ENGAGE! Chelsea and Ray!

ENGAGE: Amanda and Joe!

TWO RINGS BIND THEM: Britney and David at the Double D Ranch!

Britney and David had their wedding on a Zebra Ranch in Columbus, Texas. Oddly I didn't see any zebras at all the whole time I was out there. Everything is bigger in Texas and the house on the property was not different. It had just barely been finished. The railing these kids are leaning on was just secured by a few nails rather than the bolts that would normally hold it. That was a little freaky to find out. HA!

The guys came charging in on an old fire engine. Britney was escorted down the isle by her brother and David ended up in the pool, not once but three times. It was a fun wedding. I suppose any wedding that ends in a pool is a fun wedding. Wouldn't you think so?

ENGAGE: Farah and Spence!

Britney!

Britney had her bridals done in a very hot October, but somehow found a way to look cool and collected. I'll have to take lessons from her on how to achieve this because I was covered in sweat! Her bridals are some of my favorite from 2006!



I've been freed to try some new lighting techniques lately and have been enjoying the outcome tremendously. I don't like to get stuck in a rut for too long. I start feeling kind of odd. Always strive to be better!

TWO RINGS BIND THEM: Sara and Damion at the Barr Mansion!

Friday The 13th was their day of choice and I guess the Barr Mansion wasn't booked. these two were very fun and had an interesting career: Video game designers. Sara said, 'Yeah, programmers can make more money working at Microsoft making spreadsheets, but they prefer to work for us and blow $*#^& up.' I'm not really much of a gamer so I laughed and made some comment that showcased my lack of knowledge.

I figured the wedding was going to be all Goth or something dark to go along with the date, but it was pretty normal with fabulous flowers, dinner and cake all provided by the Barr Mansion. They had this raisin bread there that I just found irresistable and I wandered around shooting chewing that fabulous baked good until the last of it was gone.

32,000 flushes

Typically I enjoy paying my bills. Perhaps I'm somewhat of an oddity, but I find it very therapeutic to send all of my money away to happy people in other states that provide electricity, water and gas to my house as well as the occasional insurance bill to continue driving my cars. I know what it's going to cost and I always know what the bills are going to be. Sometimes I'm a little bit surprised but for most part not. I set up our budget once again when we returned to Texas in September.

My brother had left a note on our master bath toilet saying that the bob had broken and he had shut it off a few days earlier. I was happy to find it shut off and proceeded to buy the parts that I needed to fix the problem. I learned a valuable lesson that day. NEVER buy anything that is not factory sealed from Home Depot. I think they take customer returns, and put them back on the shelf with out even looking at the contents. I bought the first part and found bits missing, got rather upset because I couldn't remember which of the 500 Home Depots I bought it at and bought another one with out taking the other back. I got it all fixed and was quite happy with out acconplishments for the day. At last I could have a toilet to myself once again. Happy days.

Well, since then we took over one of the kids bedrooms as an office while waiting to get a real office, rebuilt the website after hackers took down our server and spent an arm and a leg on having a part fixed on my air conditioning. All in a days work for the self employed home owner. Then it happened. I got the mail with zeal like I always do. There was a bunch of crap that went into the recycling pile, and a couple of bills. One was a bogus bill from an internet company trying to tell me I owe them money for advertising my website when they have never done anything for me and are just hoping that I'm stupid enough to send them money and the other was the water bill. Yes, the water bill. Sure, to people who have been living in their house, taking showers, washing clothes and watering their lawn it wasn't that much money. But I had only been living in the house for two of the weeks that they were billing me for and it seemed a little high for that. I did the math and figured out that we had used about 5-6 times as much water as usual in our two weeks back. Kind of odd. It was about 45,000 gallons more then we usually use. It turned out that that had run though the toilet after the bob broke before my brother shut the water off. On our toilets thats about 32,000 flushes. It's kind of a bargain if you think that it only cost about $80 extra.

ENGAGE: Britney and David!

They called me up and said, 'we want you to shoot our wedding and engagement,' 5 days before I was going to leave for 3 months to shoot weddings on the West Coast. So I rounded up some time and went to work on a pretty humid June day. This was my first real experience shooting in humidity. Some how people from Texas have figured out how to not sweat. It's crazy. These two where masters of it.

More moving bloging

We packed up Tuesday with what we thought was everything under control. The car carrier trailer we needed wasn't ready to be picked up until later in the afternoon. The truck seemed heavy after loading and I called the truck place asking what the maximum weight was just to be on the safe side. They said it 15500 pounds was the maximum loaded weight. I weighed it at a truck scale and it was only 13600. I guessed everything was cool. After our car carrier was attached and loaded with the rain soaking us for two hours Gram wanted to test the lights on the trailer. Most of the time I would assume that the people who rent trucks only rent stuff that worked but did it anyway. The blinkers and brake lights didn't work on the trailer. I called the truck place and told them things didn't work right and they referred me to someone else who referred me the 800 number who referred to a guy named Rob in Portland who referred me back the second guy I talked to. Along the way an offer to come out and fix the truck was kind of made but instead stopping in Medford on the way the next morning was decided to be the best way. This was a good thing because we would have been screwed.
The next morning everyone hopped in the cars and went as quick as we could to Medford after fond farewells. In Medford the second guy I'd talked to drove the truck around the corner and into his shop to fix the lights. After a few minutes I walked into the guys shop to see how the fix was going. He looked concerned and said that the truck weighed way too much. For some reason I took the comment calmly and explained what the girl at the truck place had told me about the maximum weight and then went on to explain that I was a photographer, not a truck driver. I rent a truck from them assuming that what they tell me is true. He made a call to see what his boss wanted to do and then waited. I walked around outside patiently waiting optimistically for some reason. This whole move has been more work than anything else I've ever done. It seemed only fitting that this kind of disaster would be the apex of the move. I told my family of the news and walked back over to the shop where the second guy was talking on the phone. He said that his superviser wanted to talk to me. I took the phone and he made an offer to upgrade the truck because I was missinformed about the actual capacity by the truck place and that they would up grade my truck to the next size up if I would transfer all of my stuff from one truck to another. 'Okay,' I said calmly though full well knowing that I had just gotten the good end of a deal that was going to get someone yelled at an awful lot. All they had to do was find a truck that was the right size.
My mind was racing now. I had asked the help of everyone I new in Grants Pass to help me get loaded up. Now I was in Medford and didn't know as many people who could be easily available. I needed someone to help me. I called Andy and Ann to see if they could help us and got Davy to come out though he wouldn't show up for an hour. I called John Sloan and left a frantic message about ponies and meth users and also asked him to help me load the new truck too. Finally they found a truck for us and brought it to the Medford rental yard, backed it up to our truck and brought out the loading gate. No one had shown up so I started moving everything that I could. The new truck was 8 feet longer than our existing truck so there was no problem loading everything. In fact there seemed to be so much room that I began planning on driving back to Grants Pass and getting my table saw, my bike, bike trailer, bar-B-Q and a few other things that had been abandoned. John Sloan called up and let me know that he could help and came a little bit later. I had half of the new truck loaded before anyone showed up to help me. I left the biggest heaviest things and everything got moved pretty quick. It took about an hour and a half to reload the truck. As soon as we were done we got in the truck and drove back to Grants Pas, picked up the stuff we had left behind and finally got on the road towards Aunt Mary's house in Turlock six hours later than we had expected.
Driving over the Siskiyous was uneventful though we found out that Budget does not let you put chains on their trucks and expects you to hold up in a hotel until bad weather had passed. That was rather refreshing to me since I really didn't want to put chains on truck tires in the freezing cold anyway. Budget would give an extra day of travel for free instead of allowing the chains. Driving was tough. It was like being beaten by a army of angry midgets. By the time night came on I was ready to sleep. Edmond was riding with me and watching videos and playing games on the powerbook and passed out as soon as it got dark. I turned on the radio much to my terror as I weaved around in my lane. All of my life I had tried to avoid listening to talk radio. There were too many people all saying the same thing or exactly the opposite. Then one day I got fed up with listening to music and turned on talk radio. As I weaved, I found some talking heads expressing there partisism and listened.
Passing was quite a bit of stress when I first started driving. My truck was 7'10" wide and the lane I was driving on was 10 feet wide. That didn't leave much space for error. Especially when passing trucks which were just as wide. Even worse were RVs who were just blind elderly people who wanted to go out with a big bang and run me into a ditch while doing it. I passed a midsized truck with a travel trailer on the back and felt my heart in my throat as they weaved around and came uncomfortably close to scraping the side of my $45K truck. I was happy that I lived and didn't pass too may more times that night.
As we came close to Turlock it dawned on me that Aunt Mary lived on a culdasack and started thinking about what I would do with the truck. Walmart was the first answer into my mind. They always had semis, RVs and other long haul vehicles in there parking lot overnight. Conveniently there was a Walmart around the corner from Aunt Mary's so all of my worries were limited to the people who might come and break in the the back of the truck and steal all of my crap. Those would have to be crack smoking morons if they think that I have anything nice or anything worth anything. I got out of the truck, locked it and went in our other car to Aunt Mary's. I hit the bed and was asleep almost immediately.
The next morning I got up around 9 and lazily dragged my self into the shower where I tortured myself with the hot cold treatment and was wide awake as soon as I got out. We had a lovely breakfast and fun time with Aunt Mary before collecting the massive amount of stuff that we had somehow brought in and getting back to the truck to find that nothing had happened at all and we had been freaked out about nothing.
When we got back on the road I made a decision that I just could not drive into LA down to Oma and Opa's house and would rather stay out at Aunt Karen's in Palmdale, a considerably less stressful place to get to though not as comfortable to stay at since it was couches the floor or a tent in the back yard. On Highway 99 we cruised along at a whopping 55 MPH on the roughest road imaginable. I was watching the trucks in front of me moving the slabs of highway like riding on a teeter totter and bouncing along horribly as we went. I found my back was starting to hurt in an awful way and holding my bladder was almost impossible. At last my back could take no more and I got off of the freeway at a rest stop and tried to twist myself with stretches. I noticed my wallet in my back pocket and removed it during my stretches. As soon as I removed it my back felt better.
After too many hours we came to the Antelope Valley where so many of my stories, personality and neuroses were formed. It was beautiful as we drove into the valley; a windy high desert valley where the wind never gave up and the rain and snow were normally kept at bay. I had planned on visiting the old adobe house where I had spent seven years, raising goats, pigs, and lambs, fighting fires, fighting chickens, building fences and playing in the dirt. from a good distance we could see the Big tree, though it looked small and depressed after its long years in the wind. The fields around the old house were filled with weeds instead of some crop as when I had lived there. Obviously Farmer Barnes had either retired or died and no one wanted to farm the land he farmed. It was an awful place to live and work. I would have died if I had been there as long as he had. I'll add more soon enough......

-Travis

http://www.rebelwithacamera.com

We made it

It became too much of a pickle to continue posting during our trip after 12 hour days of driving the truck. But now that I have slept for another couple of days in my new home in Texas I am feeling up to giving an update. WE MADE IT! There are boxes all around the house and we need shelves very badly for all of those books that we own but don't look at and will never read again. Everything else is falling into place slowly. We finally got the key to our mailbox and got the internet working and have the kitchen set up. We have our own washer and dryer again and a lot of space for all of that stuff that has been in boxes for the last year.

It's wonderful weather here. It was 67 yesterday and is supposed to be warmer today. Every morning the sun rises and comes through my window. There isn't any fog like in Grants Pass. It hasn't been cloudy yet and according to my brother it gets cloudy to rain and then leaves. I love it and am happy that I was able to take my family away from Grants Pass, it's destitute people, hopeless employment situation, overpriced housing and foggy, foggy fall, winter and spring. Ciao!

http://www.rebelwithacamera.com

Turlock to Palmdale

Today was a lot nicer. My back started hurting and my lymph infection started acting up and we had to only go 350 miles. We finally got out of Aunt Mary's at about 11 pm and drove as fast as we could on 99. The road was absolute crap. We got accross the Grapevine and came to where I used to live in the Antelope Valley. A windy horrible place. We went down and saw all the changes that had been made to the house and old barn that used to house our goats.
We got back on the road and an hour later pulled into Palmdale. Again it's been another day of brutal beatings. I need sleep.

Truck Trouble

Funny how things don't work the way you expect. We loaded the truck on Tuesday with the help of many fine photographer friends. Litttle did I know that the truck had been over loaded by 2600 pounds. At 7:45 we left Grants Pass and took my truck to a shop in Medford Wednesday morning after finding out the lights on the trailer weren't working right. The guy at the shop drove the truck into the shop and told me the truck was way too heavy. Oddly enough I had weighed the truck the day before because I was concerned and had called the local Budget rental place to find out the max weight. I was told the incorrect weight at that time and the guy in Medford told me so. I made a little bit of stink and the guy in Medford made some calls and they offered me another truck that was bigger at the same price IF I would unload the old truck load the new truck myself. I said sure and I went from a 16 foot truck to a 24 foot truck. It took 90 minutes for us to load the new truck and we had so much extra room we decided to go back to Grants Pass to pick up the stuff that we had left behind. We picked up everything in Grants Pass and finally left at around 1:45 p.m.

It was hard driving. The 24 foot truck was so big that it was like driving a semi truck. If I took my eyes off of the road I would start veering off. The truck lanes are bumpy. Since we left late we drove into the night which was really tough. All of a sudden my gigantic truck became 10 times harder to drive. I couldn't tell when I had actually passed someone or not. Some trucks would actually signal that you had passed but not a lot. Edmond came with me and played chess on the laptop screaming every time he lost. Now that we were driving this huge freaking truck we had to stop at different places to get fuel. We were almost as long as a semi with the trailer. We found that truck stops like Petro, Pilot and TA all have wireless internet broadcast out to the drivers in their trucks. That might make this blog a little easier in the next couple of days. We got into Turlock at about 11:40, left our truck in the Walmart parking lot (they are good for something) and went to Christina's Aunt Mary's house to sleep. (Thank you so much to Aunt Mary for rearranging her whole day for us, taking us in 12 hours later than we said we'd be there, feeding us, and sending us off with lots of goodies-CSG) I felt like I had been abused by an angry bride at a wedding after driving that truck for 10 hours. Hopefully tomorrow will be better.