The Ice Storm Cameth
A trip to our house in Johnson (between Springdale and Fayetteville) confirmed the reports I had gotten: The Epic Ice Storm of 2009 devastated our backyard trees and caused minor damage to the house. A couple of the trees looked like they have enough branches remaining to make a lopsided recovery, so I guess that’s good. And the shed that sits amongst the trees appeared to have not been hit at all. Limbs and branches surround it like it was protected by an invisible force field.
Journey Rules
For some reason I’m quite taken with this defacement of public property I came across while out driving through the hoity-toity part of Little Rock.
I like that the tagger took the time and forethought to use letter stencils. The stencil allows the unlawful additions to the sign to mesh well with the official stencil used for the word STOP. He or she could have just scrawled the words freehand, but he or she knew that wouldn’t cut it. Not when you’re referencing one of the all-time great arena rock anthems.
This little bit of ephemera has taken my mind off a knotty issue that seems to have no solution. Abby and I generally grow bored and thirsty early in the afternoon and more often than not go to a nearby Sonic to take advantage of their happy hour, during which drinks are half price. I get a large Coke and Abby gets a small Sprite. A bargain at $1.48.
For at least six visits in a row, the straw incisions on my cup lid have been torn, which creates a dangerously sloppy seal around the straw. (These visits have stretched across at least three Sonic outlets.) Abby’s small-cup lid is always pristine. The only thing I can figure is that the large lids are being stored on some sort of rod and are just jammed on there by unfeeling employees. It’s no way to treat an innocent cup lid.
Yes, these are the things that occupy my mind now that I don’t have a job.
A Warm Day
Hallelujah, we got a warm day. Abby and I headed to Pinnacle Mountain to fly a kite. Unfortunately, the wind wasn’t blowing much at all. Note the kite laying on the ground. So we spent three hours on the playground see-sawing, sliding and swinging. I was playing around with balancing flash and ambient light. Abby was between the camera and the sun. I exposed for the sky and then fired the flash off camera at Abby’s shadow side.
Street Car Named Boredom
Ever since Abby saw the street car in the Little Rock River Market back around Christmas she’s wanted to ride it. The bone chilling cold kept us both inside all day Thursday and we were about ready to do harm to each other. We had to get out.
My original intention was to go to the Children’s Museum of Discovery in the River Market where I knew it would be warm and I hoped it would provide hours of entertainment for Abby. When we got down there and she saw the street car, she started screaming “Ride It! Ride It Now!” I had no choice.
Abby Picasso
Bitter-cold days are the bane of the stay-at-home-dad. It didn’t get above freezing today. It was one of those days where you don’t even want to get into a car to go somewhere else even if your destination is in a warm building. You have to get all those extra clothes on and there’s the hunching of the shoulders against the cold wind. Then the car is cold until you’re almost to where you’re going. And you’ll have a cold walk from the parking lot. And then on the way home the car will be cold again. All of that is at least doubled with a 2-year-old. Especially if she insists on sitting in the driver’s seat and jacking with the steering wheel and pushing the radio buttons for five minutes while you stand in cold.
The best bet is to stay inside. It turns out that little kids don’t really care about the cold, but they care about being bored. Even if they don’t understand that boredom is what they are feeling. Not even Abby can watch Dora the Explorer all day without getting tired of it. So I busted out the finger paints in the hopes that I could keep her entertained for about 15 minutes or so. I also thought I could get some good pictures of her covered in paint.
Extra Reach
I’ve been running my new telephoto lens through its paces the last few days. It’s a Nikon 70-300mm VR 4.5/5.6 that got on sale when the Circuit City in Fayetteville went belly up. I got it back at the beginning of December, but hadn’t gotten a chance to really use until last week. It’s really a consumer-type lens so I expected it to be visibly wonky at certain apertures and at the long and short ends of the zoom range. After I bought it, I read Ken Rockwell’s assessment of the lens and started thinking I might have picked up a true bargain. With crop factor on the my camera, this lens is the equivalent of a 105-450mm lens on a 35mm camera frame. That extra reach is nice for those wildlife shots.
The top shot is some sort of gull I shot at the Big Dam Bridge in Little Rock. Those birds gather in great numbers at the Dam and swoop all over and under the bridge so they come in pretty close to you. It was the first time I’d ever tried shooting birds on the wing with a camera. I burned off about 500 frames and only got five shots I felt were usable. They fly pretty fast and when they come in close enough to fill the frame, they are really moving. It’s tough to keep up with them.
Fried Sea Creatures
The Oyster Bar is one of Little Rock’s signature joints. When we lived here before it had always been on my list of places to eat, but I just never got around to it. Tonight, based on the urging of Jodie and Laney, we got around to it.
It’s Abby Wednesday
It’s Week 4 of the Stay-At-Home Dad Experiment. Yesterday we hit a library in West Little Rock. Today, with the sun out and temperatures much more reasonable, we made it to a couple of parks.
I was experimenting with the 70-300mm lens that I got a bargain on in Circuit City’s liquidation sale in Little Rock. It seems to work decently for portraits and I got a few bird shots a the parks. I think I’ll post a few of those over on Flickr.
Waylon Rules!
I loves me some Waylon Jennings.
When I was about 13 years old my dad bought a brand new, brown Chevy four-wheel drive pickup that came complete with a cassette player. Cassette decks didn’t come standard in vehicles in 1983 (at least not in Chevy pickups) and, as I recall, I was instrumental in convincing Dad to have the cassette player added.
In order to have something to play in it, he bought a cassette of the Waylon album “It’s Only Rock And Roll.” I don’t know why he picked that particular record. I don’t remember him particularly being a music fan, though my parents did have a bunch of LPs and I remember some Johnny Cash 8-tracks getting some play at our house. I had a few LPs and some cassettes, but they were mostly top-40 type stuff. I have fond memories of owning the J. Geils Band’s “Freeze Frame.” My favorite song was “Piss on the Wall”, for obvious reasons. I also had the Kool and the Gang cassette with “Celebration” on it.
Ice, Ice Baby
We had one of those ice storms today where it was cold enough for the rain to freeze on power lines and BBQ grills and decorative aluminum eagles but not cold enough to freeze on the streets. Icicles make good subjects for shallow-depth-of-field experimentation. Black and white just captures the moment so nicely.
Ice storms in general are hell on stay-at-home dads. Cold rain means staying inside, which means keeping Abby entertained is quite a bit harder. With the holidays over and everyone back at work and out-of-town guests back at home, our options for staying occupied narrowed considerably. We worked on our numbers and letters and she miraculously took a nap.
iPhone Fun
I’m having a little fun with the iPhone Gina handed down to me when she started her new job and got a company issued cellphone. I’ve been going wild today downloading applications from the App Store. I got one that geotags photos and uploads them to Facebook and one dealing with weather and one that gives sunrises and sunsets times. And I got one that lets me post to the blog right from the phone. I’m using that one right now. I shot the photo this afternoon with the phone at our neighborhood park.
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