Not just a long weekend...

I hope everyone has a happy and safe Memorial Day weekend. But please remember the true meaning of the holiday, and honor those who have sacrificed everything for us. God bless those who serve, and have served, this great nation.
An American soldier walks through the graves at the American cemetery in Colleville, Normandy, France, for the 60th anniversary of D-Day Sunday, June 6, 2004. AP Photo/Jerome Delay

Joint Services Air Show

I have never been to the Andrews AFB Joint Services Open House and Air Show, mostly because it happens the same weekend as the Preakness. For some reason we have traditionally not really felt like doing anything the day after Preakness. Sort of an annual flu bug or something, I don't know. But today, despite a rainy forecast, decided to make the trip.

We didn't end up staying through the heaviest rain, and missed much of the afternoon program including the premier demonstrations like the Blue Angels. But still it was a memorable day.

I have to say, it is a real treat to be around the military in any circumstances. But a huge event like this is a showcase for the organizational and logistical skills of the Armed Forces, and was a joy to watch. I don't think I've ever been to a large scale event that was run this well. Parking was at FedEx Field, home of the Washington Redskins. The security checkpoint was there at FedEx, and then shuttle buses took people over to Andrews. An abundance of checkpoints, personnel and buses made that process a breeze.

Once we got to Andrews it was more of the same. Everything was clearly marked and meticulously organized. And, of course, when they say the program starts at 10:00, they mean 10:00:00, and it started right on time.

In addition to some cool aerobatic stunts, the static displays on the ground were neat as well. But as I said, it started raining pretty good and we started feeling the effects of the previous day and we decided to pack it in for the day.

But we'll be back next year, hopefully we'll have better weather.

Meet Sarah!

Sarah, Angie, Sarah and Sandy at the Preakness. Aren't they pretty? Well we were talking about this blog and Sarah on the left mentioned that, while she does check in from time to time, she notices that it mostly just has a lot of fish pictures. Well in the interest of appealing to a broader audience, I am taking this opportunity to mix things up a bit...

The Real Deal.

Time will tell -- three weeks of time, to be precise -- how special this moment was. But when Big Brown passed the field and then my camera lens on his way to the wire and the second jewel of the Triple Crown in the Preakness Stakes, I couldn't help but feel like I was witnessing history.

Several horses in recent years have won the Kentucky Derby and the Preakness. And it's easy each time to say 'this is it!' But after a 30 year drought (since Affirmed won the Triple Crown in 1978), I really do think that this time we are looking at the Real Deal. I wish Big Brown and all the people associated with him good luck in the Belmont!

Another killer day at Rose River Farm

The pictures speak for themselves, I think. What an awesome day of fishing at Rose River Farm. Beautiful weather, bugs coming off the water and most of these trout took flies off the surface. I used my 3-weight for a while. Talk about fun! Taking trout this size off the surface with a 3-weight is really, really exciting.

First Smallmouth of '08 will have to wait.

This weekend I tried to get out and catch some smallmouth, and get a little exercise in the process. As soon as I saw the river I knew the day would turn into basically a hike on a nice day, which is fine. The water was very high. I made a few casts here and there, but it was a washout.

I thought this was an interesting view, however. I'm standing on a railroad bridge that spans the Potomac at Harpers Ferry, looking downstream at the confluence of the Potomac and Shenandoah rivers. The Shenandoah, entering this picture from the right, was much muddier, and I thought the clear delineation between the two was interesting. Hopefully you can see it in this photo.

As I continued on, I saw some nice scenery - as I always do there. This great blue heron, usually majestic and graceful, looked kind of like a dork trying to scratch his face with his foot here.

And the geese with their babies were out in droves. Or is it gaggles?

I wish my wife was there yesterday, she has never seen a Baltimore Oriole (other than the baseball kind). And I saw 6 or 8 of them! They were hard to photograph (this is the best of a half dozen attempts), they flit around a lot and like to be very high in the trees. But their song is beautiful and hopefully I'll get more opportunities to encounter these birds. If you want to see, hear or learn about these birds, or any other birds for that matter, this is a fantastic web site worth bookmarking.

Photographer Shane Knight

At the Kentucky Horse Park, at the huge trade fair as part of the Rolex event, we had the pleasure of meeting Shane Knight. Shane is a traditional photographer -- no digital cameras, no PhotoShop, no digital prints. He has some large images printed by hand and framed in beautiful rustic wood that are astonishing. I picture them hanging over a mantle of a great cabin or lodge. But I purchased these three images in a smaller size because I just couldn't decide on one. Another thing you should know about Shane: not just crazy talented, but one of the nicest people you'll ever meet. Please visit his web site and support his art. He has stunning color landscapes and photographs of a variety of other subjects. But these western horse images are my favorite.

The Main Event

Eventing is a three-pronged competition combining dressage, cross country jumping and stadium jumping, and the Rolex World Championships is that sport's pinnacle. Horse and rider have to be very fit and durable to make it through all three phases, ridden on consecutive days, and only the best qualify to be here.

Dressage is an impressive display of control and communication from rider to horse. But evidently it's not the kind of impressive that made me reach for my camera. Cross country is where the real action is, and seeing these jumps in person gave me a new appreciation for what I've seen on TV. The jumps are huge, and they get even bigger than these! One note about these cross country pictures, I'm using a small digital camera with a big delay, so there is a lot of timing and luck in trying to get a horse while jumping!





This girl, I think her name is Becky Holder (my wife will correct me if I'm wrong) did great and came in second...

...behind Phillip Dutton, shown here riding the championship winning stadium phase. He was one of only two riders who completed this course without knocking down any rails.

Equine Greatness

The Kentucky Horse Park in Lexington is quite an impressive place. The location of the Rolex Eventing World Championships (more on that later), the Park also has a very nice museum and a barn with some of the most accomplished leaders of equine sport alive today.

This is a statue depicting Secretariat dancing to the winner's circle at Churchill Downs on May 5, 1973, Ron Turcotte aboard and groom Eddie Sweat alongside.

More Secretariat treasures could be found inside the museum.


In the Living Legends category, few horses are bigger than horseracing's richest thoroughbred, Cigar. I snapped more pictures of him, but I like this one best. Content in retirement, living in luxury and seemingly still race-fit, Cigar is seen here waiting for the next parade of champions.

While driving through the scenic Kentucky countryside in spring, you will see countless miles of paddock fence bordering countless acres of rich, green pasture. In those pastures you will see countless horses, and most of them will have foals nearby. The hills of Kentucky, mild in climate and rich in tradition, are factories not only for fine bourbon, but for fast, fast horses. I think about the astonishing number of horses that come out of this amazing place, year after year after year, to enthusiasts and trainers and investors and competitors and breeders. I think of what a small number of these horses possess truly special potential, and what a smaller number still reach that potential.

And then the smaller number of those that isn't ruined along the way by injury or attitude or plain bad luck. Throw out the ones who had everything going for them all along but stumbled out of the gate on a Saturday in May, or clipped heels with a lesser horse in front or didn't like the conditions of the track. Ponder all of that and the Greatest of the Great, Cigar, Secretariat, Seattle Slew, well they just get larger than life. These horses, past and present, this place, even on a warm spring day, just gives me chills.

Keeneland!

The taste of Woodford Reserve samples still in our mouths, we traveled a few minutes back toward town to Keeneland race track for the penultimate day of the spring meet there. Under a bright blue sky and warm weather we walked around the beautiful grounds and took surprisingly few pictures. But it was a fun day, despite coming out on the losing end of the wagering equation.

Although I've only been to a few different tracks, two of them - Churchill Downs and Pimlico - are home to the first two jewels of the Triple Crown. And Keeneland is by far the nicest track I've ever been to. (I've seen Saratoga from outside the gates and that seems nice, I'll have to check that out some August and compare, but we both loved Keeneland.)

Woodford Reserve

The Bourbon Trail was definitely on my list while visiting the Lexington area of Kentucky, and we picked the distillery of Woodford Reserve to tour.

Bourbon making is kind of loud and I couldn't hear the tour guide very well. As a result, much of what I now think I know about making bourbon is likely to be inaccurate at best. So, tell you what. Go to their web site if you want to learn how to make it, I'll just show you some pictures.

This is some of the bourbon-ey goodness fermenting. This tank was bubbling away like crazy!

In an empty tank you can see the cooling pipes. I think they said it has to stay between 70 and 80 degrees for this step.

It was hard to get good photos inside the buildings because they did not allow any flash photography. Cell phones must be turned off and all the lighting is wired in such a way that there is no way anything can spark. The entire process is quite flammable, as you can imagine. But these three copper, uh, thingamajigs, are the only ones in use anywhere in Kentucky. This is where the distilling takes place.


Then some other stuff happens and they put the bourbon, which is now clear, into barrels. The barrels are then sent out the side of the building and along a track where they are stored in this really, really cool building.

It holds 5,000 barrels, and this is where it ages. About seven years. Over the course of this storage, each barrel is sampled several times. And if after seven years it's not ready, they don't bottle it until it is!

In this building something special happens. Part of the contents of the barrels evaporates, and they call that portion the Angel's Share. The barrels positioned higher up evaporate more because it's warmer up there, but they all give up a little to the Angels, and the room is thick with the aroma of it.



These barrels are ready for bottling and distribution!

Kentucky Roadtrip

We loaded up the FJ Cruiser last week and headed west for a little roadtrip. The next few posts will show a little of what we saw, including perfect weather, premium bourbon making, world class equine sports and more.

Passing within twelve miles of where I went to college, it really wouldn't have been right to extend my streak of Never Having Returned. So we stopped in Buckhannon, home of the Bobcats, and drove around a little. I showed my wife how deep that flood was back in, what, '84 or so? Submerged stop signs in town. I was actually surprised that I could remember where everything was. Even the places I visited very seldomly, like the library.

Some things never change though.

Luckily, the football team isn't one of them. They've gotten a lot better since I was there.

This is the Chi Phi house. Probably the location along my life's path with the highest disparity between time spent and time remembered. That was a long time ago, though. I'm sure the kids these days have long since found more constructive and healthy ways to pass the time.

Soon we were entering beautiful eastern Kentucky. Stay tuned for more...

Car washin' the fun way...

This weekend some friends and I came across this ford, and I just had to drive through it at an unsafe speed with my friend standing in the middle of the road at the far end with a camera. That's what friends are for, right?

Spring at Shenandoah National Park

I met some friends the other day to fish for native brook trout in the Shenandoah National Park. I had never been where we were going, White Oak Canyon. But it was near my friend's farm in Madison County (peach orchard blooming above) so we met there.

It's so beautiful out here, everywhere I parked looked like an FJ Cruiser commercial.

On to the park, this is Ed working a scenic pool with no fish in it.

I caught only one brookie. But he was beautiful, and those who have fished this water told me that, at about 11 inches or so, it was quite a large one. Another thing he was, was slippery. I dropped him before I could take a picture. But initially he didn't go far so I stuck the camera under the surface and snapped a picture. You can see the top of my fish at the bottom of this photo. The only reason I bother posting it is that fish were very hard to come by that day, and this is the only photographic evidence that we were even in the same general area as fish.

Even harder than finding the brook trout in the last picture, is finding my friend Douglas in this one. But he is in there!

After a lot of hiking and not much success fishing, we decided that we had earned the right to reward ourselves with the three B's: icy cold Beers and some fishing in Douglas' pond for easy Bass and Bluegill. They were indeed plentiful and enjoyable, and topped off a great Spring day.

Science: A Matter of Taste

I know what you're thinking: "Hey, other than figuring out ways to put more DirecTV HD satellites in orbit, what good do scientists really do?" I know. I used to feel the same way. But my own recent personal experience has me thinking otherwise. Sure, it's personal, but if sharing my story here helps just one household, then it will have been worth it.

See, there are two kinds of scientists. There are the outcasts with unkempt hair who sit in rooms and get grants to try to figure stuff out like dark matter or the origins of the universe and is it collapsing in on itself or expanding at mind-numbing speed, silly stuff like that.

And then there are the real heroes. The outcasts with unkempt hair who missed the prom and the frosh mixer because they were out there, in the real world, encountering humanity's problems and using their big brains to come up with solutions.

Sure, a lot of these solutions to life's problems go under the radar, and we the people take them for granted. Cell phones, riding mowers, pre-measured dishwasher soap packets. But then, every so often, a team of nerds will put their bad-haired heads together and solve a problem to which many thought there could be no answer.

When one of our dogs started eating poop in the yard (I will not identify him by name as he is a minor, but it rhymes with Vomit), we tried everything. (By "Everything," I mean yelling "Stop that, that's disgusting!") Frustrated, with nowhere else to turn, we looked to Science to answer our prayers. And Science came through big time with Dis-Taste, a product that actually claims to make feces unpalatable. That's right, you read that correctly. At least two doctors have developed a Miracle Drug that, when administered just once a day to all the dogs in the household, combined with a healthy diet and exercise, will within eight to twelve weeks, slowly begin to produce feces that actually tastes bad to other dogs. I know! What's next?!

We have yet to see the promised effects of the product, but in all fairness we've only given it a couple weeks and there is always the possibility that this 'habit' may be the result of a serious mental problem rather than just the presence of delecious turds nearby. But we are hopeful that we will be able to put this behind us. So to speak.

Upland Bird Hunting

Recently I got back into shotgun shooting, after about a thirty year hiatus. I searched for and purchased a 16 gauge Winchester Model 12 pump shotgun, a favorite of my Dad's. This particular gun was made in 1952, and I immediately started shooting skeet and trap at a nearby range and having a lot of fun. Then for Christmas my wife got me a gift card for a hunting preserve on Maryland's Eastern Shore called Pintail Point.

So I invited my friend Ed, an experienced wingshooter, to show me the ropes and join me for a day of chukar hunting. A chukar is a medium sized game bird not native to these parts. I don't know for sure, but it is either in the pheasant family or, forgive me, the partridge family. Here's how the preserve works: they raise these birds, you call them up and pay for some, before you get there they take the ones you paid for and put them in a field, a guide and his dog takes you into the field where the dog finds 'em, the guide flushes 'em, and, if all goes well, the hunter shoots 'em.

The day was really fun, both Ed and the guide were patient with me, I learned a lot and I think I did pretty well for a rookie. Even the dogs pretended not to notice that it was my first time out there. Speaking of the dogs (That's Bucky pictured at the top, and Jig is the darker one), this was a truly fascinating aspect of the day. I've been around dogs most of my life. And I've witnessed my share of dogs intensely focused on a stick, treat or tennis ball. But these German Shorthaired Pointers, well they were a treat to watch. And when they locked on to the scent of a bird, they stop on a dime and point at it. Not with their nose or with their raised paw like you imagine, but with their entire BEING! They do not point with the graceful elegance you might see illustrated on the cover of a dog show program. But rather in a tense, contorted, impossibly still and rigid manner that looks at once extremely uncomfortable yet wholly necessary. There is nothing else, at that time and place, that that dog wants to be doing. But more than that, there's nothing else he COULD be doing. It is a beautiful mix of raw instinct and enthusiasm directed by skilled and deliberate training.

So thanks Ed for coming with me and teaching me how to hunt birds. Maybe next I can try wild birds! And thanks to our guide Jack, and his coworkers Bucky and Jig, for working hard to make my first hunt successful, memorable and enjoyable.

Kingsnake Shedding Video

Our Florida Kingsnake, Belle, shed today and we were lucky enough to witness and videotape it. I realize reptiles as pets are not for everyone, but you have to admit, nature is a wonderful and fascinating thing.

Gromit's Finally Calming Down!

Upon further review, perhaps I should have protested more vigorously when the words "Jack," "Russell," and "Puppy" were all strung together for the first time in our household.

But he's a sweetheart and I love him. And as this photo clearly shows, he is almost to the point where his feet touch the ground. I think a couple more years and we might even get him to sit still for a minute.