Big, Beautiful "Tetons"

Maw and I had been planning to try to catch some Autumn colors in Grand Teton National Park with another photo safari. When I found out Ty was going to be in town (for a friend's funeral, sadly), I convinced him to get away and come with me to Idaho/Wyoming for part of the weekend. So after a fun Friday night hangin' out with Greg, Ryan, Tara, and gang, I was off to "hunt" moose and trees in Teton Park with Mr. Ty on Saturday morning.

We stopped in Swan Valley to see if the resident moose was out and about. We almost drive right through when I noticed a very dark moose chillin' in the water near the road, so we stopped for our first pictures of the day. She certainly noticed us, too, 'cause she stopped to look straight at us before turning, peeing in our general direction, and walking away into the brush.





Ty had just flown in that morning with only very little sleep the night before, so the poor guy was beat, as evidenced by his napping. It became such a common sight, I had to take a picture.



We stopped to take a couple of scenery shots along the way. I even tried out my polarizing filter, as shown in the picture of brooding clouds.






I even discovered the hazards of having too many filters/hoods on your lens while shooting a random shot out the car window.



And I found a tree I really liked. Yup. One tree.



Next, we found people gathered around this little pond, and upon stopping and asking, someone informed us there was a moose and her "calf" around the other side.



So Ty and I hopped out and hoofed it through the brush to the far side of the pond, cautiously approaching as quietly and ninja-like as possible. We found mama moose feeding across the far side. Ty thought she was sexy, so he started posing and posturing to attract her attention. [Photo ommitted at subject's request.] She must have noticed, 'cause she did some posing of her own. "Hey sugar, you like what you see?"



As we approached the edge of the water, we found "baby" around the corner to the right, mother moose a little to our left and across the water. Baby looked right at us, and as we learned baby was no small beast, we kept an eye on the "little" dear. Despite its size and the realization that it could pound us into people paste, it had a certain cuteness.




Mother moose did some more posing for me.




As I was engrossed in taking these photos, I heard a voice from an older gentleman across the pond yelling to us with a certain urgency in his voice, "You guys had better get out of there!" Baby was on the move. Baby was even bigger standing up, and he was headed casually but confidently towards us. We politely bowed out and got our hides away from there. The park ranger had come around and congratulated us on our good judgment not to stay and play with the precious little beast.

So we hopped back in the car and headed for the Lodge to take some pics of the valley.





We ate dinner on the balcony there: Wild Game Burgers for Maw and Ty, and Portabella Mushroom veggie sandwich for me. A large wedding party included photographers using cameras that gave me serious lens envy. The park ranger stopped at our table to ask if we'd seen more moose. And I was picked on, tag-teamed by mother and friend. OK, I did some teasing, too. And the sun set as we sat and visited. Naturally, we snapped a couple more shots before heading home. There's something warmly pacifying about watching the sun set over that expansive valley.

Two Short Days in the Emerald City

A couple of weekends ago, I jaunted up to Seattle for a weekend. It was great to smell the northwest air yet again, to be in the Emerald City, to spend some time with family and friends.

But the magic began before I landed Friday night. As the plane descended into Seattle, the clouds were bathed in a warm, orange glow from the setting sun, accentuating both their texture and softness. I thought, "Ah what the @#$%, I'll take some cliche out-the-airplane-window shots." But by the time I'd dug my camera out from under the seat, the warm sun was too low, and all I could capture was a hazy, cold, white and blue vista of some mountain peaks sandwiched between two cloud layers.

Below the two upper layers of clouds but above the bottom layer, a gorgeous sunset came into view beneath the pale cottony scene from which we'd just descended. That sun which had descended too low for the warm orange glow was now in a fiery red blaze on the horizon. I figured they were probably not seeing this from the ground, so I whipped out my camera again just in time to snap a couple of shots before it was gone.



Just after this, we passed through the lowest cloud layer, and sure enough, underneath, Seattle was a drab grey. No surprise there. No sign of the amazing sunset that had everyone in the plane pointing out the window. But the fact that I was descending into my second home countered any disappointment.

When I arrived, Kim picked me up from the airport, and as it turned out, Maw arrived right after I did, and Erik was a bit late on his way to the airport, so Kim picked up her, too, and we met Erik in Factoria at Kung Ho, the best little hole-in-the-wall Chinese place I've eaten at. I picked up a dish of the world's best lemon chicken and some hot and sour soup, and Kim got sweet and sour chicken. Then Kim and I headed south for an evening at Matt & Steph's place.

Joe and Stacey also met up at Matt and Steph's. We spent a typical evening chatting endlessly about politics, religion, and less controversial topics like Dolly Parton, the Cat Man, SNL, Shakespeare and the praiseworthiness of Meet the Robinsons, which led to me confessing I had not yet seen it, despite a friend's recommendation (due in part to the small but entertaining role of Jamie Cullum, a favorite musician of mine). Matt then looked at me and said, "When do you need to go to sleep?" I looked at the clock, which indicated it was somewhere around 1:00 am, if I remember right. I said something like, "Are you proposing...?" Yup. He hopped up and grabbed the DVD and put it in. We watched the whole thing, and I was "home" to Erik & Pam's place by sometime after 3:00 am. I'm nearly 30 and watching Disney flicks on a whim at 1:00 am right after philosophical and political conversation. I like my friends.

The next morning was the baptism. It was a nice service with plenty of tasty refreshments (always a highlight of a good Mormon function). Of course, some refreshments proved more popular than others. The juxtaposition of an empty Oreo box and a bowl full of broccoli proved too good to pass up.



The girls played and ran around the stage in various combinations of colored lights which was, again, too tempting for this somewhat experimental novice photographer to pass up. The results were varied, some of them whimsical and others creepy. These ones count as creepy.



After the baptism, we headed back to the homestead for some chili, some flying chair, and games like hide and seek, which are always good times. We also got into an entertaining ol' Jacobsen debate about UI alum Palin's preparedness for the office of Vice President or even *gulp* President. Also good times. What's especially fun is reminding one of the debaters of how she voted. *wink*

Afterwards, it was off to U-Village to meet up with Justin, where we found a friend of his at work, and during her break we all went to H&M because I was surprised to see one in the Seattle area. Then Clint, Zeke, Justin, and I ate at Bambuza (mmmm, ginger chicken pot) and jetted back to Justin's place for a small get-together. A couple more people came. Then a couple more. Then like 5 more. Wait, small get-together? Justin shrugged and said, "I didn't think they'd all come." I laughed and said it was fine. Oddly, I was in the mood for a good ol' fashioned Mormony game night with lots of people. It was a very fun night of intense Nertzness, hot cookies, and entertaining running charades.

Sunday consisted of church, followed by a very brief visit to Kim and Stacey's new pad, followed by time with the fam at Erik & Pam's, including some serious Blokus action, and then off to the airport to head back to SLC. While I never get to spend quite enough time with everyone I want to spend time with, this visit was one of my favorites in a while. My main regret: I once again failed to take any pics with friends. Next time.

Nakedness and Widely Grinning Beasties

Dream, Part I:

You know those dreams where you're naked and mortified and people are laughing and pointing? Well, that's not what my naked dream was like.

It went something like this: I'm at a recreation center for a swim, and in the locker room, I'm down to my birthday suit, and suddenly, my gym bag is gone, along with all of my clothes. So there I am, buck nekkid, and I grab a frisbee and a basketball to shield the private bits as I walk around the place looking for my clothes. Naturally, the place was a vast maze of hallways and lobbies, so this was no small search. There were a couple of interesting things about my naked quest for clothing:

1) Nobody seemed to give a second thought to the fact that there was a naked guy walking around. I remember thinking this should probably be embarrassing, but it wasn't. I wondered if I was comfortable with it because they were or vice versa. They acted as if this was a regular occurrence, which I concluded it could've been: people undoubtedly often set their clothes down never to find them again simply due to getting lost in the vast maze of a locker room.

2) In my wanderings, I saw the coolest new Olympic sport: padded obstacle water slide. There was a room that was just a huge padded, slanted floor, a giant water slide like something out of American Gladiators, complete with platforms and walls to bounce off of on your way down the "slide", not unlike a giant Plinko board but way cooler. The sport was apparently called Scarping, which I looked up and is apparently a real word.

In the end, I was saved when I was picked up outside by a copy of myself driving my car with a copy of my gym bag in the car. I wondered what I was going to do about having two copies of myself, but for the time, I was just happy to have clothes again.


Dream, Part II:

Next, I was somehow at the zoo with Greg, walking towards the lemurs section (hey, my dream zoo gets to have whatever sections I want), and a dark primate quickly monkeyed across the walkway in front of us. It was almost black, with a stout body and a very broad head and a mouth full of square teeth that traversed almost the entire width of it. It had big, coldly analytical eyes that evaluated us to determine its next move. I thought it was odd it was loose but immediately pulled out my camera and held it up to my eye to take a picture of this cool creature.

Apparently, this was a smart little monkey creature and had, in its time roaming freely, observed zoo visitor behavior to mimic it as needed. Naturally, said dark beasty had learned that when someone holds up a camera, you separate your lips and expose your closed-mouth teeth for them as widely as you can. So no sooner had I brought the camera to my face than he stopped, stood up straight on his hind legs, and briefly held a sterile wide-mouthed "smile" while I took a picture.

Of course I was amused and impressed by this behavior, but the amusement was quickly displaced by the unsettling realization that the monkey beast was analyzing the most stealthy and effective path to me from the side or back. Any time I turned towards it, it would quickly reassess the best way to get to me and make its move.

I didn't know what a dark grinning beasty does to zoo visitors if he reaches them, so I decided to keep him at bay and discovered the best way to do so was to keep taking pictures. Every time I'd lift the camera to my eye, it would stop its strategic maneuvering to dutifully stand and give me the obligatory "grin" in the most eerily bland way. It gave me the willies and made me laugh at the same time. So I just kept taking pictures to keep it posing over and over while I tried to think of another way to escape.

This is how the dream ended, with relief that I was no longer being pursued by a wide-mouthed grinning monkey-creature, no thanks to Greg. He had ditched me. Jerk.

Weird Beings

Tonight at the gym, I was listening to a downloaded lecture from a course on developmental psychology by Allison Gopnik given at Berkeley, and she said something that made me laugh out loud. This was, of course, just a touch awkward, and I quickly pulled my MP3 player out of my pocket and shook my head in amusement as I rewound the clip to replay it in an effort to make it clear something zany had come from my MP3 player and not the voices in my head or the comedy of the awkward person in front of me. It was mostly in the way she said it, but the thought is a beautiful one, nonetheless: she was enumerating the reasons to study child psychology, beginning with a grand evolutionary scheme of things, then the benefit of understanding the developmental patterns we've all been through and identifying how those influenced our own development, and finishing with reason 3 (which she claims to find most compelling): children are weird. They're very strange beings, she says, and they do really weird things. And any scientist knows that the most fascinating thing to study is the thing nobody quite understands. And children fit that bill perfectly.

I totally identified with that: I am often fascinated by what's just out of mental grasp. If it's too likely understood, I rarely bother studying it unless I have to. And while part of me thinks children are actually beautifully simple and easy to understand, another part appreciates that part of their appeal is, in fact, their unpredictability, their random streams of consciousness, their mostly harmless volatility. It certainly keeps life interesting.

Of course, I also wondered why it wasn't enough to say, "It's important because children deserve the best upbringing we can offer them to achieve the most they can and to be loved and be aware of that love and support, and understanding what they are going through can better equip us to help them in that process." But that's awfully mushy and non-compelling for a bunch of heady, cerebrally cutthroat textbook drones, so I guess she appealed to the less altruistic motivations (yes, Isaac, I still believe in altruism). Perhaps she just knows her audience?

In short, kids are weird beings. Delightfully weird. I'm looking forward to the rest of the course.

Messing Their Shorts For Our Entertainment

Scare Tactics? Love it. How did I not know about this show?