Mary’s nephew, Chris, is visiting for a few days. He rode his Harley up from Georgia with his buddy, an FBI agent who is doing a few days training up the road at Quantico.

I guess you’d call Chris a motorhead (I use that term in the best possible way), Harley-Davidson, big off-road truck, anything with a motor. He’s been one since he started driving his dad’s truck around in a field at about age six.

He was pulled twice on the way up here, once on the Skyline drive by the NC Highway Patrol, the other at the Lincoln Memorial by the park police. He must take some kind of perverse pleasure in getting stopped because he keeps a running record of the number of times it’s happened. By his count he’s been pulled 106 times; 107 if you count the Lincoln Memorial, which he doesn’t since the cop was on foot. The odd thing is he’s only gotten seven tickets and managed to talk his way out of five of those in court. Did I mentioned the boy is a talker?

We have three pear trees. Over the years I’ve pruned them to the point they aren’t recognizable as pear trees without the fruit. I probably should have read up on the art of pruning before I started, but it’s too late now. Apparently I did something right, because last years pruning produced a bumper crop of pears this year. I shot these last week while cutting grass, shortly before I blew my $2200 lawn mower engine. I’ve paid less than that for a car.

One of the unique things about Ashland is trains run right down the middle of the main drag, which is called either Railroad Ave. or Center St., depending on which side of the crossing you happen to be on. My wife’s office is just out of frame left. She once counted the number of trains during her workday and it was in the 60’s. That’s a lot of trains. I guess you get used to it. I shot this from the patio of the Ironhorse restaurant. This kid happened to be riding by and stopped to watch. Boys seem to have a fascination with trains. Most outgrow it. Some don’t. Seems there’s never a shortage of people, mostly men, sitting by the tracks in lawn chairs, camera in hand, waiting for the next one.

This is the end. I’ve finally reached the end of my career as a wedding photographer. I’ve shot my nephew’s wedding, a good friends wedding and  Saturday was the wedding of the last  of my neighbor’s three kids. I’ve done all of them as their wedding present. I tried to buy this one off with a bribe and I think he may have taken it, but his fiance wasn’t having any of that, so I spent the day pretending to be a wedding photographer. Shooting an ad is a piece of cake compared to weddings. This is the flower girl, who happens to be the second child of the first kid, waiting patiently to get dressed. By the time her wedding rolls around I’ll be too old to pick up a camera.

© 2010 Doug Buerlein

I’ve never posted a photo that I didn’t take, but this was to good to pass up. Meet  my friend, Doug. They let him out of the home every month and it was my turn to keep him. Well…not really.

Part of living in the country is dealing with what we call “situations”. Well, Doug had a “situation” last week. He had some feral cats he wanted to trap and, being a good soul, take to the Humane Society. So he gets a humane trap. Unfortunately, the Humane Society was out of  the “cats only” trap, so he had to take the ” any ol’ animal that wanders in” trap, which he puts it in his front yard, and, lo and behold, it works.

There are a lot of animals that he could have caught.  A possum would have been good. The neighbor’s chihuahua wouldn’t have been bad. A fox or even a rabid racoon would have been ok. Unfortunately “Pepe Le Pew” was a little to curious that night, and Doug had a “situation” on his hands.  He tried to convince the game warden it was  rabid, but apparently the game warden wasn’t born yesterday and wasn’t buying it, so Doug was left to deal with it himself.

One on the advantages of living close to a Food Lion and Home Depot is you always have a supply of heavy duty trash bags, 10 mil polyethelyne plastic sheeting and goggles close by, so he felt prepared for the challenge. Well, I heard about the results and faintly smelled them and based on that, my advice is should you ever be confronted with a skunk trapped in a humane trap, just shoot it.

This is about how I feel. Yesterday I started with shooting a litter of puppies and ended at 3 am shooting in a grocery store. We couldn’t start  until they closed at nine and by the time we finished putting it back together it was three.

I’m not sure if this is the puppy from the last post, but, if not she’s definitely a sister. I learned something about shooting puppies. If you put them in a pen, they’ll fall asleep in about 2 minutes, then you can put them in the shot and they be reasonably calm for a couple of minutes. Focus, push the button and repeat. Yesterday I had never shot puppies. Today I’m a puppy pro.

Holy Crap! I set the alarm for March 1 and it’s almost summer. There must have been a power outage from all the snow. Why didn’t somebody wake me?

It’s been a nice sleep and I’m trying to shake the cobwebs out of my brain, but I’m thinking there may still be an interesting photo or two out there. I met this little guy a couple of days ago while casting puppy talent for an ad. Not much difference between puppies and kids. They all want to stick their tongue out when they see a camera?