Thanksgiving Day 2012

So Thanksgiving Day 2012 is wrapping up and it was a good day.

It started with getting up at 5:15 for my 1st 5K, or at least that was the plan.  In reality I woke up around 2 and never really did get back to sleep, just dozed on and off until around 5.  In getting out the door, I got distracted for a little bit by the Black Friday ads in the paper and forgot the snacks I had pre-prepped the night before.

Before the start of the race, obviously

I got there with time to spare and had about 20 minutes to stand around and wait.  I did do a little stretching out during this time.  I did start near the front of the race, but mostly because I just didn't want to have go any extra distance than necessarily.  I just let people pass me by and tried not to worry or think about it much.

From the very start of the race

I did pretty good and just doing the pace that worked for me.  It really did seem like absolutely everyone was passing me.  I did keep looking back occasionally and there was always at least someone behind me.  I walked for 90% of the race.  I jogged at the very beginning, at the very end and at most every intersection.

My plantar fasciitis in my right foot started hurting nearly immediately, but I'm relatively used to this and can tune it out reasonly well. By around 2/3 of the way through it, my plantar fasciitis was in full blown yell and my right hip was now grumpy (probably from the slight limp for my right heel).  I just focused on my music and staying ahead of at least the one person who I knew was behind me.

A little more than 1/10 of mile before the finish

My goals going into the race was to finish it and preferably finish somewhere before last.  I am VERY happy to say I achieved both goals.  I finished with a time of 1 hour 2 minutes and 10 seconds, and I finished ahead of at least 2 other people.  :-)

So then we came home and we enjoyed watching the parade which we had set to record.  I also looked through all the Black Friday ads during this.  We then went out to Golden Corral for a very wonderful Thanksgiving dinner.  I had all my favorites and left very satisfied.  We then came home and watched the National Dog Show that we had recorded earlier in the day.

I then went out to Walmart for the main Black Friday deals I was interested in.  On one hand I don't really like the trend of starting Black Friday on Thanksgiving.  On the other hand, I'm happy to have my main shopping thing for the weekend done already.  I do have a few things I'll go out for tomorrow, but they aren't urgent or high demand items I don't think.

I got the deals I was after.  Two additional mini-crockpots for only $3.88 each so now both mom can make our meals easily at the same time.  :-D  Plus we now have a back-up and an extra-liner for only $8.  :-)  I also got a really great deal on some legos and pjs and bras.

And despite it making my foot and hip flair up again (hate Walmart floors), I did have a good time.  I was trying to decide between waiting at the crocks or the legos for the magic 8 pm hour when things could be grabbed.  I had somewhat settled on the legos because there were less of those.  I called a friend to chat and pass the time.  The nice lady who I had chatted with some and was there with her 3 kids heard my quandry over the 2 items.  She offered to grab me one of the legos and meet me over by where I was getting the crocks.  And the crocks ended up with a lot of people at them by the time the magic hour hit, so I'm very glad with how it turned out.

It was just overall a good day.  I hope and pray that everyone else had a good Thanksgiving too.

Dollywood Gospel Fest 2012

So I am finally recovered enough from a month at Dollywood enough to download all the photos and videos.  So here are the ones from the gospel festival itself.

These first two are of what I have always said are my favorite gospel group: The Ball Brothers.

Now these year only the two in the center of the photo below are from the original brothers.  And their overall sound is actually better now, I think, with the replacement of two of the brothers.

And they are definitely still either 1st or 2nd on my list of favorite gospel groups.

But this man, Josh Singletary, in the group Tribute Quartet, is why they are are now only 1st or 2nd instead of just 1st.

So I have lots of videos of them and mostly of him.

But there are a couple of the whole group...

This is the Kingdom Heirs, Dollywood's gospel quartet that is always there. This number almost always get the audience standing.

So I still have a whole bunch of photos to go through and will post more of them on another day, but this is what I have of the actual gospel festival part.  We had a good time even though it kind of tired us out, but we have a whole year to recover before we do it again and by then we might both be at our goal/target weight.  :-)

Honestly I'm just posting this here, because I'm trying to get this posted on the NS boards, and photobucket is fighting me.

Clingman's Dome

I don't remember when exactly but at some point Mom and I had gone up the Clingman's Dome Trail.  I made it then, but it really wiped me out.  Mom only a little past halfway up that time.  Today, I did walk it slow and stayed with the mom, but I barely felt any effort at all in doing it.  And Mom made it all the way.

On the first trip it was cold and windy.  This trip it was somewhat cold, very wet, and sometimes windy.  But the real problem for me was that we were walking up into clouds.  Most of the time, you couldn't see more than about 25-50 feet away.  This doesn't make for very good picture taking.  However if I had known that Photoshop does easily get rid of some of the cloud/foggy look, I might have tried a few more photos.  But I did get some I like.

Near the top of the Clingman's Dome trail, there is an intersection with the Appalachian Trail.  I like to go down to it and take a few steps on it, just to say I have been on the Appalachian Trail.  :-)

This is looking down the Appalachian Trail towards Double Spring Gap Shelter.

This is the sign.

This is looking up the Appalachian Trial toward Mt Collins Shelter.

This is, of course, the mom who has made it to the top despite all my pleas that we had gone far enough, because I was bored with walking in a cloud with no good picture opportunities.  At first she was going to be happy with just getting to here.  Then there was this couple.  A young man, who easily could have been a Biggest Loser trainer with how good he was at encouraging, and his girlfriend, a young lady in her 20's I would guess who was slightly larger than mom.  The boyfriend was trying to convince her to go ahead and climb up to the tower even though you couldn't really see anything up there because of the clouds.  So mom challenged the young woman that they could do it together.

 So here she is at the top.  When there's no cloud cover like this, there would be a really spectacular view behind her.  But oh well.

On the way down, I finally found some photos to take...little while flowers.

 Another little white flower.

 A cute little lizard on the path.

 My favorite part of this flower photo is the raindrop on the one leaf.

The cloud did lighten up some finally when were getting further down the trail.  This was one of the few landscape photos that I took and like the result of it.

I think this video is amusing.  Unlike most people, mom has just as much trouble going downhill (and maybe more so) as she does at going uphill. My favorite mom quotes while she was going down, in order of preference and I think maybe the order she said them in too.

• "I hate hiking down the mountain.  No I don't.  I like the challenge of climbing down."
• "Hi everyone.  I made it up the mountain.  Now I'm making it down, I hope."
• "I wish we didn't have to go the rest of the way down this hill.

If you click on this to see it full size, you'll notice it says the trail length is 0.5 mile.  That is one way, and is really only most of the way to the top.  I think if you include the ramp to the top of the tower and both directions, it is more like 1.2 miles.

The colors are brighter than they appear here, but the cloud cover muted them.

I do really like this one.  Although that red was much brighter in reality.

And with this, I am finally caught up on a month's worth of picture taking.

Quiet Walkway #3 on Cades Cove Rd - Part 1

Mom and I went on what I call Quiet Walkway #3 on Cades Cove Road.  I posted about my walks on #1 and #2 (Part 1 and Part 2) on previous posts.  On the other two though it was just me.

This was Mom's first time on one these quiet walkways.  There is a paved path that she had done previously, but she's getting around much better now and so here we are.  This photo was at the very start of the trail.  You can still see the road behind her.

Not far down this trail, a tree had fallen down, a large one.  It looked like such a fun photo op that I decided to crawl out to the center of it.  So I left my camera on the ground for mom to pick up when she got there, and began my climb.  It turns out this one where I am climbing is my favorite one.

This photo is essentially the one envisioned when I decided to try and climb up there.  And while I like it, I don't think it's very flattering on me.  Mom also took some photos as I was climbing to the other side to get down, but no one is seeing those unless I someday want to use one as a "before" picture.

This is the mom with some fall colors just beginning to show behind her.  Soon the fall colors will be in full effect, but at this point there was only bits here and there.

I really liked where this read leaf had fallen among the rocks.

I also really liked this leaf in a stream.

This is the mom crossing a stream.  I was really impressed that she managed to do this.  She was also a really good sport in standing there while I went across to get this picture.  But it is out of focus, as I couldn't leave her balancing there on those rocks for very long.

This is once she has crossed the stream, and I just like this one.

However, this is the one that really shows that she crossed the stream.

I did manage to take a few actual photos that I liked while out there, even though most of the ones in this post will be of my mom.

Another stream photo.

This was the hardest part for the mom.  She had a very hard time getting down this rather steep hill on the path.  But she did it!  :-)

This was at the halfway point.  She sat down on a log while I tried a few more photos (None of them really turned out to be anything I liked though).

This movie is where I was trying to get a picture of myself from a video. (Please excuse and ignore the large butt).  It turns out though that I either had the wrong lens on it or just had the zoom wrong.  So no photo from this.

On the way back I found Mom a 2nd stick to use for balance and climbing up or down some of the hills.  She had a much easier time with the 2nd stick.

So at some point, I or we will go back and do the other part of this walkway.  At the point where I climbed on the fallen tree, the path diverged, and we only had the energy to do one of the paths.  The path may actually circle around but we couldn't tell for sure.

IJams Trail Day

We went to Ijams Nature Center again on this day.  We had a good time again.

I really only ended up with the one flower-bug photo that I really liked.  However I do like this one a whole lot, so that's okay.

 This day I did also get this pretty good photo of my mom that I like alot.

Catching up on Photo Processing / Rabbit and a Flower near FBC Sevierville

Well, I've done more photo-taking in the last month than I have in a long time.  However I've been very behind in actually processing any of the photos.  The reasons for both are related.  My mom got a used bodybugg for herself from someone on the Nutrisystem boards.  It did not work well for her.  It just didn't seem to be able to track her movement or activity.  On the other hand, it works great for me.  And knowing what I'm burning has motivated me to work out more.  I'm not really sure why it has made that much of a difference, but it has.  So we have gotten out more, and often I take the camera with me when we go out.  However we also have some new Wii games, so even when I'm in then I'm exercising more with those.  The net result is though that while I have taken more photos, I've just often not gotten around to doing anything with them in a timely manner.  I'm trying to catch up some today as I take today off to let my body recover from all of the week's activities.  Anyway, so on to the photos...

These first photo are from 9-12-12 on a Wednesday night while Mom was at choir practice.  I walked around the church and took some photos.

 I tried getting photos of this rabbit for quite awhile as he hopped around the flower beds in front of the church.  This was the only one that I was happy with the focus on it.

Ever since this year's Sevier County fair when I realized there were alot less entries in the black and white categories, I've been trying most of the photos that I like in black and white.  So this is the same photo but in black and white.

The photo that I liked the best from the many flower photos I tried that evening.  The light was quickly fading as choir rehearsal starts at like 7:30.  This was the first one I took that night.

Labor Day Weekend 2012

The first thing I did for Labor Day weekend 2012 was enter some photos into the Sevier County Fair.  One of them won a first place blue ribbon in the action category.  I didn't actually find out about the win until later in the week.

This is the winning photo.  I took it in Nassau during my birthday vacation this year.

On Saturday I went on a 4-mile bike/walk.  I rented a bike at Cades Cove and went around the shortest part of the loop.

During the first part of the journey (which was largely downhill), I took a number of photos. All the clouds in the sky are the forerunners of the remnants of Issac arriving in our area.

Plus there were some horses.  I didn't make it far enough into the Cove to see any other wildlife besides these horses and some butterflies.

Now if you're wondering why I walked and biked.  The shortest path I could take involved this gravel road. Biking on a gravel road is not easy.

Plus Cades Cove is very hilly.  All the downhills, I was on the bike.  Most the uphills, well, I'd try for a minute but always ended up just walking up them.  You can't really tell it in this photo, but this hill is somewhat steep and this is gravel.  I was so tired by this point that just walking up this hill was a great effort.

This photo is just to show one of the 3 or 4 places were I had to just stop and sit for a little bit to recover enough to keep going.  Actually from the point where I started taking time to sit and recover, I didn't really take any more photos.

On Labor Day after the rains from Issac had mostly stopped, Mom and I (and Cujo) went to the IJAMS Nature Center.  This is a very nice area with lots of trails.  This first time we went on a trail that goes around a quarry lake.

I love the photos of the quarry with the way the rock and trees reflect on the water.

Plus I got this really great flower photo, that I think I might enter in the fair next year.

Mom and I went together but I would walk on up ahead of her alot and then come back to her.

Or would walk off on side trail or different trail and then catch up with her.

Everytime Cujo and I would get back near to Mom, he'd be anxious to get back to her.  Here he is looking at me and whining about what is taking me so long as I try to get a picture of him and her.

We had a good time and a good workout.  According to the tracking on my phone I walked around 2 miles.

Mom and I then went and played a game of putt-putt with a group-on deal we had gotten previously.  We both got 2 holes-in-one, but she beat me by a few strokes.

After this, we went to the fair to look at my competition.  I think the judging was okay in most of the categories.  I only really disagreed with their choices in the flower category.  But photography judging is a very subjective thing, so no big deal.

Overall it was a very good weekend.