I was working on a photograph today and it happened to be in the same folder as this one from last summer, so I decided to throw it up just to remind myself that winter can’t last forever.

I’ve spent the last 25 years getting paid to get images in focus. Now I find the older I get, the more I like the ones that are out of focus. I have more of an emotional connection with them. Maybe they better reflect how you feel when you hit middle age…a little fuzzy and out of focus.

The back of the barn is where I toss the junk. Anything that breaks or wears out ends up behind the barn. The frame in the lower left corner is an old golf ball picker upper that you see at the driving range. When I was a kid I used to try and hit the guy pulling it. I still do. It was supposed to be a brilliant solution to picking up walnuts. I spent a couple of weeks trying to make it work before I tossed it behind the barn. Over time Mary has turned my junk pile into wall art.

I am fortunate to live in an 18th century house on a few acres with lots of  beautiful trees…apple and pear trees, chestnuts, walnuts…the list goes on. The first fall we lived here I was out picking up walnuts and chestnuts and apples and pears and leaves and limbs, and my neighbor, who sold us the house, comes over and says, “Now you know why I sold it”. Funny guy.

We manage to accumulate a pretty big pile of brush every couple of months and Sunday was brushpile burning day. As I said, it’s a big pile, about six or seven feet high and maybe fifteen feet across, so lighting it isn’t easy. However my neighbor (I guess he felt guilty about the trees) showed me an easy way. I thought about explaining it in detail, but then figured someone would be dumb enough to try it (it falls under the category of “Hey Bubba, watch this”), torch themselves along with half their neighborhood and sue me. So I’ll just say it involves gasoline, motor oil, a shotgun, a few cans of Rustoleum (if you need to move the pile while it’s burning) and if you’re in a really strange mood, an artillery marking shell (the kind with white paint inside). It doesn’t take the brushpile long to turn into a small pile of cinders and it can be pretty entertaining.

Friday was the monthly poker game. It’s a mix of poker, beer and town gossip with periodic breaks for food, none of which could be considered healthy, and usually lasts until the wee hours of Saturday morning or until the beer runs out, whichever occurs first. Saturday is a day of recovery so we decided to ride to Irvington, a small town on the northern neck, and have dinner at the Trick Dog. Bad timing…closed until April 1st, so we ended up at Swanks in Kilmarnock. Great restaurant.

To kill some time I decided to ride out to a development on the point that I had shot an ad for a couple of years ago. The original developer had gone bankrupt before much had been done, other than spend a lot of money on a half-finished clubhouse, and another company had bought it and were planning to finish what the first guy started. The ad said basically, “Hey, we’re not the other guy, we’ll finish what he started”.  I wanted to see if it actually happened. From what I could tell they managed to get the marina sort of done. It was hard to tell since there were only two boats in it. Then I guess the housing bubble burst, the brakes locked up and not much else happened. It’s still a nice place to sit on the beach and watch the sun go down though.

The Central Virginia ASMP chapter’s juried exhibition “Off the Clock” opened last night. It’s a show of personal and fine art photography by commercial photographers. It’s what we shoot when nobody’s paying us. There was a great turnout and lots of fun, but like most parties, the real fun starts after the crowd has thinned and nothing’s left but the hard core. Then it’s time to change the music from easy rock to rap and do a little booty dancin’.

Here it is a week later and it’s snail no more. It’s honest to goodness snow…9 inches worth. This is not supposed to happen. I live in the south, damn it. I have daffodils in the yard. Oh well. I’ve been giving my friends, Richard and Lynda grief all winter about how much snow they’re getting in Portland. I guess what goes around comes around. Time to go cut up the tree that fell across the driveway.