India series, part 1: With a little help from the Indian Air Force, I begin my India series without actually beginning it

I have spent the past five or six hours working on the first post of my India series, but I have encountered a problem. I promised to get the first post up today and today ends in just ten minutes. I have edited, processed and placed all the pictures in the post, but I am not even half-way through the text.

The text is vexing me a bit.

Once I finish it, I will still have another hour or two ahead of me to attempt to straighten it out a bit. By then, we will be several hours into tomorrow. Worse yet, I will have to get up in just a couple of hours to drive Margie into Anchorage so that she can spend the rest of the week babysitting Lynxton.

I don't want to do that. And I don't want to rush through the remainder of the text. By now, regular readers have become accustomed to this kind of thing from me, anyway. So, to make certain I do get a real post up before this day ends, the Indian Air Force has come to my rescue.

Here is one of their planes, flying over me as I take a walk.

I don't even know what kind of plane it is. I could probably get on Google and find out, but by the time I do it will likely be tomorrow and then I would not have succeeded at getting an India post up today.

So, with a little help from the Indian Air Force, I now begin my India series without actually beginning it.

I should have the real post up at a decent time Tuesday.

I would proof read, but if I do, I won't get this up until tomorrow.

So here goes - I post now, while there is still a minute left in the day.

Series index:

India series, part 1: With a little help from the Indian Air Force, I begin my India series without actually beginning it
Return to India, Part 2: Pain beneath the fan, a sprawling tree, monkey on a string; those I would soon join on a train ride; the garland
Return to India, Part 3: My Facebook friend, Ramz, her mischievous brother, her nationally recognized achiever mom, her dad at the wheel
India series, Part 4: When you overtake an elephant on the highway, be sure to pass on the right; birthday remembrance; In Wasilla, pass "oversize" on the left
Return to India, Part 5: I wander the cold, empty, streets of Bangalore
Return to India, Part 6: A cow, blessed and safe; Suji takes me to lunch, then goes out with Bhanu to do some wedding shopping
Return to India, Part 7-A: A three-snack outing as mother and daughter shop for Suji's wedding
Return to India, Part 7-B: On the painted holiday of the final full moon of winter, Sujitha and Kruthika go back to get a necklace
A spacer only - the Buddha and the glamour poster ad
Return to India, Part 8: henna, to highlight her beauty and deepen the love between bride and groom; a moment on the way to the train
Return to India, Part 9: A prayer and a blessing for Suji; we head for the train; three calls to Manu
Time for another spacer - the green man who showed up at the railroad station
Return to India, Part 10: The train to Pune, part 2: Sujitha by the window as a thin thread of her India flows by
Return to India, Part 11: On the train, part 3: Ganesh Ravi - Photographer: how we discovered his hidden talent
Return to India, Part 12: On the train, part 4: After dark
Return to India, Part 13: train ride, part 5: we click and clatter into Pune, take a perilous walk and step into a world beyond imagination
Return to India, Part 14: The groom his wedding suit; me in mine
Return to India, Part 15: A function to mark the final night Sujitha would spend with her family before the wedding
Return to India, Part 16: Inside the Biradar house: portrait of an elder woman - portrait of a young girl
Return to India, Part 17: We dine in the home of the groom's parents, then join in the Puja of Kalasha
Return to India, Part 18: Slideshow: Sujitha and Manoj at the wedding hall - Engagement and Haldi Night
Return to India, Part 19: The wedding band, in the visual style of Sgt. Pepper's (10 image slide show)
Return to India, Part 20: The groom rides a white horse to the temple, there is dancing in the street; Sujitha and Manoj are wed
Return to India, Part 21 - Benediction: Sujitha takes me to the sacred waters; fish dine - a crow flies

On Easter, Thomas gets out of hand; the boys do a typical Anchorage Easter Egg hunt

Kalib and Jobe had stayed with us since Friday and none of us had any idea of the mischief their parents had been up to while they were with us. It all had to with Thomas the Train. They had found this battery powered, ridable Thomas the Train on Craigslist a couple of weeks ago, had kept quiet about it, but had been arguing inside their own heads the whole time.

Should they get it? Or was it over the top? Spoiling their boys just a little bit too much, maybe?

Well, they got it - and boy, was it fun! At least for Kalib and his cousin Ashley. Jobe was asleep in the car.

Oh yea, cousin Julian, too. That's him falling down.

As train wrecks go, it was grand and glorious.

Now, it is still Easter Sunday and this is the second post I have put up today - even though on Friday I said I would put up no more posts until Monday, and then I would take this blog right back into India.

What was I thinking? Yes, on Monday, I will still take this blog right back into India - but what made me think I could let Easter pass without making a good morning Happy Easter post and an end of the day, kids celebrate post?

Except for Melanie, who is doing a job up on the Arctic Slope, and Caleb, who opted to stay home, watch the Masters golf tournament and do laundry, everyone came and everyone contributed. Rex and Cortney bought themselves a smoker and smoked a ham with cherry tree chips - and I swear, it was the best ham I have ever tasted.

Oh, my goodness! Was it good!

I felt bad for the pig that contributed to our Easter feast with its life, but still it was good.

I wonder why God made the Earth this way?

And does the ressurrection apply to pigs?

How could it not?

Someday, I might meet this pig. It might say, "Bill, I am not very happy with you."

I might respond, "but you nourished me and all my family, pig, and you tasted good, and we thanked you and thanked the Good Lord for you."

"Well, okay," the pig might then say. "I'm resurrected, anyway, so what the hell. Everything is fine."

"Being ressurrected is good, but I sure miss the taste of ham!" I might then add.

"BILL!!!!" the resurrected pig might then squeal.

Of course, if it turns out that reincarnation is the real deal, then I might be the pig next time, and the ham might be the man. That would be karma. Sooner or later, though, we would get it right and we would both be happy.

I photographed everybody who came for dinner, from the babies Lynxton and his beautiful cousin Arial - the youngest in the family right now - on up to Margie. But I still have a lot to do and I can't let this post get too long, so I am restricting it to the Easter activities of the children, beginning with the arrival of the big Thomas the Train.

Maybe I will squeeze a couple of the others in this week, somewhere between India posts - at least Lynxton and Arial.

Then I move to the Easter egg hunt. After his Uncle Anthony (Ants) hid the eggs in the nearby park, Kalib slid down the snow bank on his butt and then led the way to the hunt. The first Thomas picture and all the egg hunt images were done with my iPhone, by the way - not because I was following Richard Murphy's example, but because the battery on my 7D went dead.

Cousin Julian heads out in search of eggs, just ahead of Kalib and Jobe. That's Charlie's lens. He photographed the action, too, and already has images up on Facebook - including one with me.

Ashley and Kalib search for eggs at the teeter totter - finally beginning to emerge after Anchorage's snowiest winter on record - 135 inches so far, undoubtedly with more to come.

Julian searches for eggs on the slide. I thought sure he would spot and grab this one, but he didn't. So I did. And I ate it, right there on the spot.

I JOKES! I JOKES! I JOKES!

What? You think I steal candy from babies?

Crimeny. Don't take everything I say so seriously!

Ashley finds an egg. I took it away from him and ate it right there, on the spot. It was really good, but it needed pepper. At first, it needed salt, too, but I turned Ashley upside down and sprinkled his tears on the egg and that was salt enough.

Jobe with his eggs.

It was the kind of day that turns snow into water. After hoarding a good supply of eggs, Jobe wandered into a puddle.

After awhile, he got out of the puddle. Then he dropped an egg into the puddle. "Ohhhh noooo!" he said.

Jobe does not yet have a big vocabulary, but he's got "ohhhhhh noooooo!" down pretty good.

As Ants looks on, Lavina and the boys frolic in the puddle.

Happy Easter! - He says as he shoos away a raging Tequila

I had said I would not post again until tomorrow, when I plan to launch my India series (a huge task that has overwhelmed me and feels absolutely impossible - but I must do it). Yet, to just leave my blog sitting dormant - on Easter Sunday - is bugging me.

So... happy Easter, readers! And if Easter is not a holiday in your custom, Happy Sunday! And if it is already Monday in your time zone - Happy Monday!

And if you stumble across this post long after this Easter has faded into the past - perhaps on November 19, 3424 - well, happy whatever day it is. And if this is one of those days that you cannot muster a shred of happiness no matter what - see if you can at least muster a little smile for Tequila. Poor girl! She always tries to act tough - every time I see her - and I never believe her.

For all her feigned bluster, she is just a little puppy dog at heart.

I bet she scares some walkers - especially if she barks at little kid walkers like this - but she doesn't scare me.

One DOZEN studies of ONE iPhone image of RICHARD MURPHY - inspired by RICHARD MURPHY / INDIA looms

Yesterday, I attended the monthly luncheon of the Alaska Professional Communicators in Anchorage, featuring Richard Murphy, who spoke on the theme of Personal Photojournalism. Richard is the 2012 Atwood Chair of Journalism at the University of Alaska, Anchorage, and the former photo editor of the Anchorage Daily News. 

In 1989, Richard and his staff of Daily News photojournalists won a Pulitzer Prize for their coverage of the social changes faced by Alaska Natives and later was nominated for another. In 2010 and 2011, Richard served as a nominating juror for the Pulitzer Prize.

In addition to photojournalism, Richard is also widely recognized as a fine, fine art photographer. In addition to his skill with 35 mm film and digital cameras, he often works with a large-format view camera.

Now, he has turned to his cell phone - I believe an iPhone, but I arrived a bit late and he kept referring to it only as his "cell phone." I talked to him afterward and I meant to ask, but I forgot. The cell phone has been liberating, Richard says. It gave him a chance to see everything in a new way - to be unobtrusive and, most importantly of all, to have fun.

He took every image that he showed us with his cell phone - from still lifes of flowers and weathered doors, to action shots at a wedding and a bit of street photography in Denver. I sometimes fall back on my iPhone - and, despite sometimes blurry pictures, have been pleased with the results.

I must say that Richard has taken his cell phone photography to a higher level. I was impressed. In almost all the slides he showed us, he had converted the image to black and white, or had toned it or manipulated the color in some way. 

I had a DSLR with me, but, given the circumstance, I felt it wrong to shoot with anything but my iPhone. For most of my career, I was a black and white photographer. When I went digital, it was my intent to convert all my images to black and white - but technology beat me and I almost always keep them color.

Oftentimes, even in the course of putting up this blog, I produce a picture I think would look much better in black and white than color. Sometimes, the colors just bother me. Even so, because I shot them in color, I tend to leave them color. When I process my photos, my goal is almost always to render them as close to what my eye saw as possible.

This will remain my goal, but Richard got me to thinking there is no good reason not to sometimes take a natural black and white photo and render it - black and white. Or just to sometimes play around and see what happens. This time, I decided just to play around with this one iPhone image and see what happened.

In his long photojournalism career, Richard said he had seen enough images of violence, of human depravity and inhumanity toward humans. He argued personal photojournalism is every bit as important - maybe more. In disasters, the first thing people look for when they return to their shattered, flooded, or burned homes is their personal photographs.

He urged photojournalists to cover their own lives, their own families, their neighborhoods - which is exactly what I am trying to do in this blog - my search for community home and family. I am going to keep it up, too. I need to find a way to finance and pay for it, but even if I don't, even if it wipes me out, I will keep at it.

Part of my family, my home, my community - my heart and spirit - is in India. I have what to me is an important story to tell from my last trip there. I will not post over the weekend. I need to reboot this blog a bit, put in a mechanism to at least begin to try to generate revenue. I need to begin to pull my images together, my thoughts together. This blog will reappear on Monday - in India.

That's Oscar talking to Richard - Oscar Avellaneda, who once pedalled his bicycle from Anchorage to the southern Mexican border town of Tapachula.

On April 11, Richard Murphy will present The Atwood Lecture: Professional Photojournalism to Personal Photojournalism, or how my cell phone set me free at building SSB, UAA Campus at 6:30 PM. There will be a reception at 5:30 PM.

Another short post: Kalib witnesses a train wreck; big brother - little brother

This morning, I discovered that there had been a train wreck in the living room and Kalib had witnessed it. Or did he cause it?

A bit later - big brother, little brother.

Little brother.