Month: August 2009

Saturday Drive

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Arkansas has a split personality. High country and forest lie in the north and west and to the south and east it’s as flat as Kansas. Little Rock sits right on the dividing line. You can drive 30 minutes in one direction and climb a mountain; or drive 30 minutes in the opposite direction and see the curvature of the earth. On Saturday, Abby, Gina, Aunt Jodie and I loaded up and headed to the flat lands, where row-crop agriculture dominates.

On an earlier jaunt I had discovered a country road lined on either side with huge walnut trees that formed a leafy tunnel for a mile or so. We headed back there because I wanted to get a photo looking down the road in some nice afternoon light. That photo idea was a bust. It was still too early in the afternoon and the light was too harsh. We stopped near what looked like an old sharecropper shack to let Abby get out and play in the dirt. A man in a snazzy BMW showed up directly and told us we were on the end of his crop-duster landing strip and needed to move along. So we did.

Heat + Humidity = Sweetness

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Some pretty wicked thunderstorms have kicked up the last two days. Abby and I went out looking for some on Tuesday. We found this one booming across the river at Pinnacle Mountain State Park. Lightning was flashing but it’s impossible to hit the shutter button quick enough to catch it. On our drive home another one caught up with us and put on a light and sound show as we drove down Chenal Parkway. Click on the photos to fill the screen with scary storm goodness.

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New Gear

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The UPS man dropped by on Tuesday in his magical brown truck and brought me a new photographic toy, an ultra-wide-angle lens. Right off the bat I gave Abby the wide-angle-lens-to-the-face treatment.

The lens is a Tokina AT-X Pro SD 11-16mm (IF) DX. I sold my Nikon D40 camera and couple of lenses back in April to fund the purchase of this baby. The damn thing is hard to get. It’s been out of stock at all the reasonable outlets for the last four months. Many of your more sketchy camera dealers have been offering it for $100 to $500 over the regular price, but I knew if I waited long enough I could get the non-gouging deal eventually. I could have gotten one mail order from Hong Kong, but that didn’t seem wise. I finally caught it in-stock at B&H Photo in New York last week. I guess I got my order in soon after their Web site was updated because they were out-of-stock the next day. The lens is supposed to be one of the best ultra-wide-angle lenses for the smaller sensor DSLRs, especially when you factor in the price compared to similar lenses offered by the major camera companies. But apparently the quality varies from copy to copy, which is apparently de rigueur for the off-brand manufacturers. I haven’t given mine the brick-wall test or anything, but it seems to work just fine.

T-Town

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We took a day trip to Texarkana on Sunday to visit my Grandmother and see her new digs at Cornerstone, an assisted living community. She actually has a very nice two-bedroom house in what looks like a regular suburban neighborhood. Apparently the assisted-living part of the deal is that she gets a certain number of meals at the main building and housekeeping services. Abby and Mur-Mur, which is her cutsey-itsy name for great-grandchildren, had a great time playing with Pickles the Plastic Dog.

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I told them to look at the camera for this one. Abby evidently didn’t know where I was and Grandmother evidently didn’t know I was going to take her picture.

Knowledge Is Power

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I’ve let the ol’ Post Irony get a little stale the past couple of months, but I’ve got a reason for that: I’ve gone back to school. It’s something I never thought I’d do. I was never a good student to put it mildly. Starting way back in elementary school, I understood that I would have to be educated to get anywhere in life, but my goal was always to do just enough to get by. I found early on that I was smart enough to just get by without even trying. In some classes, I even made A’s and B’s without intending to. Other classes, usually math or something with a heavy math component, needed actual study to do well, which I wasn’t prepared to do. When I was in the eighth or ninth grade, my parents sat me down and told me they were giving up. It was apparent that I was going to do well in the classes in which I wanted to and do very poorly in other classes. No amount of grounding or taking my TV away was going to change that. I remember being quite relieved that I had outlasted them. That all carried over into college. Luckily, after a lost couple of years I discovered journalism, in which I was able to maintain a B average without much effort. It only took 6.5 years, but I got a degree from a tiny state college in Kansas.