Jonathan’s Mindless Blog

I have finished uploading all the pictures from the Colorado vacation.  The last set was from the Garden Of The Gods, an incredible park full of all sorts of weird rock formations.  Most of the rocks were really red due to their high content of iron oxide.  I was even able to get a tiny flower in a macro shot, fairly well focused without a tripod!  Here are the two of my favorites from the park:
 

This year’s first of two Fall vacations was taken to Colorado Springs, Colorado. My friends Tom & Corinna and their daughter, Hollis,
have moved from Anchorage, Alaska, to Colorado, and we were able to make it out to visit them for a long weekend. Tom is now stationed at the Air Force Academy, so we got to drive around base and take pictures and harass the overpopulation of white tail deer. We even got to see a coyote! While at the Academy, we went to the visitor’s center and watched a short film about the school, saw the building of the chapel, saw several other displays and bought trinkets. After that we went to the Chapel which was just weird. Really neat architecture, but all of the school buildings were very shiny metal finish, kind of cold in appearance. If I keep going into all this detail, I’ll never get through this thing, so on to the important stuff… I did not go by myself, I was able to go with Judith! She’s an absolutely wonderful lady that I love spending time with, and was lucky enough to convince her to go with me and we’re both glad we went! I also snuck some pictures of her in so I could show the world a beautiful lady.

She got to meet some of my close friends and we got to hang out and see a bunch of really cool stuff. After the Air Force Academy, we visited Garden of the Gods, just outside of town. It was very surreal, the rocks were very red and it seemed like they were turned 90 degrees from what they should have been, like all the strata was left to right instead of top to bottom. There was so much to see that day, there were mule deer, a homestead, awesome coffee, Pike’s Peak, Cripple Creek and just way too much to process in one day.

I’m done posting pictures for tonight, but there is one more group to come… Garden of the Gods pictures. Sometime this week I’ll get those posted. There are some really cool pictures in the group to come.

Well, it’s Labor Day and I didn’t do much of anything . It was a lazy good day with some hamburgers and hot dogs and my nieces were in town. It was Elizabeth’s birthday celebration today and I played the part of human jungle gym. It was a very nice day with sunshine, mild temperatures and a good breeze. I’m really wishing I hadn’t stayed in town, but since I did, I got some great pictures out of the 100 or so I took yesterday like this one: This is an excellent example of the local agrigulture and general culture mentioned in the previous post. This week will only be 4 days long and it’s payday on Friday!!

Friday I got a personal tour of Chattanooga and took some (I think) pretty cool photos. I’m working on post-processing on a few of them to put up on flickr… maybe finish those today. My outlook was broadened quite a bit. I thought the only thing there was a hospital and a lot of stinky industrial factory type industry, but IT’S NOT TRUE! There really is a downtown, even though I’ve never really seen it, and it has quite a bit of old architecture that’s full of character. One of the things I noticed was an extensive use of glass blocks in a lot of the old buildings, also, when looking from the pedestrian bridge over the river, one notices that blue is the requisite color for new architecture in the city. Lots of really neat out-of-the-way kind of places around as well. We ate at Durty Nelly’s Pub for lunch which was pretty good, where I had a reuben, which was VERY decent. For supper we went to the Bluff View Art District and mosied through the sculpture garden and cool courtyards and ate at Tony’s Pasta which was incredible. I had a dish of Baked Chicken Pesto, but that’s not entirely the proper name… It was excellent food and atmosphere anyway.

Now to satisfy the title… I grew up in Cheatham County, which borders Metropolitan Davidson County, but seems a lifetime away from the city. One of the great things about this time of year, right about the beginning of September is the time when the darkfire tobacco gets smoked in the barns. This produces an incredible amount of smoke, usually enough to fill the valley the barn is in with smoke and it hangs like a thick fog. The smell is INCREDIBLE!! It’s not like a cigarette or any finished tobacco product, it’s just unique unto itself. Well, since I have a motorcycle now, and, in my opinion, it’s the best way to experience the sight and smell of this phenomenon, we tooled around part of the county yesterday looking for some of this in action. I expected to see maybe a few barns, not really expecting to see more than five or six, but we saw 30 barns in about 35 miles! Almost every turn yielded more smoking barns, and statistically speaking, that’s about a barn per mile! It was one of those evenings to remember, everything nice and calm, fall in the air and the sight and smell of home everywhere. I think I’ll go back today and try for some pictures of the best ones…