Roadtrip to DC !!

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Originally uploaded by Paul-W

We took off on Friday for Washington DC — a 9-hour trip made MUCH easier for the kids (and Paul & Gretchen) due to portable DVD and MP3 players. Friday night we met up with Becky and Ish and their children Tim & Julia.

Cameron was impressed by the animal print bathrobes hanging in the closet of the Palomar Hotel room. I’m not sure how he felt about the leopard print camisole and boxers. I’ll have to ask.

Not As Young As Before

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Originally uploaded by Paul-W

Every two years, ASTSWMO holds their Superfund Managers Symposium out in Scottsdale, Arizona. Leave it to government agencies (or their associations) to book conference space in Arizona in the middle of the summer… the hotel room rates are less than the utdoor temperature (110 degrees-or-so). Even the pools are oppressive in that heat, so there’s little to entice you away from the agenda.

At 5:00 am, however, the temperature is a reasonable 86 degrees, so I joined different combinations of my colleagues in climbing Camelback Mountain three times. Six years ago I had done the same thing, but that was back in my high exercise/low fat phase and I was in much better shape. Also 20 pounds lighter. It was much easier then.

The first time up this year I was worried about how hard my heart seemed to be pounding, so at about the 1 mile mark (of the 1.2 mile ascent) I just sat and watched the stream of incredibly fit hikers pass by until I could slowly finish the climb. I learned (or re-learned) that you shouldn’t let others set your pace - and you should never try to keep up with the people who do the climb every day! Subsequent climbs took about the same time: a slightly slower rate but with fewer rest stops.

This time we say desert mice (with big ears) and a road runner. I also had time to find 2 (of 3) geocaches along the route.

More photos at:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/paul-w-locke/sets/72157606524016855/

Florida Weather In Melrose

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Originally uploaded by Paul-W

The last couple weeks have been good for the mushrooms, as we’ve fallen into Florida-type weather. The days have generally been nice except for the arrival of thunderstorms in the late afternoon. Poor Miller has been in perpetual “Earthquake Position”, trembling in fear of the thunder.

Mom-on-the-Mound

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Originally uploaded by Paul-W

This is Gretchen’s second year playing Moms-on-the-Mound softball for the Horace Mann School team. Once again she’s playing shortstop and may try pitching as there is a shortage of arms on the team this year. We spent part of the morning of July 4th at the field, with the boys taking turns hitting against her pitching.

Geocaching

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Originally uploaded by Paul-W

I (Paul) received a GPS unit for Christmas with the hope of actually doing some geocaching…looking for hidden treasures based on longitude/latitude values found on various websites. This was my first, “Eric’s Adventure”, located in Breakheart Reservation, Saugus, Massachusetts. Tuesday was Bunker Hill Day in Suffolk County, so I took advantage of a beautiful day to bike over to Breakheart and find the geocache. (Also stopped at Socs on the way back for an orange freeze - geocaching is THIRSTY work!)

The GPS is also good for marking the spot where I stoped to take pictures, and for mapping the whole adventure. Check out the map with links to the photos on Flickr at http://www.flickr.com/photos/paul-w-locke/2587247737/.

Mothers Day, 2008

Mothers Day, 2008

Originally uploaded by Paul-W

Breakfast-in-bed consists of a frittata, bacon, coffee and juice for Gretchen. The boys went for coffee cake, bacon and bagel (Cameron) or just bacon (Duncan and Miller).

A Weekend in the Garden

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Originally uploaded by Paul-W

If April showers bring may flowers, what do may flowers bring?

The backyard and garden beds have suffered from use by two boys and the dog. At some point we should just tear it up and start over, but not until the boys are off to college and the dog slows down a bit.

In the meantime, there is work to be done to bring the gardens back to “not embarrassing”.

First up was the removal of the dead and dying… particularly a mountain laurel and azalea along the back fenceline. The corner where the azalea sat has never been good to us. There were lilacs there when we bought the house, but they were old and died off. (I’m still pulling up stumps.) We tried a dogwood, then the azalea. Now I’m moving Hostas into that corner because (a) I need to move them out of other beds, and (b) Gretchen would actually be happy to see them fall to whatever curse plagues that corner. (The “curse” is more likley to be related to the demolition debris the previous owners had dumped there.)

Next we tore out the day lilies and separated the lilies from the weeds (and the lilies from each other.) The lilies were moved down the fence to a spot previously taken by a couple big variegated Hostas. Some went across the yard to the dust bed to compete with the weeds and ivy.

In place of the lilies, we transplanted a Hydrangea from along the driveway and added some purchased Hydrangeas. We’ll see which ones survive (they may otherwise need thinning.)

In place of the Mountain Laurel, we gathered stray Bleeding Hearts from around the yard and brought them to one bed beside the greyhound statue.

We had a number of stray Columbines growing around the yard, including two in a dark corner behind the shed. These were brought together in bed beside the deck where we can actually see them. Our clumps of poppies were dug up, separated, and spread around that bed as well.

A couple Trumpet Flower vines were planted along the back and side fences - we’ll see how they do.

Finally, the little white flowering groundcover plant (photo) had exhausted itself, so we replaced it in the isolated spot by the gate with red-flowering broom plants.

There’s still quite a bit of prime real estate ground Gretchen to fill with annuals this year.

Boston Harbor, 1987

1987-pwl-roll10-02Originally uploaded by Paul-W

Let’s go back a few years to a couple rolls of film taken along Boston Harbor in the Spring of 1987. These images are scanned from black & white film.

I was in graduate school studying environmental science and public health. The pollution in Boston Harbor was an increasingly volatile political issue. A year later, George H.W. Bush would use the condition of the harbor against Governor Dukakis in the presidential campaign.

The trash and debris in the harbor was certainly a visible indication of how we, as a Commonwealth, treated this resource - although the worst pollution was invisible to the eye. The properties along the polluted harbor, such as this rotting and dangerous pier, were allowed to deteriorate.

Of course a lot has changed since these photos. The harbor is clean and bluefish chase herring into the inner harbor. There are harbor seals. The water and coastline don’t stink.

And the property values?

Other photos in this series follow the harbor from north of the Aquarium into South Boston, showing the area before the heavy development of the last 20 years.

Roll 1 | Roll 2

A few years later, I was working for MassDEP and occasionally involved in the harbor cleanup. Here are pictures from an MWRA tour of their harbor projects in 1991.

Smuggler’s Notch, 1995

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Originally uploaded by Paul-W

Cameron was 15 months old when we decided to spend Father’s Day weekend at Smuggler’s Notch Resort in Stowe, Vermont - they were running a deal during the low time between the ski- and summer-vacation periods.

One of the attractive features was the on-site day care they offered, so we could drop Cameron off in the morning and go hiking by ourselves ( a nice feature for relatively new parents.)

This photograph is one of the rare examples of Cameron’s face painted - he’s been avoiding face painting ever since in the belief that his skin is sensitive to the paint.

This trip was memorable for the llama trek through the mountains, a side trip to Ben & Jerry’s, and the infamous “naked house cleaning” photographs. We also came home to nearly 100-degree heat in Boston, necessitating us sleeping in the cool basement for a night.

Click here for the complete set of photos.

Back to Scanning

Back to the question of why I’m obsessively scanning slides and photographs from my family, Gretchen’s family and those from my own collection.

Organization. Given the state of my office (paper piles), basement workroom (junk piles) and upstairs closet (photo piles), the appeal of well organized digital files may be hard to accept. There is some historical precedent, however: my negatives are carefully preserved in three-ring binder, organized chronologically. Those rolls taken while I had access to a darkroom have a contact sheet beneath the sheet of negatives. The transfer of images to digital format allows me to organize and reorganize the photos by chronology, subject and (rarely) high concept. Geotagging allows organization by location. I’m not sure whether I like the order itself or the process of ordering the photos more. Think of the character Rob in Nick Hornsby’s book High Fidelity (John Cusack’s character in the movie), continually reorganizing his record collection as he continually reorganizes his life.

Socrates… the unexamined life thing. It is not about finding meaning in my life as it is trying to find a coherent story. Gretchen’s father had finally begun to write about his experiences during World War II just before he died. We have a series of photos and a box of memorabilia from that time, but just a few words on the back of each giving a brief description. They are a wonderful record, as is, and his family and friends can add context to the photos, but as time passes the family memories fade, the oral history slips, and we’re left with just the photos. A wonderful record, but much less than they could have been. And what about your own photos and stories? Do you wait until it is too late to pass on more than just the images? Ask an archaeologist. An ancient urn in a museum may be art, and it may be beautiful, but… Tell me where it was excavated. Tell me what other pieces was found around it. How many layers of fill and ash separated it from the surface? Put it in context and the beautiful urn also tells a complex story. Every bit on information we can add to the record helps complete the story of a photo, the story of an afternoon in Newport, a weekend in Stowe. A romance. A marriage. A death. A life. Which does bring us back to Socrates. I don’t know whether the examined life is any more worth living than the unexamined, but I want to at least leave a paper trail.