These three girls taught me a lesson I'd been learning all day. Today was the first time i've taken my new camera out in public where there were a lot of people around. The occasion was a local barbeque cookoff. The building behind the girls is the county courthouse. I saw two of the girls standing near a temporary stage the sponsors had erected in their dance leotards. I asked them if I could take some pictures of them. They giggled and started posing right away. Then the girl in the center approached and asked if she could be in the pictures. Just to see what would happen I began to ask them to move this way or that, and they seemed to have a really good time posing for a perfect stranger. This was a real informative day. I'm beginning to understand why some people are so attracted to photography.

This is a shot I took from the north end of the family pond just west of my house. I take a lotta pictures of this pond. The surface of the water is always changing and there are a few stumps sticking up out of the water here and there that make for a good focus point. I took this shot from the paved road. The land behind the pond goes on for a mile or so and joins my younger brother's property. If you could follow to the right of the picture you would see how the land gradually slopes down to the river where we own both sides of it for a while. Most of the land along the river is swampy and floods every time it comes a good rain. It's just beautiful to me down there in the swamp. I'll go down there and take some pictures as soon as the bugs go away. We had a couple of hurricanes through here a few years ago, one following the other. The eye of both storms passed right through here and tore a lot of the trees in the swamp down.

The pond is there because my father and two younger brothers built the dam for it while I was away in the Navy. My father bought this property during that same period. I was raised across town on a much smaller farm. He sold the place I was raised to buy more land here. I was a little disappoint they sold my home place, but it was only a place we lived for 4-5 years so I wasn't that attached to it. I don't possess the sentimentality for this farm my younger brothers have. It's home to them from an early age. I am attached to my house. It's made of cypress trees I cut down in the swamp and hauled to the sawmill.

This is a picture of the drum I play each day. I might miss playing a day occasionally, but I'm real committed to playing it regularly. The blue chair came from my mother's house after she died. It was a gift to her from her children. It has motors in it to either use it as a LazyBoy type of recliner, but the real feature is that it will tilt forward to assist older people get out of the chair. This feature makes it possible to adjust it to a comfortable seat to play my drum.

The other articles in the picture won't be seen in this particular arrangement again, because while remodeling my house things got moved around. A lotta stuff finally got thrown away during this transition, and will never be seen again.

This is a test run to see what the page looks like with a photograph on it. If this works and it looks right, then I'll be posting a picture and writing comments about the picture. This shot is of the remodeling I'm doing on my house. This shows the lastest work I've done on it. Maybe this will work for me or it won't.

I switched over to the new Blogger format. That should renew this old account and get things started. I guess I'll have to get with Rainey to figure out how to post photographs here. My plan is to post one photograph and write about the content of the photo.

I don't know whether this blog is still working for me. I haven't posted for a long time. This message is just to see if it still works. I wanna put some pictures up.