Bad news

James Kim, the CNet gadget guru who went missing in the Oregon wilderness with his wife and two daughters more than a week ago, was found dead today.
His wife and daughters were rescued a couple of days ago when Kati Kim used an umbrella to get the attention of a search helicopter crew. She and the kids stayed with their stranded car and James struck out on foot last Saturday morning to get help.
I remember him from the late lamented TechTV. My condolences to his family and friends. It's a very sad day for the tech community.

I'm a Guinness

You Are Guinness

You know beer well, and you'll only drink the best beers in the world. Watered down beers disgust you, as do the people who drink them. When you drink, you tend to become a bit of a know it all - especially about subjects you don't know well. But your friends tolerate your drunken ways, because you introduce them to the best beers around.

What's Your Beer Personality?

Evan Bayh in '08?

Even though I consider myself a Republican these days, I was raised in a Democrat household.
My grandfather was a township trustee and later the Carroll County (Ind.) treasurer, elected each time as a Democrat. The family archives include a receipt Granddad received for a $1 contribution (that was a substantial amount in those days) to the 1908 presidential candidacy of Democrat William Jennings Bryan. Bryan lost to William Howard Taft, but later served as secretary of state under Woodrow Wilson.
I still revere Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry Truman. I went to JFK's funeral in November, 1963, in Washington, D.C.
But the late 1960s saw the party of my father and grandfather drift farther and farther to the left. I guess I date my estrangement with the Democrat Party to the presidential candidacy of George McGovern. Over the past 30-odd years, the party has pandered to a nutball constituency that shares none of my values. The candidates they fielded in the last two presidential elections - Al Gore and John Kerry - were so flaky and devoid of character, I was astonished that anyone took them seriously.
I fervently hope the party comes to its senses soon, but the hype surrounding Hillary Clinton is worrisome. She's not flaky, she's downright evil and scary.
But yesterday brought the news I'd been hoping for. Sen. Evan Bayh, Indiana's junior senator, announced he's forming an exploratory committee - a first step toward a presidential bid.
Bayh is the son of a former senator (Birch Bayh), was a two-term Indiana governor and is loaded with poise, style and charisma. His wife, Susan, is pretty and whip-smart and they have beautiful children. It doesn't hurt - from my perspective anyway - that he's among the more conservative Democrats in the Senate.
So I could be comfortable with a Bayh presidency, especially if the Republicans don't come up with anyone better than John McCain.
Evan has my vote, for sure, in the primary.
And, if he is elected, he'll rehabilitate Indiana's image on the national stage after the horrible damage done by Dan Quayle.

Doh!

I'm a regular listener to several of Leo Laporte's podcasts and generally learn at least one new useful thing everytime I listen.
Friday's gem was the discovery of Open Office, an open source, free alternative to the pricey Microsoft Office suite that retails for about $400 and has a street price around $330.
I'd been using an obsolete bootleg copy and feeling vaguely guilty about it. Mostly, I was just using Word as a word processor and Outlook as my e-mail client.
I downloaded Open Office and installed it and determined it could, indeed, open and manipulate all of my old MS Office-created files and create files in those MS formats. In fact, I'm composing this post in Writer – the Open Office word processor.
So, without giving it much thought, I deleted Microsoft Office from my computer.
Oops.
As a result, Outlook – complete with all of my saved e-mails and my e-mail address book – went away.
Fortunately, I have almost all of my important e-mail addresses backed up in my Palm/Treo contacts list, so it's not a complete disaster.
But still, I feel like a bonehead for failing to realize that Outlook was a component of Office.
I no longer had a copy of Outlook Express on my computer, so I turned instead to Thunderbird, the open source e-mail client that came with Firefox when I tried it out a month or so ago.
Thunderbird will be more secure, since it's not so thoroughly hacked as is Outlook and Outlook Express, so I guess I'm better off.
But I know I'll be kicking myself in the days and weeks to come whenever it occurs to me that I need a piece of information that resided in those old e-mails that no longer exist.
BTW, you can check out Open Office at openoffice.org
It's a complete office software suite with lots of bells and whistles that was originally developed by Sun Microsystems.

Ouch

Okay, so the anesthetic was incredibly smooth - just dozed off and woke up with amazing clarity. No grogginess or headache.
Turns out the big thing is getting pumped pull of air.
Damn! I've spent the past four hours dealing with savage gas pains and cramping and doing my level best to equalize internal pressures.
The doc found and removed three polyps and sent them off for routine biopsy. I get the results in his office Dec. 6.
Another hour or two and I ought a feel reasonably normal again.

Empty and waiting

It's 5:51 a.m. and I'm scheduled for a colonoscopy in a couple of hours - the first since 1968.
I spent yesterday flushing out the pipes with a liquid diet and a couple of doses of an industrial strength laxative. I suppose I should be hungry this morning, but I'm not.
This is not my idea of a good time and I will be deliriously happy to be done with it.
Maria is taking the day off to be with me for the procedure - I'll need a driver to bring me home since they'll wig me out with drugs. That's something they didn't do 38 years ago. I'm supposed to see this as an improvement, but the desire to remain conscious and in control is pretty strong and I'm not eager to relinquish it.
Friends and even strangers tell me this is no big deal and they're probably right. We shall see.

Adios, Clint

Went to the funeral home visitation last evening for Clint Husted.
I was pleased to see his wife had placed a floral arrangement, including his motorcycle boots and Schuberth helmet on the casket.
There were still bugs on the helmet - the mark of a true BMW rider.
Lots of people there - we stood in line for 90 minutes to express our condolences to Lynnette.
I was pleased to see that the video slideshow of Clint's life included this photo I shot a few years ago in Brown County, Ind. That's Clint on the left and Rich Nathan on the right.
We went to dinner afterward with seven other club members at a restaurant run by the nephew of our club friend Dominick. It's an extremely upscale Mexican place with fabulous food and spectacular presentation. They make fresh guacamole at your table and mix some of the best margaritas I've had.
Unfortunately, Friday night is salsa dancing night and we also got a waiter whose brain imploded when we asked him to calculate separate checks. Forty-five minutes later, Dom siezed control of the situation and declared he'd pay the tab and let us know what our share was by e-mail.
I stuffed myself stupid and slept so poorly that I was in no shape to ride or drive to the funeral which is going on at this moment.

What First Amendment?

At the request of my wife, there will be no further references to her children, her ex or any controversy attached to them in this blog.
Maybe it's time to start a new blog elsewhere with names changed to protect the guilty.

Grrrrrrrr

I'm really disgusted with Blogger.
I recently changed over to the beta version and now can't upload photos from my cell phone.
Don't be surprised if you see me move to another blog hosting service.

McMistake

I had to drive to Lafayette to deliver a set of wedding photo CDs and stopped at McDonald's for lunch.
I ordered a Filet-o-Fish sandwich and a medium drink.
What I got was a F-o-F bun with tartar sauce and cheese around a spicy chicken patty.
Tasted odd, but not horrible.

Sad day

This is the second consecutive day of cold November rain, made even more depressing by the news that Clint Husted, a BMW Club member somewhat younger than I, dropped dead yesterday with a heart attack.
Clint wasn't a close friend and I don't recall ever riding with him, but we socialized at club events and rallies, so he was certainly more than an acquaintance. He had recently taken a buy-out and early retirement from General Motors which begs the question whether there was a connection between ending a career and ending a life.
It's certainly not unusual for guys to die within six months of retiring.
Retirement ranks high in the Life Event Stress Scale, well ahead of sex difficulties, the death of a close friend and a change in residence.
He seemed to be focused on the future. On Sept. 22, he responded to a (retired teacher) club member's e-mail teasing that questioned his usefulness and compentence with, "I can assure you that my teaching skills plus supporting individuals in saving money is still greatly appreciated. I am not like some retired teachers who have receded to the depths of watching daily TV, plus being prodded to clean the house."
I have no idea what other stressors were piling up on Clint over the past year to aggravate what I can only suppose was an undiagnosed heart problem.
Looking back at the year following my mother's death and my early retirement, I certainly had my share of stress points:
Death of close family member - 63
Retirement - 45
Marriage - 50
Change in financial status - 38
Mortgage or loan over $10,000 - 31
Change in residence - 20
Total - 247
A score of 150-299 means medium susceptibility to stress-related illness. Anything over 300 means you're really fucked up and are headed for trouble.
Reviewing the last 12 months of my life, I have to really search for any points at all, so I guess that's encouraging.
Clint's widow Lynnette is at the funeral home in Noblesville as I type these words, so we should have the memorial service information soon. The funeral and burial will be in his home state of Michigan, so I don't expect the club will be asked to provide any kind of motorcycle escort here in Indiana.
Anyway, it's a damned shame he had to check out so early.

Skipping and Shuffling

I'd been withholding my classical music xikkwxruib from my iPod because I didn't want to have the third movement of Beethoven's 6th Symphony pop up between the Seeds and Miles Davis or get the Gyuto Monks chanting on the heels of Beck or Neil Sedaka when I have the iPod on shuffle, which is most of the time.
Then today I noticed the option in iTunes track Info, letting me designate a track or an album to be skipped while shuffling.
Hot damn!
Now I can include everything - maybe even my three CDs of sound effects - and segregate out the stuff I don't want showing up in the shuffle rotation.
Seems like I find a new reason to be impressed with the folks at Apple every day that I use that amazing little device.
So now I have something like 6,400 tracks, plus a whole bunch of podcasts and a smattering of music videos and other videos.
The podcast lineup is constantly changing, since iTunes keeps me current on a day-to-day basis.
So now it's gotten to the point that I feel naked if I leave home without it. All this for a gizmo that I was certain, six months ago, that I neither needed nor wanted.
Thanks again, Sean, Steve and Maria. You hit a home run with this birthday gift.

O, frabjous day!

TechTV, the glorious cable/satellite geek network that got bought and killed by the greedy idiots at Comcast, is coming back in an updated internet form.
Undotv.com should be up and running sometime in mid-January with all of the old stalwarts, including Leo Laporte and Chris Pirillo.
I've been getting my geek fix via the various Leo Laporte podcasts, but this will be much better.

Short book report

Cool book about the iPod phenomenon.

Oh say, can you see?

Maria spent much of yesterday hunched over her new Bernina sewing machine and tensely complaining there isn't enough light in her sewing room. She's in what is arguably the brightest room in the house with lots of windows and a southeastern exposure with a three-bulb overhead light fixture and a built-in light in her Bernina.
I recognized the complaint as a symptom of presbyopia - the inability of the eye to focus properly on nearby objects, which is a common occurrence in middle-age.
Maria has good vision and has never worn glasses. Her last eye exam was about 13 years ago when she was 30. At that time, her eye doc told her she'd probably need reading glasses when she turned 40.
I've worn glasses or contact lenses since the third grade, so it's no big deal for me, but she was loathe to surrender to the fact that it was time for some vision correction.
So on the way to the Meijer store for our weekly grocery run last night, I explained why people who need reading glasses initially complain that there isn't enough light to see closeup stuff.
There is a phenomenon in photography called depth-of-field. When you close down the aperture on a camera lens, i.e., make the light hole smaller, it makes the light waves more coherent and sharpens the image of objects in front of and behind the point where the lens is focused. The same thing happens with the human eye. When you increase the light intensity, the iris closes tighter and the depth-of-field increases, making closeup objects appear sharper than they did before.
You can get by with adding light for awhile, but eventually you have to turn to reading glasses.
So I suggested we cruise by the pharmacy area of Meijer last night so Maria could try on some reading glasses and see if they helped.
It was, to say the least, an eye-opener for her. The first pair she tried had a magnification factor of 1.75 and she was startled at how much sharper fine print appeared. She tried various lens strengths and finally settled back on the 1.75.
She wore them to do a bit of sewing last night with good results, but refused to take the plastic tag off - keeping her options open to return them (refusing to completely accept the inevitable conclusion that she needs them).
She still has the tag on this morning, but I predict it'll be gone by tonight.
Here's a photo of her taking to her daughter on the phone, eyes closed because she gets disoriented looking at distant objects.


30 minutes later: the tag is gone.

Easy come, easy go...

This post is long overdue. So long overdue that I've lost most of my regular readers.
After all, why check a blog that seemingly never gets updated.
So here's the update.
Since we sold our rental property we've been taking care of lots of things that we put off for lack of ready cash.
We threw about $1,800 at our two cars - timing belt for the del Sol and catalytic converter for the Subaru; got Maria's wedding ring repaired (fractured baguette); replaced the waterlogged and ripped 6-year-old hot tub cover and added a mechanical cover lifter; replaced the cabinet-mounted microwave that died about six months ago; bought Maria an 80GB iPod; added a Nikon 18-70mm lens to the inventory, painted the front porch, got a proper desktop docking station for my Treo 700p; and bought a new Mr. Coffee coffee maker to replace the one that was prone to leaks and spills.
Still to buy: a new work computer (mine is six years old and makes photo editing more of a chore than it should be), and a Nikon D200 for Maria.
The bulk of the proceeds are sitting in a six-month CD while we draft a master plan to rip out the deteriorating wood deck behind the house and raze the two ramshackle garages. In their place, we plan a fenced patio and a proper two-car, two-motorcycle garage with an upstairs skylighted photo studio and offices.

Happy Birthday, Sean

My son Sean is 39 today.
His wife Ruth organized a collaborative gift with me, his mom and his brother Steve.
Together, we came up with enough money for a really good acoustic guitar.
Sean called to thank me this afternoon and it was clear that he was surprised and overwhelmed.
Mission accomplished.

M&M's what?

Hoping to save me from a diabetic coma, my wife took the leftover Halloween candy - mostly mini Reese* cups - to work with her.
But when she called me in to edit copy and do some other work, I found the cache and attacked it greedily. I also found a bunch of trick-or-treat-size packages of those colorful little chocolate candies that melt in your mouth, not in your hand.
As I ripped one open, my eyes fell upon an apostrophe that I never before noticed.
The name on the package is "M&M's."
What?
How can this be? All sentient writers of the English language know that you don't form the plural of anything with an apostrophe.
What the package designer has done, then, is to declared that the contents of the package belong to "M&M." Which begs the question: M&M's what? Little sugar-shelled chocolate candies?

I was stunned and somewhat chagrined that I'd never noticed this before.
So I fired up Google to find out what, if anything, the Ms stand for in M&M.
I seemed to remember the Mars family - the folks who gave us Snickers, Three Musketeers, Milky Way and Mars bars - was involved in it and I was right.
Forrest Mars left his father's successful candy business and struck out on his own, working for a time for Nestle and Tobler in Europe. Some people belive he got the idea for his new candy from sugar-coated chocolate pellets given soldiers in the Spanish Civil War. At any rate, he patented the idea in March, 1941. He did a deal with Bruce Murrie (the other M and a son of Hershey exec William Murrie) that got him access to Hershey's stock of chocolate. World War II was on and chocolate was rationed with Hershey having the enviable position of being the choclatier to the U.S. military.
After the war, Mars bought Murrie out, but kept the M&M name on the product.
Mars died on July 1, 1999, at the age of 95. At the time of his death, his estimated net worth of $4 billion, according to Forbes magazine, made him one of the richest people in the U.S.; his sons, Forrest Mars, Jr. and John Mars are now executives with the company and also said to be worth $4 billion each, along with his daughter, Jacqueline Mars Vogel. Based in Hackettstown, N.J., M&M/Mars employs 30,000 people worldwide with sales of more than $20 billion per year.
But I still can't get over that damned apostrophe.

*And it makes me crazy to hear morons like the counter workers at Dairy Queen prounounce it "Reesy" or "Reesie" cups. Have they never heard of anyone named Reese? Where the last "e" is silent?

Happy Birthday, Steve

Thirty-six years ago tonight, I found myself a father for the second time.
My son Steve was born in Coleman Hospital in Indianapolis on Halloween, 1970.
He took his daughter Lisa trick-or-treating tonight. She's 2½ and was dressed as a kitty.
When I called to wish him a happy birthday a few minutes ago, he said Lisa was deep into her trick-or-treat candy.
"One of her pupils is more dialated than the other," he joked.
Here's a photo from Halloween, 1974 - Steve's fourth birthday and a week before Sean's seventh birthday.

New Who

Endless Wire, the first Who album in more than 20 years, was released today.
Got it on Itunes.

Strange vacation

This time last week we were bearing down on a cheap hotel near the geographic center of the United States in north central Kansas, hauling ass for the Colorado high country.
We arrived at our friends' place in Alma - the highest town in the United States - Monday afternoon for what we expected would be a week-long visit.
But an intense attack of altitude sickness, aggravated by a powerful low pressure system and the threat of a paralyzing blizzard sent us scurrying out of the mountains Wednesday morning.
We did, however, get to visit our friends at the Colorado Mountain Hat Co. in Fairplay where Maria got measured for a very sassy cowgirl hat that just might show up here sometime after Christmas.
We'd also considered the Texas gulf coast and the New England fall foliage as vacation destinations, but it turned out that last week was a crappy time to vacation anywhere but maybe the Pacific Northwest.
Since Maria's vacation days are precious, she was very unhappy about having to abort our mountain sabatical. She was slightly pacified when we noticed a billboard for the Quilter's Harvest quilt store in Higginsville, Mo., along I-70 east of Kansas City. We exited the interstate and found the store where she loaded up on some great fabric that was on sale. So it wasn't a complete wash-out.
Here's a photo of Maria rooting through the bolts of cloth.
I was also able to turn the quilt store ladies onto a fabulous cache of local quilts at the Ray County Museum in Richmond, Mo., just up the road from them, that had previously escaped their notice. I discovered the place while on a Jesse James country tour for RoadBike Magazine about five years ago.
We arrived home about midnight Thursday.
Maria's son Austin had been house/dog-sitting for us and was getting bored since his girlfriend got grounded for being late to school Tuesday morning because she was hanging out here and also because he got downsized out of his pet shop job.
Losing the low-paying pet shop gig is actually a great thing because it forces him to get unstuck and find a better-paying job as a prerequsite to getting out of his dad and stepmother's house and on his own.
Me, I'm just happy to have found a sixpack of Hofbraü Maibok beer at Kahn's Liquors in Carmel. It's a wonderful German bock beer with a fabulous rich taste and a kick like a mule.
And now I'm going downstairs to get another.

Breakfast

At a cafe on the east edge of Norton, Kans.

We're off

We're pulling things together in preparation for a long-overdue trip to the Colorado Rockies.
Maria and I indulged in new Columbia parkas yesterday - mine came with an iPod pocket and a set of headphones in little collar pouches - so we're ready to go looking for winter before it comes to Indiana.
It's still a few minutes before sunrise, but we haven't packed a thing. I took our external hard drive and our photo CD archive over to Maria's parents last night for safekeeping and Maria's son Austin will be here through the week to care for the dogs.
Maria's never taken U.S. 24 across Kansas and eastern Colorado, so I plan to take that route instead of our usual I-70 bullet run.
Well, I must be off.
I will, of course, post from the road.

Can you believe it?

There's only one electrical outlet situated for easy laptop use at Barnes & Noble.
And it's handy to just one table in the cafe.
And it's being used by an Asian Purdue University student who's sitting there grinning at his screen.
I'm down to 21 percent battery, so my photo editing is at a standstill until I can access some AC power.
******************************
I flopped down in an armchair with a couple of Photoshop how-to books and my iPod and by the time I was through paging through the books, the kid was gone.
I quickly pounced on the table and outlet and, as it turned out, it wasn't a moment too soon. The kid came strolling back and seemed startled to see "his" spot taken. Apparently he has a more robust battery in his laptop because he was able to set up at another table and work.
I hunkered down with our most recent set of wedding photos - 1,700+ images - and winnowed them down to 800 and change for posting to our pay-per-print site for friends and relatives of the bridal couple to see and buy.
I'll give them another go-through tonight and try to get the remainder posted.
On the vacation front, it appears that Austin will honor his commitment to house/dog-sit for us, so we're scrambling to get things together for a Saturday departure.
The del Sol came out of the shop with a new timing belt, oil and lube and balanced and rotated tires for about $600. The timing belt is supposed to get changed every 60,000 miles. I had 189,500 miles on my original timing belt, so I figure I've saved $1,200 on timing belts over the life of the car.
The Subaru Forester, which is our traveling car, goes into the shop Friday afternoon for a new catalytic converter.
I can't image being ready to leave by Saturday morning, but we shall see.
Unless the sky falls, in the form of a blizzard in the plains, our destination is sunny Colorado.

McWiFi

No more free WiFi internet access at McDonald's, at least not at the McD at Tippecanoe Mall in Lafayette, IN.
They've contracted it out to Wayport and charge $2.95 for a two-hour time block.
So, while I wait for my Honda del Sol to get a timing belt, I'll stroll across the parking lot to Barnes & Noble where the WiFi still isn't free, but the atmosphere is a bit more refined.

Breakfast with Al Roker

Well, kinda.
He's seated across the restaurant from us at the Renaissance Hotel in Oklahoma City.
He carries an Apple notebook computer.
Now I know why the paparazzi don't use cell phone cameras.
His mother should know that he left without finishing his milk.

OK in OKC

We're at the National Newspaper Association convention in Oklahoma City where Maria's paper has won several awards. Here's Maria being very pleased that her convention ID badge has a prize winner ribbon attached to it.
Dinner last night was at the National Cowboy Museum and Hall of Fame, or something like that. We did an abbreviated tour of the museum - mostly the art galleries - and had a sub-par dinner served at room temperature. Hardly worth the $95 a plate, but we weren't paying, so who cares?

En route

Sitting in a plane in Memphis, waiting to take off for Oklahoma City and a newspaper convention.

iStuff

With a Treo 700p and a 60-gig iPod, I'm so deep into geekdom it's almost scary.
I keep finding new ways the iPod, which I previously thought I had no use for, is way cool.
We're contemplating a road trip - most likely to Colorado - in the Subaru in a couple of weeks and it occurred to me that it would be nice to be able to play my growing collection of iPod music on the car's stereo system.
So I stopped by Best Buy on Sunday and took a look at the myriad iPod car adapters.
I finally settled on the iTrip by Griffin - a simple tunable FM transmitter/iPod charger that plugs into what used to be the cigarette lighter power outlet.
I passed on models that include a cradle for the iPod, since I use the black rubber-armor case from Speck that would have to come off for the unit to slip into a cradle.
I especially like the Speck protective case because it makes it much less likely that I'll fumble the iPod and drop it. It's taken a couple of short drops without damage, thanks for the case, so I'm pleased with it.
I just went to the Speck website and found they make a similar case for the Treo 700p/w smartphones and I'm thinking about ordering one for my Treo.
But I digress.
As soon as I hooked up the iTrip unit and started playing music through the car' stereo, I realized I had just obsoleted the 6-disc CD changer/player that had necessitated carrying a big case of CDs the last time we went for a long drive.
I suppose we carried 35-40 CDs with us for the changer. With the iPod and iTrip we have (at last count) 5,748 songs, which amounts to somewhere around 500 CDs, plus various podcasts (I'm addicted to Leo Laporte's technology podcasts).
So the iPod, combined with XM satellite radio ought to give us enough listening choices to make Kansas fly beneath our wheels.
I've ripped nearly all of my CDs - just about everything that I'd care to hear on CD (I skipped some lengthy classical stuff, but may go back and revisit that decision) and am now looking for other things to add. Amazingly, the 60-gig hard drive is only one-third full.
Every now and then, I'll hear something on XM or remember some long-forgotten song that I have to then track down on ITunes or - as in the case with today's addition of a Spike Jones anthology and the Beatles White Album - pick up used on Amazon.com.
The song I flashed on over the weekend, then forgot, then remembered and bought last night is a nice additon - Cheap Trick's "Ain't That a Shame." Damn, what a great piece of rock and roll.

Done

It's official: we're out of the landlord business and my parents' house is sold.
Feels kinda strange.

Chilly riding

It's amazing how much of a psychological/comfort difference there is between 62 sunny degrees and 56 cloudy/drizzling degrees.
I left home for errands in Indianapolis under cloudy skies with the promise of a sunny high this afternoon of 62 degrees.
It's 2 p.m. And I haven't seen the sun yet. And I ran into drizzle as I approached downtown Indy.
WTF?
And I was running on fumes when I got to Carmel, hoping to get to the gas pumps at the Meijer store before I ran out of gas. Naturally, I got caught up in a gawker jam going past a the aftermath of a car-truck tangle in the other lanes. The gas gauge on my BMW K1200GT was reading below empty and I ended up putting 4.82 gallons into the tank - about as close to dry as I've ever come with this bike.
But I have the two cameras I came to pick up and am warming up with a vente mocha at Starbucks.
Going back south through the crash scene to the Interstate is out of the question, so I'll take local roads home.
BTW, this is the first photo from my phone's 1.3 megapixel camera that I've posted on the blog. Sure beats the images I got with the Treo 600.

Mom

Today is the sixth anniversary of my mother's death.
I had moved her into a retirement home/nursing facility near my home about six months earlier after she injured her leg in a fall at home.
She was in good hands and with people who cared about her, but she desperately wanted to get back to her house in Delphi where she had lived most of her adult life.
I got a call from the head nurse about 8 p.m. that day telling me my mother had just died. I couldn't believe it. She was in good condition, I thought.
Turns out, the arthritis medicine she'd been on caused internal bleeding and she died in her sleep.
I still blame myself for not spending enough time with her.
And we're selling her house tomorrow.
***************
Well, not tomorrow after all.
Slow paper-shuffling has pushed the closing date to next Monday. Whatever. That means the tenant owes me another $75 in rent before the house is hers.

Sew what?

Maria, as I'm sure I've mentioned before, is a quilter. A serious quilter who has written for various quilt magazines and who walks the walk as well as talks the talk.
She's knocked out a whole bunch of quilts in the last couple of years, especially after I bought her a Bernina sewing machine.
She visited her favorite fabric store last Saturday, a store that also happens to be a Bernina dealer. She got seduced by the aurora 440 QE, which has a revolutionary stitch regulator - apparently the first machine to ever have it.
She likened it to BMW's groundbreaking antilock brake system for motorcycles introduced in the 1980s.
The machine was on sale with a special 18-months-same-as-cash deal.
Well, only a fool would pass up a deal like that.
So I drove down to the Bernina store yesterday afternoon and bought her one and now she's a very happy camper, er quilter.

Testing

Testing from my Treo 700p.

New phone

Seems like every fall, I get a hankering for a new cell phone.
First it was a flip-phone that my friend Tim Balough sold me very cheap because he'd given up on having Sprint cellular service at his home in Alma, Colo.
Then I got beguiled by the Treo series of phones and picked up an obsolete Treo 300 on Ebay. I used it for a year until I stepped up to a more advanced, but also obsolete by this time, Treo 600.
That was last fall. I really loved the 600 and bought a folding keyboard for it to do blog entries and e-mail while traveling. The built-in camera was crap, but I bought it mainly for e-mail and blogging and phone communications.
The 600 started going crazy on me last week. It wouldn't respond properly to screen taps or keyboard input. I thought it might have a virus or some other data corrpution, but then I noticed it started doing funny things when I wiggled the stylus around in its silo - a clue that the problem was mechanical and, therefore, not something I could fix.
So on Saturday I bit the bullet, went to the Sprint store and stepped up to the top of the Treo food chain (for the moment, anyway), the Treo 700p. (I read this morning that the 750 was released last week in Europe and Asia.)
Anyhow, it does everything better than the 600 and has the advantage of a user-replaceable battery and a 1.3 megapixel camera, plus video and TV.
However, for some mysterious reason, it doesn't interface with my Sprint PCS e-mail account, so I had to create a new account with Gmail, the Google e-mail service. That necessitated changing over with Blogger.com so it would recognize blog entries from my new phone.
Now I have to pick up a folding keyboard and some styli that have ballpoint pens hidden in them. The 700 is Bluetooth-equipped, so I can now become one of those annoying people who walks around with an earpiece seeming to carry on a spirited conversation with themselves. But I promise that if I get a Bluetooth earpiece, I won't do that. Honest.

A Picture Share!

Screaming kids? What screaming kids? Instant privacy.

Improving the McDonald's Experience

I'm sitting in a McDonald's in Southport, Ind., a southern suburb of Indianapolis, where I just finished lunch and am killing time until my 1 p.m. dental appointment.
Lunchtime at a McD is usually pretty chaotic, especially when the place is full of kids like this one is.
However... I'm on my motorcycle and brought along my in-ear stereo headphones that I use while riding to listen to XM satellite radio.
I'm also carrying my iPod.
So I stuck the earphones into my ears, plugged into the iPod and am listening to a Leo Laport podcast from Aug. On KFI radio in Los Angeles.
I've been a Leo Laporte fan for a few years now, ever since I was helping Tim Balough move stuff to his new home in the Colorado high country. He had a satellite dish of the old variety and we spent hours upon hours watching Leo and his friends on Tech TV.
Unfortunately, TechTV got bought by some greedheads who wrecked it. Now, the only place you can see Leo on TV is Canada and Australia. But he's on the radio in LA and has lots and lots of podcasts.
Leo is a genius when it comes to explaining all of the arcane details of computers, software, cell phones and other such technology in a friendly, understandable way. If you haven't heard him, Google him up and see what you've been missing.

--
Sent from my Treo

A smiling Pete

I just had to post this one too.

Climbing the learning curve

We've had the Nikon D200 for a few months now, just getting used to it and exploring the features but it wasn't until this afternoon that I got around to checking out some of the elements of the Nikon Creative Lighting System (CLS). The SB-800 speedlights we've been using for a couple of years are CLS-capable, but the D100s we were using were not, so it wasn't until the D200 showed up that it became an issue.
We shot photos for a furniture store ad earlier this week in which I tried to get the SB-800s to act as remote/slave flashes without success.
I downloaded a primer on the subject from the internet this afternoon, read and re-read the pertinent passages in the flash and camera manuals and discovered that I needed to change a camera setting so it would tell the flash what to do. The results were encouraging and I convinced Pete the Aussie to sit for a few portrait shots, one of which is posted here.
Maria just called to say she's on her way home. We have to be at a wedding rehearsal in a couple of hours and tomorrow will shoot our third wedding in three weeks.
Fortunately, we have nothing booked for next weekend, but the weekend after that is yet another wedding. If we're not careful, this could turn into a real business.

Ch-ch-ch-changes

Summer yields to fall this week and my world is full of changes.
My mortgage lady friend says we could conceivably close on the sale of my parents' house late next week.
That house has been in my family since April, 1954 when my parents and I moved in. I was in the third grade and it was a very big deal to move from the only home I'd ever known to this neat new house where I would have an upstairs bedroom.
I last lived there in the months between my discharge from the U.S. Air Force in early November, 1965 and when I returned to college in January, 1966. So that makes it more than 40 years since I called the place home.
My dad died in a nursing home in November, 1997, and we moved Mom to a retirement community in April, 2000, after she injured her leg in a fall.
It stood idle until the late summer of 2001 when my first tenant moved in. It's been a rental property every since and I've known from the start that I was never meant to be a landlord. So I'm only a little sad to part company with the place, very relieved not to have to worry about flood or fire or other calamity theere and delighted to have the money from the sale.
The additional cash will make it possible for us to make a lot of long-delayed improvements at our own house and pump some much needed revenue into our photography business.
Plus, we desperately need a vacation together and I hear Colorado calling ever stronger with each passing day.
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Sent from my Treo

Great free image viewer

Tim Balough turned me on to Irfanview several years ago and I've used it as my principal image viewer and slideshow program ever since, going through more periodic upgrades than I can recall.
It's freeware and it's amazingly diverse.
It was created by a Bosnian-born programmer named Irfan Skiljan who lives in Vienna, Austria and it shows stills, plays movies and music and includes some basic photo editing tools. There are also tons of plug-ins that can also be downloaded for free.
If you haven't tried it, you really should.
Check it out at www.irfanview.com

Not all that bad

Saturday's wedding shoot turned out to be closer to normal that I'd expected.
Yes, the bride had the dry heaves at the hairdresser's on Saturday morning and was on prescription drugs much of the day.
And there was a flying trip to the tux rental warehouse some 80 miles away because of a size screw-up for one of the groomsmen.
And the tent/chair rental guys showed up to collect their stuff a couple hours before the wedding. (It was a mistake - they had misread the pick-up time.)
And the bride arrived more than 90 minutes later than originally planned.
But the ceremony went ahead on schedule, nobody freaked out and the wedding party rode motorcycles bareheaded the three miles or so to the reception without incident.
We only charged them $500, which was hideously cheap and I have decreed that it's the last of the cheapies for friends or coworkers. This is too much work to let it go that cheaply.
And yes, the aisle runner was white fake fur and the bride and her attendants all wore flipflops.

Bizarro World

Shooting what promises to be a world class clusterfuck wedding today.
Clue: the aisle runner will be white faux fur & the bride will wear flip-flops.
We gotta raise our prices & get out of this social niche.

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Sent from my Treo

A Picture Share!

Lunch at White Castle - 5 cheese and a large Diet Coke.

Schloss Weiss

That's German for White Castle and that's where I am at the moment, having polished off 4.5 cheesburgers.
White Castle is funky and no-class, but I love the taste and have to have them every now and then.
I've been hooked since around 1964 when college friends introduced me to the little square burger in a box.
I was a student at Indiana State University - well, actually, it was still Indiana State College at the time - in Terre Haute, Ind.
The nearest White Castle was in Indianapolis, which was nearly a two-hour drive east on U.S. This was years before the Interstate highway system existed around here in any major way, so it was down the old National Road to the White Castle.
Naturally, after driving so far, we stuffed ourselves stupid on these White Castle runs.
Burgers were a mere 12 cents then, compared with today's price of 49 cents. But today's White Castle hamburgers and cheeseburgers still taste the same - greasy and tangy with onions. They still start with square little hamburger patties with five holes in them - arranged like the spots on the five side of dice - presumably to make them cook faster on the grill.
I remember visiting a White Castle in Jeffersonville, Ind., with a college friend back in the late '60s and being dazzled by the speed with which the girl at the grill could flip, bun and box the burgers. It was a beautiful thing to see, made even more beautiful by the fact that I've only seen that kind of White Castle expertise a few times since.
Today's WC burger flippers approach their work with a nonchalance and indifference that borders on being an insult to the customer.
When I started my career at The Indianapolis News in 1967, there was a tiny little White Castle restaurant with maybe 10 counter seats and three booths up Delaware Street by the Indianapolis Public Schools Education Center. Bob Basler, now of Reuters fame, and I used to make the two-block hike on a regular basis for lunch.
They used to have a stainless steel pocket-type rack by the door stocked with copies of the White Castle House Organ - a regularly published magazine filled with articles and letters written by WC employees around the United States. Bob and I thought it was somewhere between funny and pathetic, but we always read it. I haven't seen one in years and can only suppose it went the way of the motivated employees like the girl in Jeffersonville.
The service may have gone to hell - I spent 20 minutes sitting outside the drive-up window of the Lebanon, Ind., White Castle a few weeks ago waiting for my order (and I was the only person in line) - but the burgers and cheeseburgers still call me back.

--
Sent from my Treo

Memory enhancement

We shot a wedding last Saturday night and a portrait assignment the next day, generating something like 3,500 big digital images in a single weekend.
We have three more weddings lined up over the next four weekends and probably another portrait job or two in the works.
All of this is heavily taxing our combined hard drive capacity - the 80GB on our Sony VAIO laptop and Maria's and my desktops, both of which have two hard drives.
It's also a big hassle to burn usable CDs or DVDs to transfer the images from the laptop, where we dump them in the field, to a desktop computer for final editing, client CD burning and album composition. I've tried doing a copy/transfer via the wireless router, but it's too slow for my taste.
Plus, we've been concerned about how to create a portable storage medium that could be relocated offsite as insurance against distaster.
I stumbled upon the solution the other day while browsing through the aisles of a Staples office supply store - an external hard drive.
The one that caught my attention is the My Book unit by Western Digital. I've used WD hard drives for a long time and have been pleased with their reliability. The My Book I bought today for $158.98 (sales tax included) has a 250GB capacity and takes up very little desktop real estate. It's 6.71" tall, 2.25" wide and 5.55" deep and looks like, well, a book standing on the desk.
This model connects to the computer via a very robust cable and USB 2.0.
I've just now copied last weekend's images and will now take My Book up to our office and copy the images to my desktop computer.
I love technology.

Frühstück

That's breakfast in German and that's what I'm doing at the moment, although you won't find much German food on the menu at Denny's.
It's Friday again and I've come to the county seat to pay what I fervently hope will be the final $100 child support installment to Maria's ex.
With any luck at all, her son will find his spine and move out of his dad's house during the coming week. He's been under tremendous psychological pressure from his father and stepmother, but I have confidence that he'll find the strength to get out and be a man. Especially when he realizes his girlfriend is watching.
It's a glorious sunny September day and reminds me of Sept. 11, 2001 - along with all of the news/talk shows today.
I was en route to the BMW motorcycle dealership in Indianapolis when the first plane hit. When I arrived, the head mechanic - the only mechanic I've ever known who listens to NPR all day - growled about some assholes flying a plane into the World Trade Center.
The only TV in the place was a small portable that was used to view promotional videotapes and they didn't have a cable connection. So they pulled up the rabbit ears antennae and got a passable over-the-air signal. Good enough that we were able to watch the second plane hit and the two towers collapse.
I remember Tom Brokaw saying exactly what I was thinking: "This is war."
And it still is.
Too many Americans never really got their brains around that. Maybe they are so conditioned by stupid disaster movies that they unwittingly think of the 9/11 attacks as some kind of unreal TV show.
But those were real people raining down from those towers and, for them, it was as real as it gets.
They thought they were safe that morning, just as we think we're safe today. But as long as there are wacko dirtbags like Bin Laden out there, none of us is safe.
So, five years into this war on terror, I'm delighted that the battleground is in Iraq and Afghanistan and not in New York or Los Angeles or Chicago or Indianapolis.
End of rant.

--
Sent from my Treo

A Picture Share!

Breakfast at Denny's.

My home town

This is about the town where I grew up, not where I live now.
I'm selling my parents' house - funny how they've been dead for years and I still think of it as their house rather than mine - and rode my motorcycle up to take a sales contract to the woman who has rented it for a couple of years.
Riding down the leafy streets of my childhood, I recalled seeing those streets and houses from the saddle of my bicycle.
About a block from the house, I passed a guy watering the lawn in front of a low one-story frame house.
He was about my age, dressed in shorts and an untucked sport shirt.
I looked a little closer and realized he was in my high school graduating class.
John, like me, was an only child. But he was an athlete - a gifted basketball and baseball player who was short on academic ability but long on boyish charisma.
His parents gave him pretty much everything he wanted, including a new Plymouth Fury when he turned 16.
He was a kind of golden boy in high school and doubtless expected the rest of his life to be equally charmed.
He went off to Ball State University, but didn't finish, and married his high school girlfriend.
I remember bumping into hiim on a street corner in Indianapolis a year or two after I'd begun my career as a reporter with The Indianapolis News.
He made sure I knew he was doing well and had earned "5 figures" ($10k or more) the year before. Yeah, that was more than I was making.
I lost track of him over the years, reconnecting at five-year intervals at class reunions and getting the occasional scrap of gossip from friends.
He got divorced and drank a lot. I heard a rumor that he was a professional gambler. Pretty much every time I saw him at a reunion, he was drunk and hiding out from his ex, who was also in our class.
Over the last 10 years or so, I heard he was living with his widowed mother and there he was, at the house of his childhood, watering the lawn with little to show for the 43 years since we collected our diplomas and began our lives as grownups.
John is, for me, emblematic of that town. All of the real achievers left and only come back to visit.
Ou friend Jack is an executive with major trailer manufacturer.
My friend Lynda is obscenely wealthy, living in Louisiana with her hometown husband who got rich closing banks after the Louisiana oil economy crashed.
I'm sure this pattern was repeated by every class since mine and a lot before it and it created a growing intellectual vaccuum in the little county seat town of 2,500.
I was reminded of that later when I stopped at the town's McDonald's - my nomination for the worst-run McDonald's in the world.
As I tried to enter, I found the inner door blocked by an oblivious woman who was chatting with an equally oblivious McD employee. With another customer standing impatiently behind me, I finally shouldered my way past them, but neither gave any indication that they realized they were blocking a doorway and inconveniencing others.
So I wasn't particularly surprised when my request for an M&M NcFlurry was answered with a dull stare and the explanation that the "McFlurry machine is broke down."
Of course it is.
I was reminded anew that my local attorney friend who has lived in that town all of his life, told me he has never set foot inside the McDonald's.
I seem to be doomed to re-discover the wisdom of his attitude everytime I go there.
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Sent from my Treo

Wendy's observations

This must be job applicant day at Wendy's.
I'm sitting in a corner booth watching the hapless fucks maxing out their reading and writing skills to complete the Wendy's job application.
Nearest me is a couple - he's a skinny little twerp in his 30s with jeans, a wifebeater and an Indianapolis Colts blue cap.
She's maybe 10 years younger and twice his weight, but looks significantly brighter. I find myself wondering what they've been doing with their lives that brings them into the job market at this level. I'd bet that he can't pass a drug test.
A young woman in her early 20s is hunched over a job app at a table over by the window. She looks pretty intense about it, with her glasses and wild black hair. She's wearing jeans, a black tanktop and lots of silver jewelry, including a big boxy silver cross. She also has tattoos - big ones - on her chest and right bicep.
Now Mr. Colts cap has advanced to the interview stage.
"Have you ever worked fast food before?" asks the manager. I can't catch his answer but it hasn't occurred to him to take off his cap.
He's smiling a lot and seems to be maintaining good eye contact, so he may have some people skills after all.
He's nervous. Has his hands clasped as he leans on the table on his elbows. Hands clasped - opening to gesture - clasped again.
"Did she break up with him?" asks a woman talking on a cell phone, ignoring the man sitting across the table from her.
Neil Young's "Heart of Gold" plays on the ceiling speakers and the manager dismisses Mr. Colts cap. He and his woman friend step outside for a cigarette.

--
Sent from my Treo

Zen and the Art of iPod Maintenance

My 60 gig iPod (with video) has been giving me trouble this week.
At some point, it stopped responding to the Turn Off procedure of holding down the Play/Pause point on the control wheel for a few seconds.
Consequently, it was perpetually on. That was no big deal when it was docked because it was getting recharged through the USB 2.0 connection.
But when I carried it around, the fact that it couldn't be turned off meant the battery was getting needlessly drained. I was starting to worry about possible damage to the battery, which is not user replaceable.
I decided to attack the problem last night and went to the iPod support site. I downloaded v1.1.2 of the operating software (it came with v1.1.1), installed it and then wiped the memory clean with a Restore procedure that put it back to the factory settings, albeit with v1.1.2 in the driver's seat.
This all occurred after 11 p.m. I was tired, so I decided to let it restore the 17.3 gigabytes of music and other data while I slept.
So I was delighted this morning to see the welcome "fully charged" symbol on the display. And the Turn Off feature is functional once again.
O, frabjous day! Calloo! Callay!

Crikey!

It sounds like a bad joke, but it's true.
Steve Irwin, the Crocodile Hunter, was killed this weekend when a stingray he was filming put its tail barb into his heart.
It kinda figures, considering the level of risk-taking he enjoyed, but it's still a bit of a shock.
He was 44.

Lisa Lisa

We made a long-overdue pilgrimage to Cincinnati yesterday to visit my son Steve, his wife Nicky and, of course, our granddaughter Lisa.
We haven't seen them since shortly after Lisa's second birthday at the end of May, so naturally Lisa has grown in every dimension.
She exudes wisdom beyond her years and seems to have the ability to recognize when a bad mood is overtaking her and pull away from it.
Maria and Steve and I took her to a park near their home where she had a great time climbing and sliding and swinging and running. When it came time to leave, her face clouded up and she stuck out her lower lip in what - for a lesser child - would have been the prelude to a crying fit. She was riding on Steve's shoulders at the moment and Maria stuck out her lower lip in challenge. Lisa apparently realized how she looked, decided that was not cool and then flashed a sunny smile, proclaiming, "Now I'm happy!"
She also spontaneously used her fingers to pull her mouth out of shape, a move her dad and his big brother Sean did when they were kids. (See lower picture of Steve when he was her age.)

Patriot Guard Riders mission

PGR mission for the funeral of State Police Lt. Gary Dudley in Brownsburg, Ind.
Dudley and another officer were killed last week while on a charity bicycle ride to raise money for the wives and children of officers killed in the line of duty.
Their support truck was rammed from behind by a box truck and lurched forward striking Dudley and a former Lake County police chief.
It was the largest police funeral I've ever seen in Indiana.
The weather was overcast with mist and occasional sprinkles. Consequently, only 16 of us were present, but we got plenty of thank-yous, including from Gov. Mitch Daniels who came over to greet and thank us and shake each man's hand.

Betcha didn't know this...

Hoosier Journalist William Herschel's "Ain't God Good to Indiana?" meshes perfectly with the tune to Schiller's "Ode to Joy" from the fourth movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.
Let's all sing along, folks:


"Ain't God good to Indiana?
Folks, a feller never knows
Just how close he is to Eden
Till, sometime, he ups an' goes
Seekin' fairer, greener pastures
Than he has right here at home,
Where there's sunshine in the clover
An' honey in th' comb;
Where the ripples on th' river
Kinda chuckles as they flow--
Ain't God good to Indiana?
Ain't He, fellers? Ain't He, though?

"Ain't God good to Indiana?
Seems to me He has a way
Gittin' me all outta humor
Just to see how long I'll stay
When I git th' gypsy feelin'
That I'd like to find a spot
Where th' clouds ain't quite so restless,
Or th' sun don't shine so hot.
But, I don't git far, I'll tell you,
Till I'm whisperin' soft an' low:
Ain't God good to Indiana?
Ain't He, fellers? Ain't He, though?

"Ain't God good to Indiana?
Other spots may look as fair,
But they lack th' soothin' somethin'
In th' Hoosier sky and air.
They don't have that snug-up feelin'
Like a mother gives a child;
They don't soothe you, soul an' body,
With their breezes soft an' mild.
They don't know th' joys of Heaven
Have their birthplace here below;
Ain't God good to Indiana?
Ain't He, fellers? Ain't He, though?"

Farewell, Blackie

Maria wrote this last week and I'm posting it here with her permission:

Blackie died last weekend.
I cried when I heard and I've avoided writing this column because, sure enough, as soon as I wrote the first sentence, the tears came again.
I adopted Blackie, a wire-haired terrier of some sort, about 13 years ago from the Animal Welfare League. She was a tiny pup and I was told she wouldn't grow much bigger. The saucer-sized feet should have been a clue.
She was whip smart and potty trained in a couple days. Blackie would rather have exploded than disgrace herself in the house.
Blackie took care of me when, at age 30, I had a tonsillectomy. I was convalescing in bed upstairs and just about every hour, on the hour, I heard her toenails on the hard wood floors, up the farm house stairs, through my daughter's bedroom and into mine.
Click, click, click, reassuring and steady.
She'd rest her head on the mattress next to mine, doggy breath in my face, wait for me to whisper something reassuring, lick my nose, and go back downstairs until the next check-up.
Maybe she thought she owed me. We suppose she was hit by a car on our gravel road once while we were gone. Whatever happened, half her side was laid open and she was in shock when we returned. I took her to a veterinarian on Sunday, I think, and he had me help him. He couldn't get her all the way sedated. I sat at her head and reassured her the whole time. The vet wasn't sure she'd survive. I brought her home, sat her in a beanbag chair, and we watched television while she made a remarkable recovery.
Blackie had lots of tricks. She was one of those dogs who could bark something that sounded like “I love you,” and other words we pretended to hear.
We weren't sure what she was doing at first when we saw her walking in the harvested fields, cats at her heels. She was hunting for mice. She'd find one, dig it up, and wait for the cats to get it. Then she'd walk on and do it again.
But her silliest habit was rock chasing. Blackie was a rock chasing maniac.
Our neighbor discovered it when we were on a walk. Blackie was in front of us, but backing up and watching our feet. Something had her interest. Debbie kicked a piece of gravel and off Blackie flew to get it and drop it back at Debbie's sneaker. From then on we kicked rocks for miles when Blackie walked with us.
I haven't lived with her for years, but still kick rocks out of habit when I walk.
Blackie collected and chased any rock, even if they were too big. The kids made sure to throw the really big ones in the opposite direction so she wouldn't break a tooth trying to catch it.
I left her on the farm when I divorced. She was at home there and she loved her new mom and the kids who came to live with her.
We got lonely at our new house and went to the shelter for a smaller, short-haired dog. We came home with Ruthie, who is medium sized and has long, woolly blonde hair.
She is also very silly and is a maniac for laser beam chasing. Ruthie barks too loudly and too often. She's mouthy, demands treats and won't be left out of a hug between humans. She makes goofy guilty faces when she does bad things like ripping into the trash - as if we won't know she did it if she turns her head away. We wouldn't trade her for anything.
Ruthie was a great bridge when I re-married. John went with us to choose her when we were still dating. Ruthie loved the kids and she loved John, which made the kids feel better about John until they got to know him better.
Ruthe was a safe conversational topic for everyone. She entertained us by fetching and eventually gutting, stuffed monkeys so she could kill their squeakers. All her toys are hard rubber now.
I don't think anyone should get a dog just to entertain themselves or to help blend a family. That would be selfish if you can't afford veterinary care and keep them confined to your property. But if your home is adequate and you have time for them, dogs sure make life nicer.
And I think shelters are fine places to get them. I'm sure dogs know they are close to doom when you get them there and they are appreciative. Walk through the shelter one time and you'll know what I mean. If I hadn't found Blackie and Ruthie there I wouldn't have all the memories I've shared here and too many more to tell.
We were getting ready to move my daughter to Bloomington for school again this weekend when she called her father. He told her Blackie, who was apparently hard of hearing in her old age, had been hit by a car at their farm.
She crawled to my son's car and waited for him to come out on the way to work. He found her broken, but in good spirits and calm. His father and step-mother sat with Blackie until she passed calmly.
They buried her with a rock in her mouth. It was a choice rock she'd recently brought to the yard.
Rock on, Blackie.

States I've visited on a motorcycle

create your own visited states map
or check out these Google Hacks.

I've traveled in all 48 contiguous states, but I have this little New England gap in my personal motorcycle map. I'd hoped to fill it in when I went to the BMW MOA national rally last month in Vermont, but time and weather interfered.
I've also ridden in the Canadian provinces of British Columbia, Alberta and Ontario.

Howdy from HA, via QC, HH, DC, AA, SA and AB

I was putting a fresh pad of checks into my checkbook the other day when an age-yellowed card dropped out and reminded me of something a lot of Hoosiers have forgotten or never knew.
Indiana’s passenger car license plate numbering system is pretty straightforward, making it easy to tell where a car was plated. The first digit or digits correspond with the issuing county’s name in an alphabetical list of Indiana’s 92 counties.
Adams County plates are 1A, 1B, and so on, while Whitley County – the 92nd in the list, starts with 92A. Since there are more cars in Lake and Marion counties than the 45 and 49 prefixes can accommodate, there’s an overrun with Lake County getting 94 and 96 and Marion County taking 93, 95, 97 98 and 99.
Of course things get more ambiguous when it comes to specialty plates because they don’t indicate county of origin.
But for the most part, it’s a logical, understandable system.
Not so before 1963.
Which brings me to that card that fell out of my checkbook.
It’s a little pocket reference to Indiana license plate prefixes, published by Robert Hall’s IGA Foodliner in my hometown of Delphi circa 1961.
Look over the listings and you’ll realize immediately why there had to be a change.
The old system used double-letter prefixes that were assigned without any particular rhyme or reason, other than the fact that Marion County being the most populous got all of the “A” prefixes. After that, it was pretty much random.
Old timers around here will recall that Montgomery County plates had TA and TB prefixes. Neighboring Fountain County was XJ, XK and XL, while Boone County drivers got to laugh it up with HA and HB. No correlation with county or county seat names, population or alphabetical sequence.
Here is the pre-1963 Indiana license plate prefix scheme, courtesy of the late Bob Hall:

AA, AB, AC, AD, AE, AF, AG, AH, AJ, AK AL, AM AN, AP, AQ, AR, AS, AT, AU, AV, AW, AX, AY, AZ, BX, BY, BZ - Marion County (Indianapolis)

BB, BC, BD, BE, BF, BG, BH, BJ, BK, BL – St. Joseph (South Bend)

CA, CB, CC, CD, CE, CF, CG, CH, CJ, CK, CL, CM, CN, CQ, CR, CS, CT, CU – Lake (Crown Point)

DA, DB – Whitley (Columbia City)

DC – Tipton (Tipton)

DD, DE, DF, DG, DH, DJ, DK, DL – Allen (Fort Wayne)

EA, EB, EC – Hendricks (Danville)

ED – Union (Liberty)

EE, EF, EG, EH, EK, EL, EM – Vanderburgh (Evansville)

EJ – Jefferson (Madison)

FA, FB – Clay (Brazil)

FC, FD – Vermillion (Newport)

FF, FG, FH, FJ, FK, FL – Madison (Anderson)

FM – Martin (Shoals)

GB, GC – Wells (Bluffton)

GD – Switzerland (Vevay)

GF – Jasper (Rensselaer)

GG, GH, GJ, GK, GL, GM – Elkhart (Goshen)

HA, HB – Boone (Lebanon)

HC, HD – Posey (Mt. Vernon)

HE – Warren (Williamsport)

HH, HJ, HK, HL, HM – Vigo (Terre Haute)

JA, JB, JC – Adams (Decatur)

JD – Scott (Decatur)

JF – Warrick (Booneville)

JJ, JK, JL, JM – Delaware (Muncie)

KA, KB, KC – Johnson (Franklin)

KJ, KK, KL, KM – Wayne (Richmond)

LA, LB – Jay (Portland)

LC – Decatur (Greensburg)

LD – Jennings (Vernon)

LL, LM, LN, LP – LaPorte (LaPorte)

MA, MB, MC – Greene (Bloomfield)

ME, MF – Newton (Kentland)

MG – White (Monticello)

MM, MN, MP – Tippecanoe (Lafayette)

NA, NB – Gibson (Princeton)

NC – Putnam (Greencastle)

ND, NE, NF – Benton (Fowler)

NN, NP, NR – Grant (Marion)

PA, PB, PC – Noble (Albion)

PF – Dubois (Jasper)

PP, PW, PZ – Howard (Kokomo)

PY – Perry (Cannelton)

QA, QB, QE – Lawrence (Bedford)

QC – Carroll (Delphi)

QD – Pike (Petersburg)

QP, QQ, QR, QS – Henry (New Castle)

RA, RB, RC – Shelby (Shelbyville)

RD – Pulaski (Winamac)

RN – Owen (Spencer)

RR, RS – Kosciusko (Warsaw)

SA, SB, SF – Hamilton (Noblesville)

SC, SD – Ripley (Versailles)

SE – Orange (Paoli)

SG, SH – Dearborn (Lawrenceburg)

SJ, SK, SL – Jackson (Brownstown)

SP – Spencer (Rockport)

SS, ST – Cass (Logansport)

SU – Steuben (Angola)

TA, TB – Montgomery (Crawfordsville)

TC – Fulton (Rochester)

TD – Franklin (Brookville)

TT, TU, TW – Knox (Vincennes)

UA, UB, UC – DeKalb (Auburn)

UD – Hancock (Greenfield)

UE – Parke (Rockville)

UT, UU, UV – Huntington (Huntington)

VA, VB – Wabash (Wabash)

VE, VF – Rush (Rushville)

VK, VL – Starke (Knox)

VV, VW – Monroe (Bloomington)

WA, WB – Clark (Jeffersonville)

WD – Washington (Salem)

WF, WG – Morgan (Martinsville)

WW, WX – Floyd (New Albany)

XA, XB – Clinton (Frankfort)

XD – Harrison (Corydon)

XE – Ohio (Rising Sun)

XG, XH – Daviess (Washington)

XJ, XK, XL – Fountain (Covington)

XX, XY – Porter (Valparaiso)

YA, YB – Marshall (Plymouth)

YD - Lagrange (Lagrange)

YE – Brown (Nashville)

YF, YG, YH – Sullivan (Sullivan)

YX, YY, YZ – Randolph (Winchester)

ZA, ZB, ZF – Bartholomew (Columbus)

ZC – Fayette (Connersville)

ZD, ZE – Blackford (Hartford City)

ZG – Crawford (English)

ZX, ZY – Miami (Peru)

The passing scene

Sitting at a window table of a downtown coffee shop watching the passing scene.
Dark-haired young woman in a black SUV stopped at the light, left arm danging out the window with a cigarette and right hand holding a cell phone to her ear.
Older couple on bicycles waiting for the light to change.
Old woman in a gray Buick stopped at the light. Glasses, both hands on the wheel at 10 and 2 o'clock. Nervously glancing left and right before making a left turn.
Guy in early 30s in a dark gray business suit, dark blue tie and light blue shirt. But wearing brown shoes.Carrying a briefcase and heading for the courthouse. Must be an attorney with a flawed sense of style. Hey, buddy. BLACK shoes with that outfit.
Woman in late 60s in a red Plymouth. Staring straight ahead waiting for the light.
Guy in twin-cab silver Ford pickup truck with the name of local dealer on the door.
Bald guy with glasses and wife at his side driving a silver Dodge diesel pickup with red stripes and a horse logo on the side. Wife just tossed a small bit of trash out of her window.
UPS guy in summer uniform (shorts) stacking packages on a handcart on the sidewalk outside a jewelry store.
BMW sedan with heavily blacked-out windows waiting for the light.

--
Sent from my Treo

Osama likes McGyver. It figures.

This is just too rich! From the London Daily Mail:

Terror mastermind Osama bin Laden is so obsessed with singer Whitney Houston he thought about killing her husband, Bobby Brown, it was claimed last night.

The suggestion is made by Sudanese poet and novelist Kola Boof, who claims she was bin Laden's sex slave for four months 10 years ago.

In her autobiography, Diary of a Lost Girl, she writes: "He told me Whitney Houston was the most beautiful woman he'd ever seen."

Boof, 37, who claims bin Laden raped her and held her prisoner in a Moroccan hotel, says he could not stop talking about the songbird, even though he disapproved of music.

"Osama kept coming back to Whitney Houston," she says in the book, excerpted in the magazine Harpers' Bazaar. "He asked if I knew her personally when I lived in America. I told him I didn't.

"He said that he had a paramount desire for Whitney Houston, and although he claimed music was evil he spoke of someday spending vast amounts of money to go to America and try to arrange a meeting with the superstar.

"It didn't seem impossible to me. He said he wanted to give Whitney Houston a mansion that he owned in a suburb of Khartoum.

"He explained to me that to possess Whitney he would be willing to break his colour rule and make her one of his wives.

"Whitney Houston's name was the one that would be mention constantly.

"How beautiful she was, what a nice smile she has, how truly Islamic she is but is just brainwashed by American culture and by her husband Bobby Brown, whom Osama talked about having killed, as if it were normal to have women's husbands killed."

Boof, who once claimed she had to take her son out of a Los Angeles school after rumours surfaced that bin Laden was his father, also claims the Al Qaeda mastermind read more than the Koran.

"In his briefcase I would come across photographs of the Star magazine, as well as copies of Playboy," she writes.

She also says his favourite television shows were The Wonder Years, Miami Vice and MacGyver.

Traction

When it comes to getting things accomplished, I've felt like I was spinning my wheels lately.
But today I got some traction.
I finished a wedding album I've been sweating over for a couple of months. Yeah, I know. I'm going to have to get faster and more efficient if I'm going to keep up when business picks up. This one is really deluxe, with lots of cool graphic design elements and has 243 photos on 100 pages. I'm confident it will blow their socks off and that both sets of parents will absolutely have to have a copy. The $1,300 wedding photo package included one album. Additional albums are $300 each, so there is probably a bit more money to be had from this gig.
Anyhow, I finalized the work - we use MyPublisher.com - and transmitted the album.
My other imperative to-do item today was to collect all of the returnable components of our DISH satellite TV setup, pack them in the box the DISH sent us over the weekend, and send them home to Georgia. Besides the remotes and the tuner box, they wanted the sensor gizmo that uses the dish to collect the satellite signal. That involved dragging a ladder out of the garage and removing three screws from the dish that's mounted about 15 feet up the side of the house.
It's their policy to leave the dish attached to the house, presumably as advertising and an enticement for the next occupants of the house to sign up with their service.
I think it'll be better advertisement sitting at the curb waiting for the trash collectors. I fact, I may yank it back just before they get here, so I can put it out on several successive Fridays to make sure as many passersby see it as possible.
Why do I dislike DISH? I'll spare you the trouble of searching for the previous post that addressed this issue and just say my rate was about to go up and I was tired of losing the signal everytime it storms - rain or snow. That's precisely when I want to be able to check with Indianapolis TV stations on weather conditions.
So it's back to basic cable.

C'mon, ladies... Smile!!!

Freak Out!

I've been loading my CD collection onto my new iPod and rediscovering a lot of music I haven't listened to in years.
This album is a perfect example.
I hadn't listened to the vinyl version for years when I bought the CD to update my library. I think I played the CD once.
Just now, I floated through "Return of the Son of Monster Magnet" and suddenly I was back in the autumn of 1966.
I was in my first newspaper reporter job in a small north central Indiana town, making $65 a week and living in a $20-a-week mobile home about a block from the newspaper office.
My college friend Steve Power had recently returned from wandering the West and introduced me to what passed for the drug cluture of the period.
Steve would show up at my trailer on a Saturday evening with an armload of record albums, including this one, and we'd smoke a few joints and down a bottle of Romilar cough syrup each. The active ingredient, dextromethorphan, is a semisynthetic derivitive of morphine and it produces an LSD-like experience. It's not addictive, especially considering that everytime we slammed down a bottle of the stuff the taste became more and more of a barrier. If someone walked into the room with an open bottle of the stuff today, I'd have to leave.
Steve also brought a supply of amyl nitrite capsules - made to relieve the symptoms of angina pectoris, they cause an instantaneous rush made all the more intense by Romilar and pot.
I remember having what I thought was a powerful insight during one such rush and hurried to write it down in one of my college notebooks that were lying around. The next morning, I opened the notebook and discovered I'd written, "There's no bad. It's just a different kind of good."
True enough from a cosmic perspective, but hardly practical advice for day-to-day living.
There were moments while listening to this album and others on my RCA console stereo system when we felt like we'd actually merged with and become the music.
Far out, man.
Anyhow, Freak Out! was an obligatory part of the Romilar trip soundtrack.
And I'm still getting a buzz out of it 40 years later on my iPod.

Bogus photos

It's episodes like the bogus photos coming out of Lebanon and sometimes make me wish I could diasssociate myself from the news media.
The first one to come to light was a photo showing smoke over Beiruit carried by Reuters. Why in the hell none of the Reuters photo editors recognized the telltale signs of clumsy tampering is a the mystery of the year. The plumes of heavy smoke bear the repetitive patters that can only come from sloppy use of the rubber stamp/cloning tool in Photoshop. The photographer's excuse that he was just trying to get rid of dust in the image, but was hampered by bad light just doesn't wash.
I'm reluctant to go so far as to accuse Reuters, the New York Times and AP of deliberately trying to build sympathy for Israel's enemies. I'm more inclined to blame over-competitive and unethical photographers and lazy, careless photo editors.
But the result is the same - a growing perception that the news media can't be trusted to tell the truth or get the story right.
Here's an overview:
http://www.aish.com/movies/PhotoFraud.asp

Indiana State Fair

Maria and I spent about seven hours tramping around the Indiana State Fair yesterday afternoon and last night.
We did the obligatory tour of the Home and Family Arts Building to check out the quilting and photography exhibits and were already kind of tired by the time the sun went down and the real reason we were there cranked up.
The Midway - that noisy, dirty, garish preview of Hell that draws kids and their captive parents like moths to a porch light.
It was the first really extended night shoot I've done with the Nikon D200 and I'm very impressed with how well it sorts out the white balance problems and how little noise there is at the higher ISO settings, like 1600. I shot available light all evening with startlingly good results.
This is one of my favorite photos of the night. Darkness had fallen, but there was still enough light in the western sky to spread a beautiful rich blue across the horizon. It was shot at 1/80 sec, f/4.5 at 1600 ISO. If you click on it, you can see a larger version and judge the quality a little better. The photographer in khaki by the railing is a freelancer from California who is putting together a book of photos of carnival and fair midways.
Several of the people we photographed wanted copies of the pictures, so we gave them our business cards with our photo sales site URL and posted an assortment of shots. The gallery went online at 10:30 a.m. and now, about 12 hours later, there have been about a dozen hits but no sales. You never know who's going to buy what, so I don't get my expectations up.
We've sold about $200 worth of wedding photos from the site in the last six weeks and I never expected to sell any, so who knows?
Anyhow, it was the first time I'd been back to the state fair in several years. I handled The Indianapolis News' state fair coverage from 1975 through 1985, spending the entire run of the fair at the fairgrounds, so I know/knew the place pretty well. Not much has changed in the 20 years since I was immersed in the fair. Probably the most significant difference, to my sensibilities, is the whoring out of the building names. The Coliseum is now the Pepsi Coliseum and various other buildings now have some corporate sponsor's name tacked on.
It's so hopelessly cheesy. Just like the monstrous cheese sculpture in the Pioneer seed corn building, formerly the Universities Building.

A Picture Share!

Chocolate, thank you.

Vanilla?

Wendy's - at least the ones around here - now offer their famous Frosty in two flavors: traditional chocolate and new vanilla.
Being a confirmed chocoholic, I can't get interestested enough in a vanilla Frosty to actually invest in one.
So I'm having a chocolate Frosty to celebrate our landing another wedding job. Our September calendar is filling up and it's starting to look like we'll have a better-than-expected first year in the wedding photography business. Most of our advertising has been word-of-mouth, so I guess that means we have a lot of satisfied customers.

--
Sent from my Treo

Maria's Motorcycle

I put about 60 miles on Maria's '94 BMW K75S today and am impressed anew with what a sweet bike it is.
When I bought it for Maria back in 2000, we did a variety of things to make it a better fit for her characteristically female shorter legs. We took a little slack out of the forks, replaced the stock shock absorber with a shorter custom job, sent the seat back to Sargent to have some foam carved out and changed out the stock tires for low-profile Bridgestones.
She rode it a little, but never got comfortable with it. Then she got hit head-on by a blind woman while driving my mother's '91 Buick LeSabre. The airbag and seatbelt kept her from being seriously injured, but the crash dealt a severe blow to her motorcycling confidence. She hasn't ridden the bike in the two years since the crash.
So it fell to me to keep the battery up and generally make the bike feel cared-for.
I've been riding it a fair amount this year on short local trips, trying to save the tires on my BMW K1200GT for touring.
There's a 11-mile stretch of road west of town that has lots of twists and turns through the undulating west-central Indiana countryside and the K75S is a pleasure to ride there.
Everytime I ride it, I'm struck by the pure, elemental nature of the ride. None of the gadgets and amenities of my sport-touring machine - just a nimble little motorcycle that feels right at home being flung into one turn after another.
And I like the one-of-a-kind custom acid green paint job more and more as time goes by.
Getting back into motorcycling isn't particularly high on Maria's list of priorities right now. She has her hands full with projects at her newspaper and our calendar is starting to fill up with wedding photography jobs, plus she has developed a painful hip problem.
So I guess I'll just have to keep her bike in good shape by riding it regularly.

A Picture Share!

I wonder why I never noticed this odd little motorcycle-size half-space in the Denny's parking lot. Just the right size for a K75S.

You Passed 8th Grade US History

Congratulations, you got 8/8 correct!

Could You Pass 8th Grade History?

I hate mowing

It's before noon and I'm having an unusually early beer because I'm cooling off from one of my least favorite jobs - mowing the lawn.
My distaste for yardwork was a point of sharp disagreement in my first marriage and a strong factor in my choosing apartment and condo life after my divorce. I admire a nicely kept yard as much as the next guy. I just don't want to waste my time and sweat on it.
The condo where I lived a couple of years before getting married and moving to my present home had a little garden area by the front door. The previous owner had some flowers and other plantings there, which I ignored and neglected to the point that I became embarrassed by the space. I finally began telling people I was developing a wildlife refuge outside my front door.
During my early childhood, we lived in a small house with a small yard that my dad cut with a hand-powered reel-style mower. My son Sean said he uses one at his place in Portland, Ore., and I had a momemt of nostalgic reverie over it.
When my parents bought a new home in the spring of 1954 with a larger yard, Dad invested in a power mower. I think it was a Lawson. It was one of the few mechanical things he chose to work on himself, and that consisted just of sharpening the blade and changing the oil.
It was during one of those oil changes that he lost his Masonic ring when it slipped unnoticed off of his oil-slick finger into the grass. It turned up a couple of seasons later and he wore it for the rest of his life. Now it's in a little funeral home bag of his personal effects sitting on my dresser.
But I digress.
After the novelty of a power mower wore off, Dad decided I deserved a turn at mowing the lawn.
I thought this was a heady responsibility and great fun for a month or so.
Then I began to develop the attitude that persists to this day.
I don't recall whether I picked it up from Dad or developed it spontaneously, but I mow a lawn in a decreasing radius spiral, rather than the back-and-forth straight row method. It just seemed more efficient to turn a corner rather than do a 180-degree turn after every pass.
I do the first couple of circuits in a clockwise direction, so as to blow the clippings toward the center of the lawn rather than into my neighbor's yard. Then, I change to counter-clockwise, so I don't keep chopping up the same bunch of clippings. It also avoids a build-up of clippings in the center of the yard when I'm done.
The contours of our back yard when I was a kid result in a patch of grass - in the last few circuits - that resembles the shape of Itasca County, Minnesota. We went there on a vacation the summer between my seventh- and eighth-grade years and the map stuck in my mind and transferred to the process of mowing.
Most of my lawnmowing time as a teenager was spent thinking about girlfriends - past, present and hoped-for.
These days, I lose myself in music with an iPod and custom molded earplug stereo speakers that I mostly use for long distance motorcycle trips. It saves my hearing from the racket of the mower and give me a random sampling of more than 3,600 songs.
I envy the guy down the street who has most of his acreage in wild prairie grass and actually gets a property tax break for it.
Unfortunately, I am surrounded by neighbors whose lawns make mine look bad.
They're both named Mike and they both have riding mowers. Mike to the north has a Dixie Chopper that can probably attain speeds up to 35 mph. His son takes about 5 minutes to mow their lawn, which is more than twice the size of mine.
Mike to the south seems to see his lawn as a hobby and keeps it meticulously manicured.
I can't hope to keep up with either of them. I just pray for drought and get out the lawnmower when I can't stand the embarrassment any more.
I bought a new mower last year after a wheel fell off of the one Maria had from her previous home. I had the good sense to put fuel stabilizer in the gas tank last fall, so it started right up this spring.
I've used it maybe four times this year.
I'd hoped to get out before the heat of the day this morning, but in doing so I found myself bogged down in tall, wet grass that stopped the machine in its tracks.
I set the wheels up a notch, scraped the accumulated grass out from under the blade and got it done, but not before I'd sweated about a gallon.
So that beer tastes pretty damned good.

Beach Boy cameo

Just saw Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby and thought it was outrageously funny.
Wasn't that Brian Wilson on the right side of the screen holding the champagne bottle in the final podium scene?

Dumping the DISH

Today's to-do list includes the following item:
"Cancel DISH TV, re-start cable"
Seduced by the lure of more channels for less money, I converted from cable to DISH satellite tv last summer.
Now, after a year of inconvenient outages, I've had enough and I'm going back to cable.
(The satellite signal drops out everytime we get heavy rain or snow - precisely the time when I'd like to be able to get weather information from Indianapolis TV stations. This happens to every DISH customer I know in this area, so I know it's not just us.)
The triggers for this switchback are the fact that our roofers knocked our dish out of alignment early this week, making our TVs useless, and the arrival of the August DISH bill that is substantially higher than the previous 12 months' bills. That's because the promotional period is over and we will now be billed at the regular rate.
Which, it turns out, is higher than what we were paying for cable.
I spent about an hour on the phone yesterday afternoon with DISH technical service working through the diagnostic programs to confirm what I already knew - the problem was a mis-aligned dish. Their fix is to send a repairman out next freaking Tuesday and to charge me $29 for the service call.
My fix is to tell them to pick up their electronic shit, get their dish off of my house and cancel my service.

Mexicans on a hot asphalt roof

Our new roof is nearing completion. A crew of three insanely hard-working Mexicans has spent two dangerously hot (heat index of 101-106) days ripping off the old shingles and nailing down new ones. They started about 11 a.m. yesterday and worked until about 9 p.m., taking advantage of what passed for the "cool" of the evening.
They were back on the roof at 7 a.m. today.
Now at 5:45 p.m., I can still hear them hammering.
They're working over the kitchen, which is freaking Pete and Ruthie out. Pete won't go out onto the back deck because there is a lot of scary-looking shingles and the hammering has him hunkered down in his kennel looking very intimidated.
Ruthie responds by barking hysterically, although she readily went out to the back yard to whiz.
I got a call from a prospective wedding photography client today - said she saw our work in a recent bridal tabloid insert in Maria's paper that we provided all of the photos for. So we're meeting her for lunch tomorrow to show her more of our work and try to clinch the deal. Her wedding is July 14, 2007, which is my 62nd birthday and the day I can start drawing Social Security.
I got my stepdaughter's cell phone number changed today, thwarting the efforts of her dirtbag ex-noyfriend to reel her in again.
Now, if she'll only forget to give the new number to her current dirtbag boyfriend...

Delayed Report

I sent this from my Treo about 1 p.m. July 19 - two weeks ago tomorrow - and Blogger.com posted it this morning. WTF?

I'm taking a lunch break at a McDonald's on I-90 northeast of Cleveland and about an hour from Erie, Pa., which is about an hour from Buffalo, NY.
Nice weather and no construction delays. At the risk of jinxing myself, I gotta say I'm making better time than I expected.

--
Sent from my Treo