This is too funny, too accurate...

Check this out for a chuckle or two, as the liberal media once again bashes Gov. Palin, who shows in the interview how qualified she really is.

http://www.nbc.com/Saturday_Night_Live/video/clips/couric-palin-open/704042/

I am pretty sure that the imaging limits of this blog limit the quality, but this is a nice picture with the wires and the light. Again, taken today on the way to work.

Again, we have been having amazing weather with great light. I took this today as I went to my car to drive to work.

OK, I love these flowers and their coloring, and they seem to represent late summer/early fall. I probably posted this to show how sharp that little camera is. See, size doesn't matter...

Baker and the Glacier, from down the road from where I was yesterday. These photos are from my little $100 Nikon, not my "real camera." There are differences but sometimes they work to my advantage.

Why I want a dog

How cute is this? These two were waiting for their owner (and a treat) at Starbucks

Fall morning, North Fork of the Nooksack River

Though not as early as I had hoped to be, I was still on the road by 6:45. The reward for this was this stand of aspen along the North Fork of the Nooksack River. As I have said once or twice in my life, "nice light!" There are lots of opportunities to shoot along the Nooksack, and I want to take advantage of them. One challenge is that the river is not this nice meandering river that flows gently in its wooded, smooth banks. The Nooksack exists by thundering down the mountain, and it carries silt, boulders, 150 foot trees, etc. It makes a new river bed several times a year. Still, it is a wild, beautiful river, and supposedly one of the best and most important salmon rivers in the Pacific Northwest. It will yield a few photos before the season is gone, too.

In the midst of the hike up there, a hiker comes across countless waterfalls--here are two of them, and believe me when I say that they were the little ones. Though that means nothing, as they are really variable size waterfalls--as the sun moves around the water, it melts the glacier in different spots. In the morning, the falls can be just a trickle, but in the afternoon, it can be a torrent.

Heliotrope Ridge

I can't begin to say how incredible the weather has been. Today I hiked, or rather, slowly slogged up the mountain to the Coleman Glacier. This is the west side of Baker, the side that I can see from school. This is at about 5500 feet. There is a measureable 1400 feet of vertical gain from the trailhead, but that is how the crow flies. It is about a three mile heart pumping, thigh burning, lactic acid producing climb. And then you have to go down! While gravity gives you a break, it is still work as you have to pay careful attention less a loose rock or twisted root, or rising water from a glacier stream trips you up. I was just as tired from the climb down, and more sore. No arerobic work, but muscle control. The good thing was that I was basically walking or doing something for seven hours, which is good for my sedentary butt.

Twelve tins of tuna, theater, and teaching

I promise I will tie these three topics together.

It has been an interesting week, and I have been remiss in not sharing more. I have had requests for more photos, and I promise I will meet those demands this weekend--it killed me to go into work today, as it would have been perfect for pictures. Tomorrow I will go and take photos, I promise. Before I go on, I have to strongly suggest that you do check out Steve's blog. After giving him a hard time for not writing, he has recently posted several prescient, timely and (as usual) very well written reports. Read them if for no other reason than to see why he was a writer and I was a photographer.

So, tins of tuna. Last week, I went to the local theater guild's annual awards dinner, and had a great time. The company was fun, the food good, and there was a level of comfort there that surprised me. I have thought about this, and I felt this because I have known people like the guild members most of my life. For years, I took photos of them for what seemed like every play that was presented in Eau Claire. Some there were easy to stereotype into certain categories, and most were at least quirky. But in a quirky in a good way, of course! Really. Anyone who has been associated with theater can relate to what I am saying. It was fun to be there.

Best of all, they gave things away!!! Door prizes of season tickets, flowers, and of course, tins of tuna. Cans of tuna very tastefully packaged in a basket. With a recipe book, of course, with more than one recipe for casserole, but for sure the one that you crumple potato chips on the top, just at the end of the cooking time so they provide a pleasingly different texture for the mush below. And I won! I am the proud owner or 12, well, ten now, cans of prime and local albacore tuna. No dolphins included. One went to the band, for what better way to show appreciation to a band than to give them tuna? One went to one of the table guests who was eying the basket covetously. She missed the commandment on though shall not covet your neighbor's tuna, I guess. I feel rich beyond my experience. I have never felt so flush that I could afford to own that much tuna--who could? Maybe because my bank is Washington Mutual, but I feel rich beyond that, too. More in a bit about that.

The real good news for me is that I have been able to teach this quarter, and it is wonderful. I love it, and realized the minute I was in front of the class just how much I missed it. I am teaching the first part of US history at a local college, and twice a week, I show up in front of 37 students to teach. It is worth every extra hour that I spend preparing for class or driving there. How fun!

So, you may be wondering, how in the world am I ever going to be able to tie these things together? I have thought a great deal about this, and I can do it with one word or concept, and that is family. The theater guild is a family--at that celebration, you could see and feel every emotion of a family, from affection and love to jealousy to anger to the sheer joy of the companionship of people who accept you because, well, you are family. As for the tuna, I am challenged to think of any food that is more family oriented and focused than tuna casserole. It is comfort food, a memory food that every one can tie back to family, even if they hate it or love it. And lastly, I love the idea of a class becoming and being a family. I loved it when I saw part of a row sharing a bag of cheetos or people making sure that no one walked out to their car alone in the dark, or that they laughed together, even if they were laughing at me. Family means different things to people and different things at different times of your life, but for me, family in part means guilds and classes, and of course, tuna. Yes, I am rich beyond those 12 tins...

Politics, but worse than usual...

I have refrained or resisted from overtly referencing political issues in this blog, but I am angry right now. Those who know me and perhaps care do probably know that I am, as I was once referred to, "a heathen liberal." And that is the edited reference! I have been struggling since the Palin/McCain ticket came to fruition--not in the seven presidential elections I have experienced has there been such an awful vice presidential candidate. The historian in me can justify and show that there have been few vice presidents in history who have been so unqualified, professionally or philosophically, to hold this office. That is a lot to say, since the vice presidential stable has included a traitor, more than one drunk, and several real live convicted felons.

I am so upset by the hypocrisy. This "focus on the family" candidate neglected to share birth control to thousands of Alaskan youth as she favors "abstinence only" advice for these kids. Oh, and she forgot to tell her daughter about it, too. She screams, along with her handlers who are actually hiding her from the press, that family is a personal thing, and that the American public can't comment or ask about her family. I would agree with this, except for the hypocrisy. She has made having five children, including one with Down's Syndrome, a key part of her resume and her qualifications for office, and has paraded them all at campaign appearances. She notes that she is an agent of change, but seriously, does anyone who knows anything about Alaska politics think it anything but corrupt? What, she changed the culture of 60 years of statehood and 150 years of its ties to the US in 18 months of office? She hasn't even been in the capital for more than nine of those months, but at home, 600 miles away, for more than 300 of those days.

I could go on and on, but what burns my buns the most is the incredible and undeniable double standard with which most Americans (and way too much of the media) are applying to her candidacy and her, well, person. I have struggled to put this into words, but Steve, who by the way finally posted, linked to this site: http://aseekingspirit.wordpress.com/2008/09/17/noting-the-white-privilege-of-this-election/

It is all about white privilege, and most of all, how this privilege has grafted rosy tinted glasses on her supporters and on many who are supposed to address political races with skeptical cynical eyes, and seek the best, most talented people, not political litmus tests, for our leaders. Wait!!!! Isn't that the job of all of us?

We have been blessed with wonderful weather lately, and the sunsets have been very nice. Again, for most of my life I really have stayed away from taking sunset photos, and here in the last month I have "published" four of them, three more than I did in 15 years working for a paper. But who cares--they are beautiful and calming and they do portray what this place is like, too. So my apologies to Ansel and Henri, and to the editor who once said to me that "sunsets never buy any papers."

OK, it is about time...

OK, so I know it has been a while since I have written. Bad Jason!!! I am bad at this, but to make a point, I am not as bad as my friend Steve. Steve is the slacker supreme for not blogging, not that I would ever tag him for not sharing much of his incredibly interesting life.

I think that one reason that I have not written is that I have so little to say...life here has been pretty uneventful, with work and life being pretty normal, almost boring. I have been busy with work as the start of school speeds towards us. I know that I teased my "Eastern" friends who started school almost a month ago. I laughed at them, and said, wow, we don't start until Sept. 22, months and months away. Or at least weeks and weeks away. Well, "weeks and weeks away" is now here, and my life is incredibly busy. I am in more and more meetings, and while I am learning in every meeting, I also get more and more behind as my a** continues its migration to Kansas size because I am sitting on it for 7 hours a day.

At our cabinet meeting this week, the president asked me what my impressions were of Whatcom after a month. Talk about putting me on the spot. I said that I was amazed at the College's collegiality. People are almost always simply nice to each other, and we talk to each other. How nice is that? And how different is that? It is so weird. In three years at Owens, I spoke to the president twice by phone, met with her in a smaller group of 5 or so once. Here we meet once a week with her, and I have been with her and the rest of the cabinet socially three times. It is a different world. I am pretty sure that Whatcom faces many of the same problems that any place has, and it has all of them, but I do think that we are better poised to solve them because I honestly think that we think of each other, care about each other, and mostly always like and trust each other. That is a pretty good premise for making progress.

I laugh some times, though. We are fighting the same fight....what do we do about load or overload for faculty? How do we get good people to teach our classes? How do we handle all of the paper that we generate? How do we measure student learning? The list goes on and on, and what makes me laugh is that most of the questions are ones that Owens faced. Or, that almost every college faces. At the very least, all of this is made more tolerable because when we walk outside, we can still see the mountains and the ocean. In fact, it makes it more than tolerable.

Keep in touch, eh?

One of the benefits of battling vertigo, the crowds, and the traffic is the view that you have when you are on the bridge.  Here, the sun sparkles on the pass as a sailboat runs with the current as it heads inland.  If you look real close you can see a nude sun bather on the boat.  Not really.  You can't see the the sensor part of my Minolta Flashmeter IV in the water, either, though that is really there.  My meter swung my from neck, hit the railing, and then fell 200 feet.  I neglected to go get it.  So, I am looking for a new flashmeter...

So you are walking around this incredibly beautiful spot, one that you can see is fraught with danger, with amazing views and precipitous ledges.  So what does the Federal Government do?  Tell us that falls can be deadly, just in case the public doesn't realize that it might be dangerous (or even deadly) to fall hundreds of feet to the rocks below.

This is the bridge over Deception Pass, and I made a trip down there, about 45 miles from Bellingham, last weekend.  The bridge is "only" about 190 feet above the water, and you can walk across it.  It was built in the late 20s/early 30s, and it is more than a bit nerve wrecking to walk across a 75+ year old bridge, looking down 20 stories, and feel the bridge shake and vibrate.  Added to this is the sense of vertigo, because the water below moves with the tide at about 9 miles an hour, in and out of the passage 4 times a day.  All with a three foot railing that is old as the bridge...  Incredible spot, and and you feel very close to it all.