Valentines for you, Xanga

There are two feelings I recognize as exhilarating.  The first is love and the second is pride not necessarily in that order.  Include a little of each in your daily routine and see if that doesn’t brighten your smile.

I am watching the Winter Olympics.  Doesn’t it make your heart just about burst when you see the efforts of the athletes?  It makes you feel good to see each of them stretch out  for the pride being at the games brings to their respective countries.  I have a great affection for them all.  Great stuff those Olympic games.  Great stuff those Olympians, win or lose, they are all winners to me. 

We are watching some of our favorite “Love Movies” as always.  I hope you will include a bit of “Love on the screen” this week yourself.  Still a favorite, “50 First Dates” and “Sweet Home Alabama” and about a hundred more I could name.  I’m squeezing as many Olympic games and Love filled movies into my Valentine week as I can. 

An edit to this Valentine Day entry:  This is a card made totally by me for a photography group I am part of.  I thought I would add it here.  The work is in total my own except for the tiny florets.  I did it in Paint Shop Pro and had a lot of fun doing it.  They aren’t Beverly Sills but they are voicing my sentiments.

Happy alentines Xanga,
Becca aka LittleE

Chapter 4, final on Ashland, Kentucky trip.

If text alone could tell the story, my trip to Ashland, Kentucky and our visit with Jim (Wordwarrior39) could be over and done.  The thing is, I’m hooked on photography and the story it tells over and above words.  I have considered you may have to be hooked on my photography to want to view what I post. I hope my pictorial jaunts are considered by those who view as, “worth it”. 

Ashland like many cities (Cincinnati, St. Louis, New Orleans, Pittsburgh and more) is all about the river.  These cities, built strategically beside the rivers to inherit the wealth the rivers could bring became populated with people and ideas from all over the globe.  The river is jobs, transportation, shipping, entertainments and wealth as well as the poverty inherent to big cities.  The finest homes built on the hills overlooking a river view are a dream worth dreaming for set apart by their beauty from the filth and lack hidden in the darkest corners of big cities. 

My mother was in love with the river.  Her growing up stories and the stories of Mark Twain she read to us each night passed on, to me, her love for the river.  My love lingers in a romantic past with exciting stories of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn.  The paddle wheelers and rafts so common at their time are not so common now.  I have been aboard paddle wheelers and viewed some others that ply the rivers.  They are a vacation paradise, an enviable paradise much more so than Ocean liner cruise ships.  Where was my mind when I could have made the river a real part of my vocational inheritance?  There are many today who have done exactly that.

This hill on the left, route 23, winds from the opposite end of Ashland to the bridge you see in the distance in the photo on the right and beyond.  Either leads to the city of Ashland.  Ashland is, by no means, a big city but much larger than where I live.  Ashland has its own bus terminal, big modern motels for visiting businessmen, a once active national guard armory and a very nice University.  The charm of Ashland though is in its past and in the river that runs beside it.  There are some lovely plantings, lovely parks, lovely old homes but if I were to be a permanent part of Ashland, I would want a river view. 

Resting out of the reach of strong river currents, a row of barges loaded with coal.  In the brighter light of day you can find views like the one on the right.

Driving the little out of the way roads down to the river you find spots to throw in a line and dilapidated but picturesque fueling stations for the cruisers that frequent the river.

A common river scene, hundreds of these small private boats move up and down as a private entertainment.  Fun loving but the owners of these little boats are huge polluters.  The boats are approaching the ramp just to the right in the photo.  Having walked on the dock I was dumfounded by the trash.  The owners of the boats don’t know the rule “leave a spot cleaner than you found it” but instead trash the river they profess to love so much.  They picnic as they look blindly at the mess they leave behind.  On the right, barges moving south on the river.  It’s a magnificent scene but I am not so naive I don’t realize they are a part of the pollution problem on the rivers.

On the left you see one of the unfortunates that live in all of our cities.  He sleeps under the picnic tables or anyplace he can attempt staying dry.  The open sky is his window, his grocery basket his closet and the river bank his toilet.  It breaks my heart to know how many live in his same conditions.  The only plus I see but he may not agree, he can view scenes like this one on the right anytime he chooses.

I’m not sure what my next blog entry will be.  I have more photos but nothing very different from what you have seen.  Odds and ends will be posted on my photo site when they suit the challenge subject.  See more of my photography on my Xanga, PhotoGraphics, CLICK HERE.

Some important links you won’t want to miss:
StopBadware.org

SpywareWarrior

A few spits of snow today but I think 2005 – 2006 Winter may well be the Winter that Winter forgot this year in Ohio.  Mosquitoes will be on a rampage this Summer, 2006. 

Stay well friends,
Becca aka LittleE

Chapter 3 photos, Ashland, Kentucky

The route we drove to get to Ashland to visit with Jim (Wordwarrior39) were roads that followed the winding hills that followed the rails that followed the river running between our two states of Ohio and Kentucky. We traveled, North and East on older roads thru small communities that big city people would call forgotten.  There truly are little places that appear as though they may have remained a few years back in time.  It is weren’t for satellite dishes and telephone poles the time suggested would be one I wouldn’t mind going back to.  

In sequence, sort of, some nostalgic photos. 

This was a beautiful view and brings back a lot of memories of a larger farm where hogs and dairy cattle were raised.  Family reunions were held there every year.  My son spent a summer on it as a child growing up and it was one of his best experience. 

A totally different spot on the map.  I couldn’t help myself but had to have the view.

Jim grew up with this theatre and it still operates bringing in new talent as well as well known performers.  The theatre I grew up with has not been as fortunate.   I can’t even find information on the Internet.  It is a storage facility, housing plumbing, I think.  I will have to see if I can’t go into it for photos.  I am sure it is totally not as I remember. 

The Paramount sits on a corner and around the corner on the walls of the buildings are murals very well painted and exciting to see as bits and parts of Ashland’s past are depicted.

These beautiful murals are to be found on many buildings and flood walls for miles around.  The past seems to be important enough that someone thinks it worth capturing for everyone to see as they pass.

Take care all.  I am on my second prescription for the stuff I have been harboring.  I hope everyone out there stays well.

Becca aka LittleE

An upper respiratory infection has managed to catch hold of me once again.  The worst is over and I hope I don’t run headlong into a flu-bug.  Don’t breathe on me please are my thoughts.  I have been very lucky actually and I am so thankful for all of the good in my life. 

I did stop at a site to read and Murphy’s laws were listed.  Murphy has been running rampant here.  Now is the time to buy stock in Altoid mints.  

Watching a PBS program about boys.  A very informative program any parent should watch.  It’s titled “Raising Cain”.  Not sure of the exactness of one statement but it went something like this.  America leads the industrialized world in fatherlessness.  Doesn’t that just make you proud?

Enough of that,

I have photos.  I have a thing for trains.  I grew up 4 blocks from the tracks.  I heard every train but lived far enough away that I didn’t feel the thrill of shaking walls.  Sleeping with my window open, I hear a train whistle every morning when I’m not groggy from my cold.  Walking to school as a kid, I stood and watched the trains that rolled by every morning.  I viewed many a train up close and personal and I counted the cars and read the words on their sides.  Cincinnati had a wonderful terminal, now a museum.  I think the museum is great but the terminal and the running trains was a better time.  Click Here for some history.  We have Amtrak but Cincinnati does not ride the rails as it once did.

These photos come from our trip to Jim’s (Wordwarrior39) home town of Ashland, Kentucky.

The proverbial piece of trash.  Ashland or Cincinnati or anywhere else it finds its way from the trashee to the trashed.  I considered cropping the photo but I want that distance shot.  I look down these tracks and the view says freedom, fly away with me.

To get these photos I stumble through rocks and up slopes or whatever.  I love to get angles and verticals and color and a story.  Just past the rail cars is the drop to the river that runs between the banks of the state of Ohio and the Kentucky shore.  Cities, industry, Mark Twain, river barges and Native Americans in birch bark canoes all come to mind.

The no trespassing sign kept me at a distance I preferred not to keep but I was close enough I hope you get a good feel of what I saw by enlarging the photos.  I do just about anything I can to get a shot I want, including nearly standing on my head.

This fellow kept an eye on me or I felt like he was.  Not a word was spoken as he went straight to his work and I to mine.

Jim’s office is just beyond the bridge and down the slope.  The park with it’s boat ramps are just beyond that.  More photos to come.

My mood is shaky.  I finished my html class and finished my graduation lesson with flying colors.  My finished pages had to be up and running and in good order and they were.  I signed up for another class, this time for Cascading Style sheets.  The new class wants me to download a lot of browsers to view pages.  I download 5 besides what I have.  I also have to have an FTP program.  FrontPage has it’s own and I don’t know how to use it though I have used Front Page for a long time.  I have always done my own thing as far as linking and page upload from the site and had fun with it.  Not anymore, I have to learn the FrontPage way of doing things for this new class so I play with it and mess up all of my new pages.  I have them fixed and working again.  I fixed them with FrontPage, hoorah.  The downside, I have a lot of other folders messed up as well.  I guess I’ll learn how to use FrontPage or die trying.  Anyway, If you want to see what I did for my html class pages, see them, named Blossoms pages, CLICK HERE. 

Always photos on my xanga photo site and they change each week with a challenge I take part in.  See PhotoGraphics, CLICK HERE.

That does it for now, I’m  as fast as I can.
Becca aka LittleE