It’s not a comprehensive listing.
But it’s a fun dive through some of the video captured in the past six months or so when one or the other of us remembers we have a video function on the camera. Only wish we had captured a few more of you!
Category Archives: Photography
Something New Everywhere You Look
There has been much activity on the north porch this week.
Every room at the Robin Inn has been occupied by busy mamas-to-be.
There’s the fresh green of new grass exploding in the east and west yards…
… and freshly cleaned windows out of which to see it.
There has also been a fresh layer of snow.
This is Idaho. This is how a week in spring rolls here. Now you see ’em…
… now you don’t.
Most of the local residents find the return of the snow a little disheartening…
… while others still retain a wild enthusiasm for the stuff.
Seriously… wild. Winnie ADORES a good romp in fresh snow, even, apparently, in the middle of May.
And look what flowed out of Rick this afternoon. There are new surges of creativity and talent…
… and a new opportunity unfolding that we find VERY exciting.
Stand by…
Questions About A Puzzle
This past Christmas, Rick brought three new 1000 piece puzzles into our world, God bless him.
Puzzles are as much a part of the deep freeze of January as is chunky home-made chicken noodle soup, waking up to blindingly brilliant soft rime frost, and the awareness that the time has come to settle in ’cause Christmas is over, and it’s going to be a freakin’ long time until you can walk around outside in your bare toes.
Accordingly, we started this Ravensburger puzzle when we were in our home in Teton Valley in January. Ravensburger puzzles are usually a delight to work with: no hanging chads where the blades didn’t cut deeply enough, a lovely matte finish that is silky to the touch, and a satisfying heft to each piece that results in a brisk “snap” when they find their way home.
This particular image is derived from a 1992 painting called “The Singing Butler” by the Scottish artist, Jack Vettriano, and it was my favorite of the three puzzles Rick had bought.
I’m not sure it counts as “fine art,” but as far as puzzle subjects go, it’s a beautiful image. Deeply romantic, yet filled with many layers of anthropologically significant variables, it pairs the visual search for related colors and shapes with an intellectual search for answers to questions that arise as the figures emerge.
Who is this couple, and why is she barefooted in an exquisite red silk evening dress on a windy beach in the rain? What is the significance of the servants wearing hats while both socialites go bareheaded? And where the hell is that piece that’s missing on the horizon?
At first it was brisk going.
However, once we had all the differentiated colors neatly snapped into place, we were left with approximately 300 pieces of stiff cardboard spread across the east end of the dining room table, all roughly the same color of muddy gray.
There aren’t many fun questions one can ask about 300 pieces of stiff muddy-gray cardboard.
I confess: I bailed. Rick, on the other hand, doesn’t bail easily. He methodically sorted all the pieces into their like shapes: single “outies” with single outies, doubles with doubles, and so on. He would then sit with his morning coffee and patiently review angles and shapes and outies and nuances of mud, occasionally making that begrudging grunt of success that comes with a smidgen of satisfaction incommensurate with a ridiculous amount of effort.
Eventually, it was time to return to California. We actually discussed offering to pack up and mail the disassembled pieces to the first person who responded that they would promise to complete the puzzle and send us a photo to post. The question at that point was all Rick’s to answer: Cry “uncle” and send it to a more worthy puzzle doer? Or leave it to mingle with the dust bunnies and pick up where we left off the next time we were in the Valley?
Did I mention Rick has a teeny tenacity streak in him?
We left the project in stasis to wait for our return.
And the dang thing was still there when we got back.
It mocked us every time we sat down to eat.
Rick did not do the only sane thing left to do at that point, which was to quit. He did the only other thing left to do, which was to painstakingly work his way around the space, piece by grunting piece. And this was the biggest question of all: why? Why does a person continue to patiently stay the course in a leisure activity where the maximum return on investment that can be hoped for is that you can finally say, “I finished.”
I don’t know. It’s not the way I roll. When something I’m doing for fun ceases to feel like fun, I’m already out the door in my new roller skates.
However, this is why we make such a good couple. When I’m ready to quit, Rick’s ready to persevere. When I’m ready to panic, he’s ready to stay calm. And when I’m ready to stick a brown bag over my head to block the sight of a stack of correspondence, he’s ready to pick up the letter opener and deal with the bills to be paid and the forms to be filled out and returned.
I’m good at finding the stamps, though.
It’s a symbiotic relationship. We both play our part.
One early morning last week I woke up to find a very chilly Rick-shaped spot in our bed. He had woken at 4:30 a.m. to the siren call of the Ravensburger and was just finishing it when I dragged my caffeine-craving bones downstairs to the dining room.
Boy! Were we ever glad we had NOT gone with The Great Puzzle Challenge to our readers.
No one would have thanked us for sending them a VERY difficult puzzle that was missing three pieces, straight out of the box.
Grrrrrr.
For sale: One gently used puzzle.
BTW, we figured out that Winston LOVES to sneak and hide puzzle pieces. Bad dog!
Road Signs
We usually have a good three hours of asphalt behind us before the sun comes up and the camera comes out.
This is good: it’s a mercy to get one fifth of a 15-hour day already logged before one’s butt is fully awake and accurately registering pain.
The day ahead is always a mystery. What will the next 12 hours bring for us? What glories will the skies of Nevada reveal? Will we make it through Targhee National Forest by light of day? Will we finally make our way through Twin Falls without getting lost?
(FYI: 1. Great day. 2. See upcoming post. 3. Yes. 4. YES!! FINALLY! Gotta love the little radiating blue ball on the GPS of the iPad Map App.)
Yesterday morning by 7:22 a.m., these travelers just east of Donner Pass already had their answer as to what their day would bring. The emergency response vehicles passed us just moments before we got there, and by the time we arrived, they had already left with their guests.
We found ourselves briskly attentive to the road signs that followed.
No need to ask twice.
The ticket was by far the lesser motivator at that point.
Road signs are, for the most part, effective in conveying their messages.
This one, however, could use an upgrade.
As it reads now, it could merely signal “Fun roller coaster ahead.” Wouldn’t it be more effective if the car were to tip up on an alarming angle to the right, almost at the point where tires give up and kiss the asphalt good-bye, and the person’s arms were to wave madly in a desperate motion that conveys “Help! Help! I’m about to tumble tonsils over touchas into a snowbank, and I don’t care for the sensation!”?
Some of the signs are just straight up and real time, like thought bubbles from your inner ear.
“Hello?”
“You. Are. Banking. In. A. Decreasing. Radius. Turn. To. The. Left.”
“Thank you. Come again.”
Some of the signage is merely informative and lacking in any specific call to action.
“Occasionally, it gets windy here. Just thought you should know.”
Often there is even an overt unwillingness to commit.
“The bridge may be icy. Then again, it may not be. Just sayin’….”
Other signs take a more declarative stance.
Apparently, there will be deer somewhere in the next ten miles. While there isn’t any suggestion made as to how likely said deer are to leap in front of your particular vehicle on this particular day, the deer’s lawyers will be quick to point out that they declared up front that they were present and milling about smartly.
Some signs are more ominously declarative than others.
I just wrap my arms around my head and hope that Rick is keeping an eye out for the deer.
All in all, we found ourselves grateful for the good persons of the highway sign maintenance division of Highways 80, 93, 30, 15, 26, and 31.
One small note of complaint, though.
After engaging in a new-found respect for the truth in the homily “Forewarned is forearmed,” would it now be too much to ask for sign warmers?
Waves
Do you find it irritating when people take photos of the same dang thing over and over again, like the waves at a particular small beach in Half Moon Bay, and think that other people will find it as endlessly fascinating as they do?
It’s almost as bad as people who just can’t get enough of their own puppy or baby shots.
Sorry.
It won’t happen again.
We have a particular stretch of beach that we rarely visit without our camera, but it’s not what you think.
Okay, in part it’s the thrill of the big boomers accompanying a high surf advisory after a storm that, without the stalwart intervention of The Big Rocks, would surely rip us away in a Current of Doom.
But that’s so cliche.
While, this–a ridiculously wonderful man playing with his ADORABLE puppy at sunset with little lapper wavelets kissing the sand*–is so NOT cliche.
What?? It’s contextually appropriate: waves, rock, light…
Yawn.
The secret, our friends, to endless fascination in location-redundant wave photography lies not in the spectacular, any more than the appreciation of cloud photography is found only in several dandy shots of tornadoes at 400 yards.
And, this secret is only accessible via photography and its inherent ability to slow a wave down to a single moment in time, AND… you played this game as a kid, only then it was called “what shape do you see in the clouds?”
See the snowflake?
No two waves are the same, yet they happen so fast that without a freeze-frame, we can only catch the artistry in the subconscious. Waves explode really, really quickly.
This explains (to us) why some people can visit the same beach every day of the year, year after year, and never get bored with the scenery, while others go once, figure they got all the sand, water, beach glass, yadda yadda figured out, and they’re good, thanks.
We think the parties of the first part have minds that soak in all those amazing lightening-fast shapes and ideas, and then those minds play the images back to them at a more leisurely pace in their sleep. The next morning, they’re standing in that lovely, warm, and safe twilight zone in the shower and… PAF! A brilliant idea appears “out of the blue.”
Get it?
Ever noticed how some types of creative communities congregate at the coastlines? Waves, dude… channels for the Muse.
Sometime it may even work retroactively. For instance, here I can clearly see the crochet circles of my Grandma Fentiman’s Christmas tree ornaments that she made a few years before she died.
Is it any wonder we feel so connected and comforted and whole down by the water?
Just as with clouds, you can see the speed of charging horses…
… and the fearsomeness of huge “Monsters, Inc.” style beasties charging in on you, gargantuous hairy paws grabbing at your head over the only line of defense, poor rocks… Hold on, rocks!
ACK!
So, aren’t you glad that the only actual hairy paws you’ll have to deal with from the beach will need to be rinsed gently in clear water before coming in the house so they don’t get sand all over the couch or develop an allergic reaction to salt water between the toes?
We thought so.
* I know that should be an actual em dash, but I don’t know how to do the html coding for that. Rick does, but he’s not at home right now, which is why I was able to sneak in such sweet photos of him with Winnie at the beach. It was worth it, right?
Homework
If you simply must deliver corporate-ish work on a Saturday, it’s important to retain that laid-back weekend feeling in the backdrop. Otherwise, you find yourself on Monday morning in a gently bitter “where the hell did my weekend go?!” state of mind.
For instance, before sitting down to work, it’s important to make sure the dog has been walked, fed, watered, scratched, and has had his puppy psyche sufficiently oogie-boogied.
This is especially true for non-stop rainy days.
There are penalties to be paid for failure in this regard, if one can call an impromptu lap visitation by 65-pounds of bored puppy a “penalty.”
True… it does make managing paperwork and notes tricky.
Plus, for humans it’s fairly easy to be sucked into the canine mysteries of just what is going on out there, anyway? The distraction is intensified when the vigilant stare is accompanied by deep bass under-the-breath threats of warning and curiosity and bravado.
Things lead to things…
Did you know that an eight month-old puppy still retains a remarkable degree of spinal flexibility and can happily fold backwards into a complete keyboard neutralization pose? They should make this a yoga standard known as the “The Canine Collapse.”
The moment passed, unfortunately. I returned to my work, Rick put the camera down, and Winnie could be heard out of the corner of my ear munching happily on a bone.
Not.
Good thing that through the keyboard shenanigans, I was able to stay logged into the corporate network and send the work I eventually finished. Otherwise, it would have been a classic case of…
“… Sorry, Aart. The dog ate my homework.”
A Kinder, Gentler Tsunami
No, we’re not completely nuts.
And yes, we did go down to our beach on Friday’s glorious spring morning in the company of about fifteen of our neighbors to watch the tsunami surges come in.
In defense of our decision to head towards the water when there was a tsunami warning for our area, please note: the warning was for a 3-4 foot wave during the low of low tide, and we were standing on a cliff 50 feet above the beach where the crows fly at eye level. Plus, it was a beautiful day, and Hwy 92 was completely jammed with the sane people who were “heading for higher ground,” so there would be no heading over the hill any time soon anyway. (There were still cars parked at the summit when I came home from work later on, leading one to the conclusion that there are some VERY nervous people out there.)
In addition, this was our second “potential tsunami with lots of warning” experience in just over a year, so I suppose we were a little more seasoned and calmer about the whole thing.
After all, we walk past this sign every day. It points to our house on the hill.
As the surge started, the water receded farther than we had ever seen it before at any low tide.
Within about three minutes, it had pushed into a decent high tide. We shot some video of one of the surges.
We’ve seen some pretty spectacular water down there in the past year.
But this, while not overly dramatic from an “Oh My! Look at those waves!” kind of way, was amazing to watch. The water just keep coming in, uncoupled from the usual “sets of seven” wave behavior. These weren’t merely waves: this was a tsunami.
We were watching incredibly pure, powerful and beautiful liquid energy pulsing across the empty, broad, beach.
This sand is accustomed to the pounding surge, and no one here was going to get hurt, which made our experience merely benignly fascinating. This, in stark contrast to the videos we watched of the horrific Sendai experience as it unfolded, made our privileged perch that much more profound and sobering.
Why do some people get to live in peace and safety while others don’t?