Ghostbusters Portraits #3
pictures
Egyptian Snakes
A few weeks ago our church had an Egyptian marketplace as part of our VBS program. One of my friends took the opportunity to set up an animal stall there, which led to me photographing two costumed friends holding a snake. Please enjoy.
PS It is kinda like photographing a kid. Snakes don’t stay still and are determined to go where you don’t want them.
State Park Alligators
I’m just getting around to processing some pictures I took when we visited a state park with some friends.
How to Make a Quick and Easy Jedi or Sith Costume
2014 TPC Sawgrass
I was lucky enough to get a pass to a practice day at TPC this year. I’ve been out there several times and it is always fun. I’m not a golf fanatic but walking around the beautifully manicured environment there is so peaceful and pleasant. If you ever get the opportunity, I recommend that you go.
How to Recover a Bible
I’m excited that I finally get to post this article! The work was done at the same time I was making the Batwoman and Green Lantern costumes but I’ve had delays finishing it. Anytime my articles are picture intensive it takes me a lot longer to get them ready to post.
Yosemite Preamble
*** I am running an old story I wrote about our trip to Yosemite in 2008 for the next couple of weeks. I enjoyed reading it again and looking at the pictures. If you’ve seen it before, I hope you enjoy the encore presentation as much as I did. ***
After some careful planning and reservations a year in advance, we made it out to Yosemite National Park. Being such a highly photographed location we felt like we knew it well but were really excited to get out, hike in it and see it with our own eyes. If we learned nothing else from the Grand Canyon, we learned that seeing these spectacular places in person is so much more than a photograph can convey.
Other folks that had visited before recommended that we go in the spring to see the waterfalls and to avoid some of the crowds. We knew that this would limit our hiking opportunities somewhat because much of the park would still be inaccessible due to snow.
Yosemite has some pretty drastic geography (which is a pretty big part of why it is so beautiful). The bulk of the touristy stuff rests on the valley floor which is a small portion of the park nestled in a drastic V-shaped slot of granite. The remainder of the park is on top of this granite where Little-House-on-the-Prairie-style alpine meadows perch waiting for summer flowers so small girls in pigtails and bears can romp and play. In addition, mountains rise from these meadows creating a breathtaking backdrop (even from the valley floor).
Because of this tremendous change in elevation in such a relatively small area, you get some big differences in weather. Most of the time that we spent in the valley the temps ranged from the 70’s to the upper 80’s. The higher elevations that we climbed to were typically 20 degrees cooler than this but in some instances they got even colder (and much windier). In one car drive or hike you could go from shorts and sunscreen to every layer of clothing you had and snow on the ground. It was warmer than usual when we were in the park but not warm enough for the northernmost road (Tioga Pass to Reno, NV) to be open. This cut our day hiking choices in half and eliminated the possibility of flying in to Reno and driving by Lake Tahoe on the way to the park.
We got a guidebook succinctly titled “Yosemite” from Moon Handbooks. I looked at several before settling on this one and I heartily recommend it. If Rick Steves did US guidebooks, they would be like this. It strongly recommended staying in the park if we could afford it. Our friends also cautioned us against staying outside the park. Yosemite is not a small place but even more importantly it is a slow moving place. The roads are small and very twisty and the speed limit is 20 mph in many places but I imagine that during most of the year when traffic is bad you can’t even go that fast. Trying to commute to the park every day would have been terrible. I really think it would have ruined the trip for us. It would have been like staying in Ponte Vedra and driving downtown via rush hour JTB and I-95 every day of the trip. No thank you! For you non-Jaxvillians that is a slow 45 minute drive.
So step one was reserving a room. After reading the reviews from Moon it was obvious that we wanted the Yosemite Lodge. Real beds. Real walls (not a tent). Not as expensive as the outrageous super duper high end hotel. I got online and looked at availability. It was almost exactly a year before our trip to the day and there was only one availability for one week for the spring season left! It turned out to be the perfect time to go. It would be the week leading up to Memorial Day. Sane people did not want to visit anytime around then. We would be getting out of the park on Friday morning. Hopefully this would keep us out of the clutches of the angry horde of summer tourists. We would also potentially have the warmest weather possible when the waterfalls were still cranked to 11. Most folks choose to wait until after Memorial Day because most of the summer-only amenities open that weekend such as the swimming pools, snack shacks, etc.
Step two was figure out our path to the park. Initially we thought Fresno made sense. We’d never been there and it was the closest bigger city. After checking ticket prices it became apparent we’d be going via Sacramento. We’d been to Sacky before for a wedding but the cost difference made this a no brainer. Maybe we’d be able to find something else to do besides tour the capital (which we’d done previously).
We chose to stay at the Governor’s Inn for a night on the way in and out of the park. The guidebook highly recommended this place. We thought it was decent but nothing special. Ok price. Good newer Hampton Inn-ish room. Good location. Pretty crappy breakfast bar. I can forgive no make-your-own-waffles and no hot items like eggs or biscuits, but no cereal?! Come on! If generic Tang and a generic Svenhard count as a continental breakfast they must be thinking a sub-Australia-sized fictitious continent.
2011 MS Society Jacksonville Mud Run Recap and Pictures
If you’ve been following along since the beginning, you know that Melanie, I and a few other friends ran in Mud Run last year. We had such a good time that we almost immediately began making plans for the next one.
Fast forward to 2011. The response to the pictures and stories from last year led us to create two teams this year. Because the Mud Run changed the categories, we opted for a five-man competitive team and a five-woman competitive team.
Once we arrived at the course, we found out that the categories weren’t the only things that had changed. In fact, just about every aspect of the race this year was improved: better parking, better start/finish area, better course, better spectator consideration, better food and better organization.
They still need to work on orientation/check-in. We wandered around for a while before we figured out where to go. The equestrian center is a large piece of property that can easily swallow several thousand people in its wooded bowels. This year they had changing tents (no more hunkering down behind your car after the race) but they were located halfway between anywhere useful. If they really want the community to get behind this event they need to do even more to make it spectator friendly. I would suggest a short dry spectator trail to get them to the key points of interest along the course. I’d also give them a map. Finally, they need better results reporting. At any other race I’ve ever participated in you get the results almost in real time. As of the time of this posting, I still don’t have our official time or a listing of the top finishers.
That is the end of my belly aching. Everything else was really great. We even got free Bubba Burgers at the end of the run. Yum!
As for the race itself, it was comparable to last year but wasn’t as hot out of the water, not as cold in the water, the sticky mud was much shallower and the course was a little easier. My trusty $13 boots came through the race just fine again (although I’m noticing a small amount of upper and sole separation on the right one). Unfortunately, running in those things hurts my feet. I noticed the next day that my feet were a little swollen and the bottoms hurt a little. I also got shin splints on my right leg. I think both of these are directly related to the lack of padding in my boots. I’ll heal up just fine I’m sure and it is a small price to pay to have this much fun.
On a side note about the boots, we were not allowed to duct tape our boots closed as we said we would last year (see 2010 post). It turned out to be a non-issue. There wasn’t gravel in the water or mud pits so none of us ended up getting junk stuck inside our boots this year.
We will not be doing the Donna Breast Cancer Marathon next year so that means we’ll be able to dedicate time to training specifically for this race. The advice I got last year is still good for this year: run stairs. I think that is the best thing you can do to get ready for this event.
I can hardly wait for next year.
The following pictures are copyright Sam Moore (Thank you so much for doing this!) and are used here with the artist’s permission. This is not the entire course but gives a good overall impression.
Jason Patz 