As you may have noticed, photography has become my latest obsession. I've been doing a ton of reading on photographic technique and composition, submitting photos to online communities for critique and publication (so far, none have been up to snuff), and taking a ton of pictures. The question that's come to my mind a lot, though, has been "How long will this last?"

I tend to be very single-minded in terms of what I'm passionate about. A year or two ago, all I wanted to do was play poker, and while I still enjoy it, both my interest and my skill have waned considerably since Jason was born. Before that, it was web design. Before that, movies. All of these things still have a place in my heart, but in terms of active pursuits, I've moved on.

Will I stick with photography? It's hard to say. Based on my track record with hobbies, it looks like I'll probably cool again some time in the next four or five years. On the other hand, although I've only recently taken it up again, I've had an interest in photography since I started high school, which is coming up on 17 years ago now. Too, as long as I have kids in the house, I'll probably have at least a little motivation to document their time with me.

The fact that my skill seems to be growing pretty rapidly (in my somewhat self-congratulatory opinion) helps, too. It's gratifying to be able to see the progress in my work over a very short time. On the other hand, it's also been frustrating since I can see how much more I have to learn. Some of the critiques I've gotten have been difficult to take, even though they were both spot-on and quite civilly delivered. I know: this is how you grow, you have to start somewhere, etc. And I do enjoy the process. But sometimes the gap between where I am and where I want to be seems insurmountable.

Usually around that point I have to remind myself to stop being so melodramatic and self-absorbed.

I think I had a point somewhere in there that I was swirling toward, but I seem to have lost the track. Anyway, here are my favorites from the trip home this past weekend:

Treacherous Footing

Overlooked

Garden Walk

Persistence

Contrast

And the rest of the set:

We drove up to the Monterey Peninsula for the holiday weekend in order to visit family. As with any long car trip (this one took about 9 hours, including stops), we tried to schedule things to maximize Jason's sleeping time. We also mentally prepared ourselves for his inevitable crankiness. But, as it turned out, the ride went pretty smoothly in both directions.

In fact, Jason was surprisingly playful on the drive up. He'd do something cute, then laugh and declare "Jay Jay funny!" My favorite was when he started playing "peek-a-boo" with us. It went pretty normally at first--he'd lift his blanket over his head and Juliette or I would gasp in mock confusion. "Where'd Jason go?" we'd ask incredulously. Then down the blanket would come, and we'd start in surprise. "There he is!" we'd shout, and Jason would laugh uproariously.

This time, though, the hilarity of it all became too much for Jason to keep it together, and he'd start giggling while he was still under the blanket. He started prompting us when it was time to play, too. "Wheh dih Jay Jay go?" we'd hear, followed by a conspiratorial titter, and, sure enough, when we looked back he was covered.

"Oh no!" we'd exclaim. "Is Jason gone?"

A muffled "Yeah!" would sound from under the blanket.

"Is he in the car?" we'd ask.

"No!" he'd laugh.

Finally, he couldn't keep it in anymore, and he'd burst out from under the blanket with a happy cry.

He kept that up for a good half hour, all the while giggling at how he'd pulled one over on his old mom and dad.

Juliette, Jason, and I were in Virginia this past week, visiting my mom and stepdad. Now, I could go ahead and tell you all the details of what we did, where we went, and what we ate. (I swear I gained five pounds on this trip.) I'm told, though, that a picture is worth a thousand words, and I think that this one nicely sums up the whole experience:

What I love about this photo is the unbridled joy on Jason's face. It's a sight that I got to see a lot over the past week, which was a wonderful thing. But as I look at it now, I can't help but feel a little sad as well.

I had been a bit anxious leading up to this trip about how Jason would react to his grandparents. After all, he'd only met my mom a few times, and my stepdad only once, when he was just a few weeks old. Of course, he's a pretty outgoing little guy and very adaptible, and Juliette and I would be there to give him an anchor, but still, we were going to be in a strange place, seeing people that he mostly didn't know. I wondered what I'd do if he couldn't sleep at their house, or if he decided he didn't like being there, never really coming up with any answers.

It turns out I needn't have worried. Jason took to my parents and their house right away. He fussed, of course, but mostly because we wouldn't let him climb up and down the stairs as much as he wanted. By the third night, he was asking for "Gamma" to read him his bedtime story, something he normally wants Juliette to do. And on the plane ride home, he repeated over and over, "Gappa, Ay-go. Gappa, Ay-go." (For those of you who don't speak toddler, that's "Grandpa, San Diego.")

And that gets to the reason for my present bittersweet feelings. It's always nice to come home and to resume the familiar routines of my life. I know that Jason will respond well to being back on his regular schedule. But it broke my heart a little to hear Juliette trying to explain to him that, no, Grandma and Grandpa live in Virginia, not San Diego. He never seemed to quite grasp the idea that they'd be far away, but I'm not sure whether that makes it better or worse. Jason is, like all small children, a creature of the moment, and things don't have to be out of sight for long for him to be onto the next.

This is something I've struggled with a lot over the past couple of years. San Diego is where our life is now. Our careers and wonderful friends are here, and we've begun to put down some real roots. But the closest of Jason's grandparents, aunts, and uncles lives 450 miles away--the ones we just left are on the other side of the country. It's important to me that he have a relationship with his family, but with everyone so far away, it's hard to see how that can happen, at least not in the same way that I had when I was young. Juliette keeps reassuring me that the distance might make things different, but not necessarily worse--after all, she grew up 3000 miles away from her grandparents and still managed to have a very close relationship with them. I still can't help but feel sad, not so much for Jason, but for the rest of the family for not being able to see him as often as we'd like. In the end, he'll hardly remember this part of his life, if at all, and what will stay with him will be times that come later. But I know that now is a time that will always be special in my memories, and I'm sorry that so many of the people that are important to me won't get the same time with him as I do.

While I was visiting, I helped my mom pick out and set up a new computer, and got her a Skype account while I was at it. I'm hoping that regular video chat sessions will help keep Gamma and Gappa fresh in Jason's mind. It's not the same as a trip to see them, but it's what I can do for now. My question for you is this: if you've raised kids far from your family, or if you grew up far from your parents' families, how did you deal with it? Were you able to overcome the distance?

I hope to hear from you.

It's almost 1 AM, I'm flying tomorrow, and my laptop has just about run out of batteries, but I've been a total slacker about writing since I've been on vacation and I know you are all dying for an update. I'll give a real update on Wednesday, but until then, here are some photos to tide you over:

Click through to see the rest of the March and April galleries. See you Wednesday!

Yesterday, as I was driving home from Las Vegas, I decided to stop in the little town of Baker, California. (For those keeping track, yes, this was the second consecutive weekend that I traveled to Las Vegas. The first was for Juliette's birthday, the second for the annual get-together of my college friends during the NCAA basketball tournament.) This wasn't the first time I've ever stopped in Baker, but it was the first time that I stopped for the express purpose of looking around and trying to see what was really there.

For those of you who have never driven Interstate 15 between Southern California and Nevada, Baker is a tiny little town about halfway between Barstow and Vegas. I say "town," but in most ways it seems like more of an overgrown truck stop--the main "drag" is just a few miles long and mainly consists of gas stations, fast food, a couple of seedy-looking motels, and a few diners.

And, of course, the "world's tallest thermometer," which isn't actually a thermometer at all but rather a 134-foot-tall electric sign:

There's not much else. Lonely desert stretches out for miles in every direction, broken up by a few volcanic hills.

I had always assumed that Baker really was just a truck stop, and that the gas stations and diners were staffed mostly by seasonal temporary workers. It caught me off-guard, then, when the first thing to greet me at the end of the off-ramp was a bunch of teenagers waving a carwash sign that read "Support the Class of 2010." Suddenly, this little spot out in the middle of nowhere seemed to be hiding a real community, and I found myself extremely curious to know what life there was like.

It turns out--as I was able to find via a little Googling when I got home--that Baker has a small, but apparently close-knit permanent community. There's an entire school district serving just that town, with about 200 K-12 students. And a community services district that manages things like garbage collection and water, as well as a public park, swimming pool, and community center. I drove around a bit and, sure enough, I found a teeny little public park where five or six kids were kicking a soccer ball around. I found a fire station, a post office, a ramshackle little church, and a whole bunch of trailers and small, run-down houses.

As I drove up and down the cracked pavement of the side streets, questions kept running through my head. Like "What do the kids in this town do for fun?" and "What do people do after work?" "What else am I not seeing?" I wish I had been able to stop and get my car washed, just so I could have asked some of the students what it was like to grow up there. Unfortunately, where they were set up was before the end of the very long off-ramp, where the road was still one lane, and I would have had to backtrack at least ten or fifteen miles up the freeway to try to come back around.

So, I guess I'm stuck wondering, for now, what life in Baker is like for the locals. Maybe some day I'll have the chance to stop in again, with the time to look around more to see if I could get anyone to talk to me. It seems like such a depressing, isolated life, but something tells me there's a story there.

The rest of my photos from this week's set:

In celebration of Juliette's birthday, the two of us took a little trip to Las Vegas this past weekend. We ate some great food, won some money, and just generally enjoyed the heck out of ourselves.

I haven't been to Vegas in a couple of years, and it was interesting to see how things have changed in that time. In a lot of ways the city seemed a little darker, more seedy. I've been there seven or eight times, probably, but before tonight I can't recall seeing any homeless people on the strip--this time they were everywhere. And the crowds walking up and down the sidewalk seemed a little meaner, maybe. I've come to take it for granted that most everyone walking along the strip at night will be drunk, but the general mood before has always seemed pretty convivial. This time, though, it seemed like there were a lot of people who, if I had accidentally bumped into them, might have tried to take a swing at me like belligerent frat boys might.

You might be able to chalk all that up to the recession, but, on the other hand, there's also been kind of an astounding amount of new construction since I last saw it. At Juliette's dad's recommendation, we took some time to check out the new city center, which was really interesting architecturally:

The crowds inside the casinos, too, seemed just as lively as ever, though perhaps a bit less densely packed. What all that adds up to, I'm not really sure. I can say, though, that I don't know if I'll ever stop thinking it's funny to see people drinking 100-ounce margaritas out of plastic guitars that they have hanging from their necks.

Today being Juliette's actual birthday--and it's a big one this year--I'd like to take a moment to say a few things that maybe I don't say often enough. Juliette is the best thing that's ever happened to me. She's a loving, caring, beautiful, wonderful person, not to mention an amazing mother, and I count myself more than lucky to get to spend my life with her.

Thanks for everything, honey, and happy birthday.

Heard on the PA as I was waiting for my plane last night:

"Paging Las Vegas passenger James... Walker. James Walker, please come to the podium."

"Paging Las Vegas passenger James Walker. Your flight is now boarding."

"Passenger James Walker, please come to gate 2, your flight will be departing soon."

"Passenger James Walker, this is your final boarding call for flight [whatever] to Las Vegas. This is your final boarding call."

"Final boarding call for Las Vegas passenger James Walker at gate 2."

"This will be the final boarding call for Las Vegas passenger James Walker. Please come to gate 2 to board your flight. James Walker."

At this point I started waiting for an Ultimate Final Boarding Call or maybe a Last Final Omega Boarding Call.

On the drive back from Sonoma county this past weekend--Juliette and I went to a friend's wedding--I noticed a bunch of roadside signs on I-5. The whole stretch of road between the East Bay and the Grapevine is pretty much a wasteland when it comes to anything that will attract your attention, so the odd signs really stand out. A bunch of them are little micro-political tracts, which gets extra interesting when you see a series of them on two sides of an issue. It's kind of like watching an old married couple engaging in a very passive-aggressive argument. The sign that really sparked my curiosity, though, was just south of the Highway 46 junction, and it proclaimed "Tom McLeod slept here."

I had no idea who this Tom McLeod was, but I figured there must be some story there so I had Juliette jot down a quick note so I could remember to look it up when I got home. As it turns out, this is one area where the Internet is unfortunately inadequate to the task--Googling the phrase just turns up a handful of blogs pondering the same question as me: "Who is Tom McLeod and why should I care that he slept there?"

It seems like anyone going to the trouble of putting up a sign for such an event must be showing a certain sense of pride. I mean, as far as I know, nobody goes around at the motels I've stopped at and put up a sign about my visit. And we're not even talking about the man's birthplace, or the site of his most famous accomplishment. No, this is just a place he slept once. So my first guess was that Mr. McLeod must have been some old celebrity, possibly an early Western film star like Gene Autry or Tom Mix. Of course, it would have had to have been someone a little less famous--a second-string star, if you will--as I've clearly heard of those men but am quite clueless about Mr. McLeod. Which sort of makes the sign pathetic, even a little tragic. Here's a place whose only claim to fame, what they've decided to proudly display to the world, is that some B-lister that we've all long since forgotten once decided that he couldn't make it all the way to San Francisco or Los Angeles that day and tucked in there instead.

Of course, if there were some famous Tom McLeod like that, that's surely a person that some site somewhere would have taken note of. As far as I can tell, that's not the case here. Oh, I turned up a few names, but a Texas museum curator and a New Zealand composer don't seem quite the types to inspire such a monument.

My best guess right now is this guy, the CEO of McLeod Software, which makes and distributes trucking logistics software. I-5 is, as most Californians know, one of the major trucking arteries in the state, so it's possible that the man behind these truckers' dispatching software is a big name in those circles. Maybe he's the Bill Gates of truckers, I don't know. Except, I don't know that Bill would rate a sign if he stayed in some motel out in the middle of nowhere, so either I just don't understand celebrity in the San Joaquin Valley, or this isn't the guy.

I'm left with a mystery. So, if anyone out there knows which Tom McLeod slept there, please do get in touch and let me know.

I recently had the opportunity to visit Washington, DC for the first time. Having never been there before, I wasn't quite sure what to expect. I am, by nature, a rather patriotic person, but I'm also quite the small town boy. I love history, but I hate being a tourist. As luck would have it, I quite enjoyed my brief stay in our nation's capital.

You may think that much of what I have to say in the rest of this piece is hokey, strange, or at least uninformed; I can base my opinions on nothing more than my own experiences. But, like people, places have a certain quality, call it spirit or, if you prefer, personality, that can be sensed if you are open to it.

Washington is a beautiful city. It is beautiful in a way that Los Angeles never has been, and probably never will be. Like New York, it has that rather stately feeling of an East Coast city that knows its age and the respect that it is due. Yet where New York is vibrant and exciting, Washington has a sense of understated dignity that I found humbling. It is a city that is fully aware of its history and of the symbolism inherent in its very being.

I don't normally enjoy doing touristy things. I like to try to blend in wherever I go. I don't always, or even often, succeed, but I try. Washington was a different experience for me. I found myself trying to visit as many monuments and memorials as I could. I drove all over the downtown area, saw the Mall, the Washington Monument, drove past the Smithsonian museums, the Capitol, the White House. I didn't get a chance to walk around and really experience most--I was in the area for less than twenty-four hours--but I think that many of the attractions just need to be seen. The one place I did get out and explore was the Arlington National Cemetary. I'm glad I did.

As you enter the cemetary, there is a sign that informs you that you are entering the nation's most sacred shrine, and reminds you to conduct yourself with dignity and respect. Periodically, there are signs that say, "Silence. Respect." Here's the amazing thing: people read and obey the signs. The cemetary is not silent, but it is an exceptionally quiet place. I've noticed that certain outdoor places have a certain strange acoustic property wherein sound does not resonate. The Mojave Desert is one such place. The Arlington National Cemetary is another. Sound seems to be swallowed up by the air; you can hardly even hear your own footfalls.

The cemetary is a place of awesome dignity, but one place above the rest sticks with me: the Tomb of the Unknown Soldiers. The Tomb stands before the Memorial Amphitheater, looking out over the hills and the river toward the capital. A lone sentry stands guard, pacing back and forth in front of the tomb. The only sound, apart from the occasional bird call, is the click of his heels as he turns. The tomb bears this inscription:

HERE RESTS
IN HONORED GLORY
AN AMERICAN SOLDIER
KNOWN BUT TO GOD

As I read these words and looked out over the city I couldn't help but get a lump in my throat. These were ordinary people, as much so as you and I, who gave the ultimate sacrifice for their country and their way of life. It is a poignant reminder that this land was built and sustained by the hopes, dreams, sweat, and, sometimes, blood of such people.

 

 

• Getting married in Big Sur, CA. Not only one of the most naturally beautiful places I've ever seen, but also very special to me because that's where my wife grew up as well as where I lived for a while in my childhood.

 

 

• Breakfast at Deetjen's Big Sur Inn. Some of the best Eggs Benedict I've ever had.

 

 

• Lunch at the Big Sur River Inn. Sure, the burger is kind of expensive, but it's mighty tasty (and still the cheapest in Big Sur). Plenty of good stuff apart from the burger, too; it's my favorite restaurant for lunch. And, for dessert, the apple pie is my second favorite in this world (I have to give my mom's the number one spot).

 

 

• Dinner at Ventana. They have a filet mignon that just melts in your mouth, and if you go right around sunset you have a spectacular view of the sun going down over the ocean.

 

 

• The bathrooms in the Salt Lake City Airport. Cleanest airport bathrooms ever.

 

 

• Renting a convertible in Hawaii. Yeah, it immediately marks you as a tourist, but it's so nice to feel the wind in your hair.

 

 

• The Hotel Hana Maui. Hands down the nicest hotel I've ever stayed in. The road to Hana is very twisty and a bit stressful (since all of the other people on the road are also tourists), but as soon as you get there it all just melts away. The staff was amazingly friendly and helpful. It's also very close to Hamoa Beach, which is one of the most beautiful beaches I've ever seen. And if you're into horseback riding, the hotel runs tours on a couple of trails that offer some amazing views.

 

 

• Tony and Tina's Wedding. A very interesting off-Broadway production that makes you feel like you really are a wedding guest. It takes interactive theater to a level I've never experienced before.

 

 

• Breakfast at the Sea House Restaurant. About six or seven miles outside of Lahaina, it overlooks a beautiful bay and has a great view of Molokai (or maybe it was Lanai, I can't remember) and the food is excellent.

 

 

• The Koloa Fish Market. In Koloa, on Kaua'i, there is this tiny, hole-in-the-wall fish market that sells lunch plates that are to die for. There are no seats, indeed there's barely enough room to turn around, but the fish is so fresh and the prices are extremely reasonable.

 

 

• Air Kaua'i Helicopter Tours. Not for those who are afraid of heights, but for everyone else, it's amazing. Even the locals on Kaua'i say the helicopter tours are great, and with good reason. Such a beautiful place, and seeing it from a bird's-eye view is even better. And the Air Kaua'i helicopters have huge windows, which makes for a great viewing experience.

 

 

• Brick Oven Pizza, in Kalaheo. Also on Kaua'i. They have good pizza. Really good pizza.

 

 

• Marrying the one you love. My wedding was the best day of my life. We've been together for almost seven years, since high school. In that time we've had a lot of experiences. We've grown, and grown up, together. I can think of nothing better than knowing that this is the person that I'm going to grow old with, share my life with. I can't wait to see what the future will bring.