May 2008 Archives

My Uncle Edward and Aunt Gladys Waddell (my father's sister) lived in Alaska before there was a road that took you there. They really used dog sleds as transportation in the winter, and caught salmon during the summer salmon runs to feed the dogs during the long, cold winters. One of my cousins (Kathy Miller--the daughter of my father's brother, Bill Watts) made a valiant effort several years ago and scanned in tray after tray of old slides. I now have the slides, along with a copy of the images digitally. (My intent is to scan those slides in at higher resolution that I really want.)

These are just a few of the many photos Uncle Edward took. I got his photography bug. Ann's been scanning in old photos of her family and I got to thinking about these.

This has been one of those non-stop weeks. Can't believe Monday was Memorial Day. I've worked all week on a website for the Alabama's Front Porches website I've been working on for the last 3 months for Southwest Alabama Tourism with the University of Alabama Economic Development Institute. www.alabamafrontporches.com.

I just got back from a long day in Thomasville meeting about the website. So far, so good. More later!

Don't worry, this won't be an extended version like my obsession with irises--mainly because I just don't have that many day lilies. These came, as many of my bulbs and rhizomes, from Mama's house in Octagon, Alabama. These were dug about 2 years ago--the ones in the backyard, that probably won't bloom this year--came just a year ago.

Last Friday night, I got what was one of the nicest emails I've received in quite a while. A cousin I see with less frequency than I'd like sent this. Makes me very pleased to have such a strong family! (And I did ask permission to put this out, so don't fear sending emails to me!)

Nollie told Lillian about your blog, then Lillian told me.  What a blessing you have created!  I love Octagon, too.  I wish gasoline weren't one thousand dollars a gallon (slight exaggeration) and I weren't so busy so I could go "home" every weekend.  
 
As I have gotten older, I am mortified that I was not prouder of my parents and my upbringing when I was younger.  We really did have idyllic childhoods in Octagon--roaming the woods, playing in the catch-pens, riding Ida's wagon-of-death down a 90- degree hill, and jumping off the chicken- house roof.  ( You were not born when we used to do that.  Be very grateful.)  Then there was running from Daddy's schizophrenic red bull. And the time Nollie stuffed feed corn kernels in my ears and up my nose.  And the time we Hinson children agreed to let Daddy sell our pet baby bull, (which we had named Bull-ette and which we had hand-fed with a calf bottle since his birth) so we could buy Hoola-Hoops. And the sad Christmas children we were at Aunt Sadie Lou's house because we had to wear Sunday clothes and sit and be polite and use good manners. And leave our new toys at home.
 
Your Mother's Day tribute to your Mama was lovely.  Your mother was a remarkable woman.  I am so grateful that she was my aunt.  I wanted to contact all of her children on the anniversary of her tragic death, but I couldn't find the words.  There are no words.  But Aunt Sis was brilliant and wise and warm and lovely and genteel and kind and wonderful.  I think of her and miss her every day, as I do Mama and Daddy.
 
Your mother and father; Mammy and Papa; my Mama and Daddy; Uncle Clifford; Aunt Sadie Lou and Uncle Larry; your Uncle Edward and Aunt Gladys--they all influenced the adults whom all 17 of us Hinson first- cousins would become.  I am sure I would be a better person if I had paid more attention to the advice and love they gave when I was a child and adolescent.  I like to think that I absorbed some of their wisdom through osmosis, if not through minding them and taking their instruction to heart. 
 
Although I was nearly grown when you were born, I remember you well as a little boy.  You always wore hats and you usually wore boots and carried a gun.  Your parents were so proud of you.  A son at last!

Cousin Deborah Hinson Kelly

(Well, I couldn't find photos of myself with a hat, boots AND a gun, but I managed to find a good collection of hats and one with a great toy gun! I really did love a good hat--the captain's hat was my all-time favorite, though. I think I need another.)

Final Update: read the entry located here. *the story ended with what I asked for in the first place.

UPDATE:

Well, this is just an update to my earlier complaint about Alabama Oudoors, the Birmingham, Alabama based outdoor sporting goods store. Alabama Outdoors has not responded to my website submission to their website alabamaoutdoors.com, or to an email sent to info@alabamaoutdoors.com. I'm very displeased with their performance. Sorry to take away from my otherwise pretty positive blog. This is more of a test than anything else just to see how much of an impact mentioning Alabama Outdoors in a negative context along with saying things such as Alabama Outdoors provides a negative customer service experience in Birmingham, Alabama has. I'm really curious to see what sort of an impact I can have in the search engines by mentioning my displeasure with Alabama Outdoors in some repeated fashion--all the while obeying the cardinal rule of making sure that any mention of Alabama Outdoors really makes an important reference to Alabama Outdoors as an Alabama based outdoor clothing company selling products in Birmingham, Alabama.

I'm hopeful that, as my previous post did accomplish, a search for Alabama Outdoors in google or some other search engine will pull my blog post about my experience with Alabama Outdoors will show up. Right now, Alabama Outdoors complaint shows up pretty well, but Alabama Outdoors by itself isn't quite there yet. Hopefully this post about Alabama Outdoors, a Birmingham, Alabama based outdoor clothing and outdoor gear store, will help bring Alabama Outdoors to the forefront for complaints!

I'm planning to add to this post about Alabama Outdoors for the next week or so, but for now I just wanted something out there that expressed my distaste for the Birmingham, Alabama based outdoor clothing and hiking gear store Alabama Outdoors. I have been shopping at Alabama Outdoors for most of the last twenty years. I can't recall the very first thing I bought there, but distinctly remember buying a nice tent from Alabama Outdors, several pairs of boots, several backpacks, camping stoves, jackets, lanterns, socks, shoes, sandals and no telling how many pairs of pants, shirts and shorts. Oh, and that doesn't include the shoes, boots, expensive jackets, clothes and more Ann has bought at Alabama Outdoors over the years.

Well, I bought two pair of shorts from Alabama Outdoors (AO) last week and wore each pair one time--I've owned the brand for years (grammici's) and have always loved them (always bought them from Alabama Outdoors, too). The belt buckle on both of these new ones frayed and came apart--on one it happened shortly after I put them on. I took them back with receipt in hand with a desire to simply exchange them for new, undamaged goods. I was told that they couldn't do that but would send them in for repair. I told them that I wouldn't be shopping there again. That didn't seem to make an impact on them. (It was a young, inexperienced boy who said he, I think,he was the manager.) I'm really upset by this lack of customer care and consider this a strong complaint against Alabama Outdoors. I'm not a big complainer, but feel that this bad experience with Alabama Outdoors requires a complaint. I have emailed Alabama Outdoors customer service and sent them an online message through their customer care online for (at alabamaoutdoors.com) and plan to call them on Monday. I am a strong proponent of buying locally whenever possible. I will try the other store in town (Mountain High), but if that doesn't work out, I'll be shifting my purchases online and I surely won't be going to Alabama Outdoors to experience their lack of customer care again.

Alabama Outdoors has lost a customer and I'll do everything I can to make sure that my complaint is heard as loudly as possible (mainly by mentioning Alabama Outdoors and complaint in this post and possible future posts as many times as I can mention Alabama Outdoors and the word complaint--you'd be surprised at how much mentioning a name like Alabama Outdoors in conjunction with a couple of key words like complaint and problem and upset can have on search engine rankings. Just give it a few days and hopefully, anyone searching for Alabama Outdoors and  complaint will find my post about complaining about Alabama Outdoors and the poor customer service they provided me yesterday. We'll see.

These are some of the photos brought home from WWII by my dad. Most include him--I'm not sure about the one where they are marching with the flag. Some of these photos have been posted before, but others, I hope are brand new. Thanks to all those who serve, now and in years past. Happy Memorial Day.

I stayed up a bit last night looking through old photos. I found these photos from tiny negatives (not sure what kind). The quality is pretty bad, but I had to share. This would have been a beach trip in the mid 1970's with Margaret, Madeline, our parents and, of course, the star below. (Just a friendly reminder to family members: I have several boxes of photos, so before you make too much fun, imagine yourself in a swimsuit in the 1970's!)

A wonderful email from a cousin made me want to do this post. I've got to do a better job of scanning in family photos. It is one of the things I enjoy most. Searching through photos and finding those gems (most of them really are gems, honestly). I just haven't had as much time as I would like lately. The picture below is of my Uncle Bud Hinson (my mother' brother). I've found several great photos of him from World War II. Just thinking about the folks of that generation gives me a shiver of pride.

What a beautiful day yesterday was. I had a meeting just outside of Fort Payne, Alabama about the Lookout Mountain Parkway corridor management plan I'm working on with the Alabama Association of Regional Councils. Left early so I'd have a little time to explore downtown Fort Payne before the meeting.

After the meeting, we all drove the 5 miles on to the Little River Canyon National Preserve to see the 23,000 square foot JSU Canyon Center building that is currently under construction. I was very impressed (it isn't slated to open until early next year). The construction is really impressive--they are using geo-thermal heating and cooling and will have some really nice features. The construction really reminds me of some of the great National Park Service structures out west. One of the nicest things is that it was designed to really blend in with the environment around it. After that, I drove along a short section of the Little River Canyon rim. If you haven't been, you really should.

It is ALWAYS a good idea to test anything you do on the web on several browsers. That's why I have both a Mac and a Windows XP machine--I refuse to get Vista for now--just too much trouble.

Anyway, yesterday I posted my second Slideshow Pro for Lightroom created flash slide show. The slideshow is just below this entry--and included photos from Do Day Day. The day before, I posted a slide show of Southwest Alabama scenes that I'm also using for the Alabama's Front Porches website. I tested this earlier slideshow under Internet Explorer and Firefox and possibly Safari for Mac. Once I posted the Do Dah Day photos, I tested the slideshow on my Mac using Firefox--that's where I do most of the work on my blog. All was fine and I patted myself on the back for successfully including two slide shows on my blog. This morning, Ann got to work and looked at my blog using Internet Explorer. It didn't work.

It was an easy fix (involving renaming div tags so that each one has an individual name)  and all should be working fine now--as far as I can tell it is, anyway. The bottom line is to always test, test and retest.

Caldwell and Rhodes parks on Southside. Parade of pets and owners. Free, but proceeds from food, beverage and T-shirt sales go to area animal shelters.

Do Day Day has been going on for longer than we've lived on Highland Avenue, which is a long time. We've managed to make it down almost every year. Now, we just go for the parade and to get a t-shirt.

Here are a few photos:

These are photos I've taken over the last 5 years or so from the rural part of Southwest Alabama. Some are just a few weeks old. Others I took back in 2003. I'm putting these on my blog as much to test adding Slideshow Pro Flash files as anything else. Seems to work. Watch for more slide shows in the coming weeks!

Just looking back and realized that this newsletter (finished this afternoon) is the 30th newsletter I've done for the Alabama Chapter of the Sierra Club. All but the first 3 have been printed on 100% recycled newsprint. One of the fastest, most economical printers for that I've ever found is located right here in Birmingham (jsprinting.com). They print primarily newspapers for local high schools and colleges. Anyway, here's the 30th newsletter (shown here in color, but actually printed in black and white for cost savings).

Wow! I'm really impressed with how well photoshop creates panoramas from multiple images. Had I been a bit more careful, I think this would have turned out even better. There is a bit of distortion--mainly from using my 17-40 mm lens at the widest setting. The photo below is a compilation of 8 photos taken last weekend. Even with my relatively wide angle lens, I couldn't quite get the whole Tutwiler Hotel in the frame. This hasn't been doctored by me very much at all--there are a couple of rough spots along the roof line, but nothing that a little touchup can't fix. This took just a few minutes--and most of that was just processing. This would have taken a lot longer before they added the photomerge feature to Photoshop.

I recently compiled this information for my friends at Your Town Alabama. I really enjoy doing this blog--one of my favorites.

1. The newsletter went out to the largest number ever: 625 email addresses (some bounced back, but that's pretty typical)
2. Since February 16--the first day of the blog, there have been 101 entries in the blog! (I meant to highlight it at 100, but got carried away...)
3. Prior to February, our average daily traffic on the website was a high of 286 (this was June 2007, so that sort of makes sense as it is the month of the annual workshop). Most months averaged under 175 per day, however. Currently, we are averaging over 300 per day. People are also looking at considerably more pages of the website as well--most notably the blog section.
4. This one is mostly for Paul: If you google our town Alabama, the Your Town Alabama website is currently number 1. The same goes, obviously, for googling Your Town Alabama.
5. We've gotten some nice comments from folks. Lee Sentell and Charles Ball, particularly took time to respond to the email with a thanks and positive thoughts.
6. In keeping with what I said in the email I sent out, I've made a particular point to update the blog since sending out the email--anyone that checks it again will be pleasantly surprised, I think, to discover new information: I've added 4 posts in the last two days--mainly to cement in the heads of people that the blog does get changed frequently.
7. We saw a significant increase in traffic on the day of the update email and the day after.  Our average traffic per day prior to the email for the month of May was about 320. On the day it went out, our traffic increased to 479 and the following day, it was 384. That isn't quite the jump in traffic that emails once generated, although it is still a larger amount of traffic. I chalk that up to the increase in general traffic--I think that more people already check the blog for information and don't need an email reminder, though clearly some people do.

Visit the blog at yourtownalabama.org/blog.

Well, today isn't actually Mother's Day, but Ann and I will be gone tomorrow and thought I'd just go ahead and put this out today.

I believe in Mothers. I guess I almost have to…growing up, I had six: my real mother, of course, and my five older sisters. When I was young, everyone took care of me. I guess I was lucky that way. I don’t recall, of course, but reportedly I didn’t speak for the first couple of years. I only needed to point to achieve the prize I wanted, for with a simple point or a quiet honk, I had five sisters snapping to attention to fetch something for little baby brother. Oh, those must have been the days.

And my real mother was magical. She had the experience of raising five children before I came along. (All different in so many ways, but more alike than any of us care to admit.) She had the wisdom of age—she was forty-five years old when I was born. She had the patience of a saint. We went for long walks in the woods, often resulting in my little legs being exhausted before our return home. We’d stay out in those woods for hours and hours, reading stories, looking at bugs and just listening to the sounds of nature (almost always soothing but never silent). When it was time to head back to the house, she’d often carry me home. I really don’t know how. I’m not forty yet, but I doubt I could carry a 4-6 year old child a mile on my shoulders or back. But somehow, she always managed to get us home, and often with a lovely assortment of new sticks or pine cones or leaves. (Once, in the fall, we brought home a collection of beautiful and brilliant red leaves. They turned out to be poison oak leaves, but that’s for another story.)

Those walks in the woods gave me the wisdom to believe in nature, to love the outdoors and to enjoy the simple beauty of an oak leaf or a weed in bloom. The walks in the woods really prepared me for my future. Sure, college, graduate school and years of working and networking gave me some preparation, but the time in the woods getting to know myself and learning from Mama really cemented my personality. Those walks also gave me the strength to endure what was to come.

Just a little over a year ago, my belief in the power of Mothers was sorely tested. Murdered. It is so very hard to type that word that I really can’t express it. My fingers freeze and continue to hit the wrong keys. But that’s what happened to my Mama. Murdered as she was getting ready to enjoy her favorite time of the year—spring. The flowers were just starting to bloom. In fact, she had come to Bessemer to meet several of us for lunch at the Bright Star restaurant to celebrate her 83rd birthday just the weekend before. As we were preparing to part ways after lunch, she reached into the trunk of the car and pulled out a bouquet of jonquils and daffodils for Ann and me. I was so pleased to have them then.

Now the flowers brighten my heart and mind when I think back about them—doubly so when I saw the few bloom this year that I have transplanted from our home place in Octagon to our yard here in Birmingham. Immeasurably so when I saw the thousands blooming in Octagon this spring.

But the flowers are nothing compared to the woods. I’ve gone walking in the woods more in the last year than I had in many years past. I’ve fought my way through blackberry brambles, I’ve slipped through muddy patches and I’ve crouched through wisteria vines wrapping themselves around trees. I’ve paused in the deepest, darkest of these places to think, to pray and to be with Mama. It is at those times when I truly feel her presence, telling me it will be okay, reminding me of the power of those deep woods.

I can really think when I’m in those deep woods, so very changed from my youth but still remarkably the same. I can think, too, when I stare into the bloom of a jonquil or, more recently, an iris. Looking closely, I can make out the beautiful color variations, the intricate details and most importantly, the power of the earth and the power of my Mama. And that’s what all this really comes down to: my belief in my Mama. Those woods and those flowers sustain her today. I feel sadness when I go to the cemetery and put flowers on her grave, but no overpowering connection. Sure, I cry each time and I feel the deep loss that we all feel.

I feel sadness when I walk behind the house to put flowers on the place she was found. Certainly, I feel anger here as well, something I’ll hopefully work my way through in years to come.

But it is in those woods, that land, that dark red, unbelievably muddy, sticky as glue earth that I feel the true power of Mama. I feel love and strength and the gentle beauty of nature, I feel my love of the outdoors, and I feel my Mama when I go to the deep woods. Those woods sustain me. And that is why I believe and will always believe in mothers.

I've just about wrapped up a new website for the American Institute of Architects, Birmingham, Alabama Chapter. We're still in the testing and review stage, but I'm particularly pleased with it right now. It involves using the many good photos that they have--and we'll change these photos out regularly--in a Flash slideshow. The Flash was pretty easy to accomplish using Adobe Photoshop Lightroom and an optional plug-in called Slideshow Pro. I've used it before, but never with Lightroom. It worked really well, but not flawlessly. I had combined it with a Spry menu to manage the links (easy to set up by itself as well). For some reason, these two things didn't play well together. A bit of hair pulling and then a quick search on Google helped me to track down the solution. Once that was in place, all worked as planned--what a nice change!

I developed the look of AIA's previous website as well--still really like the look of it, but it was time for a change as the website was about 3 years old. Here's a before and after.

Before:
After:

Wow, what a busy week. I've completed another online newsletter for AIA and just about completed a complete redesign of their website for my friend Rhea at the AIA Birmingham office (American Institute of Architects). I've just completed another online newsletter for CGH Insurance Group. I've added a couple of new posts to the Your Town Alabama blog and witnessed the earliest closing of the Your Town Alabama workshop--along with the most registrants. In previous years, particularly those first few, it was more a matter of finding people to attend (always plenty and always great folks, but the effort was on Your Town's part). In recent years, with this year as the best example, it has not been a problem, as witnessed by the early full registration. (everyone should read up on Your Town Alabama, as it offers a good answer to some of the ills facing small town Alabama and provides some useful and powerful self-improvement models--visit the blog: www.yourtownalabama.org/blog). And, to top it all off, I finished another small series of ads for Underwoods, sister company to Alabama jewelers Brombergs.

Another photo from my trip back from Thomasville, Alabama. This was taken along Highway 25 between Faunsdale and Greensboro. There were about 30 cows all gathered in a corner. I liked this shot. Not sure where I can use it, but it provides a bit of that pastoral feel.

Yesterday, I spent most of the day in the Black Belt of rural Southwest Alabama. The morning involved working with the Ala-Tom RC&D Council on, primarily, the Southwest Alabama Tourism website followed by lunch at one of 3 Chinese restaurants in Thomasville, Alabama--okay, I can't imagine how a town the size of Thomasville can support 3 Chinese restaurants, but it was a tasty lunch buffet. (I've got a rough draft of the front page only developed so far on my server: joewatts.com/southwestal)

After lunch, I struck out, first taking Highway 5 north to the intersection of Highway 25. I turned north on 25 and passed through Vineland then on to Thomaston, Alabama and the Rural Heritage Center. What a neat place. It has been there for years, but somehow I've managed to avoid going. I really was surprised that it had as much stuff as it does. If you ever make it to Marengo County, Alabama, it is well worth a stop. From there it was the typical route to Birmingham: through Faundsdale, Greensboro and Moundville and on to Tuscaloosa. From there, the boring but expedient interstate took me home.

Below is a shot from the drive down early in the morning taken along scenic Highway 5.