Time to Move On

Well as 2011 closes it is time to look to 2012, but that is for tomorrow.  Why you say?  Because today is all the rest of the photos from 2011.  It was a difficult year in a lot ways, but there were a few nice photographs to get me by.  Tonight some of them.
Happy New Year!

Cavalcade of The Best

You just can't title all your blog entries as, "Best of 2011 xxxx."  Anyway tonight's best focuses on my little valley, the Snoqualmie Valley to be exact.  I have two photos from the upper valley and one from the lower valley.  The first photo is of a telegraph poll on the old Monroe Branch of the Milwaukee Road.  The lines that ran on the pole took messages to my great grandfather at the Tolt Station, where he was the Station Agent and Telegraph Operator.  Second photo is of a small house on the North Fork Road, it sits in between multi-million dollar properties.  On winter mornings there is always a great deal of smoke coming from the stove pipe, the place seems more genuine than it's neighbors.  My favorite valley photo for the year comes from the lower valley between Fall City and Carnation, I've photographed this barn before, but on this late May day the cows had come home. 

Enjoy

Dan

Best of Cicely 2011

My delightful and beautiful wife shall be featured tonight.  She is my biggest fan and I am hers.  She is quite remarkable, this year she traded cakes and cupcakes for the banjo.  Go figure she is good at that too.  She inspires me.  So for my inspiration, I give you my three favorite Cicely photos of 2011.

Enjoy

Dan

More Best of Stuff From 2011

More best of stuff tonight, this time it is Quin. The boy has been largely unaffected by the world, everything is in his own terms, he has been rather amazing in that way. This year's favorite photos are a bit more serious that previous years, probably because this year has been more serious for me, than previous years. The first photo doesn't prescribe to this tend, it is Quin being

quintessential Quin, silly and hamming it up for an audience. The second is Quin with a long stare, not sure what his was thinking about or looking at, it seems important though. Finally, my favorite photo of Quin from this year, is that of him fishing for the first time. Although it's probably not the greatest photo of the lad, it is significant, as it is that last photo of Quin my dad ever saw.

The Calendar Says It Is Best Of 2011 Time

I know I've been waiting for most the year to do some best of blogging and now the time has come.  I am destined to spend a bit more time each year blogging about the best.  In 2008 it was one post, 2009 two posts, 2010 three posts and this year possibly five posts.  One year soon, I just do best of posts starting January 1st.  I am not sure my photography or the dusty bits I have found require five posts, but if this blog has proven anything it is my common sense is lacking much of the time.

Tonight we kick off a near week of shameless best of photos with photos I took with my phone.  Nifty, don't you think.  Seriously speaking, I have used my camera on my phone nearly as much as my "real" cameras from time to time this year and actually preferred it is some situations.  Some of the effects are heavy handed and the borders are cheesy, but it's my phone and it's a camera and it's photoshop-like products.  Good times on the boring days at work.  The photo on top is my favorite camera photo of the year and the photos below represent the rest of the top five (ish).

Enjoy

Dan

A Request

Today, watched my son enjoy Christmas as only a soon to be five year old can.  I asked him to do one thing, and that was to always view Christmas with the same enthusiasm.  Don't let the downers of adulthood to get in the way of Christmas.  Take the time to enjoy the reason for the season and always take pleasure in giving.  Of course since, he is four and 51 weeks, he had little or no idea what I was talking about.  I hope that Christmas morning is always exciting to him and that he finds ways to make Christmas special without getting caught up in the stupid stuff. 

Wreck

As noted not too long ago, my son enjoys wrecks.  While meandering about my office recently he found this picture.  Needless to say, he was excited, so excited in fact, that he carried the photo around with him until after dinner. 

I found this photo at an antique store, so I don't know what happened here, so I couldn't tell him when he asked.  I asked him, what do you think happened?  He then made several explosion and screeching brake sounds, which combined with hand gestures to recreate the wreck.  Like I said, I don't know anything about this photo, so I can only go off of what I can observe.  It is a tank truck that is either carrying fuel or tar, the driver may still be inside and this accident occurred on a major road, judging by the crowd.  Or it wasn't a major road and just by happenstance a bus load of useless men happened by and stopped to mill about. Regardless of the truth, it is the type of photo a four year old boy loves and funny thing is, I would have loved it too at his age.  I remember our family vacation to Victoria, B.C., it was a raining morning when we left and I-5 was littered with accidents and road construction, which may the vacation super awesome, but that is a different story for another day.

Dan

On This Date

On this date ten years ago, I did something unusually smart.  I asked Cicely to marry me and thankfully she said yes.  It really was the best Christmas present ever.

Tonight's The Night

Tonight's the night, the longest night of the year.  Local radio station KEXP played Neil Young's Tonight's The Night to mark the occasion.  The song reminded me of a hot August weekend some years back.  I ran into my friend Ryan and asked if I wanted to head to Seattle to go to Bumbershoot and see the Supersuckers.  We were going to meet a couple friends their. We jumped in his car, called the Moon Buggy and headed west.  It had no stereo that I can remember, so it was conversation that occupied us for the drive.  By the time we reached Seattle and Lower Queen Anne, we had broken into a spontaneous singing of Tonight's The Night, complete with many fits and starts as we tried to remember all the words.  We got to Bumbershoot with enough time to have a couple beers, before the show.  Once at the show we stayed for a song or two and decided another beer was in order.  After that beer we headed back to find the show was over and our friends no where in sight.  We decided to mill about the city for a bit and finally headed back to Ellensburg getting in about 5 AM, at that point continent with a good night of beer, the road and conversations we headed off to our homes.  It is at that point Mr Johnson came across me and I was off to another adventure.  That is a story of another time.  Tonight's the night, yes it is...

A New Day

With the apparent passing of I-1183, lawsuits not withstanding, we here in Washington state can look forward to buying liquor at the Grocery Store and Costco.  We will be spared the liquor store on every corner approach that California has, which actually is too bad.  It's too bad for a few reasons, one the ma and pa stores have it tough already, now it will just get worse, you need to be big box to get in on this game.  Second, you won't have cool liquor store signs like in California, we were likely not going to get those anyway, most the cool signs are 40 or 50 years old and finally the liquor stores won' t have amusing names.  The 1% have won again.  Tonight pictures of boring liquor store signs. 

A Favorite

This is one of those photos that I have just always liked.  It is of one of my favorite subjects, me.  Cicely took this photo one evening as we headed down to Greenwater from Mt. Rainier.  It was a glorious warm day in early July and there still was snow everywhere.  I can remember tromping around up at Chinook Pass in 8 or 10 inches of snow on an eighty degree day.  A good time and a nice warm memory on a chilly December evening.

SS Catala

My son has become fascinated by photographs of wrecks; train wrecks, car wrecks, shipwrecks, you named it, if it wrecked it is interesting.  I'll show him a picture and he'll say, what happened.  Most the time I don't know because it is just a picture with no details.  We were looking at the University of Washington photographic collection recently and came across a photo of the SS Catala in the sand on Damon Point near Ocean Shores.  I actually could tell him about this wreck and that I had seen it and there are pictures of me next to it.  Very fun stuff, you see once upon a time, the Williams family vacationed each year at Ocean Shores.  One of the highlights of any trip to Ocean Shores was to go down and see the SS Catala, which by the time of my youth was a rusted and vandalized listing mess.  I was considered too young to ever go inside the old lady, so I missed out on that, I remember that my sister and Dad went inside at least once.  It amazes me, by twenty-first century standards, that the State let people crawl around on the thing, let alone let it sit on the beach.  

The SS Catala was built in Glasgow, Scotland in 1925.  It spent most it's years carrying around lumberjacks and fisherman on the B.C. coast.  In 1958, it was retired and sold, eventually ending up in Seattle as a floating hotel for the World's Fair in 1962.  After the fair it moved to Ocean Shores were it was once again a hotel.  On New Year's 1965 it was grounded in a storm.  It could not be re-floated and was abandoned on the beach, to become a jungle gym and source of wonderment of young boys.  In the early 1980's a girl broke her back when she fell through the rusted deck.  After that the ship was scrapped down to the level of the sand.  Then in the aughts, wind, waves and rain exposed the hull again.  This time also exposing oil leaking from the hull.  The State then spent a couple years cleaning up and removing the last of the remains.  

Tonight a photo of me in front of the SS Catala, which is oddly enough the only picture my parents took of the ship.  I was a bit surprised to realize that, we seemed to make it out there every year, or at least that is how I remember it.

Enjoy

Dan 

The Great Northern Bridge

Back in December of 1917, the Great Northern Bridge over the Ship Canal was opened.  Of course it was made necessary by the creation of the Ship Canal, which opened in July of 1917.  This bridge is a dominating memory of my youth.  Fun family outings sometimes meant going to the locks and any trip to the locks meant that you saw the bridge.  I have rueful memories of the bridge, as a kid I was always disappointed by the bridge, it was always open. I never saw the thing down or let alone with a train crossing it.  It was a let down.  I remember going to the locks once in the early 1990's and the bridge was down and there was not one but two training crossing the bridge, that was really cool.  Then for a period I only saw the bridge down and sometimes with trains crossing, I almost wanted to see it open. 

About two years ago, I took my son out to see the locks and there was the bridge, I wonder if his memories of the locks will include the Great Northern Bridge.  That day the bridge was down and there was a training crossing it, we both enjoyed it.

Tonight, one photo of the bridge up and one photo of the bridge down.

Dan

Fog

The fog has hung over us here in the Upper Snoqualmie Valley for the better part of the last week.  Fog is an interesting thing, it is welcome at first silent and still.  It changes the landscape and your view of the world.  But after a couple days your feelings begin to change, the fog, it closes in and begins to stifle you and you long to see the sky.

A Day That Continues

It has been 70 years and this date still lives in infamy, if only for Roosevelt's speech.   70 years down the road and with few able minded folks around to describe the importance of the event, we are left with history and movie reels, so it is easy to say that Japan probably did the United States a favor by attacking when they did.  After all, Great Britain wasn't going to last forever, which would have made fighting the Germans much more difficult, once the fighting had begun.  70 years later it is hard to say that this date changed the world, as outside North America change had already come.  It did change America and it did have a profound effect on our nation and has every day since.  9/11 is the closest thing we have to compare, and at the time the old times probably would have had memories of the sinking of the Maine.  All that said America as it was then known was already living on borrowed time, at some point, one way or another America was going be to changed by the world conflict, December 7, 1941, just ended up being the date that would live in infamy.  Tonight a photo of a warship, the U.S.S Turner Joy, that was involved in another infamous event.  The Turner Joy is pictured at anchor in the early morning light in Bremerton, WA, a city that would play a significant roll in the war effort and fortunes of my family. 

Cheers

On this day in 1933, prohibition was repealed, much to the joy of most everyone.  The temperance movement and bootleggers were notably saddened.  Can't make everyone happy I guess.  Interesting note, the Seattle PI noted that the downtown bars were rather quiet on the night of the repeal, I suppose for many Americans there wasn't much to celebrate, because after all they had been drinking all along.

Tolt

The Tolt post office opened on this date back in 1883.  Tolt you may know better by the name Carnation, as along about 1922 the town changed it's name from Tolt to Carnation.  It was then changed back to Tolt before it was changed to Carnation (again).  Confused?  As a kid my Great Grandmother lived in Carnation, if you talked to my Mom or in Tolt if you taked to my Grandparents, unless they remembered that I too young to remember Tolt, then she lived in Carnation.  See my Grandparents lived in Tolt, they grew up there.  My Grandmother moved there when it was Tolt and Grandfather when it was Tolt but after it had been Carnation.  Even today, signs welcome you to Tolt and Carnation.  Tonight  a photo of Tolt, probably after it had been Carnation, but before it became Carnation, I am not sure who the child is, the photo is from 1928.

Enjoy

Dan

 

Self Indulgent

Today I feel self indulgent, I have had a long week and have not felt particularly young.  So tonight a photo taken when I was young.  This photo was taken one evening right about this time of year, when I was twenty-four.  I am in my double wide trailer and it was probably cold.  It was the beginning of time in Ellensburg and that fellow has really no idea what laid ahead for him, both good and bad.  The best thing is this fellow didn't really care. 

A Fool's Errand

On this date back in 1813 the HMS Racoon entered the Columbia River on its way to Astoria to seize outpost.  The Racoon had sailed from Rio de Janerio in an effort to seize the Columbia River and the Northwest coast for British commerce.  The Raccon left Rio on July 9th, had to sail around Cape Horn.  Meanwhile, a group of Nor'Westerns had reached Astoria with news that a British warship was coming to seize the fort.  So the chief agent Duncan McDougall approached the Northwest Company (British trappers) representatives with a offer to sell Astoria to them, apparently the Nor'Westerns didn't realize that the British warship would seize the fort for free.  The Northwest Company gladly accepted.  This was hardly welcome news to the captain of the Racoon.  Tonight, Astoria 200 years old this year and once sold to the British even though the British were going to take it for free.

The Old Times

First I really have nothing to blog about tonight, so sorry about that.  I am struck by one thing, just what did Americans do prior to the creation of the Hallmark Channel and the Lifetime Network.  Once upon a time, there were just a handful of Christmas or Holiday movies, It's a Wonderful Life, Miracle on 34th Street, Santa Claus Conquers the Martians and various versions of A Christmas Carol and a few more.  Now there are hundreds of made for cable Christmas movies, mostly using the same formula, its Christmas and things aren't as nifty as hoped, but after some sadness and tears, everyone realizes that they should be happy with what they got and some cases they get a Christmas miracle and get a bunch more than they could ever dream.  What is the point of all this?  To get you to watch more commericals about buying televisions and Mercedes Benz for your loved ones.  Or it is to assist you to enjoy the season.  Like I said nothing really to blog about. 

The Winter Celebration Zone 2011 Edition

I really don't have much to say about this photo, but it does keep with the tradition of the Winter Celebration Zone.  Nothing to say other than it really encapsulates the holidays.  Oh and as an object leason for why you shouldn't blink when somebody is taking your photo.

Happy Holidays

Dan

Giving Thanks

Like many Americans, I celebrate Thanksgiving and I have all my life.  As a kid it was more about football games and parades than food and family, but as I got older the food and family became at least as important as the football.  Many people I have celebrated the event with in the past are gone, either to the great beyond or to places unknown.  Tonight some photos those that have gone, but are not forgotten.  Why?  Because I am thankful for all moments I had with them.

Where O Where Could I Be

Well America's Finest Blog has taken a bit of a rest, so the members of the Super Committee could concentrate on saving America.  During the rest bit the anniversary of the Gettysburg Address occurred.  The words, "government of the people, by the people, for the people," have never been so out of step in this country.  Maybe the Occupy Movement should take up the line for the cause.  Meanwhile over the weekend the Super Committee, instead of reading the Gettysburg Address went to the weekend talk shows and blamed each other for failure of their committee.  Government of the people, by the people, for the people indeed!  Anyway why this was going on, I was in sunny California with my wife and kid.  It was Cicely's birthday, so deferring to the Super Committee was actually quite handy.  It was a great time for us all, too bad it had to end.  I have learned to enjoy California, thanks to Cicely.  Also Cicely has given me two great gifts, her love and my beautiful son.  I love them both more than words can express.

Dan 

Probably Best Not to Ask Why

Sometimes when you are rummaging through photos in a thrift store or flea market you come photos that leave you for a loss of words.  This is one of them, I will only assume that it is either very warm or somebody didn't dress much.  I prefer the former.  Anyway getting away from the obvious, and the chair, I find the photo montage over the fireplace interesting.  I could do the easy thing and poke fun at this photo, but won't since this photo illustrates the difference between a photo by a greater photographer and the rest of us.  The great photographer, understanding the play between the light and dark, white balance and other tonal qualities could have taken a great photo.  It would be titled, "Ed on a Warm September Day."  It would be seen in great museums and people would stop in front of it and glaze upon it with arms behind their backs.  It would have meaning assigned to it by art historians and upon looking at it we would have an emotional response.  But instead this photo was snapped by somebody that probably loved this guy and upon glazing at it they had some sort of emotional response.  So be kind when coming upon photos such as this in flea markets and antique stores, as you are glazing into the soul of the photographer.

Statehood

On this day, some 122 years ago, Ben Harrison, signed the bill that created Washington State and thus making us the 42nd State in the Union.  Happy birthday Washington State!