Tag Archives: photography

A Photo Salute to Green, Before it Retreats into Hibernation for the Winter

November 17, 2012 By in Misc. Media Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , 14 Comments

This week’s edition of the WordPress Weekly Photo Challenge is the first such challenge I’ve ever attempted. It’s not a fierce competition with a major award at stake, but I feel sheepish daring to share a theme with so many top-notch professionals who do this for a living and/or have had extensive formal training. In the spirit of fun, though, I’m giving the Challenge a whirl anyway.

Behold my octet of entrants from my own collection, submitted in the categorical competition of general greenery:

1. Sugar Creek runs through Turkey Run State Park near Rockville, Indiana.

Turkey Run State Park, Rockville, Indiana

2. The Jolly Green Giant, standing tall and proud in Blue Earth, Minnesota.

Jolly Green Giant, Blue Earth, Minnesota

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2012 Road Trip Photos #30: Boot Hill Museum, Part 2 of 2: Dedicated Hobbyists of the Old West

November 15, 2012 By in Travel Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Previously on MCC: The most notable event of Day Seven of our road trip was a quick tour through the Boot Hill Museum in Dodge City. The main attraction is a preserved portion of the original Boot Hill Cemetery, still populated by the original customers, still marked by low-budget tombstones of the Old West.

However, the Boot Hill Museum is more than those preserved historical plots. Beyond that and the spacious gift shop, visitors can also walk along a simulated Dodge City strip mall of the Old West. Some of these shops are inaccessible, but several invite visitors and contain display cases filled with souvenirs and paraphernalia of the Old West. The saloon even has occasional rounds of singing, and waitresses who invite you in for a glass of sarsaparilla, which I was afraid to sample. There’s also a working ice cream shoppe, but the tourism-level prices inspired us to bide our time and fetch snacks later at a Dairy Queen down the street instead.

Boot Hill Museum stores, Dodge City, Kansas

Not all the contents are vintage 19th-century items. One room is dedicated to TV shows of the Old West in general and Gunsmoke in particular. Their short-sighted gift shop missed a profit opportunity by not offering copies of these objets d’art for sale. What child wouldn’t want to pop Gunsmoke’s Festus…Sings and Talks About Dodge City and Stuff! into their parent’s CD player and listen to it twelve times a day?

Gunsmoke, Boot Hill Museum, Dodge City, Kansas

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Wheelchair Adventure Requires Maniac Driver to Decelerate from 60 to 0

November 12, 2012 By in Mundane Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

grandmother's wheelchairSaturday the 10th was my first day spent with a wheelchair. I tried to imagine the day beforehand, to anticipate the drawbacks and plan for every single troubleshooting scenario. I’m surprised I nailed most of them, but it was still a learning experience full of ups and downs. The day could have been much more painful and full of recriminations, had I not been blessed with a very patient, very grateful passenger.

One of the highlights each year for my wife’s grandmother is when the three of us spend a November Saturday together at the Indianapolis Christmas Gift and Hobby Show, a cavalcade of Christmas arts, Christmas crafts, Christmas edibles, and non-Christmas small businesses and hucksters held at the Indiana State Fairgrounds in one of their cavernous pavilions. It usually takes us a few hours to traverse the length of the pavilion several times to see all the booths, marvel at the decorations, overspend on a few choice items, and — always number one on Mamaw’s to-do list — have her watch batteries replaced at a specific jeweler’s booth. No one in all Creation is allowed to change her watch batteries except that one jeweler. Everyone else ever born will do it wrong.

Last summer, this once-hyperkinetic eightysomething dynamo took a nasty spill that left her wounded for a good while and reset her normal energy levels at a much lower bar. She’s having much more trouble getting around than she used to, and takes a little longer to perform her chores the way she wants them. Though she weighs under one hundred pounds, she still doesn’t have quite the endurance for supporting that frame around extensive distances. Excessive walking now leaves her winded and ready to call it a day. As her beloved Christmas Gift and Hobby Show drew near, she seriously doubted she could manage the day-long stroll that would entail, and had resigned herself to skipping the show, despite how many she’s attended, despite how much she looks forward to it every year. She feared attempting such a feat now would be the death of her.

Enter: the wheelchair.

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2012 Road Trip Photos #29: Boot Hill Museum, Part 1 of 2: Paupers’ Graves of the Old West

November 10, 2012 By in Travel Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , 3 Comments

After hundreds of miles of tourist unattraction, our first real Kansas sightseeing oasis on Day Seven was in Dodge City, fabled frontier town of the Old West. The “frontier” aspect is diminished now that the place is swamped with all the usual famous chain restaurants, but at least one section remains somewhat preserved and partly simulated: the Boot Hill Museum, which contains a preserved portion of the most well-known cemetery of the Old West.

Boot Hill Museum, Dodge City, Kansas

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2012 Road Trip Photos #28: Kansas Flatland Interlude

November 8, 2012 By in Travel Tags: , , , , , , , , , , 6 Comments

We reluctantly exited Colorado on Day Seven late in the morning. Highway 50 led us from Lamar, CO, to the regions of Kansas that everyone always warns you about. It’s not completely deserted. The long stretches between signs of life could be discouraging, but civilization exists in pockets if you know where to look, or if you’re patient enough to wait for it to cross your path, such as this armored farming vehicle that resembles the futuristic, titanic Batmobile from Frank Miller’s Batman: the Dark Knight Returns.

Farm Equipment, Kansas

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2012 Road Trip Photos #27: Lamar, Colorado — Last Stop, This State

November 1, 2012 By in Travel Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , 4 Comments

Day Seven of our family’s nine-day road trip kicked off with our last remaining hours in the amazing state of Colorado. After extended visits with the Rocky Mountains, Pikes Peak, the Royal Gorge Bridge, and Smashburger, our time to depart was nigh.

In a rare move for us, we chose to exit Colorado not by interstate, but by ordinary state highway. This is a rare move for us. I’m usually a fiend for the interstates with their higher speed limits and lack of intersection interference. This time, we decided to try something different, as both Colorado and Kansas offered tourist attractions along their southern halves, through which almost no interstates traverse. On the bright side, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that their highway speed limits were generous compared to ours back in Indiana. In terms of travel time, I hardly noticed a difference. Better still, Highway 50 through Kansas was all but deserted. The open road was mine.

Before Kansas, though, we had one final haven of roadside attractions to visit in Colorado. The town of Lamar is designed more as a warm Colorado welcome wagon than as a “Good Luck surviving Kansas” outpost, but we enjoyed a few minutes of walkabout anyway.

One of their most famous spots is this building constructed from ancient petrified wood. Originally a gas station, it now serves as a small used-car lot.

Petrified used car lot, Lamar, Colorado

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2012 Road Trip Photos #26: Pueblo’s Arkansas Riverwalk, Part 2 of 2: Art of the Riverside

October 27, 2012 By in Travel Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 3 Comments

Previously on Day Six: While my son held down the fort back at our Pueblo hotel room, my wife and I spent a romantic evening strolling along the city’s Arkansas Riverwalk, which domesticated and decorated a stretch of the same bumpy river that we’d watched bubble and babble beneath the Royal Gorge Bridge mere hours and miles prior.

As with any well-executed riverwalk, art is a key contributor to quality of leisure. Clean sidewalks, neatly trimmed grass, and vivacious flower arrangements are to be expected, but artistic expressions are a much-appreciated means to enliven any pedestrian attraction. One of the key pieces along the Arkansas Riverwalk is Walks Among the Stars, a Lakota Sioux woman cast in bronze and clad in an actual quilt.

Walks Among the Stars, Arkansas Riverwalk

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Starbase Indy Clip Show: Memories of 2010 and 2011, Plans for 2012

October 27, 2012 By in Conventions & Events, Indiana Tags: , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

Starbase Indy convention, Indianapolis, Thanksgiving weekendOn and off over the past two decades, Starbase Indy has served proudly and admirably as one of the longest-lived geek-culture gatherings in Indianapolis. Originally a purebred Star Trek convention by design and preference, its scope has broadened over time as organizers and attendees proved amenable to the presence of more than one fictional universe in their midst. Granted, it’s no coincidence that the festivities have grown more inclusive as Paramount Pictures withdrew Trek from prime-time television and lamented the decreasing aesthetic returns from the latter-day movies. The JJ Abrams reformatting certainly didn’t hurt the cause, but SBI today is a smaller, tighter gathering than its earliest incarnations — now run locally and purely For-Fans-By-Fans, not by out-of-town sideshow promoters who fancy themselves the next Gareb Shamus.

My wife and I have attended more than a few SBIs. We took a break for several years during a long, unpretty transitional period, but made our tentative return in 2010 when a few encouraging signs enticed us back. We enjoyed ourselves so much that year, we were happy to attend in 2011 as well. This selection of highlights from our last two SBI experiences is by no means the complete collection of every photo we took, nor does it represent all the SBIs we’ve ever attended. Our souvenirs date back far enough that many were created using the ancient medium that primitive man once called “35mm film”.

2010 Highlights:

Special guests included Ethan Phillips, best known to Trek fans as Neelix from Star Trek: Voyager, also known to even older TV viewers who can remember as far back as Benson.

Ethan Phillips, Starbase Indy 2010, Indianapolis

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2012 Road Trip Photos #25: Pueblo’s Arkansas Riverwalk, Part 1 of 2: Return of the Arkansas

October 25, 2012 By in Travel Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

Day Six of our vacation ended in Pueblo, Colorado — an address well-known to anyone who ever saw one of the famous commercials from the ’70s/’80s about the Consumer Information Center and its free catalogs by mail. For that alone, my wife and I assumed the city held world-famous status. Some of our friends disagreed, but that’s their problem, not ours. Believe it or not, TV had more than just toy commercials back then.

The two of us spent the evening visiting the Historic Arkansas Riverwalk of Pueblo, a pleasant downtown diversion that interested my son not one bit. This, we decided, was the perfect opportunity for a husband/wife outing. Our hometown of Indianapolis has its Canal Walk, and we enjoyed the visual diversity of the San Antonio Riverwalk in 2005. Pueblo is much smaller than either city, but its foray into the beautifying riverwalk business is fairly new, still expanding, and worth several moments of time and dallying.

I was a little surprised to reunite with the Arkansas River, the very same waterway that runs beneath the Royal Gorge Bridge back in Cañon City, a few dozen miles west of Pueblo. How nice of the Arkansas to serve as a thematic through-line to our day. Note that Pueblo has succeeded in containing the Arkansas and removing those turbulent rapids and imposing mountainside walls.

Arkansas Riverwalk, Pueblo Colorado

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2012 Road Trip Photos #24: War Memorial on the Edge of the Rockies

October 22, 2012 By in Travel Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

After we reluctantly departed the Royal Gorge Bridge and Park, Day Six continued east on U.S. Route 50 from Cañon City to Pueblo. The distance was a relatively short hop of thirty-five miles, but we paused for one unplanned attraction in our path, the Colonel Leo Sidney Boston War Memorial Park. The park was established in 1997 as a tribute to veterans alive and dead. I’d pegged its location as Florence in my original notes, but online sources say the official address is in Penrose. Its namesake was a Cañon City native who fought in Vietnam, was declared MIA circa 1971, and presumed officially dead in 1997. In April 2011, his family was notified of a positive DNA match for him contained in a set of recovered remains. I wouldn’t presume to imagine the toll of such an experience.

At the time, when we pulled over to the roadside for a gander, we knew nothing about the eponymous hometown hero. All I knew was that we were standing before a military hardware collection stationed in an unusual spot.

Ah-1 Cobra Helicopter, Colorado

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