Saturday stuff

This is my Saturday to work 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., so I went straight to the ASU campus to photograph a peewee dance clinic for girls in k-6th grade conducted by the Arkansas State A-Team cheerleaders.
In the photo above, A-Team member Marleah Hannaford, Mountain Home, teaches a routine to the kindergarten group. The session ran from 8 a.m. to noon and by the time I was shooting these photos between 9 and 10, some of the kids were showing signs of overload and a need for a break, as evidenced in the photo to the right.I arrived at the office in time to hear a heated discussion between a reporter from New Zealand and the business writer over the relative probability of the existance of Thor and/or Jesus. Huh?
Pretty freaking bizarre, but you have to expect that kind of thing in a newspaper city room.
This all happened against a background of disappointment, since our long-awaited second carpet install turned out to be as defective as the first. And on top of it, the installer beat the shit out of our painted wall and woodwork.
Maria got on the phone to Lowe's last night and raised some serious hell. So far, we have been promised an ASAP re-do with a better grade of carpet, which Maria will select this afternoon.
The fun just never stops.

I love this knife

I've mentioned it before, but this bears repeating: I love my Swiss Army knife.
The one I carry these days is the altimeter multitool (see illustration) that was a gift from my son Sean.
It has a barometric altimeter and a thermometer that can read out in metric or English scales. Since I live in relatively flat terrain, I use the altimeter more as a weather predictor. And the thermometer pretty much always registers 84 degrees in my pocket.
But I carry the knife all of the time and I use its blades and tools several times a day to open packages, tighten the screws in my glasses, open beer bottles, open envelopes, cut string, trim my moustache, remove splinters, write notes, and on and on.
Victorinox makes a dizzying array of Swiss Army knives and I can't imagine walking out of my house without one in my pocket.

O frabjous day! Calloo! Callay!

We've got a new favorite restaurant!

We dined tonight at the new Whiskey Creek Wood Fire Grill in Paragould. It opened Monday night and the place was packed because people around here are dying for a good dining experience. (This is the place where I photographed the branding of the bar last week.)

We had to search the parking lot for a space, finally waiting for a van to back out.

There was about a 40-minute wait to be served, but it was a pleasant atmosphere and we didn't mind waiting.

We had steaks - the best we've had in months and months. And I had a couple of Amber Bocks.

The service was superb. Our server was a young woman from Hemet, Calif., by way of San Diego. She'd come out to visit her mother who retired to Arkansas and was stunned to see how much house and land she could buy for what, by California standards, was next to nothing. So she and her boyfriend have two acres and 10 dogs and love it here.

We split a piece of Turtle cheesecake that was staggeringly good and got out of there for $44.48, plus a $10 tip. That's not something we want to do every night, but it was such a refreshingly good dining experience after suffering through so many bad restaurant meals in Jonesboro that we were almost giddy.

And the great thing is that Whiskey Creek is actually a little closer to our house than are the restaurants of Jonesboro.

This is where we will take out-of-town guests!

What's wrong with this picture?

 

Click on the photo for a larger view.

 

This is the company portrait of the newspaper where Maria worked until last September. It was taken on Nov. 16, 2006. That's 14 months ago yesterday. More than two-thirds of these people are now gone.

As of yesterday (I haven't checked today), 18 of the 26 employees pictured here are gone. (I'm not counting the publisher, who is the guy in the gray shirt in the front row, flanked by guys with green and red Xs.) Twelve (the green Xs) have quit and six (red Xs) were fired or forced to resign.

There have been at least seven other departures involving people who were absent the day of the photo or who came aboard after this photo was taken.

Here's another way to look at it:

Draw your own conclusions. I'm just reporting the facts.

Hopeful

Our long carpet nightmare may be nearing an end.
Or maybe not. Who knows?
I have Friday off this week and the installer is coming to rip out the defective carpet and lay what we hope is flawless Berber. We hope.
That will set the stage for a massive moving operation, clearing all of our office stuff out of the garage and one of the guest rooms where we now have a temporary office.
I'm scheduled to work 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Saturday, so Maria may get a headstart on me in organizing the new office space. Also, we need to buy a desk or two this weekend to get things set up properly.
Then I can finally finish the wedding albums for a couple whose wedding we shot last July 14. This has been an ongoing source of embarrassment to me, but it couldn't be helped because I just wasn't set up to do the work.

Had your mammal today?

I just stumbled upon The Daily Mammal blog wherein Ted Slampyak, an illustrator from Albuquerque and Jennifer Rae Atkins, a museum exhibition designer from Bernalillo, N.M. are drawing a mammal a day.

They figure it will take about 14 years to run out of daily mammals. Give it a look.

501 Club? Yes! O'Charley's? Hell, no!

Here's my personal appraisal of the restaurants we've visited in Jonesboro:

Club 501 - The best in town. Fabulous steaks and first-rate service. It's also about the most expensive place in town, so we're not likely to become regulars.

Delta Cafe - Terrific down-home Mid-South cooking and over-the-top service. You can get a killer meal of serious comfort food here for not a lot of money.

Ed's Country Catfish House - A really fine catfish buffet. This is a place we plan to take Maria's parents when they come to visit. It blows most Indiana catfish places into the weeds.

El Acapulco - A competent Mexican restaurant, crippled by the fact that they can't serve alcohol. Who the hell wants Mexican food without a beer or a margarita?

Demo's Barbecue - Good, authentic Arkansas barbecue served in a casual atmosphere.

Dexter's Barbecue - Ditto.

Couch's Barbecue - Ditto.

Brickhouse - A trendy restaurant/bar downtown with good pizza.

Cracker Barrel - It's a Cracker Barrel. What else do you need to know?

Pizza Inn - God-awful. It's like they've never seen real pizza.

O'Charley's - The "O" stands for overrated and overpriced. Almost every visit is a disappointment. We dropped in Saturday night after a movie and Maria ordered prime rib. The kitchen lost our order and when it showed up, it was tough as shoe leather. She complained and the waiter promised a new hunk of meat, returning minutes later to announce that they were out of prime rib and she had gotten the last one. We returned - against our better judgment - for lunch today. The waiter forgot to bring the signature hot rolls. When he finally did bring them with our meal, he forgot the butter. Oddly enough, I forgot the tip.

Ruby Tuesday - The iceberg lettuce on the salad bar is consistently wilted and brown. We were there for lunch on Monday and were told it was a 10-minute wait to be seated. We pointed out that there were several open tables and the hostess replied the wait was because they only had three servers. Apparently the restaurant is run for the convenience of the employees and not for the customers.

Munchys - A sandwich shop. Nothing special.

San Francisco Bread Co. - A clone of Panera's. I like the Reuben.

International House of Pancakes - OK for breakfast. See one IHOP and you've seen them all.

Chef's In - Yeah, it seems like it oughta be Inn, but it's their place and they get to name it. If you're hungry at lunchtime, seriously hungry, ravenously hungry, and you're downtown, this is the place to go. They have a buffet that is simply spectacular and the desserts are great too.

TCBY - Run by morons. Be prepared to be annoyed. We ordered at the drive-up and the girl at the window fumbled our change. She insisted we had to get out of the car and pick it up off of the ground if we wanted it. That was three months ago and we haven't been back.

Andy's - Frozen custard made fresh several times daily. And open year-round. We go there much too often.

Shorty Small's - A nice eatery in the Mall at Turtle Creek. Good sandwiches and great steaks. We'll be back.

Colton's Steakhouse - Kinda like Texas Roadhouse and Lone Star. Buckets of peanuts, throw the shells on the floor. Crippled by a lack of alcoholic beverages.

Chili's - Just like all the other Chili's restaurants, but with out the alcohol. Why bother?

Holiday Inn Express - A surprisingly good buffet for lunch.

Tuesday's best

A woman dressed as the Statue of Liberty waving to evening rush hour traffic in front of Liberty Income Tax Service.

She's a tax preparer, but she's playing Miss Liberty this week because most people haven't received their W-2s and business is slow.

And...

Jonesboro High School vs. Marion. I don't know who won because I had to leave at halftime to get my work done. Shooting sports with flash is a whole different thing from shooting available light. In this case, I had to set my D-200 on shutter priority at a 250th of a second and f/2.8 to get the shutter speed I needed to stop the action. Fortunately, the SB-800 speedlight synchs with the D-200 up to a 250th.

And then there's this one. A bunch of young boys hanging out under the goal at the pre-game shootaround, waiting for a stray ball to toss back and openly admiring their high school sports heroes. Do they realize it will be them out there on that hardwood floor in a few short years?

The night shift

I'm working the 1-10 p.m. shift tonight, so this post finds me at the McDonald's at Caraway & Highland, listening to the Windows Weekly podcast with Leo Laporte and Paul Thurott.
I'm shooting a Jonesboro High School basketball game in a few minutes, so I have to find the gym before the action starts.
Today's downer was a 6-year-old who got run over and killed by his mother after getting out of the car at school.

Walkin' the dog

Out for a stroll with Pete.

Faves

It's been a long time since I blogged a list of favorites, so here's my personal list of my top 10 favorite motorcycle and travel-related DVDs, in no particular order:

Horatio's Drive: America's First Road Trip - The story of the first transcontinental automobile road trip, accomplished in 1903 by Dr. Horatio Jackson. It had huge historical significance because it set in motion an unprecedented period of road-building and highway development that evolved into today's road network that makes it possible to drive damn near anywhere in the U.S. and opened up travel to the average American. It's a 2003 PBS documentary by Ken Burns.

Wild Hogs - Tim Allen, John Travolta and a couple of other guys are suburban biker wannabes who decided to ride from Cincinnati to the Pacific Coast. It's funny on so many different levels, whether you're a rider or not.

Ghost Rider - Film adaptation of Marvel Comics' cult title Ghost Rider stars Nicolas Cage as motorcyclist Johnny Blaze, who transforms into a skull-faced angel of vengeance to battle the forces of evil. Peter Fonda and Sam Elliott are brilliant in supporting roles.

Long Way Round - Ewan McGregor and Charlie Boorman ride around the world on BMW R1200GS motorcycles. There's a cameo appearance by my friend Ted Simon, who chronicled his first round-the-world ride in Jupiter's Travels.

The World's Fastest Indian - The true story of New Zealander Burt Munro, who took his home-modified 1920s Indian to the Bonneville Salt Flats in the 1960s and set a land speed record. Anthony Hopkins is brilliant as the cantankerous old Burt.

The Wild One - Marlon Brando's 1954 film about a biker gang that terrorizes a small California town, loosely based on an incident at Hollister, Calif., in 1947. It was banned in England for 20 years. A young Lee Marvin is wonderful in a supporting role.

Easy Rider - The definitive biker road trip movie, made in 1969 by Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper and introducing Jack Nicholson. The DVD includes a featurette on the making of Easy Rider that is fascinating in its own right. Fonda's account of how riding the chopper on the first day of shooting nearly paralyzed his arms is a scream. It was the first movie to incorporate popular rock hits of the time into the soundtrack. I once had the pleasure of watching this movie on TV with Willie G. Davidson, of the Harley-Davidson Davidsons, in a Holiday Inn motel room in Lebanon, Ind.

Rumble Fish - Mickey Rourke is the "motorcycle boy" in this brilliant, arty Francis Ford Coppola film starring Matt Dillon. It's not strictly a motorcycle movie, but Rourke looks cool on his Kawasaki KZ550. The supporting cast includes early work by Nicolas Cage, Christopher Penn, Vincent Spano, Laurence Fishburne, and musician Tom Waits.

Mad Max - Mel Gibson's breakout firm with great riding scenes. I can never get used to seeing them riding on the left side of the road in Australia, though. And, of course...

The Road Warrior - Gibson's better-made sequel to Max Max with even better riding scenes.

Dildo wars

There's a new "lingerie" business just south of town and the owners have filed suit against the county over an ordinance they feel is unconstitutionally vague when it comes to determining what constitutes an "adult" business.
The owners and their attorney went before the county legislative body last night and I was dispatched to photograph the meeting. I'd hoped to get photos of county officials examining dildos and other such marital appliances, but the owners of the business apparently decided it wouldn't help their case to bring samples to the meeting. The petitioners' attorney emphasized they don't have peep shows, aka "quarter movies," with private booths where patrons can do things by themselves and with others that they wouldn't do on a downtown street.
The county officials retained a high-powered law firm out of Little Rock to represent them. Their attorney noted that a new state law that went into effect last July covers the same stuff as their ordinance and also adds zoning conditions, requiring any "adult" business to be so many feet from the nearest church, school, private residence, etc. But both attorneys seemed to agree that the state law is also vague as to what exactly constitutes an "adult" business, versus a lingerie shop that also sells latex novelties and the like.
He opined that their best option might be to rescind the county ordinance and, if the county prosecutor is so inclined, he can apply the state law to the business, thereby saving the county some serious legal fees.
County officials have a couple of weeks to chew on the matter before coming to a decision.
For me, the highlight of the meeting came at the end, when the presiding officer - in Arkansas, he's called a judge, but it's like a county commissioner in Indiana - announced he had a motion to adjourn and, "...all in favor, say ahhh."

Ablative absolute?

My mind was wandering and free-associating this afternoon and I suddenly realized I was chewing on the term "ablative absolute."

This represents a flashback of almost 50 years to my high school Latin class. For what it's worth, I learned more English in Latin class than anything else - derivatives, word origins and shades of meaning.

I couldn't conjure up a coherent explanation of what an ablative absolute is, so I turned to Wikipedia:

In Latin grammar, the ablative absolute (Latin: ablativus absolutus) is a noun phrase cast in the ablative case. More specifically it consists of a noun or pronoun and some participle (in the case of sum ["to be"] a zero morpheme often has to be used as the past and present participle do not exist, only the future participle), all in the ablative absolute. It indicates the time, condition, or attending circumstances of an action being described in the main sentence. It takes the place of, and translates, many phrases that would require a subordinate clause in English. The unfamiliarity of this construction makes it sometimes difficult for Latin students to grasp; however, mastery of this construction is needed to write Latin well, and its availability makes Latin prose quite concise. The closest English equivalent is the nominative absolute.

The closest translation to the Latin follows the paradigm, with the NOUN PARTICIPLE. This construction however can often sound awkward in English. Therefore, it is often finessed into some other, more English-like, construction. In the following examples, the first line is the direct translation from Latin, while the second has been construed to sound more at home in English. The usage of present, passive or future participles will determine the verbal idea in the ablative absolute.

• urbe capta Aeneas fugavit:

  The city having been captured, Aeneas fled. (literal)

  With the city having been captured, Aeneas fled.

  When the city was captured, Aeneas fled.

Obsoleted again! Meet the Fabulous D-300

Damn! My camera is obsolete again.
Maria and I got into digital SLR photography a few years ago with the Nikon D-100. We'd sat on the fence for years, waiting for the quality of digital photography to reach that of film and the D-100 was good enough to make us take out our charge card and make the jump to digital.
We were already heavily invested in Nikon lenses, so Canon digital was never really an option for us, even though Canon stuff is every bit as good as Nikon. After I got my hands on a D-100, I think I've put maybe three rolls of film through my venerable old Nikon F5. I keep it around because it's built like a tank and there may be a day when I need a bulletproof film camera.
The D-100s served us well for a couple of years of shooting for newspapers, magazines, portrait, weddings and stock.
Then Nikon introduced the D-200. It had almost twice the megapixels, much less noise at higher ISO settings and the ability to shoot high-speed bursts that didn't immediately load up the buffer. It turned out to be a very competent sports camera. I still prefer my D-200 to the D2X and the D2H cameras Maria's newspaper owns because it has a much greater resolution and does almost everything those pro cameras do, only better.
Then, a few weeks ago, I got a Nikon insert in one of my camera magazines touting the new D3 pro SLR. If there's a D3, then the D-300 prosumer version can't be far behind.
And, sure enough, it wasn't.
The D-300 has a monster 3" monitor, a 51-point autofocus system and 12.3 megapixel reolution. And, wonder of wonders, it has a self-cleaning sensor unit. Dust has always been the bane of digital SLRs and a whole industry has grown up around devices to find and remove dust specks that get sucked onto the electronically charged sensor during lens changes. It can also shoot 6 frames per second (8 fps using the optional battery pack) and can do a continuous burst of up to 100 frames without loading up the buffer. There are lots more bells and whistles that make this the best prosumer digital SLR from Nikon so far, but I won't list them here.
And, of course, the price point is about the same as the D-100 and the D-200 when they were introduced: $1,700 for the body only.

Another great Western

We watched "3:10 to Yuma" last night and I'm happy to say the Western genre of film is still alive and well.
The 2007 film is a remake of a 1957 movie and stars Russell Crowe and Christian Bale. We don't have our home theatre sound system hooked up yet in our new house, so I can't make an informed comparison between this movie's soundtrack and that of Open Range, which I think has the best shootout - acoustically, especially - that I've ever seen in a movie. The one in 3:10 to Yuma may be even better in Dolby 5.1 surround sound with the volume cranked up.
But soundtrack aside, it's an extremely well-crafted intelligent movie and it's a delight to see Peter Fonda in great supporting role.
I give it five stars. See what you think.

Read This

This may seem like an odd think to include in a blog, but it strikes me as very useful information. It just came to me in an email:

STROKE IDENTIFICATION:

During a BBQ, a friend stumbled and took a little fall, she assured everyone that she was fine (they offered to call paramedics) .....she said she had just tripped over a brick because of her new shoes.

They got her cleaned up and got her a new plate of food. While she appeared a bit shaken up, Ingrid went about enjoying herself the rest of the evening.

Ingrid's husband called later telling everyone that his wife had been taken to the hospital - (Ingrid died at 6 p.m.) She had suffered a stroke at the BBQ.
Had they known how to identify the signs of a stroke, perhaps Ingrid would be with us today. Some don't die, they end up in a helpless, hopeless condition instead.

It only takes a minute to read this...

A neurologist says that if he can get to a stroke victim within 3 hours he can totally reverse the effects of a stroke... totally . He said the trick was getting a stroke recognized, diagnosed, and then getting the patient medically cared for within 3 hours, which is tough.

RECOGNIZING A STROKE
Thank God for the sense to remember the Three steps: STR . Read and Learn!

Sometimes symptoms of a stroke are difficult to identify. Unfortunately, the lack of awareness spells disaster. The stroke victim may suffer severe brain damage when
people nearby fail to recognize the symptoms of a stroke.


Now doctors say a bystander can recognize a stroke by asking three simple questions:

S * Ask the individual to SMILE.
T * Ask the person to TALK and SPEAK A SIMPLE SENTENCE (Coherently) i.e. It is sunny out today)
R * Ask him or her to RAISE BOTH ARMS.

If he or she has trouble with ANY ONE of these tasks, call 999/911 immediately and describe the symptoms to the dispatcher.

New Sign of a Stroke ------- Stick out Your Tongue

NOTE: Another sign of a stroke is this: Ask the person to stick out his tongue. If the tongue is 'crooked' - if it goes to one side or the other - that is also an
indication of a stroke.

A cardiologist says if everyone who gets this information passes it on to 10 people, you can bet that at least one life will be saved.

Great read

I'm about halfway through Neal Peart's Ghost Rider: Travels on the Healing Road.
Neal is the drummer with Rush and rides a BMW motorcycle. The book is about the healing motorcycle journey he took after his stepdaughter was killed in an auto accident and his wife died of cancer.

Naptime for my girls

Ruthie and Maria taking a Sunday afternoon nap.

Now I know why my pillow sometimes smells like dog.

Nighttime self-defense

3W LED Tactical Flashlight with Strobe function and Tactical Ring

Besides being a spectacularly powerful little flashlight, this thing is a nighttime intruder's worst nightmare.

Imagine creeping into someone's home, intent on mischief, when you're met with a blinding blue-white strobing light. The strobe effect destroys your night vision and disorients you to the extent that you are momentarily immobilized.

On the other end of the light beam is an opponent who can see you with perfect clarity and can either shoot you or advance unseen and deliver incapacitating blows.

Every home should have one of these on a bedside table.

Joining a new BMW club

 Here's Steve Clark, newly elected president of the BMW Riders Association of the Mid-South, yesterday at the club's January meeting on the northeastside of Memphis.

The venue was Robilio's Side Car Cafe, 2194 Whitten Road, just north of a Harley-Davidson dealership. I recommend the Cajun Shrimp Pasta.

I rode over with Charlie and Deb Parsons - 192 round-trip miles from our house in temperatures in the 40s and 50s and sunshine, except for the last 30 miles on the return trip.

The crowd was immediately recognizable as BMW riders - median age of 50-something and friendly to a fault. They immediately accepted me as a member of the Beemer fraternity. I wrote out a check for $15 for a year's dues for myself and Maria and, voila, we're members.

This is the club that puts on the Return to Shiloh Rally in early October at Pickwick Dam, Tenn., one of the better sites for a motorcycle rally I've seen. It's a few miles from the historic Battle of Shiloh Civil War battlefield.

I'd hoped to attend last October, but the hassles of moving from Indiana made it impossible. I'll be there for sure this year.

Today's effort

Today's effort included a morning perp walk at the courthouse.

The last time I covered courts was in Hamilton County, Indiana where it was impossible to photograph prisoners in court or en route to and from court. They were put into a sheriff's department car in a secure garage at the jail and were driven to a similarly secure garage area at the courthouse where they were taken to the courtroom via a secure elevator not accessible by the press or the public. And, of course, cameras are not allowed in Indiana courtrooms, so getting a perp walk photo was pretty much out of the question.

No so here.

The bailiff is amazingly cooperative. He showed me the best place to wait for the prisoners to be led from the courtroom to the elevator and even grouped the prisoners for my convenience. I felt like he did everything he could to help me, short of letting me poke them with a sharp stick.

It was also possible to charge down the stairwell and beat the prisoner elevator to the ground floor for another shooting opportunity. Here they are being loaded onto the prisoner transport van to be returned to jail.

The afternoon shoot was in support of a reporter's story about an effort by local fire officials to get a ban on the sale of novelty cigarette lighters. The logic behind a ban is that they look like toys, making it more likely that children will play with them and set themselves or their homes on fire.

It's a good idea, but probably violates the rights of responsible collectors. It will be interesting to see if the law gets passed and if it can survive a court challenge.

Yes, it would be easy for a kid to think these are toys.

More busy-ness

 

Yesterday was another 1-10 p.m. days with an ASU basketball game that kept me at work until about 11:30 p.m. So I'm shaving some time off of the front and back of my scheduled 9 a.m.-5 p.m. shift today to keep from running into overtime for the week.

Today's front page is dominated by this photo of the training manager of the new Whiskey Creek restaurant and bar in nearby Paragould, Ark., using a red-hot branding iron to decorate the pine-topped bar. It's a custom with Whiskey Creek to have area cattlemen bring in their branding irons to brand the bar. And, of course, Whiskey Creek has its own brand. This is the 15th Whiskey Creek establishment and will open on Monday.

This slam dunk photo dominates the cover of today's sports section. It's customary for photographers to sit on the floor at the end of the basketball court. I'm sufficiently old and stiff enough that I can only stand about 12-15 minutes in that position before I have to struggle to my feet and find another vantage point. Since I would block the view of paying fans by remaining in that spot, I move off to the corner of the court. That turns out to be a good choice, since I would be at a bad angle and too close for the 80-200mm lens to have gotten this and a couple other slam dunk shots.

For the photo geeks, I'm using a Nikon D-200 and a Nikkor 80-200mm f/2.8 lens. I have the ISO dialed up to 1600 and the camera set on aperture priority at f/2.8. That gives me maximum shutter speed and a shallow depth of field that isolates the subject.

I also got this shot of the daughter of the assistant ASU coach in her cheerleading outfit, but it didn't make the paper.

Haircut

It's been a couple of months since I've had a haircut and I'm conspicuously shaggy.

Mostly, it's because I've been too busy to find a cheap haircut place. There's no Great Clips here, but there is a Fantastic Sams, not to be confused with Amazing Larry from Pee Wee's Big Adventure.

So, since I don't go to work until 1 p.m. today, I'm off to Haircut Land. The folks at The Sun won't recognize me.

Still keeping busy

Today's effort included covering the Arkansas State University women's basketball game with North Texas - ASU won 69-55.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A recovering drug addict turned evangelist and poet.

A new senior citizen center.

And an environmental portrait of the senior center director.

Before the storm hit yesterday, it was a photo showing crowded conditions at a south suburban school district:

School administrators call this hallway where the junior high kids congregate after lunch the "snake pit." Obviously, they've never been to the Indianapolis 500-Mile Race and seen the real snake pit:

Yep, I was right

We got some heavy weather today. No tornado, but a freaking deluge and some powerful straight-line winds that trashed a neighborhood on the westside of town.

I got soaked, but shot some decent photos and had fun doing it.

Everybody say, "Awwwwwwwww."

National Guardsman Ralph Eric Tanner of Hayti, Mo., kisses his infant daughter as he prepares to leave for Camp Shelby, Miss., on Monday morning. Tanner and his wife, Sonya, recently adopted the 11-day-old girl.
Here's my contribution to the front page this morning.
Today's photos will likely be weather-related. By mid-morning, there were already several tornado sightings west of here and it looks like things could get ugly here in Northeast Arkansas before the day is over. Good thing I have my Gore-Tex jacket in the car.
(BTW, the soldier's home town is pronounced HAY-Tie. Ask me about Blytheville sometime.)

More 9/11 Payback

This morning's assignment was to shoot the departure of Co. A, 2nd Btn., 153rd Infantry, 39th Infantry Bde. Combat Team and Detatchment 1 of the same unit from the armory in Walnut Ridge.
That amounts to about 110 kids who look like your high school football team with guns - serious guns.
Lots of tearful goodbyes with wives, girlfriends, parents.
They're headed for Camp Shelby, Miss. After a month of training there, it's off to Iraq.
Arkansas is hunting country and a lot of these guys have been handling firearms since they were little kids, so they'll be be a serious threat in a firefight.

Got the windows open

It's amazingly warm here today - 66 degrees - and we were compelled to open the kitchen windows because it was getting unbearably stuffy from the heat of cooking breakfast.

This is not the kind of weather I'm accustomed to during the first week of January, but checking the Weather Channel website, I see it's headed for a high in the 60s today up in Indiana, too.

We also have a strong and gusty wind out of the SSW - 23 mph with gusts to 30 mph - but the dead oak tree in the front yard hasn't shed any more limbs yet.

I think a motorcycle ride is in order for this afternoon.

Meeting art

Ready to shoot the ASU Mascot Committee meeting.
NCAA says they can't be Indians any more. I doubt if any actual Indians were consulted or offended.

Busy? Well, kinda...

It's been a busy time filling in as the photo editor/photographer at Maria's paper since the staff has dwindled down to just one other photographer who was off a few days this week.

That left me to do it all. Here's some of the "all:"

Gas prices topped the $3 mark here last night.

The Bay High School girls advanced in the NEA Tournament.

The county's first baby of '08, born at 1:37 a.m. Jan. 1.

The Nettleton United Methodist Church Quilters meet Wednesdays.

Free dinners at the Salvation Army.

Mailing out voter registration cards. I picked up ours after taking this shot.

A driver gets cited for an expired license during an accident investigation.

Checking out materials at the public library on a slow news day.

Photo illustration for a story on smoking and health.

Art for a story on a new church, for the weekend church page.

You think this is cold?

It's amusing to see people here freaking out over the cold. Got down to about 17 this morning - no big deal for Hoosiers, but a terrible crisis for Arkies.
It got down to 2 degrees back home in Indiana.
But the folks down here may have the last laugh this summer when the temperatures soar into the triple digits for several days in a row.
Maybe so, maybe not. After all, I've seen heat - rode across the Mojave Desert in mid-July a few years ago.

Good stuff

Maria spent most of last week suffering with an upset stomach and generally feeling queasy,which we chalked up to the back-to-back colds we've struggled with since Thanksgiving.
She was at her wits' end until it suddenly dawned on me that she had taken some heavy duty antibiotics.
Antibiotics have the nasty consequence of nuking the ecosystem of one's digestive tract.
I brought up that point and suggested she start slamming down some of the kefir (pronounced KEE-fur) we have in the fridge.
Kefir is a cultured enzyme-rich food full of friendly microorganisms that restore balance to the digestive system and is more nutritious and therapeutic than yogurt.
I'd always favored yogurt as post-antibiotic therapy, but kefir appears to work even better.
Maria started drinking it in the morning and was pretty much back to normal by afternoon.
Read all about the stuff at www.kefir.net.