We took a weekend trip out to Stone Mountain, primarily to see the laser show and also as an end-of-summer camping trip. (All through the show, I kept wondering if Stonewall Jackson, Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis ever thought they’d be memorialized by laser cartoons dancing to Little Richard and Ray Charles …)

Made for some eerie scenes as there was a lot of humidity hanging in the air, so the laser showed up nicely. Brutal to make a photo of if you don’t bring the right gear …

Canon G10, 15.7 mm, ISO 200, 1/50, f/3.5

Upstate New York has the best skies anywhere. They can move from cerulean blue to boxer’s eye black in a moment and just bring atmosphere to the realm. I miss the skies.

Wandering through the Adirondack Park (the largest state park in the world), you see all sorts of old things – rocks, homes and trees. The trees that struggle just to get a little earth above their roots, and then hope they don’t get blown off a peak.

Canon EOS 5D Mark II, EF 28-135 mm f/3.5-5.6 IS USM, ISO 100, 1/500, f/6.3

The kids were getting antsy as the lunch conversation drifted off into an afternoon talk, so we headed outside to a little playground with a massive swing set. And then they tried to fly into the sky …

Canon EOS 5D Mark II, EF 28-135 mm f/3.5-5.6 IS USM, ISO 100, 1/640, f/8.0

No one crashed, which was refreshing.

The great family vacation has begun, after four days on the road.

Our first stop was to see family in Massachusetts, a two day haul from our Georgia home. We got in Friday afternoon and chased the nephews around for a while, then spent Saturday seeing my mom and the evening with some friends. Sunday was spent seeing my other brother, fetching the kids, seeing some other friends, dropping the kids at the first brother’s house so they could chase their cousins around, heading back to the hospital to see mom, then packing up for a Monday morning departure.

Which involved a six hour tow into the Adirondack Park, where we learned our camper leaks when being towed in the rain …

Ahhh, vacation.

Of course, 24 hours out from seeing family and friends, it’s crystal clear it wasn’t enough time. Three nights just went by in a blur – there was some checkers with a nephew, some time by the swings, some attempts at getting them to eat the zucchini we brought from our own garden … and then we were off. In a blur.

Canon EOS 5D Mark II, EF 35 mm f/1.4 L USM, ISO 640, 1/800, f/1.4

My academic lifestyle was supposed to let me rest for a bit each summer. Not stop work completely, but at least lighten it up.

It was a myth. Or an outright lie. It hasn’t slowed down much, because as soon as work lightened up with the end of the Maymester (and the publication of the stunning work my students did), everything hit the proverbial fan: kids went on the road, wife went on the road, I went on the road. And in the middle of all that, my mother went through a double organ transplant (liver and kidneys).

I’ve been pacing around here in Georgia until we can get up there to see her. So I did the only thing I could think of to occupy my hands and mind: I moved my office to a new room. So now we have two disasters in the house – the half-emptied old office and the unorganized new one.

At least the wiring is neat. For now …

Canon EOS 5D Mark II, EF 35 mm f/1.4 L USM, ISO 800, 1/50, f/1.8

Okay, it was last week … but my teaching duties wrapped up on Wednesday. Freedom! Freedom! Excepting for this book I need to finish designing. And this multimedia immersion workshop I need to plan. And redesigning all my fall courses, including building a new course from scratch. And catching up on the industry changes via stories and sites I bookmarked but didn’t have time to read. And … well, I guess I’m not really done at all …

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