I wrote this wearing only a towel

I feel very much like someone has had their finger on the Fast Forward button of my life lately.

Here's what has happened in the last month that I have neglected to document.

Megan is learning a lot at preschool. Here she is swimming in a corn pit with her fellow scholars, undoubtedly for some kind of physics or higher calculus lesson.


This is the first year that Megan has been old enough to anticipate Halloween, and she has been getting ready for it for months. She has been helped in her endeavors by a big package from Grandma, and a lot of fun activities with Kim.


Henry and Megan have been having a great time together. I'm getting a little nervous about what it's going to be like when Henry is as mobile as Meg.




Along with getting some teeth, Henry has graduated to "eating" rice cereal. He doesn't seem to like it much, but really, who would?


Kim and I celebrated our 6th anniversary with a romantic picnic for two on the Potomac. Sadly, our romantic picnic was crashed by our little sidekicks. Megan took this picture. I think she has an eye for photography like her dad -- look at the framing, with the Martinelli's bottle in the foreground.



My parents had a long layover in Baltimore, so we rented a big van and drove up there to have lunch with them and their friends. They brought a giant rain storm with them, but it was great to see them anyway.



Finally, we had our ward's annual Lobster Fest, where $12 bucks will get you a full lobster, flown in fresh that day and cooked on site.



That's right -- when you live in a blue state (don't forget, according to the McCain campaign, we're in the "communist" part of Virginia), you get lobster and sushi at ward activities.



Stay tuned for an overabundance of Halloween pictures.

Oh, I nearly forgot. Remember my bike accident back in June? Well, I've been ignoring the fact that my foot never felt better, until about a month ago when Kim convinced me to finally go to the doctor. Turns out I had a fracture and a tendon injury that have never healed because I've been walking around on them. I guess I'm a little too tough for my own good. The doctor promptly slapped me into a knee high boot and asked me to start using a cane. That's right -- a cane. Give me a monocle and a top hat and I'd be Mr. Peanut.

Here is a video of Megan picking up on her dad's problem.

My Favorite Pictures

I was too lazy to transfer the most recent pictures from our camera, so I decided do a post using what was readily available on our hard drive.

Like most of my interests (gardening, guitar playing, analyzing literature, raising kids, etc.), photography is something I enjoy without actually taking the time to learn to do it properly. No one else ever says so, but I maintain the feeling that I have some innate talent.

So here on public display is my first photography exhibition. It was 6 years in the making, spans a wide array of themes and techniques, and is arranged in loosely related categories. Before you bash it too much, keep in mind that all of these photos were taken with a point-and-click camera that I never even read the owner's manual for.

First up -- New Orleans, January 2007. Ostensibly I went for an academic conference, but I was really more interested to see the aftermath of Katrina a year and a half on. An acquaintance was working there with a relief agency, and she took me on a tour of the ninth ward.

In an example of what would be considered foreshadowing in a literary work, I snapped this through the car window a few minutes before we actually got to the devastated area. A light rain had begun falling.

I shot rolls and rolls of digital film, but nothing seemed to capture the absoluteness of the destruction as well as this home.


A little to the west I took a number of pictures that captured the expanse of the Texans skies. I'll only subject you to these two.


As mentioned above, I have no training in photographic theory at all, so maybe someone else could explain to me why I like this next shot so much.


These next few shots fit into a theme I call COLOR.

Here is a boy, a hookah and a silver shop in Urfa, Turkey, on the Syrian border. I also love the perspective of this shot, with the hookah in the foreground.

Muted colors that have been amazingly preserved hundred of years in a cave in Cappadocia, Turkey.

It rained ice on us once in Austin. This little bit of spring was caught unaware.

An avalanche of colors opposite a dome that we hiked on at least three occasions in central Texas.

I continue the leaf theme with this shot of the tree in my front yard in Arlington, VA. We had just moved in, and were very excited about the prospect of a real autumn. I laid on my back to get this shot.

With the previous shot, we're also moving into my LIGHTING section. This next picture was an incredible closeup of my kidney stone, made possible with my camera only by virtue of my incredible skill. Don't believe me? You try getting a photo that shows the texture of a paper towel -- Brawny offered me hundreds for this shot, if I'd just photoshop out the bodily excretion...


I'm usually not able to set up lights as I did in the previous shot, so it helps to have my camera with me when I come across just the right lighting. This is an Indiana Jones kind of shot from the same town where Abraham lived.

The purity of the white crib and bedding, the brilliance of the heaven-sent light spilling in through the window, the curiosity of two reunited siblings, meeting each other in the flesh for the first time.

The turquoiseish NICU binky that spoiled it all.


I spotted this Spielbergian light a short ways off, and told Kim when to snap this next shot. Just a father and his daughter heading upriver into the reaches of a shared imagination, that's all. This is the picture I'll think of when Megan graduates college.

I like water, and waterfalls. I would love to live in Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater. This next shot is the culmination of many MANY attempts to mess with the shutter speed on my crummy camera.

This is in the Turkish city of Antalya, where this giant freshwater river spills into the Mediterranean. My photography skills have nothing to do with how beautiful it is.

This next shot fits into my WATERFALLS section, but also segues into my exploration of evening and night photography. This is a river choked with burnt logs from forest fires in Yellowstone. One of the few pictures on here that I took pre-digital camera, I actually like how scanning it into the computer stripped out some of the color and gave it a more austere look.

Standing in the rain on the beaches of Lago Pucón, on a trip to Southern Chile in 2006.


This is my best example of chiaroscuro, and looks more like a painting than a photo. It is an evening shot of Eden, Utah, after fiddling with a number of the settings on my camera and moving slightly as I took the picture. It has been the picture on my desktop for a year and a half.

A barn and windmill in Des Moines, Iowa on the 4th of July. It does not get any more Americana than that. This picture is also the result of hundreds of previous attempts at capturing fireworks on camera.


Learning to capture fireworks helped in shooting under a full moon. This shot is from the reflecting pool facing from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on the night of Martin Luther King day in 2008.

Same night, I just turned around to snap the memorial itself where King delivered his "I have a Dream" speech.


This is my best shot of a lunar eclipse. The first time I tried to capture an eclipse I didn't warn Kim, I just got out of bed at three in the morning, and an hour later Kim wandered out to find me in our parking lot in Texas in my pajamas. None of those shots turned out as good as this one from my front porch in Virginia.


Also taken on my front porch, this is the full moon over my rose bushes. I don't really have any idea how my camera captured so much color, but I love this shot.

My UTAH series:

I've tried many times to take panoramic pictures, and this has been my best attempt. This is on top of Mt. Ogden, after I climbed up through Snowbasin. It was also taken pre-digital camera, which means I had no help in lining up the shot.



I have to confess that Kim took this shot on a trip when I wasn't even in Utah, but it is so stunning that I had to include it. Kim and I always used to drive up over Trapper's Loop in the fall just so we could see the yellow leaves on the aspens.


This was at the top of what later became an excruciating hike of the mountain in front of my parent's house. It was totally worth it.


Same hike, lower on the mountain (during the excruciating part -- I'd been living at sea level way too long.) I love the diversity of Utah's outdoors.


I didn't really know where to stick this one, but it was taken at Christmas time in Austin, and it has such a nostalgic feel to it. I also imagine that the group in the photo can be anyone.

A bird playing in the surf in Corpus Christi.

Another bird on Puget Sound.

And finally, my FAMILY section. Obviously there could be hundreds of pictures here, but since that's what the whole blog really is about, I just picked a handful. If you want to see more, go on a tour of our previous posts.

I don't know what it is about this picture of Megan that works so well for me -- maybe it's the mist that is shining in her asthma inhaler, the intensity of her blue eyes, the fuzzy pajamas, or the toppled stroller she was just playing with. Whatever, she is dang cute.


Blurry as all hell, but look at this little squirrel I found in our Christmas tree.


Another Kim shot -- Megan with her cousin on the shores of Lake Tahoe. I love the way the blue skies and water mix, the snow covered mountains in the distance, and the fact that the girls each have a leg raised and look like they're about to attack.

Megan chasing down her cousins on my side of the family. This could be anywhere, anytime. All kids play the same.


The fantastic metro in D.C. This was Megan's first ride, and she seems so little and the metro station so big. This could also go in my LIGHTING section. For some reasons, no one I ride with ever seems as impressed by this architecture and lighting.

And I end with another shot that holds an almost unexplainable appeal for me. But doesn't my wife embody sexiness in this shot? In this picture she plays the role of the super attractive female that you can't really get a good look at in the museum, so you try to follow her into the next room, only to lose her.



Thanks for coming to my exhibition. I'll put on another one six years from now.