This a shot from our honeymoon. Its one of my favorites and I have been saving it for a special occasion and this seemed like the best of them.

This is a snap shot of the river a couple years back at Christmas time down near Saint Anthony Main in Minneapolis.

This image is from a year ago, when I was waiting for my car to get fixed. There are a set of small walkways to the powerline towers out in the swampy areas of the bay. This one didn't have any gates. So we walked out to a couple of the towers and I snapped this shot trying to frame the scene.

This particular view isn't along my drive but rather along the coast on the drive between Santa Cruz and San Francisco. It was a beautiful day that was constantly being chased by huge storms coming off the ocean.

This was a picture I took while I lived in Spokane and hiked down by Riverside Park. This male was keeping an eye on his family across the river. The area around their nest had been ravaged by a forest fire a few years before.

While waiting for an interview today I wondered around the Presidio in San Francisco. This picture is from underneath the 101 before it goes up the the Golden Gate Bridge. The ground was slanted and a path had formed on the side of the hill. When I looked at it closely I saw that the feet that made it were tiny. Pigeons had made it. Further on down the path I encountered a group of pigeons moving in single file down the path. We all moved by each other quietly. It reminded me of how people act when you pass by them while hiking, eyeing you carefully and then nodding in acknowledgement.

This is one of my favorites. We were on our way to Spokane, and saw the Rockies for the first time. Driving through the middle of them, we went from a dry brown day into a snow storm. I say storm, but it never really hit us. It just touched the tops of the mountains. It was massive and silent. We began listening to audiobooks of The Lord of the Rings to pass the long three day trip. My impressions of the story are now fused with seeing the rockies and vice versa.

I spent a lot of the time during the trip setting the metering on my little camera while driving with my elbows, nudging ocala out of sleep, handing her the camera and saying, "Get me a shot of that". Poor girl. : )

A picture I took years ago on a memorable day traveling along the North Shore of Minnesota. We arrived in Grand Marais just at sunset during a heavy fog. Along the shore people often set up the rocks in this manner.

Its only three more weeks until freedom. There is always this part of me... it reminds me of owning a dog.. I have to take it for a walk once in a while. : )

Not that it has anything to do with this fish. For some reason it just seemed like the next picture to post after the smoke stacks. I guess it kind of resembles the picture I took of fish in the ditch where I grew up which was in sight of the smoke stack of the power plant.

Work has been crazy lately... as you can see from my lack of posts. I was two hours away from a 100 hour work week last week. The project is almost done and I find myself motivated by the thought of never having to touch it again.

The whole experience has made me think a lot about what I want out of life. I have never really thought of my jobs as work. It isn't that they aren't hard or sometimes painful, but being in an art related field tends to lend itself to not thinking of a job that way. I have an ambition to create and would be doing so even if I wasn't getting paid for it. Work seems to provide a good opportunity to do that. The thing about being an artist is that you are one all the time... I don't just put on my artist hat when I go to work. Because of all this, I often turn all my effort towards it without feeling like a work-aholic. It has kind of snuck up on my that way. I find myself "making a living, without having a life" to steal a quote from George Carlin.

I have promised myself to get back to living. : ) I am planning a road-trip after this project ends. I use "planning" in the loosest sense of the word, as in... I am making time for it.. and letting the wind take me where it will ( though I do have some ideas ). Hopefully I will get to take tons of photographs. Photographs never ever feel like work... I could do that 24/7. Sometimes I feel like I missed my calling... though at the same time ... I am kind of glad it isn't my job.

Another shot from the dock area down by St. Anthony Main.

My uncle is very ill. I am not sure how old he is, but he is my Dad's older brother... and since my Dad would be like 78 now.. my uncle must be in his mid 80's.

The other day I was in the checkout line and saw that Harrison Ford was on the cover of the Enquirer for some ridiculous "Drunken Binge!" article. Obviously he went out and had a drink or two.. and got the usual drunk photos (the kind everybody gets) taken of him. Looking at the pictures of him I was thinking about how my lifetime had aged the man. I think about that a lot with celebrities, him specifically, since I am so used to seeing the much younger version of him gallivanting around the galaxy and finding precious artifacts in long forgotten caves.

But it always hits me as a surprise to see what it does to people I know. It gets accelerated when you move away from your family. Kids grow up in a couple of visits... Adults go gray overnight. My uncle is one of the kindest most gentle people I have ever met. He has a voice that you never confuse with anyone else. Him and my aunt lived near me when I was growing up for quite a while. I saw 'The Wizard of Oz' for the first time sitting in their living room. When I broke my arm in 6th grade, they came and got me. My aunt made a make-shift splint until we got to the hospital.

Its funny, but turning 30 seems a lot younger to me than turning 27 did. I guess it is because it is about the beginning of a decade rather than the end of one. I find myself setting goals of what I want to accomplish in the next ten years and they seem a lot less far-fetched then what I set about to try and did when I was in my twenties.

This is one of my favorite photos of the trip. Its a moment in time. I took this same shot earlier, noticing the hill. It was sunny at the time and the hill only stood out a little. As I was walking back it got rather stormy and overcast. A single opening sent a dot of light moving over the landscape. I first saw it on the trees on the other side of the hill. I waited and sure enough it crossed over to the hill I was looking at earlier and as quick as it was there it continued on and over the next hill.

During the holidays, I got to go up to Canada where Ocala's family have their new cabin. It was the first time I have ever actually been out of the US, though I grazed the border of Canada several times when I lived in Spokane, WA. I didn't have a lot of time to take photos, but I got out for a couple of hours. This was a shot down at the creek behind their place. It was so peaceful and relaxing there. I felt really at home there.