CLOUDLAND CABIN JOURNAL - May 2005
Cloudland Cabin Deck Cam, 5/31/05, 7:31am, thin clouds down in the canyon, sun rising into a blue sky | ||
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CLOUDLAND CABIN JOURNAL, updated 5/29/05 WHICH children do I take to the ice cream store?
The May Print of the Month 5/22/05 It is getting late this evening and my eyes are heavy, but I thought I had better do a quick post to let everyone know we are still here. We've been neck-deep in work these past few days with not time to sit down and take a break. I did get to sneak out for a little while on Friday, off to a pond that had 35-40 water lilies blooming in it. When I got there a momma duck and four ducklings swam off across the middle of the pond. I was busy setting up my stuff and never saw exactly where they went, but I did not see them again, and I'm sure they didn't fly away since the kids could not - she must have "ducked" into a little hiding place somewhere out of sight in the weeds until I left. The pond was only about a foot and a half deep, with another 4-6 inches of mud on the bottom. I gathered up my photo gear and waded out into the water where I could set up right on top of a pair of colorful blooms. My tripod legs sunk in several inches, and it was difficult to move the tripod around once I had it set - had to pull the legs straight up - one at a time - to get them free of the mud when I wanted to move the tripod even a little bit. I soon realized that the sandals I was wearing sunk into the mud and sort of hung up down in there, while my feet remained up on top of the mud - that meant my sandals were locked into the mud, and I had a tough time moving my own tripod legs around! The wind was blowing and the sun was shining - not good conditions for flower photos, but what the heck, I was willing to wait for the wind to die down. Only problem was that SOMETHING kept biting my toes! Did not seem like normal little fishes, but I'm sure that is exactly what they were. All I could think about was the big snake that was sunning himself on the bank exactly where I entered the water - he was not too happy about being disturbed, and quickly disappeared into the water. The water was dark and mucky and I could not see what was moving around under there. Hum. If you had seen me in the pond you would have laughed out loud. With the sun shining, I had to take steps to control the light on the flowers. So here was the scene - me standing in the mud behind the tripod; my right arm fully extended and holding an umbrella in my hand to block out the sun and shade the flower; my left hand was also outstretched and holding a reflector to bounce a little bit of light onto the flower; and I waited, and waited and waited in this position for the wind to die down and the surface of the water to get calm. JUST ABOUT THE TIME the water got still, SOMETHING would take a bite out of my toes and I would flinch, which sent ripples across the water and disturbed my still flower! When finally the stars aligned themselves correctly, and I got calm conditions and not biting critter, I had to lean over towards the camera - with both arms outstretched holding umbrella and reflector - then I would curl my tongue up really tight, and press in on the remote shutter button - and I had to do this TWICE for each shot, once to lock up the camera mirror, and a second time to actually take the picture! Like I said, it looked pretty funny. But I did manage to get a couple of photos of three different blooms, so I went home a happy camper.
Later in the evening Friday Ray Scott showed up from Little Rock. This would begin a 40-something hour marathon to do the initial design work for his new picture book. (You can ask Glenn Wheeler and Don Kurz about these marathon sessions - they are always a lot of work, and fun too I hope!) We worked late into the night, then were back at it again well before daylight, worked all day long on Saturday, then long into the night once again, another early start on Sunday, and finally called it quits from sheer exhaustion Sunday afternoon. At one point we had three computers going (me on mine with the main book text file, Pam on hers looking up special quotes and some facts on the internet, and Ray at a third station we had set up for him to write and edit), plus two printers printing out both color and black and white versions of what we were designing. We did not get the book completed - it will take another couple of weeks of work for that to happen - but we did get a great start on the book and now have the general layout and all the photos selected, sized, and placed. This week Pam will spend quite a bit of time with each image doing a high-resolution scan to a specific size (more than 50 images will be in the book), then I will process each image and place in the final document. Ray still has some writing to do, as well as getting the entire text edited by several different people. This will not be a classic large-format coffee table picture book, but rather a more intimate little book of inspirational photos and words - I think it will be a great book if I do say so myself! At one point during the weekend, late on Saturday night (or was it Sunday morning), I just HAD to get some information out of Ray, and it had to be really CREATIVE stuff - in fact what I needed was about half of all the titles for the photos in the book. We had been struggling with this all day. Then all of a sudden, something popped, and Ray began to come up with some really terrific titles, just one after another after another. I hardly could believe my ears, but I knew it was true because I had not had anything to drink all day - of course, Ray had gotten into my stash of really cheap whiskey, and that might have been the source of his brilliant creative streak - if so, I need to get some more of that rot gut! And the best part was that when the light of day arrived again the titles STILL read well! OH YES, Ray arrived with an entire CASE of Starbucks MOCHA!!! Good man, smart man...... After Ray left I drove over to inspect a potential pond for Amber to go swimming in later this summer - a good friend is getting ready to purchase a large parcel of land south of Jasper that just happens to have two large ponds on it. It is a really nice spot of Ozark land, and I think the ponds will make for a refreshing dipping place this summer if we can slip past the guards. Somehow, in the middle of all the book work, my bride was able to do 18 MILES of training yesterday, all at 3.5 miles per hour, and today she did 15 miles at the same pace. Her 60-mile walk for Cancer is now less than a month away and she is in the height of her training. It is amazing the commitment that is required for folks to participate in this event, but I guess the stakes are very high indeed for the millions who will die from breast cancer. When I got home we had a few dark clouds swirling around, although the air was very still, so I grabbed my camera bad and went down into the meadow below the cabin - there are several hundred wildflowers blooming all over the place down there right now, and it seems like that number doubles just about every day. As luck would have it, as soon as I got there and set my camera gear up for a shot, the breezes began. That was OK though - it was warm and humid and the air movement felt kind of nice. I shot a couple of flower compositions, then shot an image that will become the photo I'm going to use in my own new picture book - on the dedication page. So it was a producing hour spent standing in a sea of waving wildflowers.
05/23/05, just after a wonderful full moon rise tonight - here is a snapshot of it rising up over Mossville (a very strange color indeed):
5/24/05 I was sitting in the hot tub early this morning, wondering where the full moon had gone (it had disappeared into a sea of heavy clouds), when a bit of color began to appear in the east. I decided to dry off and go search for a sunrise location - we don't have too many of those around here, but I thought I would give it a shot. I drove off and stopped and parked and waded out into a chest-high hayfield (everything was soaked, as was I in about five seconds), until I found a group of walnut trees that I wanted photograph. About ten minutes later a large orange ball appeared way off yonder. I had the camera and tripod down low, in the hay, with the trees in the background, or I guess the trees were actually in the middle of the scene. I love taking pictures of sunrise and sunset, moonrise and moonsets, and never tire of it. By the time the sun had climbed just a few feet into the sky, I had fired off more than 100 exposures. I returned to the cabin looking like a drowned feline.
My bride got to work on Ray's scans, and spent all day with her head buried deep inside this large "hood" that I had built to cover up one of the big 22" monitors (to keep glaring light off of it). SO NICE to have all of this fancy electronic equipment out here, and have someone who knows how to run it on staff! I spent much of the day processing her scans, and putting them in place in the book text file - I'll be doing a lot of that in the next couple of weeks with Ray's book, my calendar, and my photo book. By late afternoon I was ready for a break, so I grabbed my camera gear and snuck out the door (actually my bride pointed to the door and requested that I get out of there and go take pictures - YES MA'AM!). Several weeks ago I found some baby cinnamon ferns over along the base of the big bluff in Dismal Hollow - "I shall return when they grow up a bit!" Today was that day. As soon as I put the truck in park it began to rain, and then to pour, but the storm didn't last too long and soon I was skipping down the hill, once again soaked to the bone in about 30 seconds. Besides getting a good fern shot, I have also wanted to find a horsemint to photograph. A few days ago Tim Buchanan from Springfield, MO, posted a photo of a horsemint on a nature photography board - I consider that photo to be one of the very best wildflower photos I have ever seen - it is quite sensational. Anyway, I knew I could not ever top his photo, but I wanted to get one of my own, and today as I entered this scenic area there seemed to be horsemint flowers everywhere, so I stopped and shot in between raindrops.
Later on I entered a side canyon of Dismal Hollow and began to make my way along the base of this large bluff. I soon discovered that my cinnamon ferns had indeed grown up, but they had already entered old age and the photo I wanted to get was not to be. What I wanted to shoot was the large "cinnamon stick" shooting up through the middle of these giant ferns. There were plenty of them around today, but they were past their prime and - like a lot of old guys - were drooping. I did find an interesting group of the ferns growing right out of the solid sandstone bluff though, and set up my camera and tripod and took a few photos. I expect this one may end up in the new picture book.
OK, got one fern photo in the bag, but I am never satisfied with just one. I continued on along the bluff and found a whole line of ferns, all growing right out of the base of the big bluff. I stopped and set up and shot one of the drooping cinnamon sticks (I know there is an official name for them, but this is me, remember).
On along the base of the bluff I continued, until I came to a large area up on the bluff that had a couple dozen large ferns growing out of the solid rock, they were backlit, and there was a carpet of sorts of very dark moss or something covering the bluff behind them. When I found a spot to set up my tripod I realized that there were two saplings about 10-12 feet tall whose leaves were in the way. I don't like to tear off leaves, so instead I decided to bend over the saplings so that they were out of the way - I used my camera bag to place on top of them to hold them down. Oops, not a good idea. Not a good idea at all. In fact my lovely bride always laughs at me when I go into "photo mode" because I always begin talking to myself - kind of making sure I am doing the right things, telling myself which lens to use, how to set up the tripod, etc. As I started doing that today I made a very specific comment out loud - "This is NOT a good idea - do NOT put your camera bag on these trees!" Hum. I guess I wasn't listening, because I went ahead and did it. In fact, I left the entire bag zipped open - "CLOSE IT UP YOU IDIOT!" Once again I ignored myself. About 60 seconds later as I was trying to compose a photo looking almost straight up at the ferns on the bluff, I caught a little bit of movement out of the corner of my eye. I'm sure the following took all of five or ten seconds to happen, but looking back on it now it seems like it lasted a lot longer. Those little saplings did not like my camera bag on them, and sprung up, sending my camera bag - my camera bag with main pockets and a couple of small pockets unzipped and wide open - up into the air. The contents began to fly out all over the place, including lenses, spare batteries, etc., etc., etc. That would not have been such a big deal except for the fact that directly below where I was standing the hillside sloped down at a very steep angle, and just a few feet down that slope was the top of a short bluff - a bluff that went down, well, to parts of the canyon unknown. I lept into the air towards one of my lenses, grabbed it just as I hit the ground, then I rolled over and reached out to grab just about anything I could get my hand on - the bag was tumbling out of control down the hill - and now me with it - with the contents flying all over the place. Just as I grabbed the bag itself, I looked up and saw my camera and tripod falling down the hill as well, just about to SPLAT! on the ground below - YIKES, now I WAS in trouble! I rolled over and reached out to grab the camera, but was too late. And when I had grabbed the camera bag one of the lenses inside came out and went tumbling on down the hillside, out of my reach. I laid there in the wet earth and watched helplessly as it disappeared over the bluff. It was a speciality-tilt/shift lens. It took me a few minutes to collect myself and the contents of my camera bag. I took inventory and realized that the lens was probably the only item that I had lost over the bluff. The camera had taken a direct hit on the ground, but luckily, it hit on an accessory that I had placed in the hot shoe of the camera, and I think the camera had survived the fall just fine and without any dents (this is an $8,000 camera body, with a $1,000 lens attached). All seemed well but that tilt lens. It took me a while, but I finally found a way around and down to the base of the little bluff, but man it was not only a JUNGLE down in there, but it was STEEP! I had to hold on for dear life as I made my way around the ground below the little bluff to try to figure out where my lens had landed, and where it might have traveled. It did not look good - the drop was about 15-20 feet, plus the steep hillside continued for another 50-75 feet on down the hill - I mean terrain so steep a person could not stand upright without holding onto something, as I was. In my scramble to locate the lens I scared up a little bird that had built a nest into the hillside - it looked like a tiny cave, and when I peeked inside, I saw 7 or 8 little speckled eggs all tucked in tight. Mom would be back soon. Turns out the lens took quite a tumble and traveled over 100 feet down the hillside, but when I found it, it seemed to be OK!!! It is a very strong lens, as are most of the ones that I use (my equipment takes a lot of abuse). Now I had to find my way back up that steep slope, and this time with only one hand - I did not have any pockets in my pants or shirt for the lens, so had to hold it with one hand. And this was literally hand-over-hand climbing stuff. And the ground below - what little dirt there was - was quite slick. I inched my way up and up and up, until finally I had reached the top of the little bluff. Just as I arrived I came face-to-face with horror, but also with great beauty. There was a brightly-colored copperhead very neatly coiled up on the ground not six inches from my face. She was looking right into my very soul, telling me that I had better not move another inch or she would strike me just about eye level. But my very first impression was not one of fear or danger, but rather of how colorful and beautiful this little snake was - I immediately wanted to take her picture! But first I had to get the heck out of there! Which I did, very carefully (got out of there). And as soon as I topped out and sat down next to my camera bag, I realized that I had better leave well enough alone and save the snake portrait for another day - besides, I probably would have been unable to get my tripod in a location where I could have taken a good photo anyway - that's my story and I'm sticking with it! Just about that time I realized that it was beginning to get dark, and the sky above was rumbling, so I put the lens back into the camera bag and headed on back up the steep climb out to towards the truck. Thank you missy copperhead!
5/25/05 - here is what it looked like out the back of the cabin this morning - a classic sea of clouds kind of day at Cloudland!
5/26/05 Very COOL and still outside tonight, with clearing skies and stars/planets beginning to peep out from the dark blue sky. The night critters are a little bit late coming out tonight, but they made up for it last night so are probably taking a rest. Last night you could hardly carry on a conversation the chatter was so LOUD up in the trees around here - mostly tree frogs, looking for mates. Sounded kind of like a singles bar at closing time. I got to sneak out once again yesterday afternoon to try to get a few pictures, but I only came home with one. I hiked about a mile through dense forest down into a canyon, then wanted to follow the creek there upstream for a ways to see what I could find to shoot. All the while I was hiking I paid particular attention to where I was putting my feet down - just in case there was another friendly copperhead sunning his or her self that would not appreciate being stepped on. It always happens this way - I never pay any attention to snakes until I come face-to-face with one like I did the other day, then after that for a while I see snakes all over the place, no matter if they are there or not! Much of the ground I covered yesterday was not ground at all, but rather lush forest floor about a foot tall - TONS AND TONS of ferns of all different types, plus SOLID Virginia creeper and poison ivy - I hardly ever saw the ground at all, and just put my boots down hoping nothing was there to bite me. There wasn't. I was in a very calm mood as I hiked along towards the creek - not something I normally can say when I am out shooting - I usually am in a hurry to get someplace, and/or are looking for shots along the way. I was looking for shots, but knew since the wind was blowing at a pretty good clip I probably would not find any ferns shots that I could take. There were plenty of great ferns compositions to shoot, but way too much wind. I stopped and looked a time or two, but there was no use in setting my gear up. Down on the creek the wind would not be moving the rocks around so I was not too worried. So instead of working to find a great shot, I simply wandered on down the steep hillside, admiring all the plants and other neat things along the way. When I reached the bottom of the hill and spilled out onto the creek I was a bit surprised to find it BONE DRY! I knew there would not be much water in it - even though we had a couple of inches of rain - but not a single drop of water in sight? NO problem, I just headed on upstream and got to explore a little bit as I went, once again not really in any big hurry - I had several hours before dark, and didn't really have a specific shot in mind that I was going to miss due to the dry conditions. I will say one thing about limestone rock on a creekbed - it can get really SLICK, even when it is not wet! I bit the dust more than once. My poor camera equipment. It is well protected in the thick camera bag though, that is when I remember to zip it shut! I did manage to find a single spot that had some left-over raindrops in several little pools in the limestone layer in the bottom of the creek. I savored the opportunity to work with my camera, and ended up shooting about 75-80 exposures of this scene. How could I shoot so many you ask? I guess you just had to have been there - I'm afraid that I am a perfectionist and I often keep shooting until I KNOW I have a good one, trying different angles and lenses and exposures. And this would turn out to be the only scene I shot all day long. On the way back out I did stop a few times to take a look at some other scenes, but nothing struck my fancy, or should I say could be taken in the wind. No matter - I got one more good image than I would have if I had stayed back at the cabin!
That is where I spent the entire day today - at the cabin, in front of the computer, working on images. I did have a couple of interesting bird moments today though. The first one was while I was sitting in the drawing room early this morning sipping some hot tea (laced with cold Coffeemate). We have a lot of doves that hang around here, and we love their mournful songs early and late in the day. As I was gazing out of the window and across the way a single dove came flying right at me, then raised up just a bit and flew directly over my window. At first I could not see what was chasing the bird, but it was certainly smaller than the dove - surely not a bug? Later on Pam discovered that hummingbirds will often do battle with larger birds - like crows and hawks - and so I figured this must have been a little hummer in hot pursuit of this dove for some unknown reason (she also found out that hummers cannot walk). Later on in the day, when I was taking a break from the computer, I walked out onto the back deck to admire the view. Mom's meadow down below is literally exploding with colorful wildflowers - perhaps more than I have ever seen down there (I'm sure I say this every year, but it sure does seem like MORE and more all the time). Just as I got to the edge of the railing I heard quite a commotion - it was a wild turkey that had been standing down there in front of the gazebo and right in the middle of all those wildflowers - he/she was taking to flight, and you probably know they don't just lift off - it takes a pretty good runway for them to get airborne, and they make all sorts of commotion in the process. We have seen wild turkeys in the yard before - in fact a flock of them strolled on by the window during the very first thanksgiving dinner we cooked out here (pretty brave birds for sure, but I guess they were safe since the other bird was already on the table!). And just the other day Pam and Lucy saw one not too far up the road from the cabin. But I have never seen one down in the meadow - and it sure did look pretty majestic taking flight over all those flowers like that. You know it was old Ben Franklin that suggested the wild turkey as our national symbol instead of the bald eagle - I kind of like both. By the way, it was reported in the Arkansas Demo-Zette today that we have an OHTA meeting on June 6th - not quite correct. Thepublished information from LAST YEAR instead of the current information - for those of you who are members, just ignore the Demo-zette.... 5/29/05 I've been up since about 2am this morning, working on the new book of mine and enjoying the early air in the wilderness. It is cloudy here just after daylight, and very still, with cool temps, and LOTS of activity up in the trees. While taking a soak in the dim light, I saw a pair of summer tanagers in the tree above me. As I watched them play and jump around from limb to limb and from tree to tree, I got to looking at the other birds up in the trees and noticed something - for the most part, they always like a dead limb instead of a limb with leaves on it. I wonder why that is? And I guess they have mixed emotions about the coming of spring in a place like Arkansas - they have been able to perch on any limb since last fall, while as the leaves come on they only have a few limbs on each tree to use! (but, of course, they LOVE spring because of love being in the air, and lots of BUGS for them to munch on) I finally got started on my own new picture book a couple of days ago. This is the first picture book I've done since switching to digital photography almost three years ago (and all of the images in the book will be brand new from the past couple of years - none of them ever published in a book before). Dealing with all of the images hidden deep inside the computer is one of the largest nightmares that digital photographers face - and is one thing that I teach an easy solution for in my photo workshops. This was my own first personal test of this important workflow process, and holy cow it passed with flying colors! It is all very simple really, although most folks I know complicate the process and just get buried. I looked through more than 30,000 photographs (taken with seven different digital cameras) in about one full day of work - this would have taken me probably a WEEK if all of these had been old-fashioned color slides! And it was so great doing it this way too - I was able to see a couple hundred photos on the screen at the same time, which made picking out them very easy. My process was to go through all the photos and pick out the ones I liked and wanted to include in the book. I am pretty picky when it comes to photos that I will put in a book of mine, and when I started this process I was worried that I would not have enough really great images to fill a book (it takes 100 - 110 images or so to do the type of book that I do). When I had gotten through all of the images in this initial edit, I found there were more than 260 in my first-picks folder! Of course, that meant that I was going to have to cull out more than HALF of these photos, and that is where it gets to be a tough job. For my second edit I went through each image once again, and rated them - I can rate them in 100 different ways (really) in the software that I use, but mostly I just went through and ear-marked the ones that I simply HAD to include in the books. These are the images that throughout the past couple of years I knew when I pulled the trigger out there in the woods that the shot would be great and end up in the book - it would be easy to pick out all of those as they normally float head and shoulders above the rest. Then I could go back through the remaining batch and cherry-pick a few more to fill in the gaps. Well, darn it, when I got through this second edit of must-have photos, I had more than 125 selected - YIKES, that was too many! And then when I looked at the ones I had passed over, I kept finding more and more of them that I moved into the must-have folder! At one point during the day I had pared the number down to 115 images - that is a number I could work with. Then Amber sat on my lap and forced me to cull out a few more, but I also found several more in the other folder that I wanted to put in, so the number in the final folder actually grew once again! Kind of like having a lot of kids and only enough room in the truck for a few of them to go get ice cream - who do you leave behind (actually, with kids it is probably easier to make this decision!).
So that is where I sit this morning, ready to begin the actual design and layout of the new picture book knowing a lot of the images I want to include will not make it in. (I've still got that group of more than 140 images in the other folder that I can draw from too!) So what I will do at this point is go through the first picks and pair them up and begin placing them in the book, and just see how it goes, and I will pare them down as I go along as some will work and others will not. It is great being able to view ALL of the images I have selected at the same time on this large monitor that I have, then simply drag them into the book file where I want them - this is MILES ahead of the way I used to have to do things! As it is I have something like 22 waterfalls, 15 wildflower photos, 18 fall shots, 25 images from outside the Ozarks, a dozen "critter" photos, seven shots with people in them, four barns, 33 verticals, three or four black and white images, five infrared, etc. - in other words, I have a pretty good spread of subject matter and color, which I will spread throughout the book (no two waterfalls will be together, etc. - unlike a lot of book designers, I don't like to group things together, but rather vary the subject matter/color/perspective as much as possible to keep it from getting too boring). The magic, and artistry, of all this begins today - shooting all the photos was the easy and mechanical part - but putting them all together in a format that will flow and speak to the viewer and evoke an emotional response - that is what I am looking for and what I enjoy doing the most. I hope to create a work of art during these next few days that will be the very best I have ever produced, and one that you will enjoy and want to have in your home or office. The book will be hardback, 9.5 inches wide by 10 inches tall (actually a little larger than that), and will have 132 pages. I have the first and last page photos selected, I think, and the back cover photo, I think, but still don't have the front cover picked yet - the most important photo in the entire book. I will select photos from the book to use in the 2006 Arkansas calendar, and also will select four images (from four different seasons) to put together in a new color poster we're getting printed for sale. So that is how I'm spending my holiday weekend, working. (I have always enjoyed working on holiday weekends - the phone never rings and the e-mails have dropped off a lot - plus I don't have to drive anywhere!) However, even though I will average probably 12-14 hours a day this weekend working, I am still finding time for family things - like shooting hoops and going swimming with Amber (she is turning into somewhat of a fish, just like I was at her age), holding hands with my bride as we walk through one of the wildflower-studded meadows here, and watching a movie or two with the girls. I've also made a couple of trips down to the river and back UP. You can really get a LOT done when you don't have to drive anywhere, and you don't sleep much! AND on another business note, I am THRILLED to announce to the world that it looks like I have FINALLY arrived in my photo career - I've been published by National Geographic, Outdoor Photographer, and most of the major national publications that publish nature photos; photos on phone book covers, Visa cards, Hallmark Calendars, yada, yada, yada; I've had a solo print exhibit at the International Photography Hall of Fame plus solo exhibits at several other prestigious venues; had one of my photos on the cover of the largest-selling calendar in the world; I have prints of mine hung at the White House; had several coffee table picture books of my work published; taught photo workshops in Wyoming, Colorado, and the Virgin Islands; AND NOW, have finally hit the big time - McDdonalds has ordered and is going to hang four of my photos in one of their restaurants! And I told them I would charge a Happy Meal as a delivery fee..... Yesterday morning I was awake and down at the computer by 4am, but had to stop working several times and just go outside on the deck and gawk at the incredible scene unfolding before my eyes. The half-full moon seemed to be as BRIGHT as any full moon I'd ever seen, and it was lighting up the canyon below that was full to the brim with a sea of clouds - it had not rained in a few days so I was a little puzzled as to why there was so much moisture in the air to produce the clouds, but I guess the fact the temp was down to 50 degrees made up for that. The scene was just amazing as the clouds grew and grew and moved around in the moonlight - the sea looked solid enough that I could just walk right out onto it. The only two problems with all of this great beauty were that there was no way to photograph it, and that I had WORK to do and could not spend my time out on the back deck! But I did open up the blinds in front of my computer and took a peek now and then as the scene changed. Once the sun begin to arrive a couple of hours later, the sea of clouds really got to moving around as the air began to heat up - which made working at the computer all that much tougher - but within an hour of sunrise the sea of clouds was completely gone - literally vanished into thin air (or actually, moved off to form clouds elsewhere - we really are the cloud nursery here at Cloudland!).
By bride continues to train for her big event in Kansas City later in June, and has gotten to know the dirt roads around here pretty good - she is up to 18 miles a day now, and will eventually get up to 20 miles a day, all at a 3.5 miles an hour pace. Whew, I can't keep up with her! Amber has been out of school now for two weeks, but is getting ready to hit the ground running for the rest of the summer - she has no less than FIVE different camps to attend this summer - including two different basketball camps, a nature camp at the Ozark Natural Science Center, plus two major trips with her mom and I out west - one going to Colorado for what is supposed to be a banner wildflower year up in the mountains, and then later in the summer backpacking up into my second home, the Wind River Mountains in Wyoming. It will be a very bush summer for us all, just the way we like it! Oops, I just noticed that the sun is up now - or at least it is well past the time for it to rise and it is light outside - so I had better post this and get back to work on the book. Here is a shot of what my monitor looks like with the main "keepers" group of photos on the screen. ENJOY your holiday, and as always THANKS to ALL OF THE VETS (and to their families as well!) who have given up their freedoms and lives in order that the rest of us could be free.....
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