For me as a photographer, good lightning shots are the holy grail. This weekend, after literally years of not getting any good lightning shots, for various reasons like being out of town during the monsoons, not having a good camera on-hand, etc, everything finally came together: a great storm in the perfect location to capture it, and a great new camera. I’ll write more about this later. Right now I just want these pictures up…enjoy.
Bisbee is an odd little town. Set in a geologically fascinating canyon that juxtaposes gray limestone bluffs, crumbly red hills, and solid granite mountains, the town has a surreal, foreign feel to it. The streets wind up and down the hillsides, many only wide enough for one car to pass at a time. Wooden houses built in the early 1900s with corrugated tin roofs perch one above the other, some accessible only by the many long concrete stairways that ascend Bisbee’s steep canyon walls. I could write a book about Bisbee. I was born there and have fantastic memories of being young and free to explore the quirky old nooks, shady, dead-end streets, and beautiful wilderness, literally out my back door. In the photo above, my dad’s house is circled in red. As far as we can tell it was built sometime around 1903. I was born in this house, and I love it.
I’ve been meaning to write about the last 4th of July since, well, the 4th of July. 2 weeks later and I’m still in draft mode…ah such is my blogging life when my job involves sitting in front of a computer for 40 hours each week. It doesn’t exactly make me excited to run home and blog my fingers off. But enough of my whinging. Lets talk about the 4th of July in Bisbee. [Big, slightly fake open mouth smile + thumbs up]
I should give some account of all the cool stuff that goes on on the 4th in Bisbee, like the coaster races in the morning, the stupid parade that comes after that is just a bunch of local kids riding around in pickups and on flatbed trailers throwing candy to the spectators. But the real reason I want to talk about this last 4th is because of me. Me, me, me. I won $250 on the 4th. I knew I was going to win something, and I actually really needed the money to finance my funtime 4th party weekend. Gas, eating out, booze, it all takes its toll on the ducatry, the cheddar, the dollar-dollar-bill y’all onetime-onetime, if you will.
You see in addition to all of the other fun things, Bisbee hosts some unique contests, feats of strength, on the 4th. Around 2pm everyone gathers in the Gulch, which is an area down near the center of town where the seediest and oldest bar in town, St. Elmo’s (aka “Smellmo’s”), is located. The street is blocked off, bleachers go up, and drinking in the street is permitted. A giant granite rock, flat on top and bottom, sits on top of a flatbed. Men compete to see who can drill the deepest hole with nothing but a hammer and chisel bit in 10 minutes. It is a grueling contest, but the winner can expect as much as $1000, so people take this contest seriously.
The next feat of strength is the mucking contest, and this is what I have come for. Eli and I have placed well in this event before, so we feel confident. Mucking is a dirty sounding word for shovelling. Teams of 2 guys (sometimes girls) compete to see who can fill up an old ore cart with rock gravel in the fastest time. Winning times are usually around 1 minute 15 seconds or so, and again the winners can expect in the neighborhood of $800, with money being paid down to 5th or 6th place.
This year there were 17 teams in the mucking contest. Eli and I took 4th place with a time of 1 minute 20.3 seconds, winning $500 between the 2 of us. Not bad for a minutes worth of work, but I will say that the last 40 seconds are some of the longest, most difficult seconds of my life. My lungs burn, my back screams, my legs feel like wood, and I wouldn’t mind vomiting. But I would like to win a couple hundred bucks, so I reach back and pull out everything I have left. I throw the shovel down and stagger away when the whistle finally blows, oblivious to the pats on the back and cheers from the drunken crown. As I catch my breath and hear our time announced over the PA, I smile. Were were the last team to go, and I know we placed 4th and made some money. I laugh and say “You’re welcome” to my good friend Noah, because he and his partner came in .5 seconds ahead of us. He had asked us to please not to beat his time…
This morning was the single most beautiful ride to work I’ve had. I commute on a motorcycle 17 miles each way, every mile of it on surface streets and at the mercy of the awfully timed traffic signals we have here in Tucson. So most mornings my ride is spent in a state of mild annoyance at having to come to a complete stop every mile or so, muttering (sometimes yelling) occasional curses inside my helmet. I know, I need to calm down. It just bothers me to know that if some thought was put into the traffic light system, we could all cruise at a comfortable constant speed without stopping so often, saving gas, time, wear and tear on our vehicles, and our sanity. People like myself wouldn’t feel like they had to drive like maniacs to maybe catch the next light. Other cities have this figured out. But I digress…
My ride this morning, though, was pure joy. I could care less about stopping. I actually enjoyed it because it gave me the opportunity to look around in wonder at the gorgeous scenes in every direction. The mountains that surround the city were wrapped in delicious layers of cloud and mist. We were the happy recipients of a fantastic overnight soaking, courtesy of a big mass of moisture laden air traveling up from Mexico. The roar of rain on the roof was enough to keep me up for awhile in the middle of the night. A record for rainfall (1.42″) on this date was set at the airport, and that was just from midnight on, so we can still add to it if we get more today. By morning the storm had lumbered slowly north, giving way to a most glorious morning. The air was wet and fresh as only Sonoran desert air after a rain can be. The mixture of smells in the air from the botanical celebration taking place was intoxicating…
All monkeys should watch this:
“All that we are is a result of what we have thought.”
~Buddha
I love quotes like this, because they reaffirm what I have discovered to be a fantastic and universal truth about life that cuts through transcends religion, science and the mystery of consciousness all at once: everything you see and experience, (yes every single thing) is a result of your thoughts. “It’s all in your head” is another way to put it. This means that one can literally create one’s own reality down to the last detail…the catches are that one must absolutely believe this to be true, and one needs to alter one’s thinking to root out thoughts and patterns of thinking that bring undesirable things into their lives. This is not easy. But it can be done with practice! And guess what? It WORKS.
I’m no master (yet), but I’ve seen it work in my life many times. There may not be any sign of something happening, say a new great new job on the horizon. But I believe it’s going to happen, I say it’s going to happen, I see myself at this great new job, and sure enough a great new job pops up out of the blue.
Oh yeah, life is gooood!
I woke up Saturday morning feeling a bit lousy. Mojitos sure are delicious, though, aren’t they? Fresh squeezed lime juice, mint, sugar, and rum…is there a better summer drink? Anyway, after more than few of those and a nice midnight swim the night before I awoke in need of some special sustenance, something that would get the day going properly without weighing me down too much. I know sometimes a big, greasy breakfast seems like just the thing for a hangover, and while it tastes good, I always feel so much worse than if I eat something light and healthy. It makes sense, really. I just got done clobbering my body with alcohol and it’s feeling a bit sensitive, so why not be nice and give it something easy to digest first thing?
So I decided to go with the old standby, pancakes. Of course me being who I am, these weren’t going to be plain old pancakes with syrup and butter, oh no. These were going to be multi-grain pancakes with fresh blueberry-strawberry syrup and nonfat yogurt. Mmmmm….
The recipe is pretty easy, especially since I used a mix for the pancakes. I usually like to forgo premade stuff and make things from scratch, but Trader Joe’s is about the best place on earth to shop for food, and this multi-grain pancake & waffle mix is great. So here it is:
Pancakes (per instructions on the box):
1 cup Trader Joe’s multi-grain pancake & waffle mix
1 cup 1% milk (water, soy milk, or any other liquid will do). I added about 1/4 of water in addition to the milk for thinner cakes.
2 eggs
1 Tb olive oil
Strawberry-Blueberry Syrup:
1/2 cup fresh strawberries, sliced
1/2 cup fresh blueberries, whole
1/4 cup real maple syrup
I usually take my time adopting the latest craze/fad/gadget/movie. I like to let the fuss die down and see if it’s really something interesting or just another silly thing to fill people’s nanosecond attention spans. So it is with blogging. The fuss has died down, and it’s clear that this format has the potential to be wildly useful to me.
I’ve actually been wanting to start one for some time now, and I’ve got all kinds of great excuses why I’m just now doing so. I won’t bore anyone with those, but I will say that I’m excited because I’ve been trying to establish a presence on the web for years, but never have gone all the way and fully developed my personal website. It’s sad, really, considering I know how to build websites from scratch, and that I’ve owned a domain name and have been paying for hosting for years.
But honestly, the reason it has taken me so long is because I feel like I’m only now coming to a point in my abilities where I could design something that I would feel good about calling my own. I’ve taken some interesting side paths to get to where I am now (personal trainer, chef, tile setter, painter, etc).
I’ve known how to build websites for a few years, and have made a couple recently that I’m actually proud of. But somehow I always stopped short of finishing my personal site. A lot of this had to do with the fact that a static site always seemed so, well, static. After all that work, my website becomes out of date in about 2 weeks. I knew I’d just end up letting it stagnate for too long, because the of the time-consuming, cumbersome process of building new pages every time I want to put something new up.
Enter the blog. Now I get to forgo most of those nifty design skills I’ve spent so long acquiring, and do it the easy way! Just kidding, I’ll get around to jazzing up the design flavor around here real soon. Honest. But seriously, the ease with which I can jump in and tell a story about the photos I took, or the meal I cooked, or the mountain I climbed is quite frankly exhilarating. Call me a dork for being exhilarated by blogging, I don’t care. Or would that make me a geek? I always get those two mixed up. I wear either with equal pride.
It’s not the process of blogging that excites me so much, it’s the knowledge that this format will encourage me to write, which is something I feel very much that I should be doing. I like it. I feel I do it well. I know that by writing about them and sharing them, I can gain more from my experiences through the process of self-reflection. I can also see that this thing will gain its own momentum and spur me to do things that I love and to see them more clearly as I document and explain them.
Hopefully it will be entertaining for people other than me…but if not, hey. In the words of Tony Soprano, “Whaddya gonna do?”
