Well, it doesn’t happen often but I managed to be blindsided by a bit of Pablo Neruda motivated poetry inspiration.  Although there is something morbidly fitting that death is the subject matter.  Anyway, without further ado here is a poem dedicated to a dying oak tree at Mount Hermon. . .

Ode to the Death of an Old Friend

do you know you are dying
you don’t look like you are
you look strong and healthy
your branches like arms
stretching to the heavens
maybe you are already on your way

do you feel the changes
maybe you are confused
maybe you think autumn is coming early
that it is the world
which is changing
not you

maybe you know
maybe you have heard
in the whispers of your visiting friends
in the feigning glances of passers-by
or in the wet eyes of your neighbors
or maybe you just know
as sometimes people do

take heart and know you will be missed
it may not be much comfort
but we will celebrate your last days
sit in your shade
and watch you sway in the cool breeze
and we will curse the sweet smelling assassin
who brought your demise

farewell old friend
you are leaving much too soon

Well, we made it through the first check in of summer here at Mount Hermon pretty much without a hitch.  I’m hoping things go really well this summer now that I’ve got one summer under my belt.

We did have a bit of an eventful last week though because of a large fire that was burning just about five miles from the camp.  I’ve already blogged about that and the photos are still up over on Flickr.

The last little bit of this update is in some ways the most exciting.  Tomorrow I’m going down to Vintage to put up photos for a show we are having for the next 6 weeks in the coffeehouse.  I’m excited about that since it will be the first ever public show of my photos in large numbers.  I had two photos in a show back at Christmas but this one is going to be just Matt and I.  We both have about 20 shots to put up.

So this was a little bit of a disjointed and scatterbrained update but Coffee Cat closes soon and, frankly, I’m having a little bit of trouble concentrating right now.  Well, on that note, later!

. . .though not in a good way today. As I post this there is a 300+ acre fire burning in the community of Bonny Doon about 5 miles from Mount Hermon. The sad part is that people are going to lose their homes and this the weather is not good for fighting fires. It is hot, dry, and windy today.

If there is anything at all good to come out of it though, I got the chance to take some pictures early on in the fire from where the crews were staging. You can see them over on my flickr site. Today I had the day off of work but I was headed over there to chat with a few people since I was bored of hanging out at my house. While standing in front of the APC, Dan Dawson walks up to me and points to the sky and says, “smoke, where’s your camera?!” So I run home while he grabs his and we drive up Felton-Empire Grade to the Bonny Doon Volunteer Fire Department and hop out. At this point, smoke is rising high into the air and it is black and there is a lot of it. We spent about an hour there taking pictures of the planes overhead and the fire crews as they assembled and headed out. In some ways, this was my first taste of photographing a real news event. It’s pretty exhilarating. Being that it was my first though, I didn’t push my luck too much. If I wanted a closer shot, I pulled out my telephoto rather than moving in closer to the “action.” I also realized that it would help A LOT to know more about who is who and how the fire crews are organized. Anyway, I’ve got more photos to organize and edit so I think I’m going to wrap up and head back home. I’ve got some dust flecks I need to clone stamp out and a few over exposed images I need to tweak.

You can see additional shots from Dan on his flickr here.

Over the last few weeks there has been a movie being filmed at Mount Hermon as part of the summer program. After a small bit part earlier in the film, I got to participate again, this time playing a paparazzi photographer at a red carpet event. Of course I took the shots for realzies and it was actually a really fun time. I also got to borrow a Canon 580 flash for the evening. I don’t currently have an external flash and since it is a part of Canon’s big summer sale, I’ve been thinking about picking one up. While the majority of my low light shooting is at Vintage and in situations (like during the service) where using a flash isn’t a real option, it still would be a very useful tool to have. The onboard flash on the 30D is woefully inadequate and as I’m looking toward a 5D (which doesn’t have a flash) as my future camera it’s something I’ll need eventually anyway. Head on over to flickr to check out the shots.

“As children we assume that greatness is within our grasp. Whatever inspires us, we begin to dream that one day we will be the best. It is only as we lose our childlike innocence that we begin to settle for far less. A part of growing up seems to be acquiescing to mediocrity. It’s easy to say that we’re just becoming realistic, that it’s just a part of growing up. But, in fact, it’s the death of our souls. When we stop dreaming, we start dying. For some of us, this has been a slow, painful death.” – Erwin McManus “Soul Cravings”

When I was a little kid, I looked forward to the day when I would get to play baseball in high school and college, maybe even play pro-ball one day. My parents tell stories of me rounding the bases in our front yard pumping my fist a la Kirk Gibson celebrating my own game winning home run. When I was in middle school it was computer programming. I was just discovering all the cool things you could do with computers. I even wrote a program in BASIC which you could pretend to have a conversation with. Then in high school and college it was hanging on every word of Josh Lyman and Kate Harper on the West Wing, knowing for sure one day I would get to be “the guy the President turns to when he doesn’t know what to do.”

But then I realized I just wasn’t fast around the bases. In fact, I was slow on a level approaching epic. While I’m a big guy, I’ve never really had a power swing either, I’ve been more of a high average singles and doubles hitter. That dream limped on for a while longer through church softball and pickup games but I’ve pretty much resigned to living vicariously through my fantasy team today.

And then I realized that I really don’t enjoy math, and computer programing requires a lot of math classes. They aren’t the algebra variety either. Maybe if I had a really great math teacher who got me excited about integers and tangents I’d have turned out a little different but I decided I’d rather let other people do the programming while I just tinker around with the hardware.

Finally came the realization in college that I’m not aggressive enough for politics.  Sure I want to be in the situation room as world changing decisions are made, but I don’t want to do the ass kissing and hatchet work it takes to get there. I want to spend my life focused on making the world a better place, not focusing on the next election or congressional vote. If I moved to DC the city would swallow me up in a second. There is so much more to life than polling numbers. If some day I was given the right opportunity to become involved in a campaign or political office, I’d probably jump at the chance. But to move up from the ground level just isn’t who I am. I don’t want it enough.

I look back on my (relatively short) life sometimes and kick myself for decisions I made that basically changed the course of my future in just a few seconds. I remember being invited by the baseball coach to try out for the high school team.  I told him I’d be no good and walked away. I think about the homework assignments I didn’t put full effort into or the classes I skipped to watch a movie with a friend and wonder if I couldn’t have graduated from SPU with honors. I think about stupid things I’ve said to girls I liked that ensured a friendship at the cost of a relationship. I even wonder sometimes if the seizures I had in high school didn’t change the wiring in my brain somehow, closing off neural pathways or altering my personality.

If you had asked me even five years ago what I would be doing today it wouldn’t have been working in Christian camping. This is not so say that I feel God brought me to Santa Cruz for no reason (in fact, my brief 1 1/2+ year down here has changed me for the better in ways I never would have though). But I was supposed to be working at a web 2.0 company or the State Department or in grad school writing a masterful thesis. I’m not supposed to be a confused, frustrated, cynical 20-something. My interest in history gives me this ominous shadow of time hanging over my shoulder. People may be living longer, but I feel sometimes like I’m wasting important years of my life. To go back to the quote above, I see greatness slipping away with the passing of time and it leaves me feeling a little more panicked with each passing day. Panicked that I missed God’s calling to whatever I’m really supposed to be doing, missed that class or that conversation, or job fair interview where I was going to get my “dream job.” Terrified that I’m going to wake up and realize I’m 35 and working a job I have absolutely no passion for, just doing it because I’m still waiting for God to show me what’s “next.”

So what is next then. Well, my current passion and dream job is photojournalism. I’ve still got a lot to learn, and it is a very competitive field, but I look at my work at Vintage and compare it to “professional” work and I’m not half bad (in fact, if I might boast a little, I’m pretty good). Traveling to Uganda and documenting the trip was an amazing experience. While it has put a pretty big dent in my youthful finances, it was worth every penny for the photos and stories I was able to bring back. One of these days I will finish the book I’m working on to self publish with photos from the trip. Then next fall I’m going to sit down with a friend and put together a professional portfolio of work to market myself. Looking at photos that tell a story is so inspiring to me that I want to go shoot more myself.

“Your soul longs to become, and you can try to ignore it, but soon you will find yourself hating your life and despising everyone who refuses to give up on his or her dreams.” -McManus

I don’t know what the future holds, I don’t have a crystal ball or hot line to Heaven, but for a little while longer at least I’m going to keep dreaming.

I went out tonight to take pictures of the moon originally but it had already set buy the time I got out there. Oh well, I ended up with some great star pics instead. I just need to pick up a corded shutter release and I’ll really be in business!

I’m glad to be hooked up to the tubes again!  Even though I’m at Coffee Cat right now (how can it be cliche when it feels so right?!) I’ve finally got internet up and running at my new house.  It only took about four hours of work from the point of Comcast lighting up the cable to me actually being able to get around their weird DNS login thingy.  I finally just took my laptop downstairs and Dan (our downstairs neighbor) helped me figure out how to get it working, which pretty much just consisted of rebooting the router about 12 times and fiddling with settings that shouldn’t have any effect on getting access and poof, it finally got through.  Dan is one of the graphics guys at Mount Hermon, and even though he is a Mac guy he is fun to hang out with so I forgive him for that.

Our Wednesday night “Manfest” went really well and we talked about having more in the future.  It would be fun to see that develop into a continual thing where we meet every few weeks or so to hang out.  There are actually quite a few guys (we had 10 show up to the BBQ) that are interested so I think we can pull it off.  It is nice having a big enough place to have that many people over too.  We had a couple people out back on the deck, a couple playing Halo, and a few more around the dining room table so no one was crammed in anywhere.  I was really glad Jeremy, one of our newer program guys, made it by for a while to hang out.  He seems like a really cool guy and since his wife is out of town, he needed someone to feed him dinner.   We actually just squeaked by on meat because I went to Safeway at lunch and bought more.  Otherwise we would have run out.   I’ve gotta stop buying all the meat though because even when I just buy hamburger I end up spending $30 on it because I refuse to buy the cheap stuff (96% lean or more is the only way to go).  At least the stuff I bought for the BBQ wasn’t quite as expensive as the buffalo I really like to get (which can run $5+ per lbs).

Then last night I invited a few more people over to watch The Office and that ended up being a ton of fun.  It is fun to work in an office and then watch that show.  We were trying to figure out who is who in our office this summer and I got labeled as Dwight for some reason.  I tried to argue for at least being named Kevin or even Creed but it was no use.  Of course, I could have argued that as the only guy in the office I was at least anatomically closest to being Jim.  I took a Office quiz on Facebook today and that decided that I’m actually Ryan.  I could certainly do worse than that.

So I’ve had a great week! I got good news on two fronts. First off, I’m moving into a new house starting this weekend. Mount Hermon has a two bedroom unit that I am going to share with one of the other guys on staff that is way, way nicer than the last two places I’ve been. It actually has carpet! The best things about it though are the kitchen, living space, and washer/dryer. I won’t have to go to the laundry mat any more which makes me very happy. We will also have both a dining room and a living room so I can finally start having bigger get togethers and movie nights. I want to have one of our reg staff meetings there too so I can cook breakfast for everyone. Anyway, maybe tomorrow I can take some pics and throw them up on flickr. The power isn’t on there yet so that is the only real reason I haven’t started moving in there yet.

The other big news I have is from Vintage Faith. I’m in talks right now to become the leader of the photo team, something that came as a little bit of a surprise, but a very welcome one. I’ve been interested for a few weeks now in seeing what form the photo team would take when things started back up this fall and now I get to make the decisions! My hope is to have a two meeting system that gives opportunities both for advanced shooters to be more involved and for real newbies to have fun and learn. I want to have two meetings a month (every two weeks) where one meeting is more of a true meeting for discussing documenting of church events, planning for shows in the coffeehouse, encouraging each other in our craft, and brainstorming different projects to work on. The other meeting would be more of a photo walk where we go to a pre-determined site and shoot for an afternoon. I already have a few sites in mind but I want to talk with people too to see if there aren’t some great sites I haven’t thought of. Potentially the coolest site to go to would be Fort Ord down by Monterey but I think it might be illegal to just walk around the grounds there so I have to look into that one more. If nothing else though, there are plenty of fun sites around Santa Cruz that will work just fine. Anyway, hopefully I’ll be able to post some more thoughts on that in the coming days but for now I’ve gotta wrap up and get going. Later!

Another Big Spider

Originally uploaded by Jonathan Assink

As I say in the description, spiders don’t bother me when they stay outside and I see them well before they suddenly fly in through my car window or drop out of a tree to land on my head. But when they keep turning up in my bathroom, not so cool.

So after wondering out loud recently about how it seems like so many people we take payments from at work have had their credit card information stolen and how I’ve never had any problems, I’ve now had a problem.  Douh!  I logged onto my US Bank checking account tonight and was surprised to find that it had a -$251 balance!  Fortunately, it looks like all the fraudulent charges were made at gas stations in the Chicago area so it’s pretty easy for me to argue my case that it wasn’t me who made the charges, but still kind of a pain.  For once though, I’m actually impressed with my bank, which is rather shocking.  I called up the US Bank hot line and within just a couple minutes was talking to a fraud representative who put a hold on my account and forwarded my case onto their investigative department.  They are going to be sending me out a letter to sign verifying that I didn’t make any of the charges and then they will refund the money that did get charged along with the associated overdraft fees.  Not exactly my idea of a way to end a good day but at least it didn’t end with me getting in a fight with the people on the other end of the line.

For some good news, our summer staff training entered its second full day today and I think we have a really good crew.  They are all hard working and I think will pick up on things really quick, which is good because they have a ton of stuff to learn.  We finished up the day with desert and games at Marci’s house.  I made ice cream which was, as always, a big hit.  It sat pretty heavy with me though, probably all the sugar.  I did forget to buy any eggs so this is the first time I made it without a raw egg.  The only difference I can tell is that it didn’t freeze quite as well.  It took almost 17 hours to really firm up good and even then it still melted really, really fast.  I was supposed to make cookies for tomorrow but I decided to take a break.  I told Brenda I would maybe bring fresh popcorn back in or something but I just need a day without any baking.  We talked in the office today about how we need to avoid going into summer already worn down, so a few evenings of just relaxing and maybe watching a movie or two should do the trick.  Maybe some more West Wing episodes.  Anyway, I think I’m going to head to bed.  Later!