Blog bash
David St. Lawrence’s gathering of area bloggers appears a success as a number showed up and exchanged lots of thoughts and ideas.
David (standing in photo), who is an evangelist when it comes to the joys of blogging, led some of the novices in the group through the byzantine world of blogging with detailed explanations of trackbacks, pings, permalinks and the like.
Others talked technical details and still others discussed reasons for blogging or not blogging or just talked about why they moved to the area.
According to Technorati, there are now more than 30 million blogs out there and the list grows by thousands upon thousands daily. A lot of people, it seems, have a lot to say. Which begs the question: With so many saying, is there anyone left to listen?
Sharks to the left, sharks to the right
Well, not sharks actually but bloggers. Lots of bloggers. David St. Lawrence, the project-manager-to-the-world, organized a meeting of area bloggers at Cafe del Sol today and I’m sitting here in the midst of all these cyber opinion makers, listening to discussions of trackbacks, cascading stylesheets and whatnot.
The end nears
Loki’s end is near now. We know it and yet we don’t want to face it.
Our little brain-damaged kitten is blind and his instability increases with each passing day. He spends more time on his side flailing at the air than on his feet. We have to keep him separated from our other cats.
We’ve increased the medications that control his seizures but he still convulses uncontrollably as I hold him in my arms and try to calm him. His breathing is shallow and difficult.
Yet, in calm times, he purrs and loves like any normal kitten.
The boys and girls of Spring
Spring may finally have arrived with temperatures scheduled to hit 70 this weekend.
Spring also means outdoor sports at Floyd County High School and I got a chance to shoot the boys’ JV baseball and girls’ varsity softball games Monday afternoon.
As seems to be the norm at FCHS, the girls’ team is fast, agressive and high-scoring. The girls teams are the stars of athletics in Floyd this days and they are both fun and challenging to photograph. Time to cinch up the knee braces and get ready for baseball, softball, track and soccer. Gonna be a fun Spring.
Priceless
Inevitably, when I hook up with someone from any of my previous lives, they ask about life here in Floyd County. Even though I’m, for the most part, retired and money is not the issue it once was in our lives, the questions usually center around: “How do you make a living out there in the sticks?â€
My flippant, but true, answer is: “Well, here you have to work twice as long to earn half as much. Fortunately, it only costs about a third as much to live here.â€
Spring?
Woke up this morning to find this outside my bedroom window. This is Spring?
Brothers in the Wind
An entertaining night at Frank and Sally Walker’s Cafe del Sol in Floyd, listening to the traditional and folk interpretations of Brother Wind, a trio that’s now a quartet and a popular act for local music buffs.
Brother Wind offers a lot of oldtime feelgood tunes mixed with some contemporary. Bassist Rusty May recently joined Dave Fason and Michael & Kari Thomas Kovick to round out the group and Kari recently released a CD of her works, recorded at Dave’s Undertoad Studios.
David St. Lawence, who’s becoming a master at upstaging, blogged live from Cafe del Sol Friday night, posting his impressions and photos during the evening’s entertainment by using the cafe’s wi-fi network..
I hope David knows this means war. I used wi-fi extensively while living and working out of Washington. I could shoot an assignment and then duck into a Starbucks or other establishment offering wi-fi to send my photos to the client immediately.
If a wi-fi network wasn’t immediately available, I’d use Verizon’s EVDO high speed wireless network to send material through a cell modem running at 768k.
On my last pro shoot before leaving Washington, I shot using a wi-fi adapter on my Nikon D2H. It sent the imges directly to a trailer where editors selected the photos, cropped them for use and sent them directly to Chicago to make an early evening deadline.
The EVDO modem went into a drawer when we moved to Floyd County but Citizens Telephone is developing a high-speed over the air network in the Blacksburg-Christiansburg-Radford area that will allow 3mb service through a laptop modem. Technology marches on and follows us into the mountains.
Also ran into Todd Christenson, the Virginia official who is ramrodding the $1 million Community Development Block that Floyd may or may not get, depending on whether or not the town can get its act together and put its traditional bickering on a back burner. Todd was taking his brother, who lives in California, on a tour of The Crooked Road, the Virginia music trail that includes Floyd’s music venues. 
The squirrel was toast
Power went out Thursday afternoon. Amy said she heard a loud “bang†and then the backup generator kicked in. She called AEP and they promised to send someone right out.
And a repairman was there within the hour. He found a blown fuse on the transformer and some burnt area that indicated a small animal might have been where it shouldn’t be. A quick search of the area found a charred, and quite dead, squirrel.
You shoulda been there
More often than not, an evening of music at one of Floyd’s growing list of venues turns into a special night as impromptu guests show up on stage. Wednesday night at Oddfellas Cantina was such a night when Cafe del Sol owner Sally Walker joined Oddfellas proprietor Rob Neukirch, bass player Chris Luster and guitarist Bernie Coveney on stage for fun and music.
Sally, owner of Cafe del Sol at the other end of Floyd’s music row, joined the Oddfealls regulars on stage and belted out "Summertime" and even borrowed a guitar to sing a John Prine selection. What makes the evening more interesting is realizing that Sally and Rob own establishments at the two extreme ends of Floyd’s music row. Rob features entertainment four nights a week and at Sunday brunch and Sally’s Friday night music series has joined the nearby Jamboree as a crowd favorite.
This kind of crossover is part of Floyd’s culture. I’ve filmed Rob singing at Sally’s coffee shop on a Friday night and musicians joining each other on stage for impromtu sessions is more common than not. They also run the two most challenging venues for photography. Lighting in both Oddfellas and Cafe del Sol is tricky and shooting with available light means an iso setting of 3200 with associated noise.
Still, somehow, I always managed to get something out of shooting at both locations. Of course I also had to contend with the new guy in town, David St. Lawrence, who keeps showing up at these events and horning in on my action. Good music, good food and good companionship with friends. It was something special. You shoulda been there. 
Just a newspaperman
Our friend David St. Lawrence, a recent transplant from Charlottesville, wrote the other day about life in Floyd County, a stream-of-consciousness ramble in quasi-verse form. Looks like the poets who dot this landscape like ladybugs on rugs are starting to rub off.
Apart from poets, our local writers seem to be bursting out faster than Spring wildflowers: Fred First, the sage of Goose Creek, is about to publish his first book. David is working on his second one.