Inspired by @simret, and armed with some advice from a local pro photographer, I took three of the kids out to a very dark field tonight. It took about 35 pictures and some serious waiting for the moon to come out from behind the spotty cloud cover, but finally, I got the shot I wanted. I hope you enjoy. ISO 100 ,f22, 1/80, 70-300 Minolta lens at 300mm.
My boss, one of the ones who is no longer at our company, owed me one, so despite my relative low seniority at our company, he got me a week and a half vacation during the prime June/July window. Problem is, we have had just shy of $4,000 of unexpected car expenses this spring, so vacation turned to staycation and we're trying to keep the cost low. That means swimming at the house, fishing and visits to the zoo and Smithsonian. We had no firm plans except that the two Wednesday nights I was off, I would be able to enjoy the group ride at the local bike shop. Since the bicycle shops around here have their rides on Wednesdays, Saturdays and Sundays and I work Wednesdays, Thursdays, Saturdays and Sundays, this was a rare opportunity, so you know what happened. My 19 year old said she had been feeling left out, because she ends up working or going to school every time we do anything, so instead of being around for my ride, we were in DC all day Wednesday. I'm sure I'll live, but as usual...the best laid plans of mice and men...
We got on the road early to get one of the prime parking spots at the bottom of the hill, but needn't have worried, because the crowds were small and parking was plentiful all day. To top it all off, the weather turned out to be high 70s (25C) all day with a nice cloud cover. It was so nice, the animals were outside and active at almost every exhibit. The National Zoo is set on the side of a hill, so the optimum plan is to park at the bottom and walk up while you're fresh so the return trip will be downhill. So what did we see?
Right away, we saw the tiger. He wasn't very active, but at least he gave us a good yawn.
The lion was more cooperative. I have enough pictures from him for a post of his own, but here are some of the best. It was almost as if he was showing off for the camera.
As we were walking toward the big cat exhibits, someone asked what the big cables overhead were for. I told them that they were for the orangutans, but I had been visiting the zoo my entire life and had only ever seen them use the overhead cables once. Of course, as we left the big cats, the orangutans made a liar of me.
They made their way across and down and played for a while, allowing us to get more pictures of them as well.
After the apes, we visited the reptile house. The false cobra was curious about us, so we got to see him up close. These snakes can open their ribs into a hood like a cobra. I don't think I'd stick around to identify whether it was real or false, if I encountered one in the wild!
Then we saw the more common (and very poisonous) water moccasin and some other interesting reptiles like the king cobra and some chameleons. This is a water moccasin, otherwise known as the cottonmouth.
We saw a snapping turtle with a head almost as big as Isabel's and an even bigger mouth.
I can't remember what this little guy is called.
Farther up the hill were the giant pandas.
....and then it was down the hill to see the elephants.
Hmm...what shall we visit next?
Wolves...
Seals...
don't forget the lemurs!
and all sorts of exhausted kids and parents.
We got to the bottom of the hill, ready to get in the car. The kids were beat, just look at the expression on Isabel's face.
So, what do you guys wanna do? Think we should go home? "Ooh! Daddy, can we go to the museum?" and so we made our way downtown and made it a two for one trip, taking advantage of extended hours at the Natural History Museum. We were almost out of juice in the camera batteries, so not many pictures from there, but as we were leaving, Rebekah asked if I could get a picture of her holding up the Washington Monument while it is closed to repair structural damage caused by last year's earthquake.
It was truly the best trip I've ever had to the National Zoo, and it was a very good and enjoyable day.
So, I gotta go to bed, but I thought just before I do, I could at least post one or two pics from today. More to come later.
I was tagged by @making_a_comeback_05 to create a list of 16 things about myself. I always enjoy reading these when other people write them, so I'll keep it going. Plus, if you haven't figured it out yet, I love telling stories.
1. For ten years growing up, I lived in an old mansion my folks tried to restore. It had 11 bedrooms and one of my favorite memories from that time was when my mom covered the stairs with mattresses one rainy day and let us use it as a sliding board. When we first moved in, it had been condemned and it didn't have electricity. Squirrels lived in the space between the floors of the second story and the roof of the first. You could hear them running around throughout the day. We had to get beekeepers to come remove the hive that had taken up residence in the closet of what was to be my first bedroom. They said there were more than likely over 150,000 bees living in the hive when they came to get rid of them. Until we got a lot of work done on the house, we took our baths in an old zinc tub that we filled with water we had boiled on the woodstove, then added cold water so we wouldn't get scalded. In the living room, there was a large, silver chandelier that held candles instead of electric lights. We were sitting at the dining room table (which opened to 20 feet when all the leaves were in) with all the uncles and cousins for a huge Christmas dinner one year, and my uncle, kept slapping at his neck, wondering what bug would be biting him at that time of year. When we figured it out, we all had a big laugh. He was sitting directly under one of the candles and the hot wax was dripping onto his neck.
2. While we were living in that house, our neighbor had a farm where he raised and trained trotting horses. His day job was owning and running a small sewing factory where he did contract work for large name brand clothing manufacturers. The blanket I use when I stay overnight in the work truck, is left over liner material from a job he did making coats for London Fog sometime back in the early 80's. He gave a bunch of the leftover material to my mother, and we had all sorts of things made from it. My blanket is the only surviving item I know of made from that material.
3. The only new vehicle I have ever owned was a racing style motorcycle I bought just after I joined the military in 1991. A month after I bought it, I was driving in southern New Jersey on a brightly moonlit night. I went around a curve too fast and ran into a 6' high curb. I flipped over. The motorcycle and I separated after the first bounce, and I ended up 85 feet away from the point of impact. The motorcycle was about 25 feet past me. It was still driveable, but barely. I had a passenger on the back that night, as we alternated driving responsibility to our night job as janitors for the offices of Thomas Scientific. He hit a small, newly planted tree and broke it off, cracking his collarbone in the process. I had a severely bruised thumb, where it had been jammed between the handlebar and the tank on impact. Those, thank God, were the totality of our injuries...those and some severe aches and pains for a week or so. We had been lucky enough to land on a very soft, grassy lawn.
4. When we lived in the big old house, we often had visitors. Some, like missionaries traveling through on furlough, would only stay one night. Others, like a couple of brothers who were having hard times, stayed for months. Though I still don't know all the details, one of my Dad's brothers was fighting with his wife, and she ended up dead. It was not ruled to be murder, because she had apparently been attacking him, but he was found guilty of some lesser charge and did a couple years in the pen, so during that time, their children (my cousins) lived with us.
5. I have had a multitude of jobs. I have baled hay and planted fields. I have delivered calves (as a farm hand) and helped deliver babies (during my rotation through labor and delivery while retraining to be a medic in the USAF Reserve). I have driven tractors, excavators, taxis, charter buses, semi trucks. I made pizza in the store for Little Ceasar's, I delivered pizza for Papa John's, and I now deliver supplies and food to stores for the other, larger pizza delivery company. I have built cubicles for new offices at AMD (the computer chip maker) in Austin. I drove a forklift at a turkey processing factory in Waco. I cleared the brush from a riverbank behind a hundred year old hotel that was being reopened as a restaurant, and was then hired to be head waiter in the restaurant. I have put cable (for cable TV) up onto telephone poles in Wichita Falls, TX. I have washed windows, washed dishes, dug ditches, laid bricks, fixed airplanes (my first job in the Air Force), cleared land, mowed grass, and more things that I can't even remember just now. My daughter said she counted one time, and I have had more than 40 jobs.
6. My Air Force commander, after seeing my test scores, surprised me by recommending me for the Air Force Academy. I was summoned to his office, and with him and my first sergeant present, the surprise was sprung. They were very unhappy when I refused the offer out of hand. The military life drove me crazy. The regimentation was fine. I couldn't stand the bureaucracy. I would be given a problem, and when I came up with a solution, the answer was most often, "We thought of that already, but we can't do it, because it's against policy." I would say, "So let's follow the procedure to get the policy changed." "No! We don't do it that way!" It was like beating your head against the wall. If I had stayed in and attended the Academy, I would have qualified to retire as an officer on April Fool's Day, 2011. My wife was very angry with me, when she found the letter from the Air Force Academy a year or so after we married.
7. If someone, even someone physically inferior to me, attempts to start a fight with me, I will walk away. I will run if that's what it takes. If someone, even someone physically superior to me, attacks another person, I cannot bring myself to walk away or stand and do nothing. Most times, it costs me nothing, because bullies don't like to be confronted by someone who is not scared. Once, I took a pretty good punch to my head from a guy much larger than me, when I interfered with his beating of a small woman. I'm not sure who was more surprised, me that he hit me, him that he hit someone who could fight back, or the woman that someone would stand up for her. I got her to the cops, but never heard if anything came of it.
8. Back in the early 1990s, the Phillies made it to the World Series. I'm an Orioles fan, but I was living in New Jersey, and a couple buddies suggested we make the drive up to Toronto to see the next game of the series. We didn't have tickets or even much money, but we took the 13 hour drive anyway. Within a half hour of arriving in Toronto, we had tickets to the game in the Hard Rock Cafe overlooking the first base line, and a free place to stay. Total out of pocket for each of us was less than 200 dollars. We found a man who was just trying to unload the tickets he couldn't use, and a couple who said that because we were military, we could stay at their house if we didn't mind sleeping on mattresses on the floor and if we would be gone before they left for church in the morning.
9. It makes me angry when people keep their pets alive through cancer and other ailments that make them miserable. I think that making an animal suffer so you won't have to deal with loss, is selfish and mean. Because of this opinion, I am thought of by many of our friends as heartless and uncaring toward animals. I find that to be ironic.
10. I went to college in Georgia when I was sixteen. I worked at a pig farm most of the time I was there. I would take classes three days a week and work 4 am to 4 pm three days, then have Sundays off. Another student lived at the farm and covered the days I was off. One day I was vaccinating the new gilts with a multiple dose, vaccine gun, and I dropped the gun. It stuck right through my boot and into my foot through a vein. I wrapped the foot and took off as fast as I could drive toward the hospital. The hospital was between the two entrances to our college. One entrance was going down the mountain into the valley and the other was after you started climbing from the bottom. My car was a 1972 Mercury Marquis, a veritable land yacht and definitely not the proper vehicle for speeding through the mountains. She did me right, though and held on 'til I got to the first entrance to the hospital. For several miles prior, I had begun to smell hot brake pads, but as I approached the entrance, they finally decided they had had enough, and simply refused to respond. This is why modern vehicles have disc brakes instead of drums like my old Mercury had. The only thing that saved me was that the road was straight between the downhill entrance and the uphill one, and I was able to slow enough on the uphill to make the turn and coast slowly into the parking lot. For two weeks after, I got to walk on crutches as I waited for my foot to shrink back small enough to fit into my shoes. 11. I somehow switched the font over to italicized, and not only do I not know how I did it, but I can't figure out how to undo it either. 12. One day, while working at my part time job at a farm in New Jersey, I was trying to light a fire in the huge burner we used to provide the heat to dry out the corn in the grain bins. All the logs in the burner were damp, and I couldn't get them to light no matter how I tried. Knowing that diesel is difficult to light but effective to start a fire once lit, I filled a five gallon bucket about halfway, then poured it all over the wood at the mouth of the burner. No dice. Even a burning rag went out without lighting the wood. Again, knowing gasoline lights easily, I went back to the pumps and got about a pint of that particular fluid and dumped it on the diesel soaked wood. Knowing the potential for a flash with gasoline, I turned my back, lit a match then threw it toward the opening as I ran the other way. First try, nothing. Second try, I was about ten feet away and running for all I was worth, when a ball of fire enveloped me for a second with a loud HARRUMPH! When I stopped running and looked back the fire was lit and roaring. Feeling lucky and victorious, I closed the door, started the blower, punched my time card out and went back home. As I was changing out of my farm clothes, I heard a crackling noise. After some experimentation, I realized it was coming from my hair. Every time anything touched any of my hair, it would crackle and fall off. I had completely singed all the hair on my head. By the time I got out of the shower that evening, my eyebrows were gone, and the ends of all the hair on my head had fallen off. 13. Every time I get a new boss I fill them in on what I expect of our relationship. "I need to decrease the time I spend on the job while increasing the amount you pay me." Believe it or not, I have been taken seriously more often than not. My last boss used to laugh. "You're the only person who has ever had the stones to say that to my face." During his last year with our company, I spent more than 9 months training new drivers, and increased my pay by more than a third, while working three days a week instead of the four I normally work. 14. I was visiting my aunt and uncle once, during the summer,when I was in grade school. My uncle had picked my sister and I up in Maryland in his semi, on the way back to his house in North Carolina. We stayed for a few weeks and had a blast. One afternoon, a bunch of neighborhood kids were bored. Two of my uncles, my grandfather and my great uncle all had houses on adjoining property. We decided to blow up spray paint cans in the barrel they used for burning trash. We threw a couple cans in and lit a fire. Nothing happened. They talked me into going into my great uncle's garage to get some parts cleaner to heat the fire up. I got a pint or so and we dumped it on the fire. It flared up, and nothing else happened. We waited a few minutes more and I got some more solvent and repeated the process. Still nothing. As time passed, one of the kids decided to walk up and take a look inside the barrel. We all cautioned against, but he did anyway. He looked in, "Still burning!" He turned away. "See there was nothing to worry..." BOOM. A can exploded and it was as if a huge hand pushed him instantly to the ground, face first. Thank God, his only injury was to his pride. 15. The area where I live, when viewed from the air, appears to be more water than land, so we are an area hugely popular for our waterfowl hunting. Every year, in a neighboring town, we have a huge waterfowl festival, where they have exhibitions of guns and decoys, art and anything else that can be connected to hunting waterfowl. When I was a teenager, it was so popular, the local airport would fill every available patch of grass with parked airplanes, so they asked our Civil Air Patrol unit to direct parking to alleviate confusion. We stood out on the tarmac directing airplanes in shifts, and we camped in our tents in the grass between the car parking lots. When traffic slowed, at night, we would sneak out to the edge of the runway and lie in the grass when the business jets would take off. The noise was amazing. It felt like it was coming from inside your very being. Then the wonderful burnt kerosene smell as the jet blast enveloped us and the airplane rocketed off into the sky. 16. Wow! This hasn't been difficult at all, and it has been fun, too. So number sixteen? I have helped deliver more than 20 calves. I have been present at the delivery of several babies, while I was in training. I was present for the delivery of each of my children. I cannot watch that process without being brought to tears when I witness the new little creature, torn from the quiet warmth of their mother's womb, lie still for a moment, as if unwilling, then raggedly fill their lungs with the first gasping breath of precious air. Those are moments that I am powerless in the face of something much bigger than I...moments when I am reduced to being a mere spectator. Now, I'm supposed to tag 10 of you, so I'm going to tag the last 10 people who have commented on my blog. No pressure, though. @simret @fauquet @HUMOR_ME_NOW @soltero_alma @judyrutrider @Pphilip @Roadkill_Spatula @RushmoreJ @Lady_Kelacy @ata_grandmaI was looking for a laptop bag for my wife, who is going to start college tomorrow. I found an old soft sided briefcase from my days on the road, and inside was a notebook that contained a journal. In the midst of the memories of being new parents, I found this story I had written, dated 2 March 2000.
It seemed a year had passed, these few days since the funeral. As father and daughter each struggled with their own grief, life began again to return to normal. The phone was again quiet. The doorbell had stopped ringing. He had returned to work today and she to school. A hundred times their conversation stopped short this night. "Mom, can I color?...Oh" "Dear, where are the new checks?" and again, "Oh." followed by a silence that conveyed a slow dawning of the realization that this was forever.
At bedtime she asks, "Daddy, can I sleep with you tonight?"
"Of course, honey," he says, brushing a tear from her eye.
Sleep would be welcomed, but the bed still smells of her, and it eludes him.
"Daddy?"
"Yes?"
"It's dark in here, isn't it?"
"Yes dear?"
He yawns as sleep begins to dull his senses.
"It's an awful dark night, isn't it, Daddy?"
Awake again. She cannot see his tears. "Yes, dear,"
"Daddy, are you facing me?"
"Uh-huh." He pauses. "Why do you ask?", but she is already asleep.
"Yes, dear. I am facing you."
So I looked up my old boss today, and he was excited to hear from me and had some news from the grapevine. The news wasn't good for me though. He said the word up the food chain was that they haven't interviewed anyone they're willing to hire for the job I applied for. Since I interviewed, I'm assuming that applies to me as well. It's not official, but sometimes the grapevine has better news than official channels. The call ended well though. He said he thought I was more than qualified for the job, and he'd hook me up with his resume writer and the headhunter who helped him find his current job. So though the current opportunity appears to be ending in failure, the prospects are excellent that I will find a similar job with some more leg work. I now have two supervisors from different jobs and one of my biggest customers from when I was in business for myself who will wholeheartedly recommend me, so there's a start. I'm pretty sure I made a fatal mistake in my interview when I answered the question, "What would you change if you got this position?" I responded by saying I'd try to deal with an issue that is a huge elephant in the room at our company. I knew it would either kill my chances or make me an excellent choice, but I gambled and it appears I lost. I've learned mostly to hold my cards, but on some issues, honesty is the best policy and if I got the job, I would have made efforts to address the issue, so I couldn't leave that unsaid, and it may have cost me the job. I may also have not gotten the job because they don't think I'm qualified. Sometimes the obvious answer is the correct one. Anyway, it is enormously liberating to finally know where I stand and to be able to start moving on, so I suppose it's time to take the next step and start seriously applying for new positions, all the while making the best of the good job I already have. Hope you all are doing well. I'll resume updating when I have a little more time.
