Penguin Pictures

There's a reason for these.

Okay, the reason was that I needed a place to park them to give them a web address so I could post them in a message, but now that they are here, I'll just leave them.

Two Zoos

When we left Moline, we finally drove to one of the four states on our trip we hadn’t been in before, South Dakota. Family time over, adventure time begun (although being with my family can be something of an adventure). Tuesday we drove across Iowa to Sioux Falls, South Dakota.

We were only spending one night in Sioux Falls, but we left early enough to get there around three P.M., so while John drove I searched the tour guide for things we could do in an afternoon. The Great Plains Zoo and Delbridge Museum of Natural History sounded like a good choice. It was near our hotel, it would let us do a lot of walking in the fresh air after being cooped up for hours in the car, and we could probably get in for free.

For years, John has had an annual membership to the Baton Rouge Zoo, that allows us unlimited visits. Many zoos around the country have reciprocal agreements to honor each other’s zoo membership, and as we found out on a trip to the Honolulu Zoo, even the ones that don’t have formal ties might let you in free anyway. The Great Plains Zoo is part of a reciprocal zoo agreement with our zoo, so in we went for free. 

Even if we had had to pay the admission price, it would have been well worth it. The zoo has some amazing exhibits, including a small herd of black rhinos in a large, naturalistic enclosure, and some rare Japanese macaques (snow monkeys), which I was not able to get a picture of. Here is a sample of the pictures I did get:

This fellow looks familiar

Hello

Galapagos Tortoise

Just like in our zoo at home, peacocks roam free.

Entrance to the rhino exhibit

Black rhino, also known as hook-lipped rhino

All the trees have been browsed to the same height.

African Yellow Tortoise. One of his habitat mates was courting a female at the back of the habitat.

The John Ball Zoo in Grand Rapids, Michigan is a smaller zoo with smaller animals, but it also has nicely laid out play areas for children and is in a stunning physical setting. We got in there for free, too, but again, it would have been worth it to pay admission.

Statue at Zoo Entrance

Golden Eagles

Bobcat

Brown Bear

Capybara

Warthog

The quotation on the bench is from The Giving Tree.

Wallaby with baby

Wallaby with baby

John figures our savings not paying admission to the zoos on this trip paid for his membership for the year. That is something to consider if you have a local zoo and do a lot of vacation traveling. Someday when you are on the road and your pocket cash is disappearing fast, that membership might give you something to do for an afternoon at no additional cost.

This Is What Privilege Looks Like

I came across this photo this morning in a thread on TD, called “Second grader in wheelchair set apart from his classmates in school photo”. It linked to a news story from Canada with the same name.

Opinions seem to be mixed as to whether the child’s parents are right to be unhappy about the picture. Some typical comments are as follows:

the chair is as close to the bleachers as it can be.

did the mom want them to sit the wheelchair on the bleachers?

Hard to say if there was any malice here. The class photos are on a bench, which the kid in the wheelchair can't sit on.

I doubt there was any malice intended. They just didn't think about it enough. They should have placed him front and center.

Before the third and fourth posts were made, other commenters pointed out that the wheelchair could have been placed in front of the bleachers with the children on the bleachers placed to one side or the other so they wouldn’t be blocked. Someone also suggested another solution:

And there's room on both sides of the bleachers. Just move the kids to the edge and he would be with the rest of the students. Not that hard to figure out.

But that would create a worse problem!

and that would've made the picture off center and look stupid.

Well, we certainly can’t have any of that.

I agree with the fourth post above though. I doubt there was any malice intended. I mean look at that child. Look how cute he is. I bet he’s everyone’s mascot, moppet, pet. How can you feel malice toward him?

I doubt there was any malice intended when the school contracted with the photographer without telling the company that they have students with special needs, and asking what experience the photographer had with posing children in wheelchairs.

I don’t believe there was any malice intended when the teacher got the memo saying what time to have the children in the gym for the photograph and didn’t think, “Maybe I should go look at the bleachers and get an idea how we are going to work Miles into the picture."

I don’t believe the photographer felt any malice when he centered the rest of the class on the bleachers the way he always poses children and tucked Miles in afterwards.

That’s what privilege does. 

So if you have children who can walk on their own two feet or at least sit in the bleachers unaided and pay attention and smile on command and not get frightened at a stranger pointing an unfamiliar device at them and want to run away, take a good look at this picture.

Because this is what privilege looks like. 

The Non-Pirates of Penzance

Although we spent most of our visit in London, I did want to go to Cornwall, since that was one part of England we didn’t get to see last year on our bus tour. (Of course, seeing Wales had consisted of viewing the scenery as we drove by, but we hadn’t done so much as that for Cornwall.) Back when I was in my early twenties and occasionally read romance novels, it seemed like a good many of them were set in Cornwall, so I wanted to at least get a look at the place.

We decided to take the train from London to Plymouth, where Neal would rent a car and drive us around to see whatever sights we could take in in two days and three nights. (Yes, I know, Plymouth is in Devon, but it was a good jumping off place.) Neal wound up renting us rooms in a bed and breakfast on the edge of Dartmoor, so we spent Saturday sightseeing in Cornwall and Sunday driving around Dartmoor before taking the train back Sunday evening. Not an extensive trip, but it gave Neal ideas for walking tours at another time.

We were told to be at the train an hour before it left. When we got to the track, the conductor waved us on the first carriage and told us to walk through the train to second class. We had a hard time finding seats, which was puzzling since we were so early. Then the train started moving. Turned out we had caught the earlier train. That worked out well because we were able to rent the car, get dinner and get to the B&B before dark.

Neal did quite well driving on the left hand side, but that didn't keep me from wincing every ten minutes or so on the narrow country roads and roundabouts. I think the only way my son will ever drive me around in England again is if I am trussed up in the trunk.

The B&B we stayed at, Overcombe House, was actually on the edge of Dartmoor. It’s a delightful place - beautiful views, an excellent choice of breakfast foods, great bird watching out of the dining room window, a short walk from two pubs, and conveniently placed to get on the road and away.

I had hoped to see St. Michael’s Mount and see it I did, but it turns out the one day the ferry doesn’t run out there is Saturday, the day we were there. Just as well, because it looked as though seeing it properly would have involved more climbing than I could do comfortably. We walked around on the beach and then headed for Penzance, where of course I took pictures.

The next day we drove around the moors and saw some moor ponies and sheep. We tried to visit an old abbey, but it wasn’t open yet when we first got there and we didn’t have time to get back later. That’s okay, it was a good day to be out in the fresh air.

(Click "read more" to see pictures, lots of pictures)

Even More Fame

Ah, fame and fortune. Okay, scratch the fortune part. The book that I wrote about last August is finally out, and I have my copy. The book is called Lost in Translation: The English Language Taken Hostage at Home and Abroad, edited by Chris Stone. It’s a picture book showing humorous mistranslations, misspellings, and abuses of grammar in English signs, menus, and other documents seen around the world, and two of the pictures are mine.

I had almost forgotten giving the author permission to use the pictures in his work. Yesterday we were checking the mailbox and John found a large envelope addressed to me. “Are you expecting something?” I am, actually, a T-shirt from LL Bean to replace one that wore out in a few months time, but not this soon.

“It looks like a book. Are you expecting a book?” As I said, I had forgotten all about it, so until I opened it, I had no idea what it was.

My pictures are numbers 16 and 89.  You have to count them to figure out which is which because there are no page numbers, just a picture on each page and captions. I haven’t looked through the entire book yet, but my husband has, and I heard laughter. 

Anyway, here are my two contributions:

Taken in Hungary, April 2010

Taken at Barton Springs, Austin, Texas

To see the rest, buy the book.

I Couldn't Resist

When I saw this sign at the public library, I couldn't resist getting a picture of it. Why can't they just say, "By entering these premises you agree to be searched for weapons" like everybody else?

Book It

Last week I got an email from an editor at a small publishing house asking to use some photographs of mine in a book. In exchange I get a credit and a free copy of the book. It's not like people are clamoring to pay me for my photographs, so I agreed and sent him a few suitable shots.  Getting credit and a copy of the medium in which my pictures are used is more than I got the last time someone used my photographs, which was when my then employer used some pictures I had taken of  our young clients in a video for a fundraiser.*

I had a strange reaction when I received the email. I was sure I had already received an email about the project and replied to it. When I searched for the previous email, I couldn't find it, nor could I find a reply that I sent, a message on Flickr, or even a comment on the relevant photographs on Flickr. I have developed either psychic powers or a badly distorted sense of time.

I did look up the publishing house in question to make sure that it existed, and that they weren't some kind of vanity press. They seem legitimate. They largely publish niche books about "wine, naval history, craft, cookery and textile art". If I ever get the urge to write a cookbook about foods that can be prepared easily in a ship's galley, with recommendations for wine pairings, illustrated with photographs of quilted potholders and embroidered dish towels, I have a contact.


*The photos on the left and in the center under the title "Mask" and the two that show from the 24 to the 26 second mark are mine.

I'm Famous, Well, Sort Of

In the fall of 2007, we went to the Houston Museum of Natural History to see the Lucy exhibit. (Or as my husband put it, "Why are we going to see old bones?") Since we were there anyway, we naturally toured the rest of the museum exhibits, including the one pictured above, which is labeled as the world's largest seashell. I took the picture because I loved the way the white and blue looked together, and when I posted the picture to my web hosting site, I of course titled it "World's Largest Seashell". Now if you do a Google image search for "world's largest seashell" or any of several variations thereof, the first picture you see is mine.

It's my one and only claim to fame, because I lead an otherwise boring life. What usually happens in my life is more like this:

I work with young children who just can't get the hang of speaking correctly. Some of them have a condition called childhood apraxia of speech, which simply put means that for them saying the simplest sentence, like "I want cookie", is as difficult as reading Fox in Socks while mildly drunk is for the rest of us. Remediation consists largely of trying to make constant repetition seem remotely interesting to the childish intellect.

That means I spend my day holding conversations like the following:

D: car?

Me: Say, "I want car."

D: "ahwan"

Me: I want what?

D: Car!

Me: "I want car."

D: Here (hands me car)

D had trouble learning the pronouns "I" and "you", so even getting "ahwan" (I want) was pretty cool, and often got him the car. One day, the ladder came off the fire engine (fah en). "Don't worry", I reassured D. "I fix it."

"You fix it?"

My jaw hit the table. Not only three whole words, subject-verb-object, but he used the right pronoun. I went over to my desk to write it down before I forgot.

A little voice drifts over from the play table. "You writing?"

"Yeah, I writing so I don't forget." I crying, actually. I get emotional over little things.

Little things like having the number one hit when you Google "world's largest seashell". It's my one and only claim to fame.

ETA: Another of my adventures with little D can be found at my post Seeds.

One Down, 99 to Go

Yesterday I was given a homework assignment by a sort of mentor of mine to take 100 pictures of things that are not on a level between my eyes and my knees.  Above is the first picture of this series - a picture of the ceiling fan in the third bedroom taken while I was lying on the floor under it.  I also learned my first lesson - if you are going to photograph a ceiling fan, turn it off first.  Unfortunately, this bright idea did not occur to me until after I was on the floor.

The ceiling fan is part of a funny story.  My husband is a lovable, sweet person in many ways, but like anybody, he has a few flaws.  He is a talented man who can fix almost anything.  He can do electrical work, plumbing, rough carpentry, and painting as well as cooking, sewing, and cleaning.  So whenever we need anything done around the house, he will usually do it himself rather than hire someone to do it.

The problem is, a jack of all trades is, as we all know, a master of none, so while he almost always does a good job, he runs into snags along the way, and every time he runs into a snag, I hear the same thing.  "This was all your idea.  I never wanted to do this, but you just had to have your way."  Before the ceiling fan, the previous most inappropriate time he recited this litany was when he fell off a ladder onto the toilet while painting the bathroom and broke a chip out of the rim of the toilet tank.  From that moment on, the chipped tank has always been, in his mind, all my fault.  In my mind, it has always been a sign that my husband, while adorable, is pretty much as cracked as the tank, but I usually keep that opinion to myself.

Fast forward five years.  I have problems with the light in the third bedroom, which is where I keep my computer.  I suggest to husband that we hire an electrician to fix the wiring.  Husband says, no, the real problem is the ceiling fan (the light fixture being attached to the fan), and that he has always wanted a new one anyway.  We go to Lowe's, and he picks out the fan he wants, which is one I wouldn't have picked but can live with.

Okay, gentle reader, you know where this is going, don't you?  Sure enough, half an hour into the project I hear grumbling coming from the third bedroom.  Either the fan will run but the light won't work, or if he gets the light to work, the fan won't run.  I walk into the room just in time to hear, "This was all your idea.  I never wanted to do this, but you just had to have a new ceiling fan." 

I spoke in an amazingly quiet voice for someone on the verge of (justifiable) homicide.  I explained in the careful tones one uses with someone wearing a tinfoil hat that, no, in fact, I had not asked for a ceiling fan, I had asked that we call an electrician to deal with what was obviously faulty wiring, and that the fan was not only his idea, but his exact choice.  He had to admit that it was so.  Shamefaced, he returned to his task, and eventually got the fan working.

Poor baby.  Now every time he starts into his "This was all your idea" routine, all I have to do is say, "like the ceiling fan".  He really doesn't know what hit him, but the way I figure it, he's just fortunate it wasn't a hammer, wielded by me.

I love that little fan.

I Have a Homework Assignment

Hubby and I went to a music festival today but left early because it was about to storm.  We did hear two bands and got to see the arts and crafts booths.  One of the booths belonged to a photographer from New Orleans named Joshua Lee.  He had a booth in the same spot last year and we had begun talking about photography.  He gave me a lot of encouragement despite the fact I didn't buy anything.

This year I looked to see him again and this time I bought a DVD called Katrina Revealed:Rebuilding Lives in the Big Uneasy.  We talked a little about my recent trip and how I took over 1200 pictures, and he gave me a homework assignment: take 100 pictures, but none of them can be between my knees and my eyes.  I need to be either down low or up on something when I take the pictures.  When I'm done, Josh wants me to email him and tell him what I learned.

When I left the booth I marveled that there are people like this in the world.  He's seen me twice in his life, he's never even looked at a photograph I've taken, and yet he was willing to offer help and encouragement not just to me, but to other people who stopped by his booth. Whenever I think about all the bad in the world I also try to remember all the Joshua Lees - the people who help other people just because that's what they do.  It's more than just their actions, it's the way they see the world.

And now I have to learn to see the world from a different perspective, as in the picture above, which I took while down on one creaky, arthritic knee.  Wish me luck, and learning.