This wasn't a journey I was ready to take yet. This isn't a journey we are ready to take yet. But here we are, both of us trying to find our brave faces. "What's the best case scenario?" I ask. 0228 hours, & a nurse is waking Miss Butler on the couch, “Miss Butler? Miss Butler? Miss Butler…Miss Butler, she’s doing fine, she just ate and I laid her down. Now you really should go home and get some sleep.” “No, no, I’ll wait until the morning & get some sleep then.” “Well you need to take care of yourself. You [View Full Entry]

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So, went on another little jaunt for a client, including sunny Cleveland, Ohio (Rock & Roll Hall of Fame!) and the coalfields of West Virginia…Shooting conditions weren’t the best, and quite a bit of driving & scouting was involved. Along the way I saw constant reminders that the heyday of coal came and went half a century ago…Town after town, the windows of the buildings were boarded up, half the buildings that had survived consecutive years of flooding were on the verge of collapse, and you couldn’t kick the hillside without finding more coal… The roads were black. Not just black [View Full Entry]

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A Solstice Pilgrimage For over ten years now I’ve traveled north to New England for Christmas. The drive is always too long, longer than the sunlit hours, stretching into travel advisories and severe weather warnings. Rush hour always hits somewhere along the way, be it Wilmington, Delaware, the New Jersey Turnpike or Connecticut. And yet every year I return to the north country, renewing my soul in its snow- covered hills. At least once a year I like to get out on my skis and feel the rhythm of kick-and-glide, kick-and-glide. There is a starkly beautiful border between trudging on skis [View Full Entry]

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“Have I shown you my new camera? Man, it’s great!” I doubt there’s anybody I know who hasn’t heard me say that in the past three months as I gush about my new Pentax Optio WP digital camera: 5 megapixels (upgraded to 6mp just three weeks after I bought it), waterproof, almost too small and listed in Time Magazine’s “Greatest Inventions of 2005.” It’s almost everything I could want in a point & shoot camera: small, lightweight, easy to use, waterproof, discreet. Most people mistake it for a cell phone, the first time they see it! My only complaint is that [View Full Entry]

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Ah, the Chattanooga Choo Choo Holiday Inn. Ain’t no one askin’, “Pardon me boys, but is that the Chattanooga Choo Choo,” anymore. The irony, of course, is that even “the L&N don’t run here anymore.” Nor does the Southern Railway. And even though you’re sitting inside an opulent, if midsized, passenger station, you have to travel a hundreds miles by other means to catch the nearest Amtrak passenger train in Gainesville, Georgia. But hey, if it wasn’t for the near-demise of passenger rail in the Twentieth Century, it wouldn’t be possible in the Twenty First Century to sleep in passenger car [View Full Entry]

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Singlespeed “You know,” my wife tells me, “I used try so hard to ignore you when you ranted about mountain bikes! ‘They don’t go anywhere…Why would anyone want to ride one…They’re so slow!’ And now you can’t stop talking about your mountain bike.” “It’s a singlespeed,” I corrected her, as I smeared more liquid bandage onto the scrapes on my shins. “There’s a difference.” There IS a difference. Most mountain bikes nowadays come with dual suspension, which to me just looks like more moving parts. And 30 gears? Honestly, how many people who walk out of a bike shop with a [View Full Entry]

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So I’m riding to school along my favorite bike path in Norfolk (the one with two hills!) when I encounter a ten year old girl wobbling towards me on a bike and in a helmet that she has yet to grow into. “DING! DING!” I tap my bell a few times to get her attention as we meet beneath the highway overpasss, and I thought nothing more of it until I rounded the corner and met (presumably) her kid sister and father. Sis was wearing a helmet that was color-coordinated to her training wheels, but the gentle breeze off the Elizabeth [View Full Entry]

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My neighbor’s sprinkler makes a gentle patter on the sidewalk, tapwater meandering through the cracks and channels towards the gutter and the nearly-dead, oxygen-deprived Elizabeth River. Who knows? Perhaps a Tru-Green ChemLawn makes for a Tru-Green Chesapeake Bay. The sky glows pink and orange as clouds drift by low enough to reflect our streetlights back in an earlier glow punctuated by patches of pre-dawn azure blue, and the crepe myrtle stands in shadowed contrast, the alien trees engulfing human-scaled street lamps. The hum of air conditioners (It’s 64 degrees people, open your windows!) is accented by the constant buzz of cicadas [View Full Entry]

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I frequent occasional communities: the fast Monday night bike ride (a winter-only occurence), the slow Monday night bike ride (a summer-only occurence), the Saturday morning bike ride (used to be every week, but then the fair-weather friends dropped out when the temperature dropped), the monthly Taize services (every third Sunday for years now, plus an occasional feast day), North Carolina Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends (Conservative, and yearly), the Tuesday night vigils, (weekly after 9/11, then fortnightly, now monthly), and the Norfolk Catholic Worker soup line (Tuesday, Thursday & Saturday mornings). That’s not to mention the Virginia Beach [View Full Entry]

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I was brainwashed by Ranger Rick. May the good earth compost that flea-bitten raccoon, star of his own magazine, and his posse of sea otters, desert tortoises and mockingbirds, monthly doling out their environmentalist propaganda to impressionable, young children. Oh yes, the school libarian hooked me one copy at a time, giving me the surplus issues from the year of my birth, 1974. Soon, oh so soon, I was caught up in the joys of water conservation and care for the earth. I was the first kid on the block to bug his dad for a recycling bin. I bought into [View Full Entry]

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