Making a change

So I was in Portland this weekend, as many of you know. I was there for a National Geographic photography seminar. Excellent day, excellent weekend, really.

But what most of you don't know is that it's the start of a much larger process. And it's not something I've really talked about because it's such a big project that it could have fallen through at any point. But enough elements are in place now that I can finally share what's going on.

I came back from Africa, and it was really a big deal, that whole trip. Many of you have seen the pictures. It really changed my life. I've been talking, quietly, with Earthwatch, and now I can announce the plans.

Over the next two months, I'm going to be packing things up here in Seattle, putting most of it into storage, renting my condo and heading back to Africa, probably for an extended period of time. I'll be there covering Earthwatch's African operations for their newsletter and Web site, writing articles, taking pictures (hence the seminar), and getting to participate in a number of their expeditions. They've been looking for someone for a while now who has experience something like mine--Web work, editing, writing, photography--but because they're a nonprofit, their budget isn't huge. I really had to think hard about this because the pay is practically entry-level . . . but in the end, I decided the experience is going to be pretty damn amazing and I just can't pass it up.

My brother will be taking care of Spanky and Merlin while I'm on the road. I hate to abandon them this late in their lives, especially leaving them with someone who has a big dog and some pretty serious cat allergies. But the Big Cats are calling, and elephants and giraffes and baboons and wildebeest. . . .

So . . . at the end of my current Microsoft contract (that's end of July), I'm outta here, kids.

( A few more details beneath the cut... )

This past weekend: National Geo Photography seminar

First, before I resume usual posting, my apologies to all of those I fooled with this morning's prank. Apparently my brother was quite annoyed with me, and I know two people who read the entry were actually a little angry and a little hurt. I've never done an April Fools' prank before, and I suspect that my career as a prankster will end with today's fairly successful endeavor. And I now understand why people do this sort of thing: it's totally about entertaining oneself. It's good if you can entertain others, but there's a kick in fooling them that is exclusively the province of the prankster. So now it's something else I've checked off the bucket list. Done and done. (And yeah, it was fun.)

Now, back to our usual programming.

Early Saturday morning, KA came down from Vancouver BC. We packed her stuff, my stuff, plus two cartons of books into my car and off we went to Portland for our weekend away.

First stop: Powell's. The parking in that part of town was atrocious. The garage was full, the streets were teeming with people and every parking spot was full. I finally found a spot three blocks away from the store. We parked, we each took a carton and headed off to the store. There was a line for the trade-in counter, as one might expect on a Saturday afternoon, so KA and I shared the duty until I reached the counter. I ended up with $80+ in credit with which to play. We only had 90 minutes on the parking meter, a good third of it gone by the time I finished with the trading. I came away with three books: a Jim Morrow novel, a Mary Doria Russell novel, and a compendium of cryptozoology by Loren Coleman (not the science fiction writer). I still have gobs of credit with Powell's: looking forward to spending it. We had a light snack there while hail and frozen rain just poured out of the sky. The original intention had been to have lunch there with wanton_heat_jet and his daughter since they were in town for Game Storm, but circumstances prevented the rendezvous.

We piled back into the car and went over to our hotel, the Hotel Vintage Plaza, a lovely place where we'd gotten a discount stay by registering as guests of Lewis & Clark College (which we were, since that's where our seminar was being held). The furnishings were quite rich: fabric wall paper trimmed with fleurs de lis, tapestries on the walls, thick towels in the bathroom, and a teddy bear on the bed to welcome us. (It was hard for me not to take the bear home. He was a plush, squishy thing with a name tag on him that begged me to adopt him, but I resisted.)

Dinner that evening was at Bangkok Palace, in the most excellent company of davidlevine, kateyule, deedop, snarke, jaylake, the_child, and lasirenadolce. We consumed an enormous amount of delicious Thai food (which, KA pointed out later, was remarkably light on the vegetables) and gabbed about so many things that a lot of the conversation is lost to me now, even only two days later. (I'm getting old; memory's the first thing to go.) Still, I know it was all delightful (in such company how could it not be?), I know there was the usual general silliness. It was a lovely evening.

Sunday, we checked out and headed over to Lewis & Clark for the seminar. The event was held in a theater-like auditorium in the student center. The seminar, A Passion for Travel: Photos That Tell the Story, was taught by two National Geo photographers, Jim Richardson and Catherine Karnow. The lights went down, and the first of a day' worth of magnificent photos came up on the screen. Richardson and Karnow were terrific, talking about everything from ways to bring a landscape to life to how to get a stranger to allow you to photograph them. They talked about composition technique, how to be where the coolest shots are likely to happen, how to plan a trip around photography opportunities, and on and on.

The day was broken up by short breaks plus a catered lunch. We got to talk with some of the other people in attendance, and we discovered that--like my first experience with National Geo seminars--people there were at all different skill levels. The one thing we all shared was a love of photography.

I came away with pages and pages of notes, a desire to spend far too much money on new equipment, and a stoked-up wanderlust. KA and I are talking about going out to LaConner for the tulip festival sometime later this month. I hope we can do it. I want to try out some of what we learned this past weekend.