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Last weekend we had the Salt Lake City contingent of the family in town. While they were here I took the opportunity to set up my lights in our (cramped) living room and take some portraits. As you can see below, our family is all seriousness, all the time.
Moral of the story? Be warned: come to our house and you WILL be shot.
Rockledge, FL, 3/8/11
Rockledge, FL, 3/8/11
Rockledge, FL, 3/8/11
Rockledge, FL, 3/8/11
USS Torsk, Baltimore, MD, 12/27/08
On the 14th of August, 1945, the USS Torsk fired the last torpedoes of the Second World War. Those shots sunk 2 Japanese Coastal Defense ships, the last enemy sinking of the war. In 1968, after a long post-war career, she was decommissioned and in 1973 she was berthed in the Baltimore Inner Harbor. I looked at her for years, but had never gone aboard and taken the tour.
Christmas of 2008 we went to Baltimore to visit family. Two days after Xmas, on a misty, foggy morning, we found ourselves wandering the Inner Harbor. I decided to take the tour while MLW went shopping. “I’ll be back in an hour,” I promised.
Paid my admission and climbed aboard. They funnel you down a gangway in the stern that they installed into the Aft Torpedo Room. You work your way forward from there. It was empty when I got there, so I started taking photos and looking around. Very cool stuff if you’re into that kinda thing and I was enjoying myself. I moved into the next compartment where one of the volunteers was working.
Now, if you know me then you know I speak the truth when I say that I can talk to pretty much anybody, pretty much anywhere, about pretty much anything.
I started asking questions and we immediately hit it off. He started explaining the workings of a WWII attack sub, I kept asking questions and he ended up taking me through the entire boat, compartment by compartment, from aft to bow, telling me everything. At one point there was a gangway going down a deck that was roped off: the battery compartment & machine shop. He took me down there, showed me the batteries. I saw the bunks, the engine room, the map room. Hung out in the Galley with him and the other volunteers. The Radio Room. Past another roped off ladder, this time up, into the Conning Tower where I saw the “computers” used to determine the attack parameters. They let me look through the periscope. I was in heaven.
While in the Conning tower my phone went off. MLW asked where the hell I was. I had been gone for not quite 2 hours. Time to go.
It was a great 2 hours, though. Fascinating hardware, lots of stories about how things worked, boat and crew. I had the boat to myself (2 other folks came through the entire time I was aboard and they blew by) and the volunteers were great. If you get the chance, take the tour. It made me really appreciate a small portion of what those poor young guys went through. It must have been terrifying.
Next time, I want to go aboard the SS John W. Brown, one of only two restored Liberty Ships in the country, which is docked nearby.
I’ll budget more time for that one.
Below: The Aft Torpedo Room. Note the bunks upper right & left. These were cramped and uncomfortable.
USS Torsk, Baltimore, MD, 12/27/08
USS Torsk, Baltimore, MD, 12/27/08
Above: The “comfortable” bunks. Considered spacious, it just shows that everything’s relative. Note the gangway on the left that leads down to the battery room.
Below: Hanging in the Galley. My guide is on the left.
USS Torsk, Baltimore, MD, 12/27/08
Below: The Conning Tower. It was very cramped. I’m not that big of a guy, but I had to move sideways when passing the periscope.
USS Torsk, Baltimore, MD, 12/27/08
Geek Note: The interior of a submarine is an interesting environment to shoot in. The 10-22mm lens and good flash made it possible. Love that lens.
We travel for many reasons. Many times it’s for work. I’ve been lots of places for my job and seen some interesting things, both work related (the astronaut training pool in Houston, for example) and culturally related: catching Los Lobos at a small theater in Denver, Robert Craig in a bar in San Diego, Patti Smith in Atlanta, Rembrandt in DC (one of these things is not like the others). Of course, we also pack the bags for the traditional reasons: the lights of Paris at Christmas, a honeymoon to remember, meeting interesting people. Many of our trips carry the double bonus of doing interesting things and seeing extended family at the same time. With family members, we have sailed in the British Virgin Islands & Belize, skied in Utah and Montana, and rafted the Yellowstone River. Feasting on crabs and corn in Baltimore is always a good time. And a couple of weeks ago, we met up in New York City for the weekend.
When our talented niece from Bozeman (whose blog can be found here) told us that she was attending a blogger conference in NY, and that she was bringing her Middle Son, we were all over it. Her brother and his partner live in Harlem and our best friend from our youth lives in Midtown, so it sounded like a chance to meet up with friends & family, see some sights and spend some quality time with our loved ones. And perhaps enjoy an adult beverage or two. To make it even better, the Salt Lake contingent (our niece’s parents) decided to join the festivities. Game on!
The Montana crew did pretty well in the big city. Niece got lost a couple of times while navigating the subway, 
including getting on the wrong train and ending up in a sketchy part of the South Bronx. She persevered and ending up walking to her brother’s place in Harlem. Her son proved yet again why I hold him and his brothers in such high regard by buying the strangest piece of fruit I have ever seen while we were in Chinatown and, later that night, slicing it up himself and presenting to the gathered family in a most beautiful arrangement. I sure wouldn’t have done that at his age!
Highlights of the trip? Taking the Boy to the Top of the Rock. Walking across the Brooklyn Bridge on a beautiful morning. Wandering Central Park listening to the many buskers playing their music. Strolling the High Line (a beautiful park created from an unused stretch of elevated train tracks). Several excellent meals, made so by the company we kept. And the people watching! We never, ever get tired of watching the beautiful, strange and sometimes scary faces of the city, ranging from the girl in her too short skirt walking up 5th Av. to the mother/daughter heading to the beach on the subway. And one of the city’s best-kept secrets? New Yorkers are friendly! Every time we looked at a subway map people stopped to see if they could help. I struck up a conversation with an off-duty security guard about camera equipment (prompting an eye roll from my spouse). And the girl on the A train sitting across from us when we were heading to Harlem after dinner one night. She watched our niece and her son attempting pull-ups on the subway car grab rail and, after I caught her eye and we shared a laugh, trying it herself (and doing better than any of us).
Low point of the trip? Leaving (and not knowing when we’ll see them again…however long it may be will be too long).
Empire State Building, NY, 2010
The Montana Contingent, Brooklyn Bridge, NY, 2010
Family, NY, 2010
In July of 1969, 41 years ago (!), I was a 12-year-old boy away from home for the first time at Camp Morehead by the Sea in coastal North Carolina. I had a great time that summer. I learned to sail and eventually won the Morehead City Yacht Club’s 4th of July Regatta, Sunfish Division. (I still have the medal floating around somewhere.) I swam, canoed, shot rifles and went to my first dances with girls brought in from town for the occasion. (Side note: I learned that summer that there were certain advantages to hanging out with the opposite sex.) My most vivid memory of that summer was none of the above, except maybe the bit about girls. It was of a hot, late night spent in front of the camp owner’s color TV watching grainy images of Neil Armstrong step onto the moon.
As an even younger boy, I have memories of watching the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo launches and being “wowed” by them. Now flash forward through those 41 years. I’ve done a lot of diverse things during that time. Worked construction for many years, got into a bit of trouble here and there, spent a short but memorable time separating people from their money at a carnival, traveled a bit. But for more than 27 of those years, I have been a NASA employee at the Kennedy Space Center.
For the vast amount of that time I have been fortunate enough to look forward to going to work each morning. I have seen some truly incredible things. I’ve watched, and felt, most of the Shuttle launches since STS-6. I’ve seen them from my yard, from the beach, from the Launch Control Center. More than a couple have been surreal. Standing in the ocean up to my knees at night, adult beverage in my hand, while the launch lit the night sky to the point where you could read a paper. Watching unmanned vehicles explode in the night sky sending their boosters skimming just above the ocean. And of course, the most surreal and awful, watching the Challenger explode. That’s another story.
I’ve been aboard the Orbiter (tiny!). I’ve sat in the Firing Room during launch. I’ve played a small role in this huge process, never forgetting the significance of what is taking place. But the most fun is being around people seeing it for the first time. It’s a physical experience…from here at the Cape the ground shakes and the sound is a physical thing that you feel in your gut. People cry, people cheer, but mostly the people just gape with their jaws to their knees. Since Challenger, you can also tell who the locals are versus the tourists. At lift off, with the huge white cloud of water vapor rising and the shuttle riding the flame, the tourists start cheering and clapping. The locals don’t. We cheer a bit over 2 minutes later when the solids drop off. We remember.
It’s been a strange journey and a great ride. Things here at KSC are, shall we say, a bit turbulent right now with the Shuttle Program ending and the future uncertain. But we’ll keep going. It’s what we do. Who would have thought it, 41 years ago?
STS-126, 11/14/08
Above & below: Liftoff of STS-126 from the Banana River Viewing Site, 3.9 miles from the pad
STS-126 timelapse, 11/14/08
Ares I-X , 10/28/09
Above: Ares I-X Liftoff from the viewing mezzanine of the Operations Support Building 2, 3.6 miles from the pad
Below: In Firing Room 2 on Launch Day (Sorry for the quality…taken by my iPhone)
Launch Day, STS-129, 11/16/09
Well, we are back in the land where people drive on the right and don’t talk (too) funny. We had a GREAT trip…expect many posts over the coming weeks on some of the sights that we saw. We took a few photos, some of them actually worth viewing. Below is a screen grab showing the locations of the shots we took, courtesy of Aperture & our GPS.
The pins show locations of photos shot.
(Geek notes: Each day I created a new track on our tiny GPS and it tracked where we went that day. Back at home, I loaded each day’s photos and the associated track and Aperture assigned a location to each shot based upon timestamps. It’s a very nice feature that allows us to rapidly find photos that we took. Technology can be a good thing.)
So, a good time was had by all. We met some interesting folks: the guy we met at dinner in Oban who’s walking the perimeter of Great Britain, the geologist who had spent some time on the rig in the Gulf that is now so famous and who had some interesting words concerning BP’s approach to safety, the bartender from New Orleans we met in Edinburgh who also had a few choice words for BP, the four Englishmen we met at a distillery who provided us with some excellent pointers on enjoying Whisky (and who I educated on the making of bourbon), the nice couple from Tasmania who are essentially on their way around the world, and many others.
We had, as usual, several unexpected experiences. We spent an immensely enjoyable afternoon watching a falconry demonstration. We watched bands at an open mike night in Inverness prior to the opening of a music festival there. We learned how dyes for yarn are made from natural ingredients at a shop located at what felt like the end of the world on Skye. We utilized high technology to finally understand a battle that took place almost 300 years ago. And, again, many others.
We also watched World Cup everywhere we went. We experienced the USA – England match with a bunch of Englishmen on Skye. We learned that the Scots are cheering for whomever is playing the English. We learned that the BBC must provide an option to turn off those damn horns and only listen to the commentators. And we learned just how much the World Cup is a truly international event. Our pilots provided updates and the bar in Newark was PACKED with folks watching…they were stacked well into the concourse outside the bar we were eating in, straining to see. (Reading the UK newspaper coverage was a lot of fun, too.)
Now we’re just trying to get back on our feet and re-adjust to the oppressive heat of Florida in summer. Not to mention our return to our desks tomorrow. All good things….
Dunrobin Castle, Scotland, 2010
Above: Falconry demo – yes that’s an owl, not a falcon. His name is Plop.
Below: Recipe book for yarn dyes
Isle of Skye, Scotland, 2010
(BTW: upon leaving each city, village, District, whatever, there was a sign that said “Thanks for visiting, Haste Ye Back”. Thanks, we may just do that.)
22 years ago (!), in what now seems like a previous life, I took my family on vacation to a cabin near the Great Smokey National Park. We shared the cabin with my good friend George and his family. Things did not go smoothly. Blood was shed on multiple occasions and I will never forget a wild ride down the mountain trying to keep the ambulance in sight. But that’s the subject for a different post. This post concerns what we now refer to as “George Moments”.
If you are familiar with the GSMNP, you will be aware that quite often there are scenic pullovers. George finds it impossible to pass these by, but rather he MUST stop at each one, gaze about and snap some photos. It makes for, shall we say, lengthy journeys.
When my bride and I went to Ireland on our honeymoon I took my new Minolta digital camera. We drove the SW of Ireland for 13 days (a different stop almost every night, which we won’t do again) and during that time I took about 1500 photos. We would be driving along, I’d see a beautiful sight and I’d HAVE to pull over to capture it. After a short ride up the road I’d see another beautiful or interesting sight and pull over again. Repeat. And repeat again. For 13 days. These quickly became referred to as “George Moments”. We’d be riding down the road and I’d holler “George Moment” and two things would happen simultaneously: I’d start looking for a place to pull over and there would be a rolling of eyes from the navigator. The sigh was optional.
I took a bunch of grief from the navigator during this trip, but when we got home we had a nice, chronological collection of our trip. Even the navigator admits, reluctantly, that it turned out pretty well. (Site here) We have since had many George Moments in many different places. On our Montana trip we took our new point & shoot and the navigator took it upon herself to chronicle them. Smartass.
Stay tuned for George Moments from Scotland.
Maggie Valley, NC, 1988
Above: George recovering from the first of several injuries sustained by multiple people during this trip. I can’t find the wider shot that includes the bottle of Cuervo next to the chair.
Below: Part of the George Moment collection.
Grand Tetons, WY, 2007
The World as We See It 