Post Irony

Weird. It’s been weird this week. It feels like a pocket of calm before everything changes – again. Gina’s been out of town this week leaving Abby and me to forge ahead as a duo. Tuesday was extra dull and I asked Abby what she wanted to do and added that watching Calliou was not an option. She said, “Go to the Big Dam Bridge.” So that’s what we did.

I took my 70-300mm telephoto lens with us because I thought maybe there’d be some gulls flying around, but there weren’t. We walked up the bridge and watched a storm over Pinnacle Mountain. Then we walked down the bridge and out on an unpaved trail that branches off the North Little Rock River Trail. Abby was looking for fire ants. She’s taken a liking to stirring up their mounds and watching the ants go nuts and then running away shrieking. We got our shoes muddy and Abby saw some bugs, but no fire ants.

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Abby stood with a stiff, but warm, wind flapping her dress and said “It’s springy out here.” We took her tricycle to Two Rivers Park and toured some of the walking trail. On the way back she noticed a field with scattered jonquils/daffodils and made a beeline for them. Even though I’ve showed her a better way, she has been picking the yellow flowers all over Little Rock by grabbing just below the blooms. She comes up with very short stems that make it impossible to put them in a vase or glass or something.

Then she noticed a small yellow butterfly and took off after it. She didn’t catch it, but she had a good time running through the grass. I was running around too, but she didn’t get a picture of me.

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I got a fancy new tripod and ball head a couple weeks ago and I haven’t really gotten to break it in. I’ve been using an el cheapo model from Wal-Mart for a long time, but I got sucked into the thinking that a decent tripod is worth the big bucks. So I went all out (for me anyway) and got a carbon fiber number from Manfrotto. I paid a little extra to get the carbon because it’s lighter and I do a lot of hiking with my camera. I did get to try it out on a hike and though it’s bigger and more stable than my old junky tripod, it’s about the same weight. The shots of the waterfall I got on that hike weren’t even good enough to put on the blog. The tripod was an excellent buy. It does make a difference. I also was never convinced that a ball head would be that much better than the pan head you get with the cheap ‘pods. I was wrong. It makes a world of difference in the ease-of-use department.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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With a contingent of family in town for the Christmas thing, we went to the Flying Fish in the Little Rock River Market district for some lunch. It’s a chain but it has pretty good catfish. I had what the menu calls the catfish poor boy loaf. It was just your regular po’ boy sandwich. I don’t know what the loaf part is all about. I’m a fan of catfish and central Arkansas is loaded with catfish places.

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Day 5 of the Atay-At-Home-Dad Experiment dawned bright and warm. Hallelujah! After another round with the cable company, Abby and I set out to see the other end of the Little Rock River Trail. The pedestrian bridge over the Murray Lock and Dam is the centerpiece of this part of the trail.

We got to the top in time to watch a barge lock through to the upstream side of the dam. Abby nearly had a tiny heart attack when the big horn blew to signal the opening of the lock, but later when we had made it back to the truck she said, “I was brave when the boat made that loud noise.”

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