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Posts Tagged ‘Christmas’

For the past few weeks prior to Christmas — I’d been working on five drawings of the grand­children of Mr. Robert Leffler, my father-in-law out in Tucson, Arizona. We’d even gotten in touch with La Paloma Art Gallery in Tucson so that mats would be cut and waiting when we got there. You just can’t transport art properly on the airlines. If we’d framed them the glass would need replacing at the very least. Stuff gets tossed around. Sue bought two heavy plastic frames and and we nested and taped them together with the drawings carefully placed in a tracing pad between the two. From there, they would be my carry-on luggage along with my camera, extra memory cards and a battery charger.

Initially we were set to fly on the afternoon of Christmas Day. Turned out that our flight from PHL on US Airways was canceled due to a shortage of flight crew. So Sue went to work resched­uling from this to that… and back again. It wasn’t too much fun. We got up at about 2:45 AM and I brewed the coffee. We left in the dark. It was rainy. The night before I’d finally cleared a snow drift and plow in with the VW Beetle and the driver’s side window regulator broke in the pouring rain. Murphy’s Law. So — Trash bags were taped over the window and the rain stayed out. Thank goodness we were taking the van to the airport. We parked and dragged all the luggage into the United terminal at PHL. Two connecting flights and we were finally in Tucson.

The entire reason for our going West was to attend and document Mr. Leffler’s 80^th Birthday Celebration that was held on the afternoon of Saturday, December 27, 2009. Good thing that I had the art and the camera because our luggage was nowhere to be seen. The morning of the party — Sue, the girls, Lauren and myself all had to go shopping at 7:30 AM or so — otherwise… I’d have been in the same t-shirt and jeans that I traveled in. As would all of the group that departed from Philly. So — We had clothes. Late Sunday night, the day after the party, they found our bags and brought them to the house in Tucson. You pay $20 each for 4 bags from point A to point B and they lose them. Will we be compen­sated by the airlines for the loss of the bags and needing to go buy clothes? Who knows?

The first thing that I did on return was to jump onto the computer here to “process” the Olympus Raw Format “ORF” files in Photoshop CS3 Extended and convert them into uncom­pressed Tiff Images (2.26 Gigabytes). Then I made full size Jpegs, half size Jpegs and quarter size Jpegs and burned all materials onto a data DVD and onto 3 CD-Roms for distri­b­ution and safekeeping. As of yesterday afternoon all were ready to ship. That’s good. In case the extended family is inter­ested in them — I’ll pop them into a NextGen Gallery and post them here very soon. For now I have to work on a website.

The VW Beetle is now in the shop to fix that broken window that I mentioned and the parts won’t be in until Friday. So I’ll be right here working I suppose. Lots to do. Got to go change over the laundry and get another load of wash in. I’ll be back and corre­sponding again soon — but nose to the grind­stone on that website for now.

I hope that everyone has a warm, happy, and wonderful Christmas. If you live in the Northeast like me, we actually have a White Christmas. Most unusual according to the statistics. I’m very typical of my standard behavior again this year… a bit nostalgic and melan­choly missing my folks and my brother. I have the blessing of my wife Sue’s compan­ionship and my stepdaughters who are always “enter­taining”.

Had a couple unexpected bumps in the road recently and I’m glad that I’m here. I don’t take it for granted. I feel a need for a few days of quiet that I’m unlikely to see — but I think perhaps that isn’t a physical quiet but instead a quiet that you carry with you inside. The animals feel a peace now. Maybe it’s the snow. Things are a bit more muffled than usual. That is okay. I’ve listened to the Christmas Carols on the radio and I’m in the mood. I’ve been drawing and designing a whole lot of stuff lately and right now I’m working on a series of portraits. I’ll be done with them soon. I really don’t want to run out of projects. But if I did — I’d update this blog with lots of new things.

I hope that everyone here in Bucks County takes a piece of their Christmas break to go to the Visitors Center to see Daniel Troy’s exhibit of Railroad Photography entitled “ON TRACK”. It runs until January 9, 2010. Go to the Visitor’s Center website for additional info and direc­tions and also see lots of Dan Troy’s work at his website. It’s a good show. Image below ©2009 — 2010 Daniel Troy.