Monthly Archives: October 2009

10 Years

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A view of Mount Moran at sunrise from Oxbow Bend in Grand Teton National Park

It’s been 10 years. I registered the racphoto.com domain on October 25, 1999.

The site itself is much older as I started it while in graduate school at Virginia Tech and ran it off the personal storage I had on the servers there. I didn’t keep track of when the site first went live — which is a shame but who knew what was to come? — but at the latest it would have been 1996 and might have been a year or two earlier. To put that in context, Google didn’t launch until September of 1998.

But 1999 was the year the site grew up and got a real domain name. While the pictures have improved as I’ve improved as a photographer, the look of the site hasn’t changed much in the past decade. I still hand code the main site and while there are things I’d like to do to improve it, my focus has always been on keeping things simple to make it easier to maintain.

The blog is a relative newcomer and didn’t arrive until January 2006, starting off with a story of Templeton swallowing a sewing needle, and I certainly don’t hand code it and use WordPress instead.

This picture of Mount Moran at sunrise comes from 2006, taken from Oxbow Bend in Grand Teton National Park. Everybody, and I mean everybody, photographs the mountains from here. I’ve done it on a couple of different occasions, but I also enjoy photographing the southern part of the range where you can watch the sunrise in quiet solitude.

I, Writer

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2005 NaNoWriMo Winner Icon After a four year layoff, I once again signed up for NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month. The goal is to start with a blank sheet of paper and write 50,000 words towards a novel during the month of November. I ended up with 56,251 words in 2005 and the story has been bouncing around in my brain ever since.

This seems like a good time to start fresh and see what happens. Last time an unexpected character entered the story on day one and I didn’t know what to do with her, but since then I’ve figured out why she introduced herself and where she fits into the story.

As per the rules of the contest, I’ll be starting from scratch, rather than re-working the old story, so we’ll see what happens!

Touchdown Celebrations Are Getting Out of Hand

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Saturdays and Sundays in the fall are usually full of football and this weekend was no exception. Saturday morning I hit Ellie on a crossing route and she sprinted untouched into the endzone, dropped the ball (baby hedgehog), and peed on it. There weren’t enough yellow flags in the world to be thrown for this truly unsportsmanlike behavior and, after consultation with league officials, play was halted.

A moot point since the heavens soon poured forth and we headed inside, my wife decided it was a good opportunity to give the whole hedgehog family a good washing. Play resumed on Sunday with no showboating by my star receiver, she brought the ball back to me after each score, like she had been there before.

Good girl, Ellie, good girl.

First of the West

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A red squirrel sits on a tree branch beside Shoshone Lake on the Shoshone Lake Trail at Yellowstone National Park

I was first exposed to the noisy chatter of red squirrels while hiking in West Virginia when I lived back east. I would see them a few times more before moving to Oregon, where I wouldn’t see or hear them again until my first real trip to Yellowstone in 2004. On my first hike in my first few hours in the park, I came across this red squirrel near the beach of Shoshone Lake on the Shoshone Lake Trail. I’ve since seen them quite a bit in the park, but good pictures usually elude me, so this first picture remains my favorite of my pictures of red squirrels in Yellowstone.