April Fools

I wear hats much of the time

..these days and standing in the grocery store in Lenoir, North Carolina, intently reading the label on a jar, I felt a light tug on my jacket and turned to see a small older woman with tight curls in her thin blond (Clairol) hair.  She had this weird little impish grin on her face as she asked me without any introduction, "Do you know what kind of man wears the biggest hat?"

As my mind whirled trying to figure out if this was an off color joke or maybe just being a busy body attempting to make a point, I finally decided to bite and ask, "No Ma'am, I sure don't."
She gives me this Goober Pyle smile and blurts out, "The man with the biggest head!"

"OK..," I'm thinking, "What's this all about?"  I gave a nervous little laugh as my eyes darted around looking for the TV cameras.  If I had any notoriety at all, I would be looking for an Ashton Kutcher Punk'd crew hanging out but this is in hard core Mayberry RFD territory and wasn't likely.

With no film crews visible, I then began looking for an escape route down one of the aisles in case she pulled an ice pick or Beretta from her purse but just before I took flight, she perked up and said, "Made you laugh, didn't I?"

I nervously chuckled, "Yes ma'am, you did."  They say some folks laugh when they don't know what else to say or do and I was still looking for an escape route.

Still smiling, she perked up again, blinked her eyes and told me "Bye!", as she ambled off down by the pasta.

This Mayberry thing is going to take a little more "getting used to."

Spring is bursting out all over

As the buds begin to pop open and little creatures come out to play in the sun, so do the denizens of Lenoir, North Carolina.  Warm temperatures and shiny days bring the best out in everyone.  Reminiscent of times 50 years ago, the spirit of Andy, Barney and the characters of Mayberry burst forth with innocence as you hear gospel singing in restaurants and warm greetings between the street sweeper and shop keepers addressing each other by their first names.

Almost script like, the mannerisms of this small town, where hosiery companies and furniture lords once prospered, takes you back to kinder and gentler times.  With deep fried southern accents all the norm, you almost want to believe it's all a hoax and somehow you've been caught up in some corny play or a glitch in a time machine but the charm is very real and I like to think the world is a better place for communities like this.


Perhaps, I'll be working here another few weeks but it will take much more time than that to grow an affinity for livermush (look it up) and Carolina styled barbecue. 

Super Moon

While in Raleigh, North Carolina, this weekend, I slipped out to take a shot at the Super Moon.  It's trajectory brings it closer to Earth than it has in 18 years.  Fear mongers were crawling out of the woodwork, predicting more earthquakes, tidal waves, and natural disasters bigger than Al Gore's global warming head.

I admit, the moon would have looked better had there been some other objects in the frame with it but there simply wasn't anything near me that would have worked.  Plus, I really needed something in the 1000 mm range to make it really work.

On a tripod, Nikon D60, 200 mm digital (equivalent to a 300 mm in film cameras), ISO 100, Aperture 5.6, shutter speed of 1/500 second.  Cropping was necessary.

In North Carolina

A couple of weeks ago, I said adieu to Sonoma, California wine country and headed east to North Carolina.

Being in North Carolina.  Pros: the food is down home and folks here do not have that much of accent.  Who am I kidding, they think I talk like a Yankee.  Cons: the hardwood vegetation hasn't developed it's green yet and it's hard to find something that isn't gray.

This has been the first weekend I've had free to roam so I spent most of it hiking through some of the parks along the Blue Ridge Parkway such as Linville Falls. Waterfalls, yep there are a few.  I've hiked so much, my bunions are complaining but it's been very nice.

The falls on the right were only .7 miles from the parking lot but the experience gave me an intimate knowledge of North Carolina's rock, mud and tree root system.

From the Blue Ridge Parkway

Near Linville Falls

I am a fan of Timothy Allen

If I could go back and change a few turns in my life, this is how (at least on the surface) I would have done it. 

In 1993, after receiving a degree in zoology at Leeds University, Timothy Allen spent 3 years traveling Indonesia before signing onto an aid convoy to Bosnia for a report while working toward another degree in photography.  Six months later, he dropped out of school and began working with the Sunday Telegraph.  Through a series of changes, he has worked all around the globe.

If you have 7½ minutes, entertain yourself with collection of some amazing photography.

 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-12618167

 If you have even more time, here's a a lot more.

President's Day Weekend (or "Doing the City")

Instead of flying home for a quick turnaround, Darlene came to see me, arriving Wednesday night.  Years since she had once lived on Travis Airforce Base, she wanted to see how it had changed in 43 y......er...a few years ago.

Darlene doesn't travel well so it takes a day or so for her to catch up after flying.  With that, she pretty much laid up in the bed Thursday while I worked.  Friday turned out to be a wet and drizzling day so we pretty much went shopping, did a winery/olive tour and changed hotels.  Stopping off at the Jacuzzi Winery and Olive farms, we had fun tasting dipping oils and a moderate amount of wine tasting.

Saturday proved to not much better weather wise and eventually wound up in Old Sacramento for a nice dinner after the kind folks at Travis AFB deemed Darlene a threat to national security and wouldn't let us on the base.  Actually security, as you might imagine, is pretty strict these days and since we had no sponsor to vouch for us they told us to hit the road.

Sunday, we could see Mt Diablo from our hotel room in Suisun City so we did the city, the whole ball of wax....bridge, downtown, trolley cars, cheap camera shops, Ghiradelli, Fisherman's Wharf, Lomard and pretty much the whole nine yards.

It was Chinese New Year so we thought we'd see what that was all about.  Driving up Pacific, we see this guy in the middle of the street pointing at us and yelling something.  As we got a little closer, I rolled the window down, I found out he was a street person engaged in free enterprise.  "Mike", it seems, found street parking signs for people, held back cars while they parked and insinuated he would watch over the cars while we did China Town.  Unspoken, it was a GREAT idea to tip Mike so that the car would not be broken in to while we were out.  It was worth the five bucks.

Monday, Darlene and I had a great time traveling over to South Lake Tahoe.  The place recently had a huge snow and snow machines had left banks of the white stuff so deep we couldn't really get out and take pictures along the way.  However, we did get out near the lake and play around.

Putting her back on the plane Tuesday morning, I hated to see her go because we had such a great holiday weekend.





 
 
 

  

The Golden Gate Experience

Last weekend, I figured on going down to San Francisco and spend the day taking a few artsy pictures of the Golden Gate Bridge from places I had not been before.  Looking on the map, I found Baker Beach so after 30 minutes of trying to find a place to park, I bundled up my tripod and backpack full of camera and lenses and ambled off down the beach toward the bridge.

As soon as I got down to the water's edge, I put my pack down and changed the lens on my Nikon to a 18-55 kit zoom lens, the widest angle piece of glass I owned.  There were people walking up and down the beach, some with dogs, a couple of people pushing baby carriages with sand tires and the usual day at the beach folks. Complacent in my surroundings, I busied myself with camera settings and attaching the tripod.
 
These days, I purposely choose manual settings on my camera (control freak that I am), adjusting light, ISO, shutter speeds, etc. I fired off a few frames then dropped the camera down to see how they were looking and then I noticed....yep, right there in all his glory......a nekid man (we Southerners say it like that) sauntering down the beach.  I'm a big boy or old man, however you want to look at it, so I can take all that in stride very well.  Pondering the idea of a naked guy on the beach made me to look around and in doing so, I realized there probably were maybe a dozen or so folks in the same state of dress.  Off up against the hill there was a congregation of people of whom some seemed to be in the nude and as I approached the rocks nearer to the bridge, realized there were a couple more laid out on the rocks.

I thought I would like to climb out on the rocks where a couple of dozen people were for a different shot of the bridge. On my approach, I came face to face with an older man just sitting there wearing nothing but a hat, shades and a smile.  Young teen girls were passing in front of him undeterred.  Me? I'm thinking that I've discovered at least one source of lesbianism.  If I were a young female and came up on such a sight, I would either have to gouge my eyes out with a stick or I would be turned off of the idea of men forever.

On returning back to the hotel later that evening, I Googled "nude beach San Francisco" and found that there are several beaches like this in California and at least four in the Bay area.

Yep, I think I may have discovered a source of lesbianism.

Feeling Guilty...........um....almost

With all the horrid weather in sweeping across much of the country, I feel just a little guilty as I find myself wintering in northern California's Sonoma County,  Well....some...yeah, some.


I'm hearing stories about -27 °F in Oklahoma, waist deep snow in New York and hard freezes in Louisiana.  That's just terrible!

So, with all the weather friends and family are experiencing let me apologize for enjoying myself and let me feel dirty for having to drive through miles of vineyards and rolling hills on the way to work each day.

However, I feel like I've paid my dues.  It hasn't been that long that I've flown into blizzards in Detroit and let sleet bounce off my head in Grand Rapids but for the sake of those still fighting it, I'm sorry.

Yeah, that's it.  I'm sorry.  Can we all feel better now?

Me, the motorcyle "wrench"

In the motorcycle world, there are those who are fair weather riders.  Some won't ride when it's too hot, too cold, raining or the wind is blowing from the wrong direction.  Of these, I am not counted.  I ride, simply because I have the bike and do not want to be one of those people who have a Harley sitting in the garage gathering dust.  There are people out there who can tear down a motorcycle, put it back together then get on and ride it.  They're called Wrenches. 

I've rebuilt and replaced starters, fluid changes and way back in the day, replaced tires.  So when Boudreaux's rear tire had become pretty slick, I decided to do it myself.  I've done it before and shouldn't be that big of a deal, right? Heh!

Previously, I had bought a Metzeler rear tire and tube online and it had been sitting next in a corner since before Christmas.  Saturday morning I decided it was high time I mounted it, so I enlisted the aid of my brother-in-law, Gary, to oversee my project.  While he was on the way over, I jacked the bike up, removed the side bags and had almost removed the wheel before he got there.  With a little effort, we completely release the wheel from the frame and went about the task of taking the tire off the rim.  We were so proud of ourselves for having the old tire off the rim within 20 minutes and no skinned knuckles.

Now for mounting the new one.  I unpacked the tube to discover it was the wrong type and just would not work.  Rats!  It is a mail order tube I needed one right then so a trip into town to the Harley shop for a much more expensive one.

Once home, we went about the chore of mounting the new tire and tube.  Between the two of us, we fought that spoked rim all over the garage floor, the driveway and back again. We got the tire half way on and tried to stuff the tube in but it sounds much easier than done.  We even went inside to watch a YouTube video on the art and process of tire changing.  Somewhere in the process, I got the bright idea of lubricating the tire so it would slip in easier.  Well, it slipped in alright. Somehow we slipped the whole rim into the tire completely with both sides inside the tire lips.  Darlene encouraged us by asking how much I had saved by buying the tire online and doing it myself.

By now, we're both tired and disgusted.  It's now 4:30 PM and we've wasted four hours and not any closer to having it completed than we did just after taking it off the bike.  Completely dejected, we decided the best thing to do would be to take it to a shop, admit defeat and pay someone with the right equipment to do it for us.  Gary will undoubtedly take it to a shop for me, explain it's not his and belongs to his idiot brother-in-law and some time in the future Darlene will remind me about the incident when I decide to make my own repairs again.

Sometimes, you just need a professional to do things and not be a Renaissance man.  Admitted, I'm not much of a wrench.