Tag Archives: photos

Protected: Christmas Concerts, 2007

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i was able to captured #1 Daughter’s school Christmas Concert, but where we sat for her Nutcracker performance didn’t really allow for me dragging in one of my decent lenses, and the Moscow Ballet is rather stringent on the “no photography” issue, so i declined to go there. #1 Son, apparently, would not have been very happy with me if i had shot his choir concert, either, but his grandfather did. if those photos are provided to us digitally, i’ll get them up here so we can embarrass #1 Son, who really has no reason to be embarrassed at all.

obviously, i need to get a little point-and-click with a decent zoom lens, where i can shut off the back screen and any other lights so i can illegally photograph her dance performances. that, or a nicely compact extreme telephoto lens i can put on something like the D70. bah.

at any rate, these are from #1 Daughter’s Christmas Concert on December 4, 2007. she’s quite the ham, isn’t she? once i figured out where they were, i tried to capture some of the neighbor kids as well, but that really wasn’t my focus, of course.

on to the photos…

The Land of Nostalgia and What If (iii)

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long, long ago, in a galaxy far, far away, my first love was Music, and She was mine i was Hers. those who received a copy of “the sabre” may remember that quite a few of those 333 poems made references to musical inspiration. as well, and undocumented, many of those “poems” were lyrics i created to remember melodies that i didn’t have the time or equipment to otherwise record.

{and yeah, on a side note, the number 333 was significant, because i consider myself only half evil. shut up.}

the ghost that i laid to rest, and which i’ve honestly not discussed with anyone yet, was a surprising ghost to revisit and to now have at ease, for it was a ghost in the form of a blockage. meeting up with this ghost was neither foreseen nor planned, and now creates an interesting conundrum for me. i already find myself once again driving around and humming to myself instead of listening to the radio. anybody got a decent midi keyboard they want to donate to the cause? it ain’t like i’m allowed to buy photographic equipment these days, let alone musical stuff. i have songs in my head again, and many of them were originally composed when i was somewhere between the ages of 10 and 18, riding on my bike in my old neighborhood.

The view going south down Mertz Avenue at Senova Street. The title given to this photo in the popup is from Simple Mind’s “This Earth That You Walk Upon”, one of my favorite songs at the time I left San Antonio (most memories associated with this song are actually from Austin, though), and which literally happened to come up in my playlist rotation while I was writing this.

so, as i already stated, and as you have probably already guessed, i went by the house i grew up in. it’s a humorously eclectic thing i do, this working in numbers. i drove by the house exactly three times. it’s effectively been twenty-one years since i was there (in fact, i got a kick out of telling people i was last in San Antonio an “adult ago”—think about it….), which is the seventh third (or the third seventh, if you prefer). either way, basic primes hold a relevance for me for many reasons. numerologically speaking, 3 is the number which relates to resurrection, revival and rejuvenation and 7 is the law of motion. any other Jungian correlations are strictly intentional (so there, hah!)

my first drive down Teakwood Lane was a bit disconcerting. during my last couple of years of high school, there was a field across Jones-Maltsberger Road from us that used to have baseball fields when i was younger, and which was being built up. in fact, the construction site itself became a haunt of mine, but since i have fonder memories of being much younger, i found that having the whole area between Jones-Maltsberger and the MacAllister Freeway built up to be just kind of sad.

the tree on the left of these photos and i used to have a great relationship, despite my falling out of it one year. the big knot up front was depressing to see. when i was last there for a brief drive-by when i brought The Elder and Unknown and her mother home back in 1990, that was a fresh cut. the limb-that-used-to-be was a handy foothold, and thus a launchpad for many a youthful excursion in responsibility-evasion.

i took these two photos on the second drive-by. anxious at the potential of accidentally running into my adoptives, i didn’t really have the camera setup for high-speed snaps while moving on the first drive-by, and while i see now that those photos were easily correctable, i wasn’t confident of that at the time.

on the third drive-by, which was just after i met with Sherri briefly out at MacArthur Park, my adoptive father was home, standing in the window of the den (under the carport) and talking on the phone. in the space of a second or slightly more, i thought and re-thought about stopping approximately seven times, while simultaneously setting the camera down. i luckily managed not to rear-end a parked car on the side of the street and called it quits and went on back downtown to the Spouse-Unit .

it was just a brief glance, but it was far more disconcerting than seeing the commercialization of a formerly relatively open field. the image hasn’t been in my dreams as of yet, but i’m sure it will be soon enough

The Land of Nostalgia and What If (ii)

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Sherri (who sadly falls into the category of “old friend”) has been bugging me about how the trip went for me. sadly, i am still assimilating it. she also thinks the “installment method” sucks. oh well. there’s always a critic somewhere. responsibilities aside, the reason why i’m doing the installment thing is because one post would be terribly long, and i’m told i’m better when taken in smaller doses.

so….hrm….where to start with this one?

i guess i’ve already noted the most important part: we didn’t get to meet The Elder and Unknown after all. she won’t be getting her driver’s license until her 18th birthday, and since she is living again with her mother and step-father, her personal freedom is anything but expansive. the Spouse-Unit did call her and talk with her a bit, which i think was odd for both of them, but pleasant as well. i think it meant a lot to The Elder and Unknown that we did try to meet with her. the Spouse-Unit says she didn’t sound too terribly Texan, so i guess there’s hope for her future! (oh, me SO funny).

we stayed at the Hyatt downtown along the River Walk, as i mentioned before. it looks something like this from the River level, and this is the inside of the hotel. the last time i was there was my senior year of high school for the Texas State Choir concert. they made us all stay there, even though some of us were from San Antonio. talk about blurred memories! (in a positive way!)

our room was on the second floor (which because of two floors of conference and meetings rooms, is actually the fourth floor), but i did go up top and take some photos looking down. a little over halfway up on this photo, just right of center, one floor is jogged in a little to the right. right there was the room we stayed in.

when i have the time to get a gallery of photos from the trip up online, you’ll see that i frequently pretended #1 Daughter and #1 Son were along, and i tried to capture things i knew they’d like to see. however, when i get that gallery up, i know i’m going to be asked to get other galleries up, so i have to go carefully with these things. wedding season approacheth, and all that….

this was taken a few minutes prior to the photo i included upon my return—the bridge down there being where i took that photo from. this part of the River Walk is not a natural part of the river. i think it was made sometime during the 1970′s. just past that bridge and to the right, is the Convention Center. to the left is some sort of shopping extravaganza from hell that didn’t exist when i was growing up….er….getting older….down there. it was under construction when i briefly returned to San Antonio after Basic Training. like any mall, it has a cheap food court, so the Spouse-Unit and i ate over there a couple of times.

so, i guess that’s enough tap-dancing around impressions of the place while playing tour guide to my semi-nostalgic reminiscences.

to be honest, i could have driven around San Antonio anywhere i wantedd (traffic and reconstruction endeavors allowing, of course), but i didn’t. on the initial drive in from the airport downtown to the Hyatt, it was immediately clear that we were simply visiting some big-ass city. since in so many other interpretations i wasn’t coming home, i slipped into a comfortable tourist mode. the Spouse-Unit and i had to do the same thing over the summer when we visited Albuquerque. the River Walk was “safer” in that regard: it’s changed a bit, and a couple of the restaurants i liked back then no longer exist. but even with those changes and the construction on some parts of it, it felt a lot more homier than anywhere else i visited. plus being so picturesque, it was much more personally gratifying to hang out down there and shoot than slog around in the traffic and try to catch brief glimpses of half-remembered places.

i did go back to my old neighborhood, and will probably write about that little excursion next. like everything else, it had changed a lot. i drove by old schools and places where i used to hang out: all measurably changed, not that i expected anything else. change is always noticeable when you aren’t in the middle of it happening. but since i was pretty young when i left, and hadn’t really been driving all that long either, my memories of San Antonio are ultimately pretty confined to downtown, my old neighborhood (several square miles if you include where we lived across to where i went to school and where many of my friends lived), Loop 410, places i went to church, the Mission Trail, etc.

actually, i remember more detail about Albuquerque than i do San Antonio, and i spent barely 1/3 of the amount of time there. San Antonio has just become so huge, i wonder if, unless you live there or visit frequently, it’s really much like coming home for anyone. extrapolating from the 2000 Census, the city is pretty close to twice as populated as it was when i left back in the mid-1980′s, and it shows no signs of slowing down. ah….progress….

i used this lens a lot along the River Walk, largely because it’s representative of my memories of growing up down there. an inherent myopia and a type of fixation that was rarely exactly on center. the particular location i shot this from makes it look like i was on a boat myself, but i wasn’t, nor was i in the water (ew! yes, it really is that green without any early Saint Paddie’s Day shenanigans).

it might be fun to take the kids down there someday, but that would probably be more of a Six Flags/Sea World kind of thing—which brings to mind that those places didn’t exist while i was growing up there, either. i’m glad i went along with the Spouse-Unit on this trip, though. i seem to have finally laid to rest at least one old ghost (i’ll write about that later), and seeing the changes to some of the places that used to haunt my dreams has brought me at least a little peace.

The Land of Nostalgia and What If (i)

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my week-long adventure into “The Land of Nostalgia and What If” actually began with a trip down to Saint Louis, which beyond being a brief stop on the way to and from basic training at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri back in 1986, is actually neither the Land of Nostalgia or What If.

we left early in the morning of March 1 on a chartered bus, just slightly ahead of a local snowstorm and directly into a good-sized blizzard. we made it through in one piece, so to speak, but much of the trip looked something like this:

we passed a snowplow that had gotten stuck in a ditch, after which point those who were not yet nervous about the trip certainly became so. the folks from Brookings just sat in the back and drank. i would have shot the snowplow, but there unfortunately wasn’t enough contrast for the camera to autofocus as we “sped” by on the interstate at 25 miles an hour, and not enough time to switch to manual, even at that speed, due to the limited visibility. it was kind of hairy for a while, as we decided not to pull off, concerned that if we did, the highway would get closed ahead of us and we would be stuck in the middle of nowhere for goodness knows how long. which for me could have meant missing the plane from Saint Louis to San Antonio and wasting non-refundable tickets.

eventually (13 hours for a 10-hour trip, so i guess it could have been worse), we made it down to the US Youth Soccer Association National Workshop, where we had an okay time….”we”, by the way, being me and a couple dozen other soccer-heads. one of our local coaches was named the Boys Coach of the Year for the whole nation, which was really pretty cool: Chad O’Donnell is the first Coach of the Year from South Dakota. unfortunately, he was stuck in Sioux Falls because USYSA insisted on flying him out, and the airport was closed due to the blizzard.

i roomed with Loren, one of our Emeritus referees (which in soccer terms means he’s retired but still active), and he got our room switched up to the 19th floor, so we had a pretty decent view of the less-than-stunning side of Saint Louis, but i still managed to pull this out of it:

the workshop itself was relatively boring, and the “referee” classes and seminars were largely geared for referee administrators, so i didn’t come away from it with as much new information to use as a referee or referee instructor as i would have liked. we did learn about all the things the FIFA referees for the World Cup had to do, which was at least interesting, and we picked up a few tips on referee retention that maybe we can put to use. other than that, and maybe because i was simply anxious to get down to San Antonio, i was basically relieved when the last day of the workshop was over. our friendly bus driver dropped me off at the airport, and then i was truly headed for “The Land of Nostalgia and What If”.

time

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i don’t get as much time as i would like to have with #1 Son and #1 Daughter. and to make it worse, i don’t always spend the time i do have all that well. but they’re good kids.

i thought i’d also start using this space, as i get all our photographs reprocessed and cataloged, to share some with you.

i’m still using an {ancient} javascript popup window thingy that we built for MetaCreations “back in the day”, to show previews. you’ll need to tell your browser to trust popups from this site. once you’ve done that, you can click on an these photos to see larger versions. the previews are pretty large ~ large enough to print, although the formatting may not always be at a normal print aspect ratio.

these are from the Omaha Zoo ~

if i have any regrets, it’s that all my children can’t be together all the time. i think they would be very good for each other.

we have many connections to each other throughout our lives. i’ll explain why this is labeled “the moon” in the next post.