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.

More things that make you go "hmmm"

Here's how Cliff dictated his thoughts to me:

"While cruising on my motorcycle with the love of my life, I came across a junkyard filled with the cars of my youth. They were all rusted, sinking into the ground. I knew that once, under some of those hoods, throbbed a magnificent 427 engine, now long-since froze up. The crankshaft had quit turning a long time ago. The memories are as lively as I remember the back seats of those old cars to be. I had to stop and gaze at those old automobiles, if only for a moment, to relive those days. Sad to say, I was never able to own one of the muscle-cars. I spent my life as an economy-vehicle person. But I've never lost the vision."







There are lots of peculiar junk yards out there, folks. Neat ones; sloppy ones.

This one is unique because it's filled with really old cars and trucks. It doesn't look like anybody has touched them for years. Sort of like a "ghost" junk yard. It's somewhere in Lafayette County, Missouri. I persuaded Cliff to pull over and let me take some pictures. Click on them to make them larger and see if you can pick out old models that are familiar to you.

We saw an Edsel and a '59 Chevy and a '57 Chevy; Cliff recognized dozens of cars from his past.

I love me some junk yards

Best entertainment around, watching this team get rid of our scrap iron.

He picks it up off our trailer....


swings it around...

Drops it on the bucket of the bobcat...

These guys are talented!

(and manly)

and away goes our junk iron.

Be still, my beating heart.