see above
29 Dec 11. With the TFX contract being stolen from Boeing in 1969, courtesy of a certain former senator from TX, things in Seattle got very grim, and remained so for a few years, even more so than what has been experienced in the past 3 years. Some of you may even recall the Time Magazine cover showing the billboard with the words "Will the last person out of Seattle please turn out the lights." Employment was grim, and if you had a job you did everything possible to maintain it. I wound up working three different jobs (day job, on-call evenings in the hospital, and weekend barber) plus donating a fair amount of time with a couple of efforts that were dear to my heart, both involving marine mammals. As a result I wasn't home nearly as much as I would have liked to have been, and the family stresses because of such were not small. I didn't have a lot of time at home when daughter Jennifer was awake, and we didn't spend a lot of quality time together. BUT when we did do some things together, they were often unlike those any of her playmates ever experienced, and they centered around some of my activities. At 3.5 years of age, Jennifer was old enough to appreciate that dad was working with some rather, shall we say, interesting animals, much more so than just having a 6' boa constrictor as a pet. She really wanted to get involved with one of the critters dad was working with, so one day we took a trip down to the waterfront to go for a ride on a Killer whale. She was all excited, at least up until the point when we started wading along the side of the animal, whereupon she suddenly realized that this "pet" was just a wee big bigger than she had bargained for, and suddenly going for a ride didn't seem like such a great idea. But dad had gone to some effort to get her permission, so he wasn't going to let her "miss out" on this opportunity. As she approached the dorsal fin of a female Orca, she started bawling and claiming she didn't really want to go for a ride, but I put her on the back of the whale and made her hang on for a few moments to get a feel for what it might be like to actually go for a ride on one in the water, such as one could read about in our local Indian lore. Now Jennifer was a bit of a ham in those days, so in mid bawl I pointed to mom up at street level with camera in hand. As soon as she saw the camera she immediately stopped crying and grinned for the shot, then, once she heard the camera take the photo, returned to crying until I took her off the back of the Orca. I have looked unsuccessfully high and low for that particular shot and can't find it, so here is one taken just prior to her starting to bawl. Note the tightly clasped hands around my neck!
30 Dec 11. So here we are at the end of year 6 of the Daily Image, and the final image for 2011. I've chosen a rather somber image for the final offering, and a shot that has been one of my favorites in 40+ years of shooting. The original was in color, but primarily in gray and yellowish gray. I played with it a bit today and decided it had even more impact in B&W then it did in the original colors. Back during the time I was working at the Institute (IEMP) trying to develop a set of diving tables for the U.S. Navy that would be decompression sickness free (i.e. bubble free), I had the opportunity to go to sea and work with groups of divers who were trying to erect a steel tower in the mid Pacific Ocean that was to be used as one leg of a weather triangulation system. There is an undersea mount called Cobb Seamount that had been selected for the tower due to its rather close proximity to the surface. We were diving in 105 - 130 feet of salt water (tide dependent) and in the years before we got involved in monitoring the divers for decompression bubbles they were experiencing multiple cases of decompression sickness and one or more cases of CNS hits. Once we got involved we were able to reduce the incidence of decompression sickness to zero events, something the divers truly appreciated. At first they were very skeptical about letting me monitor them, but once they realized that the work was keeping them healthy and thus working (no dive - no pay), they wouldn't dive without my performing both pre and post dive examinations. It was a wonderful, opportunity, and eventually we were able to devise a way to monitor them while still in the water which allowed them to perform even longer dives than normal which translated into more $$$ for them. A lot was learned but due to internal operations I never got to see it to a conclusion.
