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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
We went to Branson to visit Abby’s Mimi and Papa about a month ago. We’ve been to Branson many times because Gina’s parents live there, but we hardly ever do any Bransony type stuff. We made a mini-vacation out of this trip so we thought it would be appropriate to bite the Branson fruit and let the nectar run down our faces. Gina’s mom works at a big resort and she got us a very nice suite to stay in. The place has several swimming pools so Abby was pretty happy about that. A huge draw in Branson is the World’s Largest Banjo. As you can see in the picture the neck goes all the way out the window.
It rained a lot on Tuesday, so to get out of the house, which was driving both of us to madness with Gina out of town for a few days, we went for a drive. Eventually we found ourselves at Harris Brake Lake in Perry County, west of Little Rock. The clearing storms created some cool clouds. For the photo I metered on the clouds and then threw some light on Abby with the pop-up flash.
After the photo session we walked down to the water’s edge so Abby could throw some rocks. She asked if she could put her finger in the water and I nodded. Just before she got her finger wet she looked up and asked, “Are there any sharks in this lake?”
I don’t know. She was making some kind of fish face.
Kickin’ it poolside.
When I was a young’n, just about every weekend I would go with my Dad to my Grandma’s place in DeQueen, where I would be made to do all sorts of slave labor. One of the main things I would slave away at was mowing the vast lawns on her 3 acres during the summer. I actually kind of enjoyed the mowing. Grandma had a lawn tractor, so it wasn’t particularly strenuous, and I’d do a lot of good thinking while mowing. It sure beat the hell out of cutting firewood, the other main chore I was forced to participate in. You can’t think well and load firewood at the same time.
The best part of mowing, however, took place for only a few weeks during June when the wild plums were ripe. Grandma had a couple of wild-plum thickets on her place and few free-standing plum bushes. Every time I’d pass a thicket or a bush, I’d get a big handful of plums and eat them while I mowed. Grandma would also make jelly out of those plums. The best jelly I’ve ever had.
Gina wanted to get some pictures of Abby in honor of her reaching the milestone of becoming 3 years old, so we headed out to the little historic homesteader cabin at Burns Park with my picher takin stuff. This is some of what we came back with.
