poster for his room, which has a sports theme. That felt a little selfish to do. Maybe not, but this is what I mean by the best of intentions leading me astray.

Ryan and I took a trip a couple of weeks ago, and when he got back I was really swamped with catch-up work. Day after day I had the entry of "finish editing pictures and have them printed", but the task went unchecked.

Oh yeah, that's my real secret to getting good pictures--it has to start as a pretty good picture, but editing really improves them--I divide the image using the "Rule of Thirds" either horizontally, vertically, or diagonally. Then I boost brightness and contrast slightly to make the colors pop out a little more.

Anyway, that takes time, and I had over 100 photos to go through and edit down to one featuring each kid, then send them off to be printed at the photo lab. Fatigue and my busy schedule caused me to put it off, day by day, during the week leading up to the party on Saturday. Fran wanted me to just give it up, and I quickly determined not to even mention it to her again because she was so ticked at me for agreeing to do it in the first place. At this point, she started to say that it was just my idea and that nobody even wanted me to do it.

I had edited all the pictures by Friday night but hadn't burned a CD or anything so I couldn't drop them off for processing (I hate printing them out on my printer because it is expensive and not as nice as real photograph paper). So I woke up early Saturday morning and went to work--I had to crop them to the right size and send them to the Wal Mart photo lab online. As I was in the middle of the final editing stage online, Ryan started asking repeatedly if he could use the computer to play a game. Focused on the task at hand nearing completion, I tuned him out.
Then he started asking me again and again in a whiney voice, which shook me out of my focus (one of his friends always talks with a whiney voice which drives us nuts when he comes over).

So, instead of poised and mature, I slammed my hand down on my desk and bellowed harshly, "Ryan! Cut it out!" which made him bolt into his room and cry. Nice, huh? Mission accomplished. I let us both calm down for a minute, finished submitting the pictures, and then went to apologize, but it really hurt his feelings and he continued sniffling.

This brought Fran around to investigate and I told her the whole story. I guess I could have just lied since I knew that the pictures were already an irritating issue to her and I also knew that she was about to tee off on me once she found out that it had led to me losing my patience with Ryan. I wonder what most people would do--Lie and make up something? I am really terrible at lying, so I would rather just take my lumps.

Of course, by telling Fran this I got the whole story about how she never thought I should have done the pictures in the first place. I felt the insinuation that I was just being a delusional fool and just offering to do something to bring attention to myself. It seems to me that anytime anyone does something nice for someone else, this could be said...You just have to decide which view of life you are going to take. My motivation at that point was just completing something that I said I would do. I wasn't looking for thanks or recognition or anything like that. Parents had seen me on the sidelines taking pictures of their kids and had told me that they were glad I was taking pictures of the team and that they were looking forward to seeing them. It would make me look more foolish to have done that for several weeks and not have anything to show for it. The pendulumn would swing from "Nice guy" to "Wow--he really doesn't have his crap together, does he?" (not mutually exclusive concepts, by the way).

I guess Ryan eventually forgave me for yelling at him and, after days of begging barefooted in the snow, Fran eventually let me back in the house, so all seems to be well. At the party, one of the kids, who had a pretty flattering action shot since he is unusually un-coordinated, turned to his dad and told him "I would really like to learn how to take pictures!", which I took as an indirect compliment.

Sometimes the "small stuff" makes me stop and take a look at my philosophy of life compared to other people's. It's still a work in progress and contains flaws. I know in my heart that my motivations are well-directed, and I guess that's what matters.

Now, back into the cage for another experiment...

Special Delivery

When I went to get the mail last Friday, this magazine, wrapped in a clear plastic bag (to protect it from stray drooling), winked up at me, wedged amongst piles of bills and Christmas ads.

It's funny that Ryan really doesn't have a taste for candy. This Halloween, when we dug out his bag for trick-or-treating (for my non-American acquaintences, please let me know if you don't follow me here...) it was still full of candy from last year that he a) never ate and b) never missed.

Kaitlyn, however, makes up for his lack of a sweet tooth. She often wakes up saying "I want chocolate!" We have a little bag of Hershey's kisses, and we give her one when she craves chocolate. It turns out that she probably has inherited it from me, but sometimes I like to think it at least partly comes from her native Mexican ancestry--you know, the guys who stuff cocoa leaves in their cheeks. Well, maybe not.

At any rate, this magazine cover inspired my evil plan which I immediately set in motion.

I showed it to Kaitlyn, who was just waking up from her nap. She got excited and grabbed the book from my hands just so she could look at it. I told her, "Kaitlyn, maybe Mommy could make this for us!"

Off she ran.

Fran laughingly told me that Kaitlyn had come to her with the magazine asking her to make the chocolate bundt cake on the cover. She thought it was so cute that she saw it and thought to ask her Mommy to make it (wink). Ironically, she had everything, except for the raspberries, that was needed for the cake, so she was tempted to make it. That's the kind of mom that she is, and the reason it was a good idea to put my doll-like daughter up to presenting the proposal rather than doing it myself.

Sure enough, a picture-perfect replica sat on our kitchen table three hours later.

What a life!

Where Have I Been?

First of all, I love this picture of Kaitlyn.

She loves to watch the movie "The Sound of Music", and one day she was inspired to go and find props to match Maria's guitar and suitcase. Not bad creativity for a 2-year-old.

I suppose there's no good single answer to the question of where I've been, though.

Here's kind of the funny, poetic justice answer:

About two months ago when some of Ryan's friends were over playing, they kicked my wireless router over and it disconnected. I came along, in a hurry, and needed to get on the net for some reason or another...When my wireless network failed, I noticed that several of my neighbors have unsecured wireless networks, and I jumped on theirs (in case that might be illegal in some way, you could read it this way: It's possible that my computer somehow, and without my direct action or knowledge, spontaneously connected to a network that may or may not have been my wireless router--at this point I'm really not sure (hee hee) ).

After a while, I kind of forgot that we were doing that and it lasted nearly a month. Finally, I thought to myself "Why keep my service? I have 2 networks with perfect reception on either side of me..."

I'm not saying that this was nice or ethical, but, you know, it was more about seeing if that would work. So I canceled my service.

THE DAY I canceled the service, after poaching it for over a month, the guys on the right put a "For Sale" sign in their yard (no, I don't think I had anything to do with that), and they started the process of moving, which, apparently, includes unplugging the wireless network. So I was down to one network with no backup.

Two weeks ago, the guys in front of us got some kind of different internet connection and didn't put it on their wireless network.

So we were hosed--All I could do was laugh at myself for trying to get away with it.

In the meantime, Ryan and I went out of town. When I came back, we got the new FIOS internet, which is screaming fast, and it cost the same as our old DSL service. In fact, we got all new hardware, etc. so we actually came out way ahead on the deal. Total monthly expenses saved : $0.00.

But for a while there I could only get the internet at work so I didn't feel comfortable posting anything of substance.

It's funny, too--I go through times of feeling self-conscious about my posts and feeling that they are very self-absorbed and trivial. During those times I find it hard to make time to sit down and write. I guess I had one of those episodes too while I took time off.

And, my friend "Anonymous" (his poor mom couldn't think of anything else to name him?) is moving away, and that's depressing too.

At any rate, I'm all Blogger/Google upgraded so I think it should be easier to post pictures and other stuff, so I'll get back in the swing of things and catch up on the now-elapsed moments of brilliance and hilarity.