Come for the politics, stay for the snark.
In this, my final cat post, I expand my roster beyond my live-in felines to include a couple of pictures of my older daughter’s cats plus the cat of a friend in Paris.
Spike in a box.
On The Road – Steve from Mendocino – We Have Cats 4 of 4Post + Comments (15)
On the Road will be all frosty next week. The Everglades, Zion National Park, the Grand Canyon, and finishing up with the Grand Staircase. As for today, I will be sad when we get to Cats 4 of 4. I love these cat photos!
Continuing in the third chapter of my four-part cat series, I’m featuring our two remaining indoor cats, Oz and Spike. We also have two outdoor kitties who are semi-feral and difficult to photograph, but who faithfully control the rodent population in collaboration with our seasonal fox and her family as well as the odd snake, the occasional owl, and any other random predators that manage to participate.
Oz grooming himself.
On The Road – Steve from Mendocino – We Have Cats 3 of 4Post + Comments (24)
45 minutes after Oz, the red, arrived at the house. The two of them hate each other now. Oz is just so ridiculously dominant and intolerant.
On The Road – Steve from Mendocino – We Have Cats 2 of 4Post + Comments (11)
I thought it would be fun to do something different for a bit. Pet pictures seem to be popular here and elsewhere, and I’ve collected a number of them over the years. To further deviate from OTR, most of these were taken by my daughters when they were in high school and before.
I’ve had Abyssinian cats since the early 70’s with a break during the late 80’s when I was in Puerto Rico and NYC.
Feeding time with the blue, the red, and the old ruddy Abyssinians.
On The Road – Steve from Mendocino – We Have Cats 1 of 4Post + Comments (11)
The rudiments of my interest in photography began during my junior year at a boarding school in Michigan. As always, my best friend was a socially unsuccessful geek, in this case the school photographer. The position wasn’t actually functional, but it gave him sole access to the darkroom, where I would work with him while everyone else was in study hall. I remember printing photos and singing a loud, off-key version of Clementine with him. It was silly, adolescent fun, but it introduced me to the inner world of photography in a way that blossomed later on, at a time when I was at a loss to know what to do with my life.
I spent my senior year at Los Angeles High School, where I offered my services as football photographer. I provided pictures for the school paper without being on their journalism staff, and I gave team members free 8 x 10 prints of themselves in games. Their appreciation went a long way toward giving me a sense of safety during this white boy’s first exposure to integration. It wasn’t until the following year at UCSD that my Republican heritage was washed away forever.
Much of my photographic experience has been covered in previous posts, so I’ll leave the remaining bits of my story to the introductions of individual photos that follow. I’ve selected this group of pictures because for the most part they’re photos I would not submit to On The Road in the normal course of my posting there. My OTR submissions are more of places and things, so for this go-round I’m showing more shots of people.
I invite you to visit my web site, but I warn you that there are far too many pictures there. I apologize for that. I use the site as a repository for all my photos that I can see possibly appearing in some publication, and I’ve given no consideration at all to the needs of potential visitors who might stumble on my work. My overarching goal has been to demonstrate the many techniques and styles I’ve picked up along the way. Visit at your own risk.
In 1965, while at boarding school in Michigan, I borrowed my friend’s Leica and loaded it with a roll of Kodachrome. I had no idea what good photos looked like. I just pointed the camera at things and clicked away. The building in the front of this scene housed staff offices. The big building behind it housed the dining hall, the infirmary, and other functions I no longer remember. The stream in the foreground emptied into Lake Michigan about a hundred yards beyond this point. Cabins were scattered along the beach for boys’ housing, while girls stayed in a dormitory about a mile up the road.
Steve from Mendocino – A Brief Photo HistoryPost + Comments (34)
When we first moved to Mendocino, within the first couple of weeks we concluded that Café Beaujolais was the best restaurant fit for us. We booked a standing 6:00 reservation for every Thursday going forward. Many years later, Margaret Fox had decided to sell, and we knew, from descriptions of the two sets of prospective buyers, that everything we loved about the restaurant was about to be lost. My mother had been badgering me to be doing something in business, and I ended up buying the restaurant with the overarching goal to keep it at or above its then current level of dining. We succeeded in this. I had the experience of directing a restaurant as I’d once hoped to do. The restaurant lost money, but the property appreciated so I was able to exit without too much damage.
This photo shows the gardens decimated by the people who bought the restaurant from me. They made money, but the food, décor, and service became generic tourist fare. Sad, but the six years that I owned it were sufficient to leave me happy enough to abandon my restaurant addiction.
On The Road – Steve from Mendocino – Mendocino Village – third setPost + Comments (25)
Seeing Steve’s pictures of Mendocino reminded me of the 4th of July, 2019 parade we watched there. It was a great old fashioned small town parade with floats, fire trucks, and just about every civic group represented.
Fourth of July Parade
On The Road – Scott – Mendocino Fourth of July ParadePost + Comments (4)