Virginia Is For Families

We turned the heat off before leaving Friday evening for northern Virginia.  And now as we return the house is cool.  It feels good.  The sheets are cool and the blankets do their work.  I set the thermostat to 68 degrees tonight but still hope to enjoy the autumn air.  It was 39 degrees outside when we awoke this morning near the mountains of West Virginia.

It was a lovely weekend except that Beth was sick and stayed in bed while we went to the DC zoo.  I took some photos of some incredible animals today.  But then I forgot the camera when we returned to Richmond.   The children loved the zoo and were so excited about all the different creatures.  The pandas were wrestling and talking at the same time.  I had never heard a panda growl before.   One of them pretty much wanted to rest but the other one wouldn’t stop.  It was a noisy affair.

The cool water glistened around the seals as they effortlessly flew through the water.  And I began to appreciate the photogenic qualities of lizards.  I wish I could show you how beautiful they are but it will have to wait until someone sends me my memory card.

Very funny Halloween scenes were set up all over the zoo.  Skeletons dressed in different outfits.  I took photos of many of them and plan to put together a StumbleUpon  post this week.  Everybody who stumbles it in the first 48 hrs will get a link to one of their fine posts from here.

If the memory card arrives.  How can you be so dumb and  leave your camera on the kitchen chair?  I don’t know!  We had a lovely dinner last night at The Dock.   Apparently the new wave of house building in various places includes many houses plus a downtown area of stores and even a movie theater or two.  They  sell apartments above the stores to folks who (I guess) just want to be near other people all the time.

All the shops are quaintly built and the houses are built on streets that curve.  There are no straight streets anywhere.  And the homes are full of curves too.  The outside is rectangular of course.  But inside you find curved staircases and passageways.

The houses look at each other from angles.  Last night someone was showing a movie outside  on the side of their house.  A fire was burning  too.  There are neighborhood playgrounds and schools.  They are building “towns” along the freeways that bring bumper to bumper traffic every morning to DC.  In the towns of an earlier century everyone would walk or drive downtown to work.  Now they leave the towns and journey to the city.

My son-in-law travels one or two hours to work depending on the traffic.  Sometimes he has conference calls in his car with people in New York while traveling to his office near the White House.  His car is his office.

If you were walking downtown to your office in 1925 you probably would never imagine how things would be eighty years later.

But on Saturday afternoon the boys and their parents and sisters go down to the baseball diamond just a few miles away and play ball.  For a few hours things are just the same as they were many years ago.

We can say things are better.  Or we can say they are worse.  But we can also say with some certainty that these mothers will not die in childbirth and their children will not contract polio.  We can say that they will learn that ALL their friends are created equal and their new president may be black.  We can say that the crazy uncle won’t get away with so many things.  And if they happen to have a chemical imbalance it will be treated.

And as they grow the children will have the world at their fingertips as they use the internet in school and learn about other children around the world.

Also their parents and grandparents will love them just as they did decades ago.  And work to provide what they hope will be the best for them in all things and for many years to come.

More writing

http://davidnotes.com/2008/09/03/wednesday-evening-henry-miller/

I’m in the Chesterfield Mall this morning.  The dining court has a high peaked roof and all the sound bounces around up there.  I just tried calling Beth and we had a somewhat unsatisfactory conversation because of bouncing sound.  But the WiFi seems to be working well.  Come on by if you are near here and look for the guy in the plaid shirt typing away at a table with uneven legs.  It’s difficult to type on a wobbly table.  But they fixed up the bathrooms.  Stellar B rooms.  Hoping everyone will decide the Mall is too nice to pass up even if you pay more for some things.

Look for the guy who is going to throw a chair in a minute if the table doesn’t stop wobbling.  It’s all about the details guys.  Fix the tables!

I’m not well this morning.  My stomach feels iffy.  And my brain is sleepy.  And I’m convinced most of the readers who write comments here have gone for good.  Because I’m such a poor conversationalist.  This makes me sad.  I’m sure there a few of you guys and girls still around.  Hopefully.  But some of you have run out of comments.  And that’s my fault.  I guess.

But there are many more readers here who I don’t know.  Google is up to about fifty percent now after falling to zero this past summer.  Or just about zero.  A little misunderstanding.

But no one was terminally misunderstood.  We patched things up.   And now there are thousands of keywords doing their thing.  So the blog is well.  But the blogger is sick.  And his commenters are gone.

It’s a mixed bag.  But this dining court must be for crazy people like myself because all the music and the conversation are mixed together up in the pitched roof and then bounced back down here.  It’s like ease dropping on a telephone  trunk cable.  You can’t really make anything out but it’s all there.  And I would be much more comfortable sitting at home in front of my computer.

Maybe it’s time for a Hagan Das milkshake.  I was successful in my quest to buy my lovely daughter who must not be named a birthday present.  Soon we will head up to the Northern Virginia to see her and the family and the new home.  Leesburg.

It’s supposed to be nice.  I’ve never been there.  But I have to go.  I can’t stay here.  It’s too confusing.

Update:  I’m going to read this ebook.  Maybe learn to be a more skilled conversationalist.  Craig Ferguson is my role model when it comes to being good at this.  He is awesome.  He can have an interesting conversation with a rock.

Maybe this book will help.

Make the leap from writing in the offline world to effective online communication.

Bye.

Views per week/ Virginia Breeze

Views per week/ Photo LinkLove (little brother)

I was looking here yesterday evening and just sort of staring at the blog.  Feeling relatively empty after a week of turmoil and just amazed also at all the things I have done here in the past month.

Lots of creative stuff for an old geezer and maybe that’s what blogging will do for you after awhile.  Like anything else if you pursue it over a period of time you will learn some things and grow in different ways.  I was amazed as I went back to the beginning of our  trip in August.  But now I’m feeling pretty much empty.  When that happens it is always a good time to try and get out to take more photos.  Photos are the fuel and the Nikon D70 is the fuel tank.  It is rather small by today’s standards but then the fuel comes in micro-bits.

Beth tells me that the National Folk Festival will not be coming here this year but Richmond has managed to retain all the sponsors and plans to do the same thing again.   Hopefully many of the same talented people will be here plus some more.  Smile everyone!  Click.

Actually that’s not the way we take photos here.  We like to go for the candid shot.  And it’s difficult to get birds to smile.  Their beaks are a little too stiff.

And then we will be going up to northern Virginia to see my daughter and her family.   We have not seen their new home in Leesburg, Virginia.   It’s a pretty picture perfect part of the state so there should be more photo opportunities there.   As well as my grandchildren of course.  But not to worry they are all part of the paranoid wing of the party (I mean family) and like Beth will never be seen online.   Or rarely.  I have managed to sneak one or two photos of the kids into the blog but don’t tell anyone.

One thing I did manage to create this week was a new look for http://myfotobuzz.com.     Each post is going to be a combination of one larger photo and then there will be four NextGen photos with similar content beneath.  I think it will be pretty interesting.  After a year or two with keyword growth it should do well.  If you have a nice photoblog why not think about linking up?   That helps everyone too when done in a legitimate way.

Eventually I may start advertising there or maybe try to sell some photos.  Maybe.  When (if ever) I become convinced it isn’t a waste of time.

Have a nice weekend everyone.  The nice weather is finally coming in many places.  Hopefully the storms have passed and some of us can enjoy life a bit more again.

I have been wandering through the web this Sunday morning. It is peaceful so far around here and there is not much happening.  Zachary has apparently made it to Daytona, Florida  with Ashley for their vacation.  My daughter, Jena, and her family are moving any day to Northern Virginia.  My father is doing well up on Cape Cod.   I have three sisters in various locations across the United States but I must confess I do not know where all my nieces and nephews are these days.

I am a bad uncle.  I did find out recently that my nephew Mathew who is in the Air Force is stationed in the US Embassy in Berlin, Germany.  That’s pretty cool.  And I have another nephew Tom who is stationed in the Navy in Florida.  Do you know where all your nieces and nephews are located?  What about your spouse’s nieces and nephews?

Here’s my Exercise and Dieting Report for Week Number One.

And it’s brought to you by anything that doesn’t have a lot of refined sugar in it.  In other words I am still looking for an advertiser.

Just kidding.  We don’t have advertisers here. Because they are a pain and mostly freeloaders.  In my opinion of course.  Lots of folks love them.  Probably I would love them if they were sending me money.  But it always seemed like I was doing my part of the deal.  I was advertising them.  And they were. . .

Anyway.  In the first week I walked every day for about 45 minutes. And these walks included hills.  I discovered that it’s very important not to think at the beginning of the walk about all the streets you will be walking on and how hot it may be.  It’s better to focus on. . . nothing.  Or to listen to the wind rustling the tops of the trees.  We are fortunate to have large trees around here and they provide lots of shade.

Give me a choice between a large tree or an advertiser and i will pick the tree every time.  So the walks are going well and it pays to take one when you start to experience Restless Legs Syndrome.   If I take one every time I experience RLS it won’t be too long before I look like. . .

As you can see I didn’t take this photo. I have taken the vast majority of the photos in this blog.  Perhaps three or four are by others.  But I am interested in the sharing procedure and that is where I have been wandering this Sunday morning.  Until it’s time for the actual walk.

Here is a useful post I found on the subject from skelliewag

Flickr of course plays a central role in this subject.

And here is something else that I have incorporated into my methods.  It allows you to take a photo stamp of the photo you are using along with the Creative Commons License that determines whether or not you can use the photo.  Because we all change our minds from time to time.  And I can still prove I used it when it was legal to do so.

http://s1.imagestamper.com/login.jsp

My photos in Flickr are combined with a Creative Commons License.  I think it would be rather unfair if I put them in an All Rights Reserved status while using someone else’s photo.

NewsLink Briefs, one of my other two blogs,  will probably make more use of all this information.  Because I am still searching for the right combination of elements there.

PhotoLinkLove.com and Virginia Breeze.com (this blog) are pretty much settled in my mind.

For now.  You never know.  Trying to be creative means never having to say “I will do it this way forever”.

And now it’s time for the walk.  If I can fix a blog maybe I can fix the blob.

Gaining confidence and a willingness to try new things. . .    another one of those unheralded benefits of blogging.

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