September 5, 2021

Momentary lapse of reason….

Well, I guess this isn’t a big surprise. Some time back while searching for a WordPress theme, I selected the “Photo-Diary by Sitko-Designing”. It wasn’t perfect, but I knew less than nothing about WordPress, and Photo Diary provided the look I was wanting. Mostly. The individual lack of font control was a pain, but that was resolved via a plug-in and life went on. And then WordPress introduced the Block Editor. Photo-Diary started doing some interesting things, the most painful of which was eliminating whitespace between paragraphs. A quick e-mail to the author produced a shoulder shrug reaction in that he wasn’t planning on updating Photo-Diary to work with the…

August 22, 2021

Throw me somethin’ mister!

Continuing on with our look at yesteryear, it’s Mardi Gras time, circa 2004. We packed up the car and traveled down to St. Charles Avenue on the Sunday before Mardi Gras to catch a string of parades planned for the day.. If memory serves me correct (?), the parades were Toth, Venus, Tucks and MidCity, They were typically run one after the other, and for the truly dedicated you could stay a while and catch Endymion in the evening. As we aren’t/weren’t anywhere near that dedicated, the day parades suited us just fine. We had the luxury of being in front of a business that Melanie’s sister-in-law’s sister worked at…

August 3, 2021

They all axed for you,

At the Audubon Zoo! LOL! You would have to be from New Orleans to understand. In any event, Meghan, Jourdan and I got a wild hair one day early in 2004 to go to the Audubon Zoo. It had been some time since we had been there, and we had the after Christmas/New Years blahs, so we jumped in the car and went. When I was kid, Audubon Zoo was a sad, pathetic place that no one went to. In the mid ’70’s the city embarked upon a major rebuilding effort, transforming it into the hallmark facility that it is today. As I recall it was an extended effort, with…

July 25, 2021

Renfest

We’re still living in the past here today, and this post hearkens back to 2003. We had discovered the Renaissance Festival, held in the booming metropolis of Robert, LA the year before and had decided to make it an annual family tradition. The Friday after Thanksgiving would be our Renfest day and this particular instance on November 28, 2003 was the first in a long series of visits for us. As last time, these are/were raw images taken with the Olympus E-10. We got to the grounds, parked the car and entered the self described “Royal Village of Albright” as shown below in the map from around 2006: We collected…

July 18, 2021

Trip to Fort Pike circa 2003

In the early ought’s, Melanie and I were Masters of our local cub scout troop. Predominantly done to give Jourdan the opportunity to be a cub scout, it was a very rewarding experience in working with these young people providing support in their journey to adulthood. When we first started, the troop numbered nearly ten, but over the years it dwindled down to just a couple. Don’t honestly know the cause, but we maintained as honestly, we enjoyed doing it. Typically we would organize some sort of field trip for the youngsters, which is the focus of this post. In early fall of 2003, we took a trip to Fort…

July 5, 2021

4th of July in Fairfax City

In the spring we moved to a townhouse in Fairfax City, VA after selling our long time home in Reston. Scroll back a few posts and you can read all the gory details. With the summer season firmly among us, we have been having the opportunity to get familiar with Fairfax City, and it’s becoming a very comfortable place for us. We wound here by shear happenstance, but I’ll take serendipity whenever I can get it. Fairfax City has proven, to me at least, to be a small town jammed into a large metropolitan area. In doing so, it’s managed to keep it’s character and the feel is very warm….