February: Stone color amethyst, meaning is sincerity, security, and peace of mind

Supposedly during this time she is 7 months pregnant with Trig Palin? She is walking too fast and breathing so easily. I can't imagine her being pregnant 7 months in this condition.

I have never seen a skinny woman so pregnant before in my life.

What Are Your thoughts?

JSC

4 February

"Very painful legs. Took Voltarol in the evening in order to try and get a better nights sleep"

5th February

"Rang the hospital again. The suggested I saw my GP. My own GP away so had to see a different one, a lovely female doctor."

19 February

"Hospital Appointment - The Registra said that there is a high risk of the cancer coming back. This really shook me. They don't want to see me again until June when I will have my next CT scan. No blood test today. Seems such a long time with nothing."

20 February

"Rang the surgery for an appointment to see the female doctor to talk things over, but can't get an appointment until 5 March. Told to ring week before on wither Mon or Thurs to see if there is a cancellation."

22 February

"Rang my nurse support at the hospital to talk through last Mondays hospital appointment and to find out if I should have had a blood test. The nurse thinks I should have done and will check if need one."

28 February

"Rang hospital to ask about having a blood test as have not heard back from nurse. Spoke to a different nurse who agreed I needed a blood test and told me to come in tomorrow."

Major Props to the Springfield-Greene County Library system for trying to find ways to support local music. First, the new Park Central library downtown sent out an open call to area musicians to put their albums on library shelves for people to listen to and borrow. Now, the library is offering more opportunities to play live. More details follow after clicking.

Here's the message we got this morning, courtesy of MySpace:

"The Park Central Library is looking for musicians to play the second Thursday of Dec, Jan, and Feb.
If any or all have the inclination and the FIRE! to play in such a marvelous place as the PRK, please drop us a line.
We would love to know by the weekend.

Thanks,
Alan @ PRK"

You can get in touch with the Park Central library by calling 417-831-1342 or by clicking here.

I had a three hour layover between trains last spring in Washington, D.C.'s Union Station, during which I spent some quality time with Don't Blame it on Rio: The Real Deal Behind Why Men Go to Brazil for Sex. The crux of the book's argument, and my interest therein, was why women of the tropics were entirely more sexually satisfying in almost every respect than their American counterparts. The point of the book was not to tell American women their situation was hopeless, or to stereotype Latin American women (well, maybe it did strive to do that. But let's be honest: anyone would want to be stereotyped as sexual Buddhas): rather, it was to highlight the - how do I put this - frigid behavior a cold climate can subtly bestow upon a Norteamericano. The volume made an effort to stress that this frigidity applies to all sexes who have the misfortune of enduring five months of winter each year. One bundles up one's balls along with one's summer clothing. Its Cosmo-esque prose simply lent itself to talking to "the girls."

The book is chock full of sexual platitudes and over-advocates the use of lingerie to cover up other inadequacies, but it does acknowledge something very real, and also something that, in my guess, tends to occur a lot more towards the Arctic circle than the Tropic of Capricorn. Let me be blunt: cold weather makes you less outwardly friendly. This is not a knock on the fundamental character, of, say, New Englanders. Vermonters are some of the most genuinely warm and loving people I have ever encountered. But you wouldn't necessarily know it if you sauntered into Montpelier and expected to be waved at in the midst of a February cold front.

Many Latin Americans (and Southerners, and Texans, and anyone else who lives in a warm climate) have asked: why do so many Americans act cold when they come down for a Christmas break? Essentially: why don't Americans smile and wave at you and come up and offer conversation the way "warmies" might? Simply, if you live in the cold, you are used to walking around with your hands close to your tightly bundled body for half the year. For six months, you spend almost all your time inside - if you care about your blood circulating - and deprive your poor skin cells of all the delights the tropics afford. Inevitably, it takes a little for anyone to thaw.

I feel the need to briefly defend New England's amorous aptitude. Think of Northeasterners as ice cream: cold at first, but just as delicious and libido-tingling as a pastry once they are allowed to melt in your mouth a little.

I'm not saying we're all sexy. If you watched us dance, then you would rightly judge Vermont men and women to be taxonomically closer to naked mole rats than homo sapiens. But otherwise, we're really a spirited bunch, once you have accomplished the monumental task of distracting us from the cold long enough to be undressed. In all seriousness, winter sometimes affords a somewhat voracious appetite for a certain sexual relationship: that is, the "comfort blanket" way of relating to someone. All I have to say about that is that when it gets dark at 4:30 in the afternoon and you're done with work, sometimes there is little to do other than hump like rabbits until your lamb stew starts to boil over. Not quite the rocket of sexual energy the tropics, or the American summer, provide, but it's something. Getting laid is better than not getting laid, and New Englanders haven't forgotten that. I think.

Edith Wharton puts it more astutely. In Ethan Frome, she depicts the difference between "summer relationships" and "winter relationships," and how we in the land of seasons naturally look for different things romantically in different climates. I'm not saying this is a good thing, but Ms. Wharton at least acknowledges the phenomenon's existence. Ethan is not a dislikable character, nor is he fundamentally unfriendly or cold. He is simply thrust, both through his original geography and his subsequent resignation to said region, into an inevitably disappointing climate:

Ethan Frome drove in silence, the rains loosely held in his left hand, his brown seamed profile, under the helmet-like peak of the cap, relieved against the banks of snow like the bronze image of a hero. He never turned his face to mine, or answered, except in monosyllables, the questions I put, or such slight pleasantries as I ventured. He seemed a part of the mute melancholy landscape, an incarnation of its frozen woe, with all that was warm and sentient in him fast bound below the surface; but there was nothing unfriendly in his silence. I simply felt that he lived in a depth of moral isolation too remote for casual access, and I had the sense that his loneliness was not merely the result of his personal plight, tragic as I guessed that to be, but had in it, as Harmon Gow had hinted, the profound accumulated cold of many Starkfield winters.

Wharton places Ethan's desire for carnal warmth and fulfillment in direct conflict with the realities of the seasons and its accompanying culture. Bleak, yes. But I like to view it as both a depiction and condemnation of such a culture. Ethan Frome - and now, far removed from 9th grade English class, I am free to realize this - is a tragedy, with the hero's tragic flaw being that he succumbed too easily to the emotional death that can accompany a long winter. That he pays the price in the form of permanent disability is beside the point. Wharton understands how profoundly the cold affects one's ability to express desire. She also understands that such desires are not devoid in the tragic New England male: they are merely warped through the prism of February and March.

One cannot help but be driven to function differently in the cold than in the heat. What's the solution? Deal with the cold or get out? Or change your fundamental nature and go against generations of sexual frigidity? In the end, my D.C. Brazilio-American sex manual did not advocate moving to a warmer climate as the solution to one's coital ills. Rather, it laid out a "road map to better bedroom behavior" that General Petraus would have been proud of. Essentially, "don't blame it on Rio. Blame it on yourself." Suggestions included saucy negligees and full-spectrum UV light lamps in which one could bathe oneself in the cold solstice evenings.

I'll take the former, at least in theory. I won't say I've put it into practice until I put my money where my mouth is. But I will say that I'm looking into becoming less of an ice cream cone and more of a delicious Argentinian almond croissant.

We drank a 2006 Winter's Hill Pinot Blanc

Bruce made a salad of arugula from the winter farmer's market (it had texture and flavor and we were so excited to have it as we had been eating the bagged, vapid, stuff from the grocery store for a long time...), radicchio, dandelion greens, Cara Cara oranges, sliced, raw baby turnips, Spanish almonds, and leftover garlic chips. The dressing was an apple balsamic vinaigrette. We enjoyed a bottle of Elemental Cellars 2004 Syrah.

So I've been going out to Yellowstone for about 3 years now during Rut Season in late September or early October.  What a blast, from a photographic point of view. 

I have wanted to get out there in the winter sometime for a while now.  Missed out on an opportunity last year when The workshop I was interested in filled up fast.  Not gonna make that mistake this time.  I just got an Email from the nice folks at The Great American Photography Workshops.

They are doing their Winter Wonderland III Workshop in Yellowstone in February.
I have signed up as well as my Favorite Sherpa Diane!  It did snow briefly on us there at 8,000ft. last October, but to be there when the snow is so deep we can't walk without snowshoes!  I can't wait to get out there...  I'm no Tom Murphy, but this guy inspires me.  I would just Love to be able to get even close to a shot I have seen of his with a Bison -35 Degrees near a thermal and the frost and ice on this bison's face and the mist in the air is just amazing!  This guy camps out in the wild during winter, and Not in a full covered tent either!  If You have ever seen the video "Christmas in Yellowstone", (this has aired on PBS several times) you'll know what I mean, and why as a photographer I am so excited...  Well worth the time to watch... Heck I bought my own copy.

Don't know if we will be taking the video camera on this trip... but ALL the camera gear is going.

Can you see me in the back of a Big Snow Cat with the 500mm lens in tow?

So we weighed our options, flying in, renting a vehicle, hotel costs, limited gear packed giving ever changing flight restrictions, etc. vs. driving the Big Ass Truck for 20-hours with all my gear, extra pillow(s), No Tray Table restrictions, No radio/music/electronic/cell phone restrictions, ability to pee whenever Sherpa #1 wants too (providing pilot feels like stopping!), and of course - the cost of Gas.  Driving has won out.  Oddly, there seems to be one Direct flight in and out of Jackson Hole a day from Chicago on our airline of choice, and about a dozen or more connecting flight a day through Dallas Fort-Worth (DFW).  some of those connecting flights had total times start-to-finish of over 30-hours, Dang!  My chance of having a weather delay with the truck is a lot less than waiting around the airports for weather.  And I can get Pizza!  Of course, that time of year the scenery can be so much better looking than the clouds.

These images are just a few shots from last October's trip. Keep an eye out here for images from February's trip once we return...

More images from our 2007 trip at this link: Yellowstone /Grand Tetons 2007

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You see, the island is inspiring corny thoughts, but that is how it is. Rimbaud was not corny in his poetry, but he almost had a corny end in Arabia. Nobody is perfect. Oscar Wilde thought he was, and it is true, he wrote Salomé, for me a masterpiece--didn’t he write it in French? I’m sure you‘ll have no problem with old Oscar, you like him too much and rightly so, he was almost hundred years ahead of his time. And he had a sense of humour. I visited his tomb in Paris.

The island looks almost like an English landscape, all green with the blue sea around, but it is full of flowers already, yellow buttercups (or something like that) covering the fields everywhere. Also beautiful mauve ones. I don’t know the names, I’m hopeless. Rousseau, when he got older started getting interested in plants and flowers. Is it a sign of old age? I’m not that interested as yet. I remember I read Rousseau’s Confessions in a sunny hotel room in Casablanca, thirty years ago. From my window I could see a balcony opposite with a tortoise in it. I don’t know how these thirty years have passed. You must learn to carpe diem.

Today I bought a laurel to plant to remind me of the old house in Athens and to dry the leaves for cooking. I’m also planting two fig trees. The old ones died years ago and no Greek garden is conceivable without fig trees. One is supposed to produce white figs and the other, black ones. But the big event is the homage to Dionysos, by planting the vines. They will produce dark red wine (not to be confused with the wine dark sea of Homer.) Unfortunately I will not be here during the planting, because George the Albanian who is going to plant them has gone back to Albania to renew his visa for Greece. The prosaic reality destroys romanticism, although I have not yet visualised George as a Dionysos disciple with a vine crown on his head.

The same birds seem to be around as in the summer. They go about their daily affairs crowing unconvincingly. The nights are cold and there is going to be a full moon on Saturday, my last night here. They predict bad weather as from tomorrow but I hope it will be clear on Saturday. If it is, it will be a good omen. I’m going to build a fire in the fireplace anyway, to celebrate the passing of another winter. And so life flows. Amen.

The salad was baby arugula, lettuce, radicchio, walnuts, green onion, radish, apple, & some kind of dry Italian cheese (we didn't document the name). The dressing was pomegranate balsamic vinaigrette.

We drank a bottle of Masi Ripasso 2004.