Old business, New business

First, the old business.  Of course, there’s always old business, although with a blog there is always the question of why anybody would want to rehash old news.  In this case, it isn’t so much the old news as much as old pictures. Back in May we went to a party at Auke Rec, the same recreation area where Sheryl and I [Michael] had our "day after the wedding" party.  It was a lovely day, warm (for here), sunny, no wind, about as nice as days in Juneau get.  After a while, Becky made herself at home on the beach near the water line, slowly burying herself in the mud.  Michael joined her, at which time Becky started trying to bury him too, or at least started flinging mud in his direction.  They both pled ignorance when asked what they thought they were doing.  Of course, neither of them had any problem with the cold, cold mud until it was time to go, at which point they both cried incessantly (perhaps it was the cold water I used to rinse them off before putting them in the car).

More recently, work continues on the new storage area on the west side of the garage.  Until the retaining wall went in, the ground to the west of the house was virtually unusable, especially in winter when ice would render the sloping hillside too treacherous to attempt a crossing.  Our previous blog entry shows how tall the retaining wall had to be to level out the worst stretch of the hillside. The work on the west side was fairly straightforward. Build the retaining wall. Fill in behind the retaining wall.  Put in pier blocks.  Assemble roof supports.  Attach the roof.  When I added lights and an electrical outlet in the new covered area I duplicated the effort in the shed we constructed last summer, so now we’ll be able to see what we're doing in both areas in the dead of winter. And what will become of the new storage area?  For one thing, it would seem to be a good place to put the radial arm saw, which I never use because it’s too much of a hassle to haul it out of the garage (and too messy to run in the garage).  There are a number of other things that we’d like to store there too, things that need to be out of the rain (and snow) but otherwise don’t need a heated space, like garden tools and yard equipment.  And then of course there is the prospect of storing another couple of cords (or more) of firewood, but we’ll have to deal with that as wood becomes available. Speaking of available wood, we may be coming across a large quantity of it soon enough.  Several of our trees (about a dozen) are showing evidence of a spruce beetle infestation and may already be dying.  After giving the matter some thought we’ve decided to let the infestation run its course, which means that we’ll be losing some trees, gaining some daylight, and filling both woodsheds for the next few years.  I’m mostly okay with losing some of the trees, because we have plenty of them, and since the older trees are in the most jeopardy their loss would enhance the growth of the younger trees, just like nature intended.  The only thing I don’t look forward to is removing the stumps: my experience has been that even the small tree stumps are really difficult to dislodge from the ground, as I was reminded while taking out the one old stump (which should have rotted out but didn’t) that resided in the path of the new retaining wall. Becky’s in Kindergarten five days a week and loving it.  Michael is in preschool two mornings a week, and he loves it too.  So far, I have been too occupied to consider what the extra “free” time means to me.

 

Organizing My Newspaper Clippings

To make life easier, I've put all my newspaper articles in one place, including the two most recent ones.  Here they are:

 Newspaper Article Link 

A Little Catching Up to Do

We’re a little embarrassed by our lack of blog entries lately, but what excuse can we give?  Obviously, we haven’t been updating things on this end because we’ve been doing other things with our time.  In that light, it’s time to move on. Our last entry was June 24, four days after Dorothy’s wedding.  We all had a lovely time in Wasilla, visiting with the Hall clan and with my [Michael’s] niece Amy and her family.  We even took in an air show, which the kids did really well with discounting the occasional screaming jet overhead. At the end of June Dad and I flew back to Juneau to work on the summer project: finishing the ceiling.  Dad did all of the staining and most of the cutting.  I did the installation work.  Luckily we had a lovely streak of days when we first arrived, allowing the stained wood to be spread out to dry.  Except for the ceiling fan, everything was complete before dad flew south and I flew north in mid July (the fan was installed a week after our final return).  In fact, the work went so well and so quickly that we finished early, leaving plenty of time for Dad to do some sightseeing around Juneau. The rest of the vacation travels were fun, if a little wet.  Every day and every night brought rain, but there were also dry spells almost every day allowing us to camp in relative comfort.  We continued to prepare and eat all of our meals outside, for instance. Once we got farther north the pavement ended, and the rains meant muddy going.  Even so, the Scamp remained warm and dry (compared to tent camping, anyway).  Before the trip we reverted the front of the trailer to its original bunk bed configuration, removing the shelf we installed a couple of years before when Becky and Michael were small enough to share a bunk.  The kids liked having their own bunks this time around. When the weather was especially rainy we erected our screen house on the end of the Scamp’s awning, an arrangement that yielded a tremendous amount of dry space in which to move around.  In fact, the dynamics of camping in the Scamp worked really well for our family of four, which bodes well for our continued use of the Scamp as our family trailer.  Sheryl and I had been somewhat concerned that the little trailer might be too cramped to allow us to travel comfortably, but those thoughts have been laid pretty much to rest with this trip. We took a side trip to Eagle, on the Yukon River.  It was an interesting drive, and an interesting town (it was once thought that Eagle would be a major transportation hub).  We toured the old fort and most of the town, but the thing that most attracted the kids’ attention were the miniature strawberries that seemed to be growing everywhere, yet remained virtually invisible until looking very close to the ground. We drove the Top of the World Highway this time around. It was a pretty drive, with little traffic and very few settlements along the way.  In Dawson City the traffic situation changed, with lots of young adults cramming into town for a music festival.  We were lucky to get a camping space.  To the north of the campground was another lucky break: a graveyard of old steamships and riverboats. We were hoping to get more use out of the cycles during our trip than we did.  A lot of the lack of cycling came from the weather.  Still, the kids did get to do some pedaling, and occasionally we were able to put the tricycle to additional use as a wood-hauler, a task that Michael took very seriously. Our original plan was to camp in Haines the night before sailing to Juneau.  So much for planning.  When we approached the ferry terminal (it is on the way to the campground where we would have stopped) we saw the Columbia at the dock, waiting to load its cargo of people and vehicles.  We stopped.  Sheryl went into the ferry office.  After what seemed like a very long time, she returned with a confirmed ticket for the imminent sailing.  In another hour we were in the main restaurant at the rear of the Columbia, enjoying a wonderful meal and toasting our luck at having made it on board. The month since our return has been busy: We’re contemplating changes in our office, and in much of the rest of the house’s east end, and so we’ve been sorting and cleaning in the house and in the garage to make room for the changes. I stored away our winter firewood supply thanks largely to our neighbor, who had several trees cut down this spring; he wanted the wood split and I had a splitter, so I split all the wood in exchange for half of it. We want more wood storage, and a place to store things out of the weather, so I’m building a retaining wall and leveling the area on the west side of the garage.  Once this platform is finished we’ll add a roof, and after that many of the things cluttering our garage will be able to live outside. And the tandem bicycle?  We bought it this morning after seeing an ad in the newspaper.  Clean, shiny, not a speck of rust (not even on the chain), and only $100.  Such a deal!  Now if we could just get some dry, sunny weather.

 

Dorothy's Big Day

Dorothy and Jason were married on the 21st of June in Fairbanks.  It was a lovely wedding.  The skies were sunny with just a few clouds, the temperatures warm (for us), and a light breeze kept the bugs away.  There were a couple of snags, like the music not being loud enough for anybody to hear, but nobody seemed to mind (or even notice) what might not have gone according to plan.  It seems that with weddings, the only thing people are really interested in is seeing the bride and groom successfully wedded.  The food was good too.

We didn't see much of the young couple during our visit.  Dorothy apologized  at one point for not having much time for visiting, but I [Michael] told her apologies weren't necessary: Dorothy did most of the planning and a good deal of the preparation for her big day, and I knew that this was not the trip for a visit.  My gratification came from seeing them together, and happy.

Our drive up to Fairbanks was uneventful, although the runup to the drive was not.  Three days before our departure we decided that Sheryl's Isuzu was no longer suitable for towing (the frame is rusting away thanks to Juneau's climate), so we bought a car.  The next day we got a different car after discovering the dealership misled us about the availability of a trailer hitch (and they were disinclined to deal with us on the second car until we revealed that we took the precaution of cancelling the check we wrote for the first one, and the first deal was as dead as the check).  We drove up in a 2008 Mercury Mariner.

My dad joined us in Fairbanks and came along on our drive to Wasilla.  In a few more days Dad and I will fly down to Juneau to tackle a couple of home renovation projects, after which he'll be flying back to Illinois and I'll come back north to retrieve Sheryl and the kids, after which we'll drive back home.

I'm taking lots of pictures, as always, which leads to the topic of my column for June.  Sorry I'm late posting it, but we were on the road when it went to press.

 

 

If a picture is worth a thousand words

By Michael Wittig | At Home with the Kids

Click. A precious moment of my children's early life is recorded for posterity. Click, click. Two more precious moments. Click, click, click, click. Get the picture?

I inherited my photography hobby from my father. He inherited his hobby from his father, who served as the photographer for a small Illinois newspaper. Because of their passion for pictures I got to see snippets of my father's childhood, his tour with the Army in the 1950s, and my own early years a decade later.

I bought my first camera when I was 8 years old, a Kodak 104 instamatic. I also bought my first roll of film then, and when my pictures were all taken I paid to have them developed.

And then I stopped taking pictures for a few months. I had to, since there was no more money for film and developing.

Until the digital revolution, photography was a hobby with a price. Every picture cost money, good or bad, with more tending toward the bad side than the good. Worse yet, film photographers had no way to tell whether a given picture was any good until it came back from the processor, and only professionals actually exposed enough film to capture the "right" moment.

The opening years of digital photography were slow to reveal the promise of the new technology. Early digital cameras offered low-resolution images of mediocre quality, and limited memory storage meant that only a few pictures could be taken at a time.

But technology marched forward, offering better cameras and more storage for less money. In this decade, digital image quality has improved to the point of rivaling film, and on-board storage has expanded from kilobytes to gigabytes.

When I first saw my father taking dozens upon dozens of pictures with his digital camera I thought it was a novelty. When I saw the results it was a revelation. To be sure, many of the individual pictures weren't very good, but there were so many of them that the number of keepers was actually quite respectable. Additionally, the sequences themselves were fun to watch.

I adopted my father's technique. If a picture is worth a thousand words, after all, then a sequence of pictures should be worth thousands of words, right?

I did my father one better too, by changing the setting on my camera from single exposure to continuous, so that when I hold down the shutter button the camera takes a continuous stream of pictures, slightly more than one every second. I've been taking a lot of pictures.

But even good concepts can go awry. After a recent outing to the beach I came home to discover over five hundred pictures on our camera, which I added to the nearly 18,000 pictures already on the computer. More and more, I feel as if I'm trying to contain Pandora in a digital box.

I try to pare down the pictures, I really do. But the reality is that although 90 percent of my pictures may get deleted, 10 percent remain. What am I supposed to do with 50 great pictures of a day at the beach?

I'm not much better with videotape. On our last big road trip I recorded 14 hours of video footage. How many bowls of popcorn does that equate to? Surely, I do not know.

The upshot of all this is that I believe digital photography has diminished the value of a picture. The pictures on my hard drive do not represent 18 million words. Indeed, the whole collection can probably be summed up in two words: too much.

My kids are getting into the act now. We bought them cheap digital cameras at Christmas, and since then it has become a regular event for my 3-year-old boy to come to me with tears in his eyes because his camera has quit working. There's never really a problem with the camera, of course. He's simply filled the memory card again.

And so a fourth-generation photography buff has come into being. I can hear him now. Click, click, click. More pictures he wants me to look at.

I see one-terabyte hard drives in the store these days. How many words are a million pictures worth? I'll find out soon enough.

 

The Monthly Column

When I wrote last month's column I didn't anticipate a loss of our cheap electricity.  I actually got a few comments from locals who thought I might need to rethink my priorities after the avalanche, so with that in mind it seemed appropriate to continue talking about energy in this month's column...