Rain Feature

Just when I was resigning myself to the idea that I'd have to go back to my editor with a pretty standard umbrella weather picture, this girl with a super cool transparent umbrella walked by. I guess they designed it so that the dome could come right down over your face and you could still see where you're going. This girl was one of those people who seemed ready made to be featured in the newspaper. It turned out that it was her birthday. No hesitation, she said, "well if its going to rain on my birthday, I guess I'll dance it." How cool is that?!

A Hula Natural

This kid was a total hula natural. He spun 7 hoops at once, and he just picked it up for the first time. And since his name is Jordan, I'm gonna go ahead and say that he's the Jordan of Hula-Hooping.
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Correction: After further research, it has become clear to me that she, and not Jordan, is the true "Jordan of Hula-Hoop."

Peripheral Primaries

Yeah, at this point, thats how I feel about the primaries too.
Or, like this.
But, I'll end on a more hopeful note.

Where's Waldo: Deluxe Photographer Edition

This from tonight's Obama rally in Evansville. Funny story from tonight: about half way through Obama's speech a reporter who was doing video came up to me urgently asking for one of my memory cards, so I gave her one that I hadn't used yet from my pocket, thinking that she had run out of memory. After the speech I went back to the Courier table where my editor was submitting remotely from a laptop. He asked me why there was no Obama pictures on the card that the reporter had retrieved from me. What I thought was a request for a card to use, was actually a request for Obama pictures to update the website with. Whats funny, is that while there certainly wasn't any Obama pictures on the card, there was some left over personal shots, such as my photo collage panorama of sauteed veggies.
A couple weeks back while cooking up some fresh vegetables I couldn't help but notice how pretty the vegetables looked, partly sliced red, green and yellow peppers splayed out across my wooden cutting board, with some already in the black pan (you're just going to have to trust me on that one). So I took like a 40 small macro shots of different portions of the scene, to eventually combine into one large photo collage to put on my wall. The thought of my editor frantically looking for Obama pictures to post online, only to find dozens of arty macro shots of sliced veggies just makes me laugh.

Clowning

As I've mentioned to some of you, this job tosses you into some pretty strange and otherworldly situations. I count bowling with clowns as such a situation. Trying to have an earnest conversation with a clown in character can be a little tricky (not quite as tough as mascots), but engaging in an activity for a couple hours with like 6 clowns is a different matter entirely. So, instead I just did as clowns do, and celebrated with gusto, acted deeply dismayed at small failures, and just generally smiled a lot. I had a great time and even got an honorary clown nose on my way out (I wasn't even going to try to say no to a clowns nose). I got invited to go out to dinner with the group, but unfortunately I was on deadline. Next time, right.

Playground