I had to turn down Jobe's generous offer of chips

We have just arrived home after finishing off our most expensive meal of the year. Grand total: $19,289.42. It'll take me 92 years to pay this off. When we got home we found not just a toddler, but his two older brothers and his parents. Ever since Caleb started working for Frito Lay, there has been an overabundance of outdated yet still good chips around the house. Jobe had a bag. "Want some, grandpa?" he asked. I had to turn him down. My tummy feels kind of queasy.

In case anyone is wondering, those dark marks on his arm are Alaska Railroad tattoos from our Saturday train/fair excursion.

I was brave, but Margie was afraid of the Ferris wheel.

Those two shot up like they were headed to the moon. "No!" I screamed. I won't go on this ride! Too dangerous! Why don't we just go try the Ferris wheel?" A look of fear overcame Margie. "Ferris wheel? No way! Ferris wheels scare me to death." Well, we are both full so I guess we will just go home. I think we might find a toddler there, waiting for us.

It looked like it could be scary

I thought we should go on at least one ride. "Let's try this one!" Margie suggested. "Well, let me watch one first." I said. "I want to see how it works. I don't want to subject you to undue danger."

Brief analysis: the multiple failures and little successes of yesterday's attempt to live-blog the fair and the train ride to it

First, I must admit my failures yesterday greatly outnumbered my little successes, with both success and failure illustrated by this image of Kalib headed toward the super slide. I knew from the outset it would be a challenge to get my iPhone through the day without the battery going dead. Before I started this whole iPhone/Instagram thing, if I began the day with a full battery charge the phone would still have decent charge on it come bed time, when I always plug it back in again.

If I use the iPhone camera with Instagram even a little bit, I always need a second charge. If I use if often, I might have to charge it three times a day; perhaps four. Still, I thought by being careful and turning the phone off for brief periods of time, I could get the essence of the train ride blogged and then do the same at the fair.

Maybe I could have done better than I did, but the on/off button at the top of my iPhone has become defective. It can take many, many, tries and several minutes each time I try to turn the phone off or on, or even to put the screen to sleep to save battery power while the phone is on.

So what kept happening was that I would I struggle for several minutes to turn the phone off, then, maybe just minutes later, would see a picture I really wanted to take, so I would struggle and struggle to get the phone turned back on again. When finally it would turn on, it would take awhile to recycle and get back to where I could activate the camera again, but by then the picture would, of course, be gone. This cost me many pictures yesterday - and each time it happened, it drained that much more of my battery power, most often without my having obtained even a single picture to show for it.

During the train ride, we passed through areas of varying 4G strength. We never lost the signal altogether, but there were several stretches where the signal was not strong enough to complete one or the other of my posts. I say "one or the other," because I posted everything twice - first, on Instagram, because that is where I make the file that I then put on this blog.

So, I would go through the whole process of Instagram, then, having drained my battery that much further, the Instagram would it fail to post. So I would have to redo it - sometimes two or three times - before finally it would take. I have discovered I need a stronger signal to post to this blog than to Instagram, so, even after I had succeeded in doing the Instagram, it could take a few more tries to post to this blog. The drain on my battery would be huge - in at least one case, a full 10 percent.

This greatly limited how many pictures I could take and how many I could post.

Worse yet, the iPhone Squarespace App has a TERRIBLE flaw. Sometimes, it will drop the picture and just post the words - especially if I have edited the words much at all. If I have gotten them right the first time and do no editing, then it seems the picture always posts as it should, but sometimes a text edit can knock the picture right out of the post. I discovered this flaw when I went to Nuiqsut, so I try to always double-check that the photo is still attached when I launch the post and then to triple check in my browser once it is posted. But this takes time and drains battery power.

So, while I did my best to double check that the photo had not been dislodged before posting and if it had been to reattach it, I took my chances and quit doing the browser check - it just consumed too much battery power.

And so, after I returned home, got some sleep and got up, I was horrifed to see several picture-less posts. Those posts made no sense with just words and no pictures. Jobe corny? What does that mean if the viewer cannot see the cob of corn?

As to the post this picture goes with, the conductor taking Jobe's ticket, it was missing altogether on this blog, but was there in Instagram. This must be my fault. I must have done the Instagram, then immediately tried for another picture and then forgot to come back and post it here. This left a big hole in the description of our journey. I have now placed this picture with the original words in proper sequence, as well as here.

Then there is the matter of entering text itself. This also proved costly in terms of time and battery power. I can enter text either by typing on Instagram's tiny, tiny, vertical keyboard or I can dictate. It takes both a strong signal and battery power to dictate. If the dictation makes a mistake, or several mistakes, then correcting those mistakes can wind up taking longer than if I had just done it by thumb. Worse yet, I did not carry reading glasses with me and so all the characters were hard to read. I could not distinguish a comma from a period, etc.

So I wound up with even more errors and gaps than usual. 

The very worst thing, though, is that I just missed any kind of picture of the bubbles altogether, because they happened while my phone was getting partially recharged by solar power. I explained this last night and I don't want to explain it again, but, those boys were firing those bubbles so rapidly and in such overwhelming numbers, at anything and anybody. The light of the sun about to set was beautiful - perfect. I believe that was the best potential picture of the day.

And then all the bubbles stopped right when I got back with my partially recharged phone.

Still, despite all the failure, the day was a success. I got to spend it with grandkids, my son and daughter-in-law. Time spent with them always seems to be good time. As for pictures and stories, I missed a whole more than I got, especially of the fair, but maybe what I got is enough. Too much happens in life, and it flows past way too quickly for even the most prolific of us to capture more than a glimpse of it.

As to the top picture of Kalib headed toward the super slide, taken just before our brief excursion into the carnival rides, followed by our departure:

The success: just that I got it at all. And this is one of those images that is definitely better in full, horizontal, frame than in the Instagram square. In past years, this slide was the only "ride" either of the boys had ever been on. Between them, last night they may have gone on a total of only three rides and I may have been able to get a pic of only one of those rides, but for them just to ride was a graduation. Afterward, they wanted to go back to the slide and slip down it again this year, but the train was whistling impatiently. We had to leave, board and go.

The failure: I knew I would likely not have enough battery power left to post this and the shot of Kalib and his mom on the carnival ride and then still take a picture in the return train and post it. It had to be one or the other. So I chose the carnival ride.

Yesterday, I could not take the time or spare the battery power required to add categories and tags, so I just left them off. I am going to make a master category to link to every railroad/fair post I put up. 

It will be:

Alaska Railroad/State Fair

I will add it to this entry on posting and then attach to the others when energy and time permits.

I take a short hiatus from my hiatus to take Margie to the fair, where a gigantic duckling steals her corn

This will be a very short hiatus from my hiatus. As regular readers know, I have been doing this blog exclusively with my iPhone since I went into surgery June 29. Just before my surgery, I received a gift of a Ricoh GR Digital pocket camera from my friend, the very fine photographer Zun Lee, who I met at David Alan Harvey's Brooklyn loft almost a full year ago. Zun had recently upgraded his pocket camera to the latest Ricoh GR and he wanted me to have something better than my iPhone camera to document my surgical and recovery experience.

So Zun sent me the Ricoh - and I went to the hospital intending to use it. I took all kinds of things to the hospital with me... the Ricoh, my iPhone, my iPad, my laptop computer, a card reader... I went into surgery thinking that within hours of coming out I would be shooting photos on the Ricoh, downloading them into my laptop, processing them in Lightroom and Photoshop and then, using the laptop, uploading, resizing and thumbnailing them through my laptop into my blog.

But... after surgery, I found myself not nearly so lively as I had anticipated. I realized too that I could take a picture with my iPhone and then make my blog right from my iPhone - a much quicker and easier process, accomplished within maybe 10 - 20 percent of the time. So I did, thinking that in a few days, as my strength began to come back, I would start shooting with the Ricoh and then doing all the things described above.

But... it was so much easier to stick with the iPhone that I did. And then, as I progressed, went up and down, I realized that sooner or later, given the absolute absurdity of our national health care debate and the fact that our US health care ?system? is ruining the lives of so many people unnecessairly, sometime I might want to put together a story about my own experience and so I decided I should keep shooting on the iPhone so that all the photos would have the same basic technical look - or palette.

But when Margie and I headed to the fair, I decided it was time to give the Ricoh a try.

So here we are, preparing to park, me shooting with the Ricoh. The fee was $5.00, so we had change coming.

I don't know what it cost to get into the fair. Melanie gave us tickets, so it cost us nothing.

Right after we entered, I saw Smokey standing there, so I shot an image.

Just beyond Smokey, I saw this girl with "Fair Hair" descend this climbing pole by the quick method, so I shot again.

Just beyond the descending girl, I saw "The Guesser." You pay him a modest fee and then if he correctly guesses something like your weight, your age, the month you were born, he gets to keep your money and you get nothing, other than the satisfication of knowing you have contributed to the well-being of another human being.

If he gets it wrong, then you get a little prize, like the ones in the background. I was going to have him guess the month I was born, but I was pretty sure he would get it wrong and I would then have to carry a prize around for the rest of the fair. I decided to wait until we left and then have him guess so I could carry my prize directly to the car, but when we left, I forgot. I feel really bad about that.

After I shot The Guesser, it suddenly occured to me that we had been inside the fairgrounds for about five minutes, I had shot four scenes, we had advanced only a short distance beyond the gate I could see that Margie was hungry and if I kept doing this, we would move through the fair like two snails and would nearly starve. 

Afterwards, I would have a whole bunch of images to edit and process. I did not want to have a whole bunch of images to edit and process. It would take too much time. I wanted to eat. But first, before we could eat anything, we had to walk the entire fairgrounds so that we would know what the offerings were... even though we already knew they would pretty much be the same as last year.

So I put the Ricoh in my pocket where I could not take pictures with it and we walked the fairgrounds.

Then we decided to begin our dinining experience with a cob of corn each.

This lady is handing our corn to Margie.

Before Margie could take even a single bite of her corn, this giant duckling dipped down its head and with one swipe, ripped out all the kernals along this streak and consumed them himself. We got out of there, fast.

We ate lots more, too... fritters, hot dogs, french fries, pretzels... good healthy stuff like that. Thank goodness I finally got a check the day before - big enough to cover all of August's unpaid normal bills (not counting medical - geez! Medical!) allow us to eat at the Fair and get a start on September.

Damn! This corn was good!

Here are people taking a ride, and walking about. I decided I should try to get Margie on a ride. I knew she would not go for this one and, given what I have been through and the fact that I still have some healing left to do, was not quite certain I should, either.

I suggested we ride the ferris wheel. "No," Margie said. She didn't want to.

I then decided I should go ahead and ride the ferris wheel anyway, by myself, if for no other reason than to rise above the crowd and get a picture from up there. There were two ferris wheels. I thought the other one might provide the better view, so I took it instead. Margie stayed on the ground.

These two didn't.

There were holes in the foot basin of the gondola and I noticed I could see other riders flash by on the other side. I decided to see if I could get a two-hole shot showing people in different gondolas through different holes.

It was a bit challenging and there was a bit of glare on the Ricoh LCD screen, so I could see no details of expression or movement of the people passing by on the other side of the holes. I wondered if they could see I was shooting through the holes? Sure enough, they could.

The scene from on high. It started to rain after I got back on the ground, but we took our time leaving. That was when we bought our pretzels, with hot, melted, cheese to dip them in. We always buy the pretzels last. Damn good - just damn good!

I hate to say it, but these pretzels are better than the pretzels one can by from the vendors on the streets of Manhattan. I hate so say it because Manhattan pretzels used to be the best pretzels in the world and then someone got the great idea to replace those wonderful, New York-exclusive pretzels with mass produced pretzels of the commercial "super pretzel" variety that one can buy in a supermarket.

Way to go, New York. You had something so wonderful and now it has been beat by the pretzels at the Alaska state fair! I should have photographed our pretzels, but I got more interested in eating mine.

By the time we got into the car, we were a bit chilled. The chill lasted all the way home, where Margie turned on the electric heaters. I made myself comfortable on the recliner that got me through this recent ordeal. I spread a small but cozy blanket across my legs and feet and another over my torso and shoulders.

Jim jumped up an settled down on my legs. Now I was nice and warm; comfy and cozy. I closed my eyes and dozed off.

It was wonderful.