Back in July we had a brief bit of rain. The resulting wetness in my yard gave me a chance to take some macro raindrop images.
I enjoy them, hopefully you will too.
As we sit and shiver through the 45th snow “storm” of the year today, I hope these flowers warm some people up. It is only about 4 weeks from spring and with it flowers and green grass and cherries and rhubarb and raspberries and fire pit Friday Night Supper Clubs and maybe, I’ll actually get to take the drone out for a spin!
Way back in May of 2018 I went to the Boone Area Humane Society’s Dog Obedience School to take some pictures of the class for the Boone Area Humane Society newsletter. A publication of some note.
I have no clue what picture they used, but here are some of the options they were given:
I have a few more Boone Area Humane Society Pictures to publish yet, but not many.
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Here is an update on my goal to eat out for lunch only/less than 20% of the time in 2019.
I am currently 0/13 for the month of February. Combine that with January’s 1/22, I am currently 1/35 for 2019. I am currently at 3.0%. Pretty much crushing my goal of 20%!
I have currently spent $43.21 on lunch groceries in February.
Estimating that it costs me $10 (at the aggregate level) to go out to lunch per day, I have currently saved in the month of February:
Last week I once again had overnight oats. The recipe I used was similar to last week’s recipe, but I made a couple of switches:
Ingredients
1/2 cup uncooked old fashioned oats
2/3 cup skim milk
1/2 cup Greek yogurt
3 teaspoons dried chia seeds
2 tablespoon peanut butter
1 banana
I bought an organic non-GMO peanut butter, that didn’t taste the best. Not bad, but certainly no Jif. But by the end of the week it had grown on me.
If you have any recipes you would like me to try, leave them in the COMMENTS section of this here blog. The recipe needs to be easy. I mean really easy. Plus, relatively healthy. I eat bad enough as it is on weekends.
I’ve still only eaten fast food twice in 2019.
Sometimes I still stare longingly at B-Bop’s through the Computer Mine kitchen window.
Another week with subpar participation despite being perhaps the easiest theme of this set of 52. Weather I’m sure contributed. This week central Iowa is supposed to get two more snowstorms, so we’ll see how many people struggle through the elements for this week’s theme.
But you didn’t come her to listen to me talk all tommyrot about participation rates. You came to see the submissions:
Michelle Haupt
Tamara Peterson
Christopher D. Bennett
Logan Kahler
But enough dwelling on the past. Time to look to the future. We are all interested in the future, for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives. And remember my friend, future events such as these will affect you in the future! This week’s theme:
TRANSPORTATION! What a great theme! But what is a TRANSPORTATION photo? A TRANSPORTATION photo is a photo that involves any aspect of TRANSPORTATION. A car, a train, an airplane, an airport, a bridge, a road, railroad tracks… the list goes on and on. It bottles the mind! Truly mind bottling!
As always, I look forward to seeing your interpretations!
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A MESSAGE FROM THE PHOTOGRAPHY 139 RULES DIVISION
The picture has to be taken the week of the theme. This isn’t a curate your pictures challenge. This is a get your butt off the couch (my personal experience) and put your camera in your hands challenge. Don’t send me a picture of you next to the Eiffel Tower, when I know you were in Iowa all week. I will point out that I have let that slide some in the past. I will not in the future. Since it is literally about the only rule.
Your submission needs to be emailed to bennett@photography139.com by 11 AM on the Monday of the challenge due date. It should be pointed out that this blog auto-publishes at 12:01 on Mondays. So it wouldn’t hurt to get your picture in earlier.
That is it, them’s the rules.
A MESSAGE FROM THE PHOTOGRAPHY 139 SHAMELESS SELF-PROMOTION DIVISION
Nobody showed class, taste, and sophistication this week by signing up for a Photography 139 email subscription. I’ll try and do better next week.
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That’s all I got for today, so if the good Lord’s willin’ and the creek don’t rise, we will commune right here again next Monday. Hopefully it will be a very transportive Monday.
There are 2 types of pictures in the folder called 10-26-08. Some are from Iowa State’s game with Texas A&M. The second type are pictures from a Suffrage Parade re-enactment that took place in Boone in 2008.
Perhaps you don’t know that Boone was (possibly) the site of the first Woman’s Suffrage Parade in the United States. That’s right, sometimes this backward hick town can be darn right progressive.
Here is some information on the event taken from a “Des Moines Register” article printed around the time of the re-enactment:
Boone Lead the Way
If you haven’t heard of this milestone event in women’s rights, you’re not alone.
Suzanne Caswell, who helped organize the re-enactment as a way to celebrate the parade’s 100th anniversary, says for the most part Boone’s marching suffragists have vanished from public consciousness.
Caswell hopes the re-enactment – which will include the dedication of a memorial – changes that.
“I think people need to realize that a small town was able to be in the vanguard of an important movement in American history,” she said.
The gathering
It was just before lunch hour on a windy October day in 1908 when the women gathered in front of the Universalist Church in downtown Boone.Some were eager; others, afraid.
All were growing impatient with a struggle that showed no sign of ending, especially their leader, the Rev. Eleanor Gordon, a “relief minister” at First Unitarian Church in Des Moines and president of the Iowa Equal Suffrage Association.
“Perhaps the dreariest of all the dreary meetings of the summer were the monthly meetings of the Des Moines Political Equality Club,” Gordon recalled later in a first-person account compiled by the Iowa Suffrage Memorial Commission. “We listened to an earnest paper written by an earnest woman, read in an earnest manner, giving good and sufficient reasons why women were entitled to vote. … As I walked slowly home over the hot and dusty pavement, I said to myself, ‘Something must be done and done quickly or we shall learn to hate the whole business.’ ”
Less aggressive mood
Gordon was in the mood for more aggressive action, similar to the stories she was hearing from England, where a group of suffragists had led a march through the rain and mud that drew 3,000 participants.Although Gordon didn’t want to take things quite as far as some of the more militant English leaders, who were waging hunger strikes from their jail cells, she thought it was time to take the movement to the masses.
With Iowa suffragists’ annual convention coming up in late October in Boone, Gordon enlisted the help of Rowena Edson Stevens, president of the Boone Equality Club, in planning a parade for the convention’s last day on Oct. 29.
The only thing not in the women’s control was the blustering wind that October day, which whipped dust into the faces of the marching women – some accounts say there were 30, others 100 – as they followed the band down Seventh Street, the hems of their long skirts brushing the dirt roads.
Accompanied by a few high-profile guests, including the Rev. Dr. Anna Howard Shaw, president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, they carried banners that read “We have knocked on Iowa’s door for 37 years, is it not time it opened” and “Like the daughters of Zelophehad, we ask for our inheritance.”
Many of the marchers were the wives of leading community professionals and Caswell, who has a doctorate in history and has done extensive research on the parade, said accounts written at the time clearly show they were worried about the possible ramifications of their involvement.
What if the townspeople disapproved and stopped going to their husbands’ businesses?
What if their daring cost their husbands their jobs?
“It took a lot of courage to do this,” Caswell said.
The women needn’t have worried. By all accounts, the town of Boone gave them a warm welcome. A large crowd quickly formed, politely cheering the speakers rather than jeering them, as had happened other places.
News of the event made the New York Times (which erroneously reported 600 participants) and the Boston Daily Globe.
First of its kind?
Some historians — mostly Iowans — maintain the Boone event was the first official suffrage parade in the nation but Caswell says you have to define the word “parade” pretty narrowly for that to be true. Female suffragists had marched through the streets that same year in New York City and Oakland, Calif., she said, although without bands or speeches.
After Boone, parades and open-air meetings became staples of the suffrage movement across America. Among the Iowa women who led the way, there was a strong feeling of satisfaction, as if they’d struck a powerful enemy a mortal blow.
One successful parade, though, didn’t change the law.
In the 1923 book “Women Suffrage and Politics,” authors Carrie Chapman Catt and Nettie Rogers Shuler recounted how every two years, a contingent of women would go before the Iowa Legislature to ask for suffrage only to be steamrolled by liquor lobbyists who feared – correctly, as it turned out – that a prohibition on liquor sales would follow if women earned the right to vote.
It wasn’t until the ratification of the 19th Amendment in 1919, 50 years after Iowa suffragists first took up the fight, that they finally were able to celebrate victory. Some of those who marched in Boone that October day, like Mary Jane Coggeshall, a charter member of the Polk County Woman Suffrage Society, died before they were able to cast a ballot.
Here are some pictures from that folder:
By adding these images to the Photography 139 Gallery, I was able to restore the following historic “An Artist’s Notebook” entries to their original glory:
Next Saturday’s walk down memory lane will involve a Senior Night.
I still need to circle back to the Alamo Bowl Trip, but thought I would share more from my project of re-organizing some photos that pre-date the Photography 139 website.
I’m actually going through a big photography re-organization in general. One of the photographers I follow on Instagram recently shared a post about their photography closet and a light went on in my head.
My house has an excess amount of closet for just one person. My bedroom has 2 closets. The office has 2 closets. The guest bedroom has 1 big(ish) closet. My bedroom closets are obviously used for clothes and some miscellaneous stuff. The guest bedroom closet house like 3 shirts that randomly ended up in there, board games, and a bunch of photographs and negatives. One office closet houses retired electronics. Electronics I should just throw away, but just haven’t. If any of you want a VCR and old DVD player, a receiver, or an old CRT television let me know and you can have it. The other office closet is mostly random stuff.
My photography stuff is strung all over the house. I have a big metal cabinet with sliding glass doors in my bedroom that is meant to house all my photography stuff, but that has never really worked. Then I decided to dedicate an old dining room table that is in my living room to store stuff. That definitely hasn’t worked. I’ve decided to steal the photography closet idea from that Instagram photographer.
I’ve decided to make one of the closets in the office the photography equipment closet. The other closet in the office the photograph closet. The guest bedroom closet will become the retired electronics closet, unless I finally am able to get all of that stuff out of my house. Especially before I retire any more electronics. For example, in 2020 I may upgrade the projector in the Union Street Theater to 4K. This will mean that I will also need to upgrade the receiver in the basement and then add a 4K player to the Union Street Theater. Of course, that will mean more retired electronics.
But that is 2020, I need to conquer my 2019 goals first.
Some of this physical reorganization has lead to digital reorganization. Which has lead to this post. Here are some pictures from the Iowa State Cyclones 2005 football season:
These pictures were taken with my very first digital camera. A Minolta Dimage Z2. It was at a point where I wanted to dabble in digital photography but was still really loyal to film.
The Dimage Z2 was a point & shoot digital camera, but a bit on the higher end of the spectrum. I was so broke back then, I couldn’t have imagined buying an actual DSLR.
There are a couple hundred more pictures from that season that you can peruse by clicking on the link below:
Hopefully next Friday I will return to the Alamo Bowl Road Trip.
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This is your reminder that this week’s WEEKLY PHOTO CHALLENGE theme is SELF-PORTRAIT:
A SELF-PORTRAIT is a picture that somebody makes of themselves. Pretty simple and straight forward.
Happy photo harvesting!
Happy Valentine’s Day from Photography 139! I love you all! Except those of you I don’t.
While some like to dismiss Valentine’s Day as a “Hallmark holiday”, they should remember that Hallmark holidays don’t get banned in countries like Pakistan.
I hope your Valentine’s Day was filled with exactly what you wanted from it.
This collection of pictures I took for Boone First United Methodist Church’s Church Directory were taken because the Committee (I feel like I’m in an Orwell novel when I write ‘the Committee’, but if the last few years have taught us anything, it is that Orwell was a bloody optimist) wanted pictures of the choir, the praise band, Doug sermonizing, and of Children’s Time. These were taken on Mother’s Day, so the Children’s Time pictures are actually of a pageant of some kind the kids put on for their mothers.
I don’t actually think that any of these pictures are actually in the directory, but I haven’t studied it to within an inch of its life, like some people.
Have a peek:
If our church looks like a happening place filled with all sorts of hip cats and the kind of place that you would like to check out, then you are correct. You don’t have to stand on ceremony though. Just invite yourself in. As the saying goes, “Walk-ins Welcome!”.
There is a “traditional” service at 9 AM on Sundays. A “contemporary” service at 11:15 AM on Sundays. There are a plethora of other activities sprinkled though out the work that you can pick from once you get plugged in.
There is nothing particularly memorable about the Boone County Fair. It is just your typical rural county, county fair. But it is my rural county and my county fair, so I visit it a few times each year.
Once to participate in the barbecue competition with Baby Got Rack. Another time to see how my photos did in the photography “competition”. Another time to see how the youth I know did on their 4-H projects. Usually we have FNSC at the County Fair. On one of those trips I will take a look around the livestock barns.
Here are some pictures from one of my trips to the Boone County Fair last year:
I do love pigs and cows and goats, but I don’t think I would ever want to own one. Well, maybe a few goats.
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Here is my update on my goal to eat out for lunch at work only 20% of the time in 2019.
Currently I am 0/8 in the month of February. Combine that with my 1/22 in January, I have currently only eaten out for lunch 1 out of 30 possible work lunches. That is a success rate of 3.3%. Pretty much crushing my goal.
I don’t know if that says I’m amazing at crushing my goal or that I’m really unpopular at work and nobody ever asks me to go out for lunch. You can decide.
As far as the money saving aspect…
I have spent $35.13 ($10 of that is chia seeds) on groceries for take to work lunch. Some of that is actually groceries for home use, but not enough to make a big deal out of it.
Estimating that is costs me $10 a meal to eat out for lunch, so far this month I have saved:
Last week I brought overnight oats for lunch. Here is the recipe I used:
Easy, no-cook oatmeal with make-ahead convenience; packed with nutrition to get your day off to a healthy start. Make it in individual mason jars for a perfect serving size and an easy grab-and-go breakfast.
Ingredients
1/4 cup uncooked old fashioned rolled oats
1/3 cup skim milk
1/4 cup low-fat Greek yogurt
1-1/2 teaspoons dried chia seeds
1/4 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 tablespoon raspberry jam, preserves, or spread
1/4 to 1/3 cup raspberries (cut each berry in half), or enough to fill jar
Directions
In a half pint (1 cup) jar, add oats, milk, yogurt, chia seeds, vanilla, and raspberry jam. Put lid on jar and shake until well combined. Remove lid, add raspberries and stir until mixed throughout. Return lid to jar and refrigerate overnight or as long as 2-3 days. Eat chilled.
NOTE: I actually double that recipe for pint jars.
That recipe came from here:
If you have any recipes you would like me to try, leave them in the COMMENTS section of this here blog. The recipe needs to be easy. I mean really easy. Plus, relatively healthy. I eat bad enough as it is on weekends.
But on the positive, I’ve only eaten fast food twice so far this year. Once at a McDonald’s in Manhattan, Kansas. Once at Freddy’s before an Iowa State Women’s basketball game.
Although last week I did find myself staring longingly at B-Bop’s from the kitchen window at the Computer Mine while I was cleaning up my jar from my overnight oats.
I would describe the amount of submissions this for the theme EYE as fair. People might be coming out of the winter doldrums even though winter weather doesn’t seem to be going anywhere for this week. Maybe next week won’t be so bad.
But you didn’t come here to listen to me talk all tommyrot about participation rates. You came to see the submissions:
Stephanie Kim
Stephanie Kim – These mosaics are in the Chambers Street station in Manhattan.
Kim Barker
Christopher D. Bennett
Tamara Peterson
But enough dwelling on the past. Time to look to the future. We are all interested in the future, for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives. And remember my friend, future events such as these will affect you in the future! This week’s theme:
SELF-PORTRAIT! What a great theme! What is a SELF-PORTRAIT? It is a picture of yourself. Sometimes called a selfie, but a selfie and a SELF-PORTRAIT aren’t the same thing. A selfie is a SELF-PORTRAIT, but a SELF-PORTRAIT isn’t necessarily a selfie. A selfie has to be taken on a cell phone to be a selfie. Regardless, take a SELF-PORTRAIT with your cell phone camera, your 35mm camera, your pinhole camera, or your DSLR camera. Doesn’t matter. Just take a SELF-PORTRAIT and submit it.
I look forward to seeing your interpretations!
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A MESSAGE FROM THE PHOTOGRAPHY 139 RULES DIVISION
The picture has to be taken the week of the theme. This isn’t a curate your pictures challenge. This is a get your butt off the couch (my personal experience) and put your camera in your hands challenge. Don’t send me a picture of you next to the Eiffel Tower, when I know you were in Iowa all week. I will point out that I have let that slide some in the past. I will not in the future. Since it is literally about the only rule.
Your submission needs to be emailed to bennett@photography139.com by 11 AM on the Monday of the challenge due date. It should be pointed out that this blog auto-publishes at 12:01 on Mondays. So it wouldn’t hurt to get your picture in earlier.
That is it, them’s the rules.
A MESSAGE FROM THE PHOTOGRAPHY 139 SHAMELESS SELF-PROMOTION DIVISION
Nobody showed class, taste, and sophistication this week by signing up for a Photography 139 email subscription. I’ll try and do better next week.
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That’s all I got for today, so if the good Lord’s willin’ and the creek don’t rise, we will commune right here again next Monday. Hopefully it will be a very self involved Monday.
The pictures in the folder 10-19-08 are from the Iowa State-Nebraska football game in 2008.
One of the head coaches in the game would go on to win a national championship. The other coach… looks like he got exiled to someplace called Youngstown, Ohio.
Looking through these pictures, it does remind that when conference realignment hit the Big 12 and we lost Nebraska to the Big Ten, they are an opponent that I really miss playing. At least in football. No interest in playing them in basketball. It isn’t just because Nebraska slit their own throat by joining the Big Ten by severing recruiting ties with the state of Texas and now are amongst the worst teams in college football and would make an easy yearly W for Matt Campbell and the boys. I legitimately missing playing them and as much as it pains me to say it, I actually miss their fans coming to Jack Trice every other year. Their is nothing sweeter than rubbing a sweet victory in the face of a pompous Nebraska fan. Not even beating Iowa is that sweet and we all know how obnoxious a faction of that fanbase.
I also miss playing Missouri. Particularly in basketball. Their fans don’t travel like Nebraska fans and they aren’t that obnoxious, but it was a regional school with which Iowa State had a decent rivalry. I really enjoyed the 2 year basketball series Iowa State just had with Missouri. Even though both games ended up being blowouts.
Colorado was a traditional Iowa State opponent. They were the last school to join the Big 8 in 1947. Oklahoma State technically was the school to make it the Big 8 after they rejoined the conference in 1958, but let’s not pick nits here.
The point is, I also miss playing Colorado, but not anywhere near as much as I miss playing Nebraska and Missouri.
The other traitors to leave the conference was Texas A&M. I don’t miss playing them at all. Texas A&M is more like a cult than a school. While it is well-documented that I am fascinated by cults, I don’t want them coming into holy ground like Jack Trice Stadium or into the cathedral that i Hilton Coliseum. Ever. Good riddance to the Aggies.
I do like the Big 12’s current lineup of 10 teams. While the name is stupid when there are 10 schools, the Big 12 can’t become the Big 10 because there already is a Big 10, that has 13 schools. 14 if you count Rutgers. Which I do. Because I am a very charitable person.
I think the Big 12 is the only conference that gets it right. I know the other conferences added schools that don’t really belong because they were chasing television markets for television markets. It was a short-sighted pursuit because Americans are cord cutting like crazy. When all the major conference television contracts are up in 5 years, the way that people consume television will be entirely different. The majority of people won’t be watching content on traditional television channels. They will be consuming through streaming services. ESPN, Fox, and CBS won’t be willing to pay the outrageous fees for broadcast rights that they did 4 years ago. They won’t have the subscriber base that they did back then. Instead, services like Twitter, Hulu, and Amazon Prime and services that probably don’t even exist yet will be entering the fray for broadcast rights. They won’t care about size of television markets. They will be interested in content. It will be at this time that the Big Ten will really regret adding a Rutgers and a Maryland.
2 years ago when the Big 12 looked into adding 2 more schools was a glimpse at the future. The television networks actually paid the Big 12 more money to NOT expand.
This doesn’t mean that the Big 12 couldn’t implode in 5 years. It easily could, but I think it won’t. My best guess is that in 5 years the Big 12 expands and adds Arizona and Arizona State.
My second best theory is that conferences are broken up and the Power 5 schools and maybe a couple others are put into geographical districts. Kind of like high school football. At least in football.
But none of that isn’t why I think the Big 12 gets it right. I think they get it right because as a fan of a Big 12 school, I get to watch Iowa State play every single other school in their conference in football. In basketball, Iowa State gets to play a home and road game against every other team in the conference. It is the only conference where the regular season title actually means something. I love that, but I mostly love getting to play everybody in the conference. Instead of, and for example, Iowa only plays Ohio State in football about once every 8 years. That isn’t an exaggeration. Look it up.
That being said, in my dream world, the current lineup of the Big 12 isn’t what I would go with. In my dream world, I would get rid of West Virginia because geographically they just don’t belong. I would be a little bit sad to see them go because I legitimately hate their basketball team and can’t stand their ex-football coach. Their are seeds of a rivalry there. However, they belong in an east coast conference. They belong in the ACC. They certainly belong in the Big Ten more than Rutgers. I’d give them an edge over Maryland as well.
I would also kick out Baylor. Their football programs rape culture is an absolute disgrace. Not only should they have been kicked out of the Big 12, their football program should have been closed down.
Then I would bring back Nebraska and Missouri. This would make a pretty sweet conference:
1. Iowa State
2 Nebraska
3. Missouri
4. Kansas State
5. Kansas
6. Oklahoma
7. Oklahoma State
8. Texas
9. Texas Tech
10. Texas Christian
It actually wouldn’t take too much pressing for me to want to kick out TCU and put Colorado back in. Nothing against TCU, but I don’t like competing against private colleges because they aren’t subject to the same open records policies that public universities are.
All the being said, here are some pictures from the Iowa State-Nebraska game:
I don’t know what the final score of this game was, but I’m sure it wasn’t pretty. The Gene Chizik era at Iowa State ended with 10 straight losses. Most of them were beatings.
By adding these pictures to the Photography 139 Gallery I was able to restore the following historic “An Artist’s Notebook” entry to its original glory:
Next week’s walk down memory lane will involve women fighting for the right to vote. No, really.
