Nicole Gustav Barron

My sister's middle initial is G, but no, it does not stand for Gustav.

She is in Austin, Texas, riding out the fury of Hurricane Gustav with her friend Sarah. She sends word, which is this...

Dude, NPR just called. I've already done my first interview! Could you do me the favor of making a blog post letting everyone know where I am and how I can be reached? And maybe put "media inquires" in there somewhere? Making lemonade, N.

If you are a media member, or if you would just like to wish her well, email Nicole here. If you are a sexual predator, lunatic, or a member of one of the many government agencies looking at my sister as a "person of interest," sorry, but the email address above is just a forwarder.





Nicole in her New Orleans home, December 2006.

Did Someone Say Yum?!

New Wearable Feedbags Let Americans Eat More, Move Less

Fair Skies

I shot this yesterday while I was waiting to photograph the Ada High School Couganns Dance Team. They were chatting about eating out, and mentioned Papa Gjorgjo's restaurant. I said, "My wife and I had our first date there!" They responded in chorus: all twelve of them said, "Awww!"


Anyway, I was thinking about fair skies as I monitor the progress of Hurricane Gustav in the Caribbean, and wonder if we'll get any of the moisture from it.

In the Bullseye

As you can see from this updated map from the Tropical Prediction Center, Nicole is now dead center of the Hurricane Gustav bullseye...


Also, my sister is between 350 and 500 miles tall, apparently.

Some Quotes from the Olympic Games

1. Weightlifting commentator: 'This is Gregoriava from Bulgaria. I saw her snatch this morning during her warm up and it was amazing."

2. Dressage commentator: 'This is really a lovely horse and I speak from personal experience since I once mounted her mother."

3. Paul Hamm, Gymnast: "I owe a lot to my parents, especially my mother and father."

4. Boxing Analyst: "Sure there have been injuries, and even some deaths in boxing, but none of them really that serious."

5. Softball announcer: "If history repeats itself, I should think we can expect the same thing again."

6. Basketball analyst: "He dribbles a lot and the opposition doesn't like it. In fact you can see it all over their faces."

7. At the rowing medal ceremony: "Ah, isn't that nice, the wife of the IOC president is hugging the cox of the British crew."

8. Soccer commentator: "Julian Dicks is everywhere. It's like they've got eleven Dicks on the field."

9. Tennis commentator: "One of the reasons Andy is playing so well is that, before the final round, his wife takes out his balls and kisses them... Oh my God, what have I just said?"

Always a Cheerful Word

My sister Nicole called me last night. You might recall that she lost all of her possessions in Hurricane Katrina in 2005, then heroically rebuilt her home. "Okay, I'm really freaked out about Hurricane Gustav. Talk me down."

I assured her that...

1. Hurricanes seldom strike New Orleans
2. When they do, they are usually quite mild
3. The City of New Orleans, State of Louisiana, and FEMA are well-prepared for such an occurrence
4. The levi system in New Orleans can't possibly fail

On the National Hurricane Center's web site, I see that Gustav was downgraded to a tropical storm over night. The five day cone, however, forecasts intensification and a path directly toward New Orleans. Wheee!

Sadflowers

Now that it's late summer, Abby's sunflowers are played out. They did amazingly well considering how little attention we were able to give them. Today I am going to cut them down and feed them to the goats, so Abby can put something into the flowerbed for the fall. It's a banquet for the boys, who like the leaves of sunflowers a lot.

Image: I went out to photograph the sunflowers before cutting them, and found this huge, cool-looking grasshopper.

Beautiful Bird

I downloaded Cindy Morgan's latest album, Beautiful Bird, and have not found it wanting. If you like the contemporary Christian sound and complex, elegant harmonic vocals, you might like this album. I recommend it.

Also, here is my beautiful bird, in an image I made on the Chickasaw Turnpike last night as we drove home. I really liked the light on Abby's face, and she seemed so happy.

She Takes My Breath Away

I made these images of Abby in her sister's back yard garden in Ryan, Oklahoma, this afternoon. She is captivating, amazing, gorgeous, beautiful.

Am I a Wedding Photographer?

I talked to Chele today, and she asked if I would be her wedding photographer. As you know, I am NOT a commercial photographer by trade, but a photojournalist. I told her I would post a few of the photos I made at the last wedding I shot, an orthodox Jewish wedding in Oklahoma City last year that Michael was shooting. He asked me to shoot some too, and I came up with some nice stuff. Here are a few samples from that afternoon...


And as you know, every man at a traditional Jewish wedding is asked to wear a yarmulke, so I did...

Uber News!

When I got in from mowing (heavy, wet mowing after days of rain), Abby told me some exciting news: her daughter Chele has accepted the proposal of her beau of two years, Tom, to marry! Details will follow, but suffice it to say we are very happy here. Congratulations, Tom and Chele!

You might remember that Chele was one of my super heroes when Abby was critically ill in May. In her current home of Baltimore, she goes by her actual first name of Dawna. She and Tom bought a house together a year ago. These pictures of them were made in our front yard in the spring of 2007. They look happy, don't they?





This is her ring.

A Beacon of Hope

I shot this on the way to work this morning.

Never Prouder

Eye, Mom!

Looking at this radar image, I see that Mom is currently directly under the eye of Tropical Storm Fay. She lives in Palm Coast, which is the fastest growing town in Flagler County, Florida, which is the fastest growing county in the state. In fact, since she and Dad moved there in 1987, Palm Coast has grown from about 15,000 to about 115,000.


Anyway, for their hurricane party, she went to the neighbors last night to play Yahtzee!

Image: today's WSR-88D radar image. Palm coast is near the center of the rain-free eye.

"Got Stars in His Eyes"

For his birthday, which is Saturday, we bought Mitchell a new Washburn electric guitar, which is what he wanted. I was surprised how little it cost; it included a practice amp with cord, some picks, and a strap. We also got him a gig bag and headphones. Lane says he'll teach Mitch how to play it.



On the way home, we listened to Stairway to Heaven.

The other seminal guitar song is Juke Box Hero by Foreigner...

"He heard one guitar, just blew him away
He saw stars in his eyes, and the very next day
Bought a beat up six string in a secondhand store
Didn't know how to play it, but he knew for sure

"That one guitar, felt good in his hands
Didn't take long, to understand
Just one guitar, slung way down low
Was one way ticket, only one way to go

"So he started rockin'
Aint never gonna stop
Gotta keep on rockin'
Someday he's gonna make it to the top..."

Pictured: Mitchell with his new guitar tonight.

Know Thy Towels

Tropical Storm Fay is expected to move up the Florida peninsula, which, according to Homer Simpson, is "America's wang." In response to this, my mom has gotten out her hurricane towels, since the window in the den leaks whenever it hurricanes out.

Picture: WSR-88D radar image of Fay south of Florida today.

Another Important Pet Peeve Entry

People don't complain enough on their blogs, and in particular, they don't complain enough about people they think are idiots. I am as guilty as the rest of the blogosphere, and I hope to correct that tonight by whining about a couple of things that bother me.

1. Cops who speed (by which I mean pretty much all cops.) I think the only cops who will escape hell are the ones who either heed the speed limit themselves, or have never written a speeding ticket.
2. Cops who don't know the law. This goes with the subcategories of cops who are uneducated, inbred hicks, and the towns who hire them. Point of order: the white speed limit signs we all see and are supposed to heed do, in fact, display mandatory, legal speed limits for vehicles. The yellow advisory signs are, according to fairtrafficlaws.com, "advisory; their purpose is to provide important information concerning hazards that may not otherwise be noticed by motorists. Unlike speed limit signs, they do not represent a legal requirement. Drivers cannot be ticketed for not heeding the advice given on them." I have, on several occasions, been stopped by cops who tried to tell me the yellow signs are the speed limits. This most recently happened to me this spring in Konawa, Oklahoma.
   
3. Cops who lie, especially the ones who lie to intimidate you and feel powerful. This belongs in the broader category of anyone who has power but shouldn't because they are immature, angry, or spiritually poisoned. Soldiers who throw puppies off of cliffs come to mind.
4. People who think they are being funny, especially with their good-'ol'-boy buddies, who are doing it at your expense. There was a small-town mayor I was supposed to photograph one time who thought he would "have some fun" by telling me he was someone else. When I finally found out he was the one I needed, I was pretty unhappy, and I let him know. Suddenly it wasn't funny to him, and in fact had never been funny.
5. Guys (and they are all guys) who act superior to you because you like music that they think is lame. It's as though their opinion is superior to everyone else's. (There's a really funny scene in the movie High Fidelity about this.) This kind of "my world is the only one that counts" mentality showed itself once when a college room mate of mine asked, "Why do they even make antiperspirant?" If he didn't like it or use it, it shouldn't exist, right? (Yes, I am aware of the irony of making this claim in light of my last entry, but hey, it's my blog.)
   

I know that not enough people are complaining about stuff, and I hope I have remedied that here tonight. I hope to complain more soon!

The Glory of the 80's

The Glory of the 80's is a really cool song by Tori Amos. The only thing wrong with it is that the 80's, in a lot of important ways, sucked.

I say this as I listen to my iTunes, to which I recently added a bunch of songs I found on an abandoned hard drive at my office. (Someone said the cable guy was backing up his songs and copied them to it for some reason.) I had iTunes set to shuffle, and along came Rick Springfield. The song sounded like all the rest of his songs, so I deleted it. Maybe, I decided, I should see if any of the other Rick Springfield songs need to be escorted to the trash. One by one, as I listened to the first 90 or so seconds of each song, they landed in the trash. Before long, no more Rick. They were just breathtaking in their awfulness; derivative, puerile, annoying.

Okay, there were some pearls in the 1980's. But for the most part, it was a decade of unpolished commercialism, artistic copycatery, and, in effect, waiting for grunge bands to come along and cleanse our musical pallets of the unsavory synthesizers and drum machines that talentless hacks like Springfield, Bananarama, Rick Astley, The Human League, The Thompson Twins, A-Ha, Lionel Richie, Spandau Ballet, Cyndi Lauper, The Firm, etc., etc., etc., brought us.

Photo: stolen from the internet. Springfield is actually holding an award. I wonder what idiot or idiots gave it to him.

School Daze, or: A Wedgie Around Every Corner

Today is our son Mitchell's first day of school for the year, and his first time at Byng High School. There were a lot of excellent and ridiculous myths abounding in the grand summer of 1978 when I first went to Eisenhower High School in Lawton, Oklahoma, as a tenth grader. (I can't say what it was like for Abby on her first day as a Ryan High School Cowgirl, but I'll ask her later.) We were told, for example, that seniors would try to sell us "elevator tickets," since there was an elevator installed for the handicapped. I explained to Mitchell that "the seniors will pee in a cup and make you drink it, then give you a super atomic wedgie just for showing up." I'm not sure if he believed me or not.

Pictured: Byng High School

Rose Rain

Today is cloudy and quietly rainy. As I walked to the mailbox after lunch, I was taken aback by the beauty of the soft raindrops clinging to the Rose-of-Sharon. Abby planted these many years ago, and they are now mature. They line our entire driveway, which is about 75 yards long. They are always fun to photograph.


And speaking of photography, I am teaching tonight.

Strangled Straight

Until now we had few, if any, images of Lane, the youth pastor at Dorothy's church with whom Mitchell hangs out some, and from whom Mitchell wants to take guitar lessons. He was here today, and I managed to steal a couple of frames.

Lane chatting with Abby


Lane giving the boy what he has coming

An Indisputable Miracle

Cantaloupe vs Delicate Arch. Coincidence? I think not.

Somniloquy

In college I had a roommate one semester who talked in his sleep almost every night. Being a night crawler, I heard most of it, and wrote down the good ones:

"Space Monk, wanna sharpen my knife?"

"I said I want some pie!"

"Put a little foam on it so the kids can play."

"Bill, I don't know anyone. Give the pad to Ray Roberts."

"Can you get those ladies to sh*t? Who gives a sh*t?"

"If she doesn't get in there fast, tell her to f*ck off, goddamit. Good!"

"My mother has a wolfpoint."

"You bastard! You bloody bastard!"

He Shoots, He Scores!

This is the way we pretty much picture Michael all the time. Behind him is the vaunted "computer desk" where he and I spend fun but wasteful hours playing Unreal Tournament, and this is easily the most common expression on his face.

Word on Wall Street

While I did visit the Wall Street section on Bryce Canyon last month, this post is about a different Wall, Wall Arch in Arches National Park. Word from our friends at Bogley.com suggest that this feature of the Devil's Garden section, which I have visited several times, has collapsed.

Seedless Seatlessness

Because sometimes a watermelon just needs to wait for a bus.

The Feats of Strength

Last night Mitchell came with me as I shot National Night Out, a nationwide program designed to keep kids off drugs and get them hooked on hot dogs and cotton candy instead. It made pretty good pictures, and afterward Mitch and I made a Wal Mart run, which is actually easier when he helps.

Image: Mitchell climbing the "An Army of One" rock wall last night.

C Name, C Name Run, Run Name Run

We have this excellent cadre of friends who live mostly in Norman, Oklahoma. Pam once nicknamed us "The thirtysomething Group" (though few of us are currently in our 30s), while at one time we all had bread makers, so we were, "The Breadmaker Group." Names never stuck, but we always stuck together. My longest-lived friendship is with Michael, who I have known since we were 12. He married Thea in 1991. Anna and I met in high school. She married David in 1991. The other David and I lived in the same rooming house in college. He married Brenda in 1992. They're still around. Ann came into the group in 1990. Some came into the group but didn't stay. Kathy was in there somewhere (the dead one, not the gay one), as well as Joe and Lisa, Shel, Margaret, Ben, the Burke family, and Nurdlinger (I forget his real name.) Most of us have kids now.

One thing we have done for 20 years is have dinner together on Sunday. Usually the Norman residents take turns hosting, though once in a while we've gone to Moore when Margaret wanted to host. Also, Abby says that when she feels better, maybe in the fall, she and I should host. The Wheelocks have a big back yard, so they have a volleyball/badminton net set up, and I'd like to do the same, since we have the biggest yard of the bunch, probably bigger than all the other yards combined (we live on 12 acres.)

But I digress. I tell you today about our group to tell you this: we are still close, and still having just as much fun and camaraderie as always. Last night at dinner, Ann's neice Jenny and her family were visiting. A friend of Jenny's is expecting a baby, and wants to name the new child with a "C" name. We couldn't let that challenge go, and spent an hour and filled up five pages of suggested names that start with C. I made a couple of minutes of video, but this went on all night.

This is Like Three Dreams in One

Dream: a girl who went to my high school, Denice Warren, was entered in a long mountain foot race that involved stopping periodically to eat hot peppers that the natives grew along the trail just for that purpose. Suddenly we realized we were at the wrong end of the course, and started to hike from the finish line to the starting line. I looked around to discover that Denice had taken a red Blackhawk helicopter to save time. She flew along side us.


Part of the trail went through the energy bar section of an open-air grocery store. I tried to buy a Rice Crispy's square, only to find that most of them were place holders with arrows showing how to exit the store. Near the top I stopped in the newsroom, where reporter Randy Mitchell and I asked our sport editor Jeff Cali a question, which made him mad due to safety concerns, since he was on the phone to the helicopter. I sat on the floor and drew a square on a large piece of paper with chocolate cake batter. After a few moments, I went outside and was on a rocky mountain top. I saw reporter Judd Morse, who was conducting a social engineering experiment . His jacket was torn in half, and he was offering robin's eggs to passersby from a large basket in his hands. I took three of them.

Emergency Mind Wrap

Okay, when I read this it kind of blew my mind:

There is enough concrete in the Grand Coulee Dam to build a four-foot wide, four-inch deep sidewalk twice around the equator.

This picture isn't from the Grand Coulee Dam, but from the Glen Canyon Dam I visited last week.

No Greater Good

What could be better than a young super hero who happily greets travelers with offers of $1 card tables and 50¢ coffee makers? Okay, maybe if there were free puppies.

Flashback Friday

Our fellow bloggist Steph does a "Flashback Friday" segment, or at least she did do it until putting her house on the market and stressing herself into hairlessness. I'm not going to start flashing back on a regular basis, but here's something that will shock and amuse us all. This image was made 11 years ago, Halloween 1997. The costume began life as real clothing, and had been stored for many years at my mom and dad's house. When I came across it at Christmas 1996, I wanted to take it - the polyester flowered shirt with the pearl snaps, the gold chain, the shades, the wash-and-wear slacks, home with me to wear as a costume. When my dad got wind of it, he said no, I couldn't have it unless I was really going to wear it. Mom, my sister and I laughed 'til we cried when we heard that one, so he grudgingly relented.

As what am I dressed in this picture? My dad in 1977, or course!

Her Game Face

Since we are coming up on three months since Abby was first hospitalized with pneumonia, I thought I would say how proud I am of her. Since she was so sick, she is still dealing with the fallout, but thankfully she is better every day, in no small part due to the fact that she is working so hard in physical therapy three times a week. Her therapist, a fellow hiker and outdoorsman named Dan Charbonneau, is very talented, and pushes her in new, helpful ways every time she's there. He understands that one of her goals is to return with me to Delicate Arch, where we got married, in October, and with his help and her determination, she'll be there.

I am very proud of her.

Pictured: cell phone camera image of Abby on the elliptical trainer.