This Old Blog

excited It's tough being a visiting parent. You want to treat your children like small children instead of adult children, to reach out and protect them still. The hardest part is acting with restraint. You offer praise without being asked, and carefully nuanced advice when asked and only when asked. It's a different form of parenting. It goes to underscore that you never stop being a parent. Your parenting continues in small and surprising ways as long as you live and breath. This is by no means everyone. This is a small fraction. And it's extending, slowly, as my daughters build their lives. The things I have, especially my cameras, are far more important as instruments to capture moments of what is really important to me than as things to own unto themselves. wary annoyed I have begun to shift (or perhaps the word is "pivot") in my photographic technique. Here's a surprising personal revelation. I find I don't quite like the added expo...

Look! Blown highlights! New blown highlight chaser mobile. Call me Blown Highlight Bill. Some weeks ago - never mind how long precisely - having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me in Orlando, I thought I would drive about a little and see the blown highlight part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen, and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a humid, stormy August in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before camera stores, and bringing up the rear of every forum post on photography I meet; and especially whenever my typos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically strangling people with their DSLR straps - then, I account it high time to get to the road as soon as I can. Taken in or near Railroad Square , Tallahassee, FL. With p...

Another trip to Tallahassee over the weekend. This time I drove up in my wife's Prius to deliver an antique chest-of-drawers that was owned once by her grandmother, my wife's mother. It's been 11 years since my mother-in-law passed, but there are still strong memories, especially attached to personal items. Women seem to have a strong affinity for personal items owned by their mother and grandmothers (and even further back). I noticed that with my mom and my sister, and I've noticed it with my wife and both the girls. I took the antique chest up, and then removed the chest-of-drawers that my daughter had had since she was in elementary school and had taken with her to college. She wanted to replace it, built as it was out of lesser materials, and use her grandmother's built out of cedar and mahogany. I got it into her small house, then we took the other dresser to a thrift store in Tallahassee. I went by myself to Tallahassee. Unfortunately I didn't start...

Daughter #2 deep in thought Molly the guard cat This weekend was another world-wind trip, from Orlando to Gainesville to Tallahassee on Saturday and then back home again today. We hired the same house sitter we'd used on our road trip so that we could leave the Labs and make as efficient use off our limited travel time as possible; that means very few stops along the way and thus the shortest travel times possible. The biggest amount of work was in Tallahassee. We transported a queen-sized bed purchased at the Orlando IKEA up to daughter #2. To get it there I had to put down the right back seat and push the front passenger seat up as far as possible. There was enough room to put everything in. My wife and I sat on the driver side. In spite of all that material loaded in the Prius, we still managed 52MPG, which is more than double what the much older Kia Sedona van was able to get when it was brand new. Granted, the van was much larger, and had a much larger engine (3.5L v...

You're looking at two recently deceased businesses on I-10 at exit 262 north bound on County Road 255 to Lee, Florida, one directly across the other. I found these quite by accident when I pulled off of I-10 to switch driving with my wife. I say recently deceased because there's very little wear on the businesses. While I was standing there trying to photograph Kounty Kitchen Restaurant a relative of the former owner drove up in his truck to ask if I was interested in buying the business. When I told him "No" he grew a bit disappointed, said goodbye, and drove on. This is indicative of what I continue to see, small businesses all over that are being shuttered, one by slow steady one, while both political parties continue to dither over a solution. I find the unemployment statistic of "only" 7.8% to be something close to obscene. No, I don't believe the numbers were manipulated by the president. Yes, I do find 7.8% just as depressing as any of the p...

This is a small cautionary tale about business, one a small business, and one a large one. We'll start with the small business, the former Seminole Wind on Monroe. The first time I even knew Seminole Wind existed was when I drove by it July of last year and caught site of the sign addressed to the President hanging up high (see below). I stopped and grabbed a photo, and then drove on. It was in July of last year that I helped my youngest daughter move into her current residence, another rental. We were driving up an down Monroe between where we were staying on Monroe and where my daughter eventually wound up. My daughter had never heard of this place in all the time she'd been there and I'd never noticed, like I said, before now. After this one photo I forgot about it. And then, this past weekend, driving up Monroe back to where our hotel was I happened to glance over to the place and saw it was completely closed up. The only indication that there was even a closure was ...

Mollie (a.k.a. Rocket) has grown a bit since the last time I saw her . She's up to ten pounds. She's also been "trained" to handle being outdoor on a special leash. The leash consists of a special harness that fits around the upper body; one strap around the body behind the front legs and the second around the body at the front of the legs, with a connecting strap parallel with the spine and a second parallel with the brisket. It seemed to work, although I was warned that Mollie hadn't learned she could somehow get out of the harness. Regardless of the danger of Mollie getting free, the harness and attached lead managed to help maintain control on a rather active ten pound cat. On this particular outing Mollie immediately went into a stalking mode and went slinking and jinking towards a group of azaleas at the side of my daughter's place. I'm not sure what she was after, but she sure was intent on getting whatever it was she thought she was stalking. I...

You can tell what kind of influence you've had on one of your children when they tell you to meet them for a short father-daughter photo walk as soon as you check into your hotel room. That's exactly what Megs did. She invited her mom and dad to meet her at Railroad Square Art Park . In all the years I've trekked back and forth between Orlando and Tallahassee, I never knew this place existed. It sits right across the railroad tracks from the old Amtrack station on Railroad Avenue, caddy corner from the northwest corner of the FAMU campus. It used to be the Downtown Industrial Park in the 1960s. When it finally closed down it left behind a large collection of warehouses that were turned into over 50 artist shops and studios. My daughter knows of this place because she had a small studio in one of the warehouses-converted-to-studios when she was taking art classes as FSU. She made the perfect guide for the short period of time we walked about and photographed the area. I jus...

Driving west on I-10 late Friday evening, 22 June It has been one long weekend, a weekend devoted to driving up to Tallahassee and back to visit my younger daughter. On the surface it should have been a small pleasant trip. Instead, Tropical Storm Debbie made a surprise visit as well. Thursday My long challenging weekend started Thursday in the lab. I'd finally gotten the second Dell R610 server prepped and added to the vSphere Cluster. Once that was done I started working on a third virtual machine to host a terrain server we've been trying to set up based on Open Street Map. We'd already gone through two iterations of setting up that terrain server. While it worked, it wasn't particularly performant. With the new server in place I created a third baseline VM with 32GB memory and four cores. This new server has a pair of hexa-core Xeon 5675 processors with 144GB of memory and 4TB of local storage. So when I create a an equivalent quad-core system with 32GB of me...

If anybody ever tells you that all your parental responsibilities end when your children turn 18 has either never had children or never been a real parent. They may grow up and move out, but the bonds that develop between loving parent and child are never severed. Strained, perhaps, but never truly severed. Being a parent grows ever more difficult as your children grow older simply because they do become adults, with their own independent wills, dreams, and ambitions totally apart from yours. The best you can do is offer advice when asked, both sides knowing that the advice offered is from a different generational perspective, and the older generation realizing the younger generation may decide not to take that advice or modify it to suit the current situation. You can be there to help them the best you can when they need it. But if they don't ask for advice or help, then you have to stay out of their way, realizing that you don't have a complete awareness of their situation. ...

On the road again... back up to Tallahassee. A quick two day run-up (Saturday and Sunday) to visit daughter #2, drop off some "vital" items, fix what can be fixed in a very short period of time, and try to be a father. Post-undergraduate-school, these trips seem a little melancholy; they remind me of the time that's passed. But then all that is more than balanced by the good of being able to visit and socialize. While I certainly love to visit, the "getting there" is most definitely not half the fun. Trying to drive responsibly (65mph in the slow lane on a three-lane highway to save gas in the Prius) makes you the target of tail-gaiters and vehicles that literally blow past you, like this trucker that did both on I-75. Florida drivers are real assholes. We (Labs and I) stopped at the Archer exit in Gainesville to pick up a quick bite of lunch. The temperature was cool enough I could leave the pups out in the car with all four windows down. And being the natu...

Occupy Tallahassee While other Occupy camps are being roughly disbanded by over-militarized local police (New York, Oakland, Atlanta, Miami, Orlando, etc), the camp in Tallahassee seems to be alive and well, having been established since October of last year, and having been at this location since Thanksgiving. I found this while leaving Tallahassee after stopping by the Broken Brogan (see more below). I met several camp inhabitants this morning and they were all quite friendly. One of them, Aaron, gave me a thumbnail history of the area, stressing the fact that the city gave them permission to occupy this vacant lot at the corner of West Madison and South Duval. Apparently the Occupy group went to great pains to occupy the area legally. I find it amazing that the city of Tallahassee would be so open-minded and cooperative with the Occupy group. Or perhaps I shouldn't be, with Florida State University and Florida A&M sitting right next door to the group. Both of these s...

That little critter might look like Lucy, but it's not. My daughter's boyfriend decided he wanted a cat, so they went to a local animal shelter in Tallahassee to see what they had. Tallahassee shelters have a humane will-not-destroy rule about animals. They'll keep them until they find a home for them, however long it takes. The shelter fixed this little girl kitten, but they used super glue on the outer incision. That seems to be a commonly accepted procedure, but the incision didn't stay shut with this little one, who opened it back up while cleaning herself. So they took her to a vet, who surgically stapled it back shut. Then, to make sure it healed as quickly as possible they bought the collar and put it on her. They haven't decided on a final name for the kitten, but the one they're both leaning towards is Rocket, because of the way she goes flying around inside. The collar doesn't seem to slow her down. So now my very extended family is involved...