thy mighty contract
figuring out external flash/film. slowly.

These are friends from homelands. Kevin, the dude in the vaguely discernible Usher shirt, works at the Northwest Georgia Trade and Convention Center. The Trade Center is a venue used by most of the local schools for proms, graduations, and sports tournaments. I've also attended both Bob Dylan and Charlie Daniel's concerts here.
So, the other day Kevin walked in to a crowded room and announced there'd been a breast-feeding convention at the Trade Center that day ... many questions followed. When I told Caroline later that night, she launched into a full interrogation. She has a habit of asking several questions in a row without allowing time for even the first to be answered. This time, I saw it coming. More often I'm quickly trying to answer her first couple of questions before realizing what's happening, then stopping to laugh. "Who goes to a breast-feeding convention? What types of products are being targeted to breast-feeders and who is buying them? How do you get invited to a convention? Are there lectures on how or why to breast-feed? Are a bunch of people just sitting around breast-feeding all day? What's the difference between watching and lurking?"
Kevin did mention that he'd seen a lot of "titties" that day, then reconsidering his terminology, amended, "I mean, milking titties." All particples aside, milking titties? My, my, my...

My brother, Tad, and I once wrote a show for a kid's puppetry arts camp, about a convention center mix-up. The all's-well-that-ends-well narrative was our solution to incorporating into a cohesive story the array of characters that'd been created during the earlier part of the two-week project: there were alien-dinosaurs, monkeys, a mad professor, a royal family, the sun, and the moon among them. So often when miscommunications arise, a la a breast-feeding and motorcyle convention/Charlie Daniel's double-booking...hilarity is prone to ensue. I'm just thinking aloud here.
There was also an opera camp that summer and I can recall being both bewildered and thoroughly amused as I peeked over the Art Center reception desk to see the cast arrive on performance day, clearly reviving the previous year's halloween costumes ... spider-man, a ninja, and a bride are the few I remember now. But that kind of strange seems par for opera.

fujitsu
WSJ: What can Fujitsu do to help Japan overcome the crisis?

Mr. Yamamoto: For example, some small towns and villages in northeastern Japan were almost completely swept away by the tsunami. As the region recovers from the damage, there will be a question of how to retrieve the lost family-register records for those towns and villages. With Fujitsu's technology, it might be possible to recreate those lost registers using tax-payment records and other data.

The nuclear accident will surely trigger more debates on how we create electricity, but at the same time we also have to discuss how we consume electricity. I think the whole disaster will accelerate a shift toward a more energy-efficient society. Fujitsu can contribute to that shift by providing necessary technology for building a more efficient power-distribution system. How to cut wasteful power consumption will be a major theme for the world. --- via.

leo's hand car wash, memorial dr.

star bar

northside tavern

mechanicsville, atlanta

Maison, Atlanta

Once a week, usually on Fridays, I meet two of my co-workers, Kelli and Elizabeth, at West Egg about 9 am, or shortly thereafter. We have a usual waitress with red hair who'll knows two coffees and a sweet tea. I call this breakfast meeting. It's a glorified show-n-tell. We rotate the bringing discussion to the table. It's pretty malleable. We share whatever's up....new interest, old passions, sentimental musings, existential discoveries, secret talents, westlemania, found objects, whatever! Good food, good dialogue, good times.

This puppy photo was taken one morning when we were leaving "breakfast meeting." We spotted the puppies and as I bent down to take a photo, Brian Kirkland, rococo designer and puppy papa, comes over to be the Miss Jay to their ANTM. We were cracking up at this. I can't remember all of their names now...one was definitely Noodle...and Elizabeth thinks another might have been Mr. Snuggles.

Didn't make any flights last Monday.
Not the direct, or to Salt Lake, or SFO, or PDX, or SEA...
It happens...but I'm really good at flying stand-by. Adaptability is one of my strengths, I'm told.
Also, I'm lucky.
A flight to Salt Lake had been canceled on Sunday and so there was an extra flight leaving Hawaii for Salt Lake at 7am on Tuesday. Chances were that I'd make that flight where as if I tried to wait for the direct or any connections later in the day, the odds weren't as good and I might have spent another night in HI which would have meant not getting back in time for an important day at work on Wednesday.
Indeed, I made the morning flight, the only hitch was that the last connection to Atlanta left 12 minutes after my flight was scheduled to arrive in Salt Lake. So, I wasn't even listed for the connection as it being impossible to make that. I knew when I got to Salt Lake I'd have to start getting numbers of available seats on different flights and calculating whether it was better to try to connect through another west coast city since most mid-west and east coast flights were done for the day or wait for the 12:55 am small craft to Atlanta which was better by virtue of less variables. Any choice would have gotten me back in ATL around 6am on Wednesday...if I got on.
This is where lucky comes in...Got to Salt Lake and looked at the departures...Atlanta's departing gate was directly across from my arrival gate. Everyone had already boarded the flight, but it hadn't left yet. I went to the desk, "Hi. I'm flying stand-by and my final destination is Atlanta. I know there's probably no way for me to get on this plane, but I have to ask just in case." The gate attendant agrees, "No, there's no way. It's scheduled to leave in 10 minutes. There are already people waiting to get on and there's not enough time for you to re-list anyway."
Okay...I figured so...but I couldn't walk away from the gate until I saw the plane leave. It was going where I wanted to go and I even though I was hungry and really needed to pee, I wasn't going to give up until the plane was gone and it was really, truly over. So, I waited. And guess what..... Got back to Atlanta while it was still Tuesday! They re-listed me and let me board. There was no more room overhead and the gate attendant looked at my carry-on, "Is that going to fit underneath your seat?" .... "Oh, it'll fit," I said. She smiled at me, "Good answer." I was really thinking I'd leave my bag sitting in Salt Lake before not getting on that plane, but there was room overhead after all or at least the self-help book reader sitting next to me made it so.
Getting into Atlanta I went straight to baggage services to try to find out where my checked-bag might be assuming that if I'd barely made it to town, my bag was probably still moving. But that attendant surprised me too when she directed me downstairs to baggage storage...voila!
Got to sleep Tuesday night...got to work...where a chocolate birthday cake was waiting for me.

Speaking of the bday, KBBQ tonight and er'body's comin.

the dixie cups are better known for the song going to the chapel, a phrase which caroline's childhood friend misheard as "going to the jack-o-lantern." which makes sense.



mr. lee was a teacher that several or maybe all of the bobbettes shared in school, like 5th grade math or something. and was, contrary to the tune, the "ugliest teacher [they'd] ever had."

on the way to the airport, caroline asked me what i thought to be the best moments. i'll declare two: one of specificity, and another antithetically vague.
1) crawling into a small tunnel of ferns, and flowers, and tropical tangle. the opening is only a few feet high, but pulling back the vines, i can step knee deep into the stream we're following. there's not a lot of light, but the water's clear and i can see crawfish swim in this shady place. i can't stand up, but i see the sun though the end. it's bright like the sky opens. there's rushing water. a lot of it. caroline's face appears on the other side. the other side is what she'd brought me to see. that moment.
2) jessica masterson, riding in cars, i second that emotion, highways and the clouds above the coffee fields.

aloha means a lot of things. hello, love, peace, take care. when you say "take care of ____" you say, "aloha _____" origination/interpretation are kinda debatable, but for reference,'alo' means presence and 'ha' means breath of life. this photo was shot on the leeward side of the main island. leeward stretches up from pearl harbor to pearl city where a two lane road winds past beaches, churches, residential streets, gas stations, military training fields, a few miles of camp where an estimated 4,000 (nearly 50%) of hawaii's homeless have created pop-up communities, and dead-ends at the north point of the island where some special bird travels thousands of miles across the pacific to mate each year with the same bird. on leeward it's not uncommon for non-natives to be called haole which means without the breath of life because years ago hawaiians noted that foreigners did not greet with honi, a polynesian kiss in which partners touch nose-to-nose and share in a breath.

the photos i've been posting all week are slides from a trip to visit Caroline in the late summer of 2008.

this is one of the only times i've shot slides. i think they're pretty sweet. there's a brightness to them that prints can catch. and the hummmm, click-click of a projector is nostalgically soothing. below: a slide projected on dining room curtains creates a dream at the hizzy.

on my last night in kaneohe the waning supermoon is still bright in the courtyard beside caroline's room. i'm being bitten. i notice that i've become accustomed to that this week, being bitten. the jungle is luscious and bloodsuckers collect a small fee for climbing her. that's erotically stated, but true. at present, the macbook's cool face puts bugs into a trances. illuminations makes them easy targeting. bless their moon-seduced souls. dead mosquitoes find their resting place is a smudge across my screen. a fair, but bit so comprehensible warning to the others. then i guess we're all savoring the night.

wind moves through everything on an island. in the house a door left ajar will sometimes swing closed, snapping or slamming shut with the wind. startling at first, it's become background noise, like the wind, like the mosquitoes. every now and then, at night or a lull, that snap still startles people who live here. right now though, the breezes just rock the tree branches and push the smell of plumeria from gnarled branches. the sound is shushing low decibels of lou reed wailing a good-bye to youth. i'm saying goodbye too. another year older. it smells so good here. i look forward to waking up. and i'll come home to atlanta.

aiea

venus

dude, HI
waimea bay skate park

don't wait for the break, HI

today's my birthday.
ichthyarchy, HI

hit it, HI

:), HI

windward, HI

men at work, HI

HNL, HI

steel mill, scotdale

rocky
- likes to play darts
- owns at least four hats
- claims not to have a couch
- claims to keep a refrigerator in the back of his van
- which is why he can't pick up a couch
star bar, atlanta

the sound system at standard feed & seed, atlanta

fire, fire practice!
















backstory: for awhile now i've had a hope - for the chance to shoot fire practice. fire practice = the fire department sets a thing on fire to learn how to put out said fire, quickly, efficiently, and safely.
on this day, i witnessed fire practice for the second time in all my years. the first time had been from a distance, at night, back in my hometown. the event now shown above was located a few hundred yards from the backside of the lakewood amphitheater at an atlanta fleet services center.
i scout/sleuth/wait for these things. so, when i drove by and saw the smoke, i figured the worst they could say is no, but i've heard that word before. so, i bounced up, smiled, asked politely and they began explaining what they were learning that day. it was a lesson on smoke reading. billowing black smoke indicates the location of the fire. brown smoke means wood is burning, probably structural. steamy smoke means water has been put on the fire. this was new information to me. the captain says to me, "we don't just run into places without an idea of what's happening inside." i couldn't help but smile. "well, i'd hoped not. good to know." was my reply.