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...

 

 

Sprintime Activities
For those folks wondering how we’re doing with our electricity situation, we’re doing just fine.  Last month’s bill indicated our usage was down by over half.  Even better, the power company decided to implement the rate increase effective April 16 – the day of the avalanche that took out the power lines for Juneau’s hydroelectricity source – which means we got billed at the pre-avalanche rate last month instead of the anticipated higher rates.  We’re also informed that rates will come down at the end of June, when repairs are now expected to be complete.

On to more important things.

I [Michael] promised Sheryl that we’d set up the kids playground once the ice was gone in the back yard.  When Mother’s Day weekend rolled around it was time.  The fence came down easily, and even the posts set in concrete came out of the ground with some effort.  With substantially more difficulty Sheryl and I managed to move the structure from the side yard to the backyard.  Once there it wasn’t too difficult to level things up and bolt on the roof and swings.  Last year Sheryl got a trail for Mother’s Day.  This year a swing set.  Maybe next year she’ll get the first hole in our much talked about miniature golf course.  Maybe, but I doubt it.

Sheryl also had a birthday this week.  The kids loved it.  We (me and the kids) went shopping and the kids got to pick out the flavor of cake mix to make, in addition to having input on what presents to buy (“Do you think Mom will like this toy boat?”).  At home they got to help (mostly watch) with the cake, and with wrapping presents (ditto).  The steaks came out from under the broiler shortly after Sheryl walked in the door, and we all enjoyed a happy birthday celebration as a family.  The weather even cooperated, so we were able to try out the R/C boat in our pond without getting rained on.

It’s that family thing that makes for such good times.  Becky “gets it” more and more, and with her vocabulary and other progressing cognitive abilities she’s fairly easy to communicate with, and she has a sense of humor too, as evidenced my her smiles and laughs when I catch her in a prank.  Michael does not have Becky’s range of vocabulary but uses what he has with somewhat more ease than Becky.  The interaction between the two of them is remarkable to observe, with Becky teaching Michael vocabulary and Michael keeping Becky’s attention focused much better than most adults do.  Both of the kids are also interacting more and more with Sheryl and me, and it all certainly fits the “family” description.

The house Sheryl owned when I met her went up on the real estate market this week.  We’ve rented it since buying this home, and with mortgage rates where they are it seems like the right time to sell.  I am also selling property I own in Nevada (to the woman who has been renting it since I moved here in 1992).  The idea is that we’ll be able to take the proceeds from these two sales and refinance our present home, leaving us with a lower mortgage here, about as low as we were paying when we lived at Sheryl’s house.

We’re anxiously watching gasoline prices rise as our impending trip to Fairbanks and Anchorage looms closer.  We’ll go almost irregardless of gas prices, unless of course gasoline becomes unavailable at any price (highly unlikely).  At some point we’ll have to rethink the whole road-trip paradigm, I suppose, but there’s more to life than what we can see and experience in Juneau, so as long as it’s still possible, we’ll still be trying to wing it.  We’re still talking about using our Metro to tow our travel trailer too.