All the news that’s fit to read about the family.
Becky’s told me that Cousin Mark just called to tell her that Aunt Helene has passed away today. This was her father’s sister. This sure leaves a big hole in their family.
Man, I just hate seeing the days, months and years pass by, and watching the faces fall away. Of course, it’s not all bad. We’ll get to see ’em all in Heaven one day, and that’ll be as cool as it gets.
I haven’t been putting much on the blog lately. There’s been just too much life in the way.
On Friday, June 5th, Becky’s father passed away suddenly and unexpectedly. It’s been a tough, tough week or so. But Becky’s seeing the right way, and in that, there’s some real comfort:
Not to get into it too much — but want a great Lord we have — Dad just went under the anesthesia for the surgery and they started losing him even before a single incision was made — so into ICU for Mom and me where we met him and were able to be stay with him as the angels took him home. He just went sleep on the table, never knowing the risk he was at. Through his dementia, God shielded him from the knowledge and the fear. He never was afraid — was very lucid and peaceful before the surgery.
And now, he has his 10 fingers back, his mind is solid again, his vision back, and his heart is going pitter patter. And I bet he has wings that rival St. Peters! And hey — I bet he does own all that land the thought he did for all these years, and much much more.
He just went to sleep, never knowing the risk he was at. What an awesome way to go. We should all be this lucky!
Becky found a poem that really sums it up:
I couldn’t have put it any better. I’m gonna miss ya, Glen.
The passing of another milestone — Siobhan got all gussied up today, and was carried off to her prom.
I gotta admit that I’m less than objective, but I thought she looked beautiful in her ball gown. It’s just amazing to see her growing up, and starting to become a young lady!
I wish for each of you the best of Christmas wishes, and all the joy the season brings. We’re having fun spending time on The Mountain with the family, and waiting for the last us to get up here this morning so we can open gifts.
For those of you who like my twisted sense of humor, here’s a little gift….
This was shot during one of our vacations as we passed through Santa Claus, IN. Truly, truly twisted! 🙂
Let’s put me aside for a minute. Right now, I’m watching the live broadcast of Stand Up To Cancer (SU2C). If you’re breathing, you’ve probably been impacted by cancer — moms, dads, kids, sibs, friends… some still here, some not.
There’s no amount of pleading I can do to have you — my readers — donate to this cause. 100% of the public funds go straight to research. That’s all of it.
I’ve donated. How ’bout you?
So why is this getting top billing on the Deauxmayne? Because of my dad, who’s no longer here after fighting his fight, and for my mom, who *is* still here, fighting her fight and continually beating the odds. Because of two friends who are fighting their fight right now.
This is more than a cause. This is personal.
Today would’ve been Dad’s 68th birthday. It’s still hard to believe he’s gone, and has been gone now for six years.
Watch for a page dedicated to my father coming soon. Of course, in terms of Deauxmayne-time, that could be anywhere from next week to three months from now!
Our Fourth of July was spent pretty quietly — a shrimp boil at Cousin Mark’s, and neighbor Joe and I combining fireworks for a nice little show. Quiet and laid-back…. just like it should be.
Hope your fourth was great!
I struggle daily between the creation/capture/manipulation/production of my content, and the consumption of others’ content. With all the web play-pretties out there, it’s a hard journey to weed out the things that are just fluffy entertainment from the things that can challenge me, my art, and make me see things a little different. I’ve contended for years that the MTVisation of my generation has killed our ability much of the time to focus on any one thing for very long. We seem to consume content in short spurts, just the way the old MTV used to feed it to us. Interestingly, those timeframes aren’t terribly dissimilar than the amount of time a quarter would buy on a video game or pinball machine.
Periodically, I go through a big purge. For example, I have well over 2000 emails to myself from work or other places, informing me of some website I found, some idea I had, some concept that I thought would be good to write about. This “note to myself” has been pretty helpful for some things, but generally, I never look at them again, except in a fit of housecleaning my inbox, finding these voices from my past so old and outdated as to be useless in the here and now.
NewsFire (a *terrific* newsreader on the Mac platform) has 782 RSS feeds waiting for me right now. At times it has been over 1000. I have updates I wanna do to MySpace, Flickr, Deviantart, Classmates, Twitter, Plazes, LinkedIn, and my own sites, in order to drive some exposure for my work. I have 60,000 images in my library, most of which need to be cataloged and keyworded, and many of which could actually turn into saleable art. I have easily 10,000 scans of images from my family that need to be posted somehow, and made available for comments so that the far-flung family can tell me who’s who, where they are in the images, and why, before there’s no one left who knows or remembers. I have cycling I want to do. I have a horribly stale gallery space in St. Charles that desperately needs some attention and rework. I have at least two photography-oriented organizations in town that I want to begin working with. And my copy of WordPress is telling me there’s a new release that should be installed tonight. And I have half a dozen or more books that I wanna read, each of which will have nuggets o’ knowledge that will help my work my images.
I’ve got a lot of consumable content queued up.
The challenge between creating the content my soul needs me to create, and enlightening it with new concepts from around the net without falling into a pit of self-indulgent web-based clickery is… well, it’s hard. Somehow, I’ve got to get better about filtering out the inspiring from the inane, the deeply funny (because laughter is a great thing!) from the guy getting his privates compressed into an octave or two higher singing voice on a outdoor stairway rail while skateboard sliding down it, and the beautiful animals in nature from the little dog who can grunt out “I love you” to the camera.
It’s all about priorities. When I went to the Mac platform almost three years ago, one of the big banners I marched beneath was the “it just works” banner. The good news is that it does. The bad news is that it does it almost too well, making it entirely too easy for me to chase the shiny objects, and not push my dreams into reality. The time has come to dull some of the shiny objects, and get the priorities in place.
So will you, the reader, notice anything different? Probably not. At least, nothing drastic. I will be doing some facelifting here and there, and things might be down from time to time as I work on upgrading stuff. But generally, I hope the biggest thing noticed will be a little more attentiveness to this site and the others, and more new content on all the sites.
I don’t usually shoot portraiture. I’m just not comfortable with it, and don’t generally have a good enough grasp of unnatural light to pull it off.
However, Sio’s new look warranted an attempt at doing some shooting. With Karen’s lights and backdrop, I tried to photograph Sio in three different outfits. Now, being fourteen, she wasn’t always the smiling kid for each of the photos — she’s got an image to uphold after all! 🙂 — but I think there are some really nice photos of her out there.
Take a look, and let me know what you think!
Happy Birthday Sio!!!!!