This is why I'm not a photographer

My sister lives probably thirty miles from me, as the crow flies. That is, when she isn't snowbirding in Texas. We do see her perhaps a half dozen times a year. Her son lives in McPherson, Kansas; her grandsons, in Oklahoma City.

So I was thrilled to find out the whole crew was going to be visiting her this weekend.

Knowing how difficult it is to get a group picture, especially when children are involved, I snapped away; I took three shots.

The first one isn't bad, really. OK, Ethan has a forced smile, but that's a four-year-old for you. Trouble is, Grandma Debra was fussing over her granddaughter. No problem, because I took a second picture.

Oops. Debra blinked. Hmmm, and here I thought the children would be the problem.

One more time:

Alrighty then. This one's pretty good, although you can see Ethan is growing weary of posing; he'd rather be playing with the toys Great-Grandma keeps for him. Of course, there's the usual red-eye caused by the flash; I suppose my daughter could fix that for me if I asked her, but I'm satisfied with this.

Cliff and I started out to my sister's on the motorcycle, but ten miles from home we ran into rain. So we returned home and got the car. It rained all day long in Kansas City, North. Steadily. Persistently. Drip drip drip.

Since we were a little north anyhow, Cliff decided to go about sixty miles farther north to get a scrap piece of tin for his Oliver tractor. Don't say Cliff never takes me anywhere.

I've visited some of the finest junk yards in the state, over the years.

Here's the piece he went after. He paid good money for that!

We arrived home to find out it had only sprinkled here; I poured two drops out of the rain gauge.

I had planned to go to the local high school football game, but we got home starving, with only a half-hour to go before kickoff. So we scratched that.

I found out in the process of making this entry that the Chrome browser doesn't work well with Blogger. It won't let me cut and paste the photos to move them, and spell-check doesn't work when I'm making a blog entry.