Here’s ours:
And here’s ours when I do a little flick of the wrist while clicking on the shutter.
(I don’t need no holiday for an excuse to play with my toys!)
Everybody please be happy, be safe, kiss those who should be kissed, hug those who should be hugged, and take 10 deep breaths in the name of the Giving, Generous and Forgiving Spirit of Christmas.
Anybody can do a Greatest Hits of 2006 post; I’m doing a Greatest Misses of 2006. That is, pictures that were almost good enough to post in the past year but for some reason didn’t make the final cut. Let’s check ’em out, month by month:
January
Along the trial to Murietta Falls on the Ohlone Wilderness Trail from Lake Del Valle in Livermore. This is a section near the top of the Big Burn where many impressive old oaks decorate the hillside.
February
A self-portrait taken after a night spent camping on the snow at Carson Pass in the Sierra. I was in desperate need of a haircut at the time, as the chilly mountain breezes attested.
March
Snow coats the hilltops in our neighborhood after a nasty cold front came through. This is Monument Peak at Ed Levin County Park.
April
A foggy morning at Henry Coe State Park, where I had just spent the night sleeping on the ground as part of a lightweight-backpacking course.
May
Melissa’s mom was in town so we took a drive down to the coast. This is a pile of driftwood on the beach next to California Highway One between Half Moon Bay and Santa Cruz.
June
The sky turns interesting colors as night falls near Penner Lake during an overnight backpacking trip to Tahoe National Forest.
July
Rebecca of calipidder.com and backpackgeartest.org, next to a blazing fire her husband built using wood he chopped with a very large knife, during an overnight backpacking trip to Emigrant Wilderness.
August
A stop near Carson Pass in the Sierra, where Melissa and I went for a road trip to warm up for the big miles ahead in our southern Utah vacation.
September
A rocky mount near the entrance to Zion Canyon at Zion National Park, just down the road from a bed & breakfast where we slept for a week between day trips to see all the scenic splendor of the region.
October
Pacific Crest Trail in the Shasta-Trinity National Forest, where a bunch of outdoor bloggers got together for a long weekend.
November
Leaves turn at Castle Rock State Park in the Santa Cruz Mountains.
December
Mission Peak along the Horse Heaven Trail, looking out over the San Francisco Bay.
Pretty good year if I do say so.
Something different this week: post-worthy pictures that’ve been taking up hard drive space unseen, some of them for several years.
To wit, this picture of my brother’s daughter Hannah, at my Mom’s place on Christmas Day 1998:
I had just bought my first digital camera a few months before so this counts as one of the first digital pictures I ever took. Kids this cute can overcome extraordinary expressions of photographic ineptitude.
The rest of this week’s pictures are quite a bit newer: late 2003 to late 2005. I think a large number of the pictures I took with my old camera got either erased or misplaced, an error for which ensuing generations of humans will be genuinely thankful.
Here’s a picture of one of our late great cats, Eldridge, who thoughtfully posed with a pumpkin for Halloween in October of 2003.
I’ve got about a dozen other shots of him not posing. He does have the expression which says we oughta be damn grateful for his cooperation.
Next up, a tail light from an early ’50s Cadillac, seen at an antique-car show in Pleasanton in March 2004.
Caddy tail fins got to be so much more expressive as the decade wore on.
Here’s a shot from one of my first walks on dirt, at Ed Levin County Park in the summer of 2004:
I wouldn’t have much of a portfolio if it weren’t for California’s golden hills and blue skies.
If you ever walk through downtown San Jose, this is a sight you’ll see every 20 minutes or so:
These jets fly incredibly close to the buildings downtown. I’m guessing the people flying in on the jets wave to their co-workers in their cubicles. This one’s from September of 2004.
Falling water at Uvas Canyon County Park in January 2005.
Uvas Canyon is the best place in Santa Clara County to see waterfalls.
Something I’m also thankful for: expressive, though expired, trees.
This one’s at Del Valle Regional Park in Livermore, early spring 2005.
Here’s a shot along the trail at Pinnacles National Monument later in the spring of 2005:
The Pinnacles are an impressive rock formation, but there’s quite a bit of non-rock things to see. The wildflowers go crazy every spring.
Next up: The beach at Andrew Molera State Park in Big Sur, south of Carmel, where I camped out in the summer of 2005.
The ocean’s blue is sublime down this way.
Speaking of sublime, it’s an apt adjective for the view of San Francisco Bay from Angel Island State Park, seen here in the summer of 2005.
While we’re on the subject of San Francisco, here’s a shot of the downtown as seen through a chain-link fence on a crystal-clear late-autumn day in the fall of 2005.
I couldn’t help thinking this must be what the Financial District always looks like to the homeless who sleep on the city’s sidewalks.
Plucking these pix from the archives was no small task — I had to give myself credit for having already posted most of the good ones.
A writer and an editor are out camping. A large pot of stew is cooking over the fire. Writer comes up to campfire and is distressed to find the editor peeing in the stew.
“Making it better,” the editor replies.
A priceless quote:
“I deplore the putrid state into which our newspapers have passed, and the malignity, the vulgarity and the mendacious spirit of those who write them.”
Thomas Jefferson, 1807
I think I can say I have officially joined the Wave of the Future, which means:
Somebody at work mentioned a theory on why my employer decided to tell everybody we were subject to layoff rather than just those whose jobs were actually at risk: to ensure everybody felt the anxiety, to increase the likelihood that our union would accept these concessions. A hard-nosed tactic, for sure.
A lot of this sounds like a kick in the teeth — and I’ll definitely be buying fewer camping toys in the near future — but I’m working in a troubled industry: we know there will always be a demand for news, but these days we’re deeply unsure how to turn a buck tapping that demand. Until we figure that out there will probably be more demands for concessions, more anxiety over lost jobs, more of the bosses playing hardball. And more newsies sucking it up. Not like we’ve got much choice: The paper going broke is not useful to any of us.
Sometimes I wonder how much good a union is doing me, personally. Unions do help slackers keep their jobs and make it harder for the bosses to reward the workhorses. But I learned one thing on this latest contract negotiation: in tough times people have to band together to protect their interests.
Our company had a laundry list of far harsher concessions it could have imposed at will on a non-union shop. Management abandoned those ideas in the interest of getting what it needed most: us to pony up more of the cost of health care. Frankly, this was only fair.
Perhaps the greatest concession on the company’s part was accepting our union’s right to have a say in who does what jobs. Companies don’t hate unions because they demand better wages and benefits: they hate unions because unions challenge their power to do as they damn well please. Perfectly understandable from a manager’s standpoint.
In the current environment there is simply no way that I could’ve negotiated a better deal than the one our union negotiated. One copy editor has one copy editor’s sway. Which ain’t much.
Sure, unions are a pain in the ass, but sometimes they save your ass.
Ten a.m. passed without incident — no Phone Call of Doom to report.
More than a dozen of my colleagues presumably did get The Call, though, so I’m not exactly dancing in the streets at this turn of events.
I’m off to work, where the office will no doubt compare favorably to a funeral parlor.
Our union and the paper have reached a tentative agreement on a new contract, with the company cutting its layoff number by more than half. The threat of layoffs was designed to extract concessions from the Guild, which appears to have succeeded. The company had a list of draconian concessions that it eventually abandoned in the interest of getting us to agree to take on more of the cost of our health insurance premiums.
I won’t breathe totally easily till 10 a.m. tomorrow but the statistical odds of me being among those shown the door have been reduced.
Ed, my stepdad in the Peoria area (downstate from Chicago) and my mom have a place in the country with a nice paved driveway. He even has one of those mini-bulldozers to plow his drive. But when the big snows come, the county snowplows leave a ridge of frozen, filthy snow that has the folks locked on their land for now.
The tracks in the snow here are as far as the ol’ Jeep Grand Cherokee could make it, apparently.
Times are tough in the newspaper biz these days, and perhaps none tougher than at the good ol’ Mercury News, which has nevertheless seen fit to overlook my many character flaws and keep me on staff for seven-plus years because I can crank out headlines quickly and alertly redirect misplaced commas to their proper homes.
Come Tuesday the newspaper will have its chance to rectify this oversight. A couple months back the paper’s execs told us that about 15 percent of the newsroom staff will be given their walking papers in December. Tuesday’s the day of reckoning. Our instructions are to sit by the phone between 8 and 10 a.m. and if the phone call doesn’t come, we should report to work as scheduled. If it does come, we’re free at last to pursue intriguing careers in fast food and long-haul trucking.
I’d very much like to stay on at the ol’ Mercury News, and not only because keeping this job is so much easier than finding another one. I’ve worked with excellent people, helped cover important stories, learned a lot about the Bay Area by being in a news room when big news breaks. I’ve seen people respond with incredible calm and professionalism in the midst of computer system meltdowns. I’ve seen people keep their sense of humor when it seems like the world’s going down the drain. (In our biz, that’s pretty much every edition. World not going down the drain is not news, you understand.)
So that’s where I stand now. If I have time on Tuesday I’ll post an update (though you must understand what it means to have time to update one’s blog when one should be leaving for the office).
