A small set of photos from driving Nate’s car cross-country. He, his wife, their two cats, and their two month old son moved from LA to Chicago, and I offered to drive their car since I was scheduled to have nothing better to do and I LOVE roadtrips.

This is a mix of stuff shot with my good camera and with my phone, since the weather was such that the one day I had for wandering around Chicago, the weather sucked.

Speaking of the weather sucking, you can see how bad the snow was up on Vail Pass when I came through, but there was a stretch of I-70 on the way to Green River, Utah that was much, much worse.

Thunder, lighting, snow, hail, sleet, freezing rain, and at one point I was driving through a solid inch of unplowed snow. It was insane, and I’m lucky that car has damn good traction or I would have been in a ditch.

If I hadn’t been staying with step-relatives in Denver and Omaha for two of the three nights I was on the road, I might have looked at the weather and taken I-40 through Albuquerque instead, though that would have put me right in the middle of a bunch of tornadoes on I-44 the next day anyway.

Anyway, all in all it was a great trip, I got to get my roadtrip on without putting more miles on my car, and I got to hang with my friends in Chicago and stuff myself silly for a couple days when I got in. Good times.

I went for a bike ride this afternoon, partly because my cheapo necklace finally broke and I needed to buy a replacement. Fortunately replacements are 2 for $10 at Venice Beach.

I actually dragged my giant camera with me this time because it’s been pouring rain and a lot of the usual pollution and gunk has been washed away, and things are much, much clearer than they usually are.

Anyway, some of the better pictures from this little excursion are up on my Flickr, which you can access via this link or this lovely slideshow:

I will say, days like today make me wish I had a working point-and-shoot camera. The small-ish one that I carried around Europe with me (and which compared to today’s point-and-shoot cameras, is freakishly huge) died some time ago, and sometimes the iPhone’s camera just isn’t enough.

I love the pictures my D50 takes and the level of control it gives me, but there’s no getting around the fact that lugging a giant DSLR around with me on a bike ride is a humongous pain in the ass.

And now, in honor of the holidays, a slideshow of some of my (heavily, heavily cropped due to all the cars coming through) photos from the LA DWP’s Light Festival:

Full sizes of everything can be found at Flickr – I realize some of the cropping doesn’t make for the best viewing in the slideshow format.

I’ve been rather bad about blogging consistently, so in case I don’t get a chance to post again until after the holidays, I hope everyone travels safe and enjoys the holidays.

The first, both pretty and telling, comes courtesy of the New York Times’ photography blog’s feature on Dubai. Lauren Greenfield, who had mostly been documenting the way the recession hit here in the States, went over to Dubai and snapped this telling shot:

The juxtaposition of the impotent palm tree next to an empty McMansion, both of which are on a man-made island built in the shape of a palm tree, is just too fantastic.

The second is just a random one from a story on the LA Times’ local breaking news blog about a Shetland pony that was found wandering around the streets of Norwalk. Just an outstanding shot by the Times’ Don Bartletti of an animal control officer trying to calm the pony, gorgeously backlit by the sun.

Sometimes it’s just the random stuff that happens around town that turns into a really amazing photo.

The silliness that the flu can inspire:

More of this goofiness available at Flickr.

I saw it in the distance. And I thought,”What the fuck is that sitting on the sand? It looks like a boat. It…is a boat…”:

Okay, so it’s a boat just sitting in the middle of the sand on the middle of a very busy beach. I have a few questions.

1. How exactly did this boat get there? It hasn’t been stormy enough for the damn thing to just wash up, especially not that far up the beach and particularly not relatively upright and totally intact.

2. Why is it just sitting there? If it’s for a TV show or a movie or something, which is about the only rational explanation I could think of besides it just washing up, why is there nobody guarding it?

3. If it actually did wash up, why the hell did they put a fence around it instead of removing it?

So bizarre. I’m hoping I can do some more riding this coming week – though I seem to have re-aggravated a pectoral muscle that’s been giving me trouble for a couple weeks by hauling my heavy-ass backpack around for 31 miles, so I may have to figure out an alternate way to carry all my water and Gatorade and granola bars before I go out again.

But we’ll see if the boat is still there in a few days or a couple of weeks. Anybody else got ideas of why the hell a boat would randomly wind up sitting on the beach a couple hundred feet in from the high tide mark?

We use them to annoy the living shit out of our pets by taking 8 bajillion pictures of them, often about three inches from their little faces:

A few new shots of Chaplin are up at Flickr.

Photos from my trip to D.C. last week are finally up on Flickr, divided into two sets, and thus two slideshows for your time-killing and/or general perusal.

My set of wandering around D.C. with Jill, with quite a bit of stuff from my trip to the Air and Space Museum:

And my set from Maggie’s wedding:

I went to Denver for my stepuncle’s stepdaughter’s wedding (my step-step-cousin, I suppose) a couple weekends ago and hauled my camera along with me. I also got to see my cousin Jeff for the first time in about six years, and there’s some pictures of his family in here as well (or at least the members of his family who weren’t off at college or work).

If you can’t see the images below the set’s also available here at Flickr.

Photographically, I focused mostly on the drive through Nevada this time, which is through an otherworldly beautiful part of the desert where there is literally nobody around for hundreds of miles. So spectacular and incredibly relaxing.

There’s also some good shots from my hike to Titus Lake with my dad. For two people whose combined age is 100 and who have two good legs between us, we did pretty damn well.

Photos are from my D50, but a bunch of fun ones from the iPhone mixed in. If the slideshow below doesn’t feel like cooperating, the set is here on Flickr.