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

This shot was taken years ago with one of my old point and shoots. It has always meant a lot to me. I grew up traveling down tracks like these and yet the first time I walked these tracks it was a new adventure. I had never really lived in a big city before, much less hiked around one... and I was just getting to know Ocala. These tracks are "her" tracks... the ones she grew up around.

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.

I took this right after taking the last one of the train, still in my habit of re-looking for the small things. I liked the texture contrasts. The crispness of the leaves, the grain quality of the snow, and the softness and sharpness of the plants themselves seem like a nice combination.

I can tell already that today is going to be one of those days where you drown in the pace of it all and it is all over before you even feel awake. The kind of day that I try not to have.

While I was sitting here typing, Afta saw a spider crawling down the wall. Even after it met with a toilet paper squashing death, she sits staring at the wall. She is both horrified and intrigued by bugs. When she was a kitten, she let out a loud yelp and ran to the other side of the room at her first sight of a bug. It was a beetle crawling along near the ceiling. She eyed the ceiling for weeks after that. It was as if her whole safe little apartment world had been shattered.

Watching that little drama unfold just now made today seem a little better and slower. : )

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.

Nicolette Mall in downtown Minneapolis is always pretty cool. The warm skyways are definitely something sought out by all the frozen pedestrians.

A wintry sidewalk of trampled leaves. I liked the dinginess of them. Not really hallmark Christmas card material, but it reminded me of that moment after the Christmas party when you walk back outside into the cold and try to remember where you parked. It seems like a very urban picture to me, sidewalks in my home town were never this traveled.

When I saw the church being knocked down it reminded me of another leaning building I had first seen on the same day. The Pillsbury building down by St. Anthony Main has been leaning for quite a while. You can see it a bit in the picture. I tried to line up the windows on the right side of the picture with the frame since. As you move left across the picture you can see the tilt. Granted, some of it is the perspective of the picture and the 50mm lens.. but trust me.. it isn't affecting it all that much. The wall of the building looks like it has a beer belly and the edge along the roof is arching in toward the building. You can see in the bottom of the picture that they have reinforced it with metal beams, but it is a disconcerting feeling walking by the place. It always makes me feel off balance.

As I started walking around that day I decided that since the landscape was so winterly bleak, I would look for things that had a color to them already to contrast against it.

This is from the dock area down at St. Anthony Main in Minneapolis, MN. The atmosphere the day I took this was very somber and quiet, as it was hovering between 0-10 degrees (F). As on a lot of the photos from that day, the blurring around the edges is actually from the heat of my hand as I adjusted the lens. It was so cold that my camera kept fogging up when I touched the metal of the focus ring.

A few days before this was a church. I had noticed several years ago that one of the walls was leaning badly while walking by. They eventually put supports on the wall. But last year another part of the building fell off and did substantial damage to a nearby house. From what I am told they were unable to raise enough money to repair the building so it was torn down. I wish I had got out and taken some pictures a few days before this, most of the building was still there, but by the time I had a chance the building was almost completely gone. The site reminded me of all those old world war II pictures of various bombed out buildings through Europe.

I just got back from Minneapolis, where I spent the holidays with Ocala's family. I had a good time. It is always interesting to revisit somewhere you used to live. I always find myself remembering other times I was in the same place and wondering if I had any idea back then of where I am now. I hiked around St. Anthony Main (down by the Mississippi river) for a while and tried to get a good shot of downtown. Unfortunately the best shots of downtown at the time of day I was out are from the south side rather than the north.

Some rubble of the foundation of a torn down building behind Ocala's parent house.