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.