Go Chiefs!

Neptune wears a football jersey in a fountain on the Country Club Plaza, Kansas City, Missouri.

A statue of Neptune wears the uniform jersey shirt of a Kansas City football team member in honor of the team’s advancement to a playoff game.

The Neptune fountain sculpture sits in the Country Club Plaza Shopping Center in Kansas City, Missouri. The sculpture depicts Neptune, the Roman god of the sea, holding a trident. Neptune sits in a chariot pulled by sea horses. Water gushes from the horses’ nostrils. This cast lead sculpture was built by the Bromsgrove Guild of Worcestershire, England in 1911.

Miller Nichols purchased the 8,000-pound cast lead fountain for its weight in scrap metal. It was found on the top of a train car full of scrap metal at a salvage company. Nichols transported the rescued sculpture from Great Britain to Kansas City, where it was refurbished and installed on the Plaza in 1953.

Miller Nichols was the son of J. C. Nichols, who established the Country Club Plaza shopping Center in 1922. The Plaza was designed architecturally after Seville, Spain. The Plaza was the first shopping center in the world designed to accommodate shoppers arriving by automobile.

Kansas City, Missouri, is known as “The City of Fountains.” There are 200 officially registered fountains in the metropolitan Greater Kansas City area. That number excludes the many fountains at corporation and sub-division entrances, office atriums, private gardens and homes.

One of the messages flashing on a Kansas City bus is “Go Chiefs!”as it drives through the Country Club Plaza Shopping Center in Kansas City, Missouri.

UPDATED: New Photo Added

Pomona Statue Wearing Dee Ford’s Kansas City Chief’s jersey on a fountain at a restaurant in one of the courtyards of the Country Club Plaza in Kansas City, Missouri.

Bark at the Park

Bark at the Park Registration at Kauffman Stadium for the Kansas City Royals game against the Seattle Mariners on June 22, 2014.

Balls and dogs definitely go together.

At Bark at the Park, scores of dogs and their people had a great time at Kaufman Stadium on July 22, 2014 at the Kansas City Royals-Seattle Mariners baseball game.

Bark at the Park at Kauffman Stadium during the Kansas City Royals-Seattle Mariners on June 22, 2014.

At the event in Kansas City, Missouri,  dogs and their people had a special section, pre-game parade, games, wading pools, tickets to seats at the game, vendors and special activities.  Part of the ticket price benefited Wayside Waifs, a no-kill animal shelter where I volunteer as a photographer of available cats for the website. (I don’t think we’re going to be seeing any Purr at the Park events.)

What a treat to see so many dogs!  Click on any thumbnail to see a full-size photo and to start the slideshow.

 

Dog and human cool off at Bark at the Park at Kauffman Stadium when the Kansas City Royals played the Seattle Mariners on June 22, 2014.

Dogs and their people relax at Bark at the Park during the game on June 22, 2014. The Kansas City Royals played the Seattle Mariners.

The Seattle Mariners hustle to catch a ball as a Royals player runs the bases on June 22, 2014.

What dog wouldn’t enjoy a hot dog race. Here relish, mustard and ketchup race at the Kansas City Royals game on June 22, 2014, during the Bark at the Park event.

Flags fly and fountains play at Kauffman Stadium when the Kansas City Royals played the Seattle Mariners on June 22, 2014.

There were plenty of wading pools for dogs to enjoy at Bark at the Park at Kaufman Stadium on June 22, 2014.

Visitors stop at the Wayside Waifs booth at Bark at the Park during the Kansas City Royals game on June 22, 2014.

Bark at the Park Registration at Kauffman Stadium for the Kansas City Royals game against the Seattle Mariners on June 22, 2014.

Bark at the Park Registration at Kauffman Stadium for the Kansas City Royals game against the Seattle Mariners on June 22, 2014.

Bark at the Park Registration at Kauffman Stadium for the Kansas City Royals game against the Seattle Mariners on June 22, 2014.

Bark at the Park Registration at Kauffman Stadium for the Kansas City Royals game against the Seattle Mariners on June 22, 2014.

Bark at the Park Registration at Kauffman Stadium for the Kansas City Royals game against the Seattle Mariners on June 22, 2014.

There are Bark at the Park events at many Major League baseball stadiums.

Bark at the Park Dog Events at Major League baseball stadiums.

Kansas City Royals Bark at the Park.

Wayside Waifs Website.

 

Outgunned

A surfer rides the waves in the ocean along Huntington Beach, California.

I love photography,  I love to watch surfers catch a wave and I love photographing surfers catching a wave, so I was thrilled when I recently stumbled upon a surfing competition in Huntington Beach, California.  I’d been hoping to find surfers, so a tournament was a bonus. My ever-patient daughter waited as I shot photo after photo.

I wasn’t the only one there with a camera.  My little Nikon D40X was like a child’s toy next to the dozens of big guns stationed along the pier.  I slipped in among them, and we all watched as the surfers waited for a worthy wave.  When a surfer rose up, a chorus of clicks followed the surfer doing all sorts of fancy moves on the waves.

In a break in the action, one photographer pointed out a pod of dolphins to me, and I hurried after her to find a better vantage to photograph them.  My telephoto lens was outmatched there. The dolphins were too far away to get a good shot.  I had serious lens envy. I sell a few photos, but not enough to justify the expense of a bigger rig. Although if I did upgrade (and it would be a seriously expensive upgrade), would I be more aggressive both in photographing more subjects as well as peddling my wares? So far, I don’t have the nerve.

I want this camera and lens!

I have serious lens envy.

Here, a surfer catches a wave under a rainbow!

More surfer photographs on a calendar I designed.

Round the Town from Down Under

Sure, snow is pretty, but the thrill quickly wears off when frost bite sets in. When it's snowy, sleety and frigid, what are you going to do with guests who don't know what real winter is? I took them to the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, where the temperatures are balmy. Here two of my Australian guests check out the acoustic furniture on a curving floor in a special exhibition in the Bloch Building. In the foreground is Michael Cross' work, "Flood," which features light bulbs and brightly colored cables in vases of water. (Kids, don't try this at home!)

It was a dreary, cold, snowy night when we picked up our Australian guests from the airport in late December. To us locals, the snow was a nuisance, but our guests thought it was beautiful, like fairy dust, fluffy and bright.   (It was soon dirty and crusty…)

The first night, the boys raced through the snow in the dark with a flashlight, making tracks.   We’d gotten rid of our sleds long ago (probably in some garage sale for nothing!), but the next morning, the youngest boy found a piece of cardboard and “snowboarded” down a hill several times.  

Squirrels were fascinating creatures. Cardinals and woodpeckers were exotic.   It was wonderful to see the world with a new perspective.   When I drove them around, I pointed out what I knew.  They also asked me plenty of questions I didn’t know the answer to, so I spent some time online when we got home learning more about my own city.

We spoke the same language, yet we didn’t quite.  Jumper, biscuit, council, fringe, bum.  Familiar words, but with different meanings from American English. I’ve watched enough Masterpiece Theater that I knew what they were talking about, though.   Thanks, PBS!  New to me is bushwalking, which means hiking.

In Australia, they are surrounded by birds we only see in cages, such as lorikeets and parrots.  There are marsupials everywhere, while we have only one — the opossum.  They have mandatory voting and are fined if they don’t vote.

The Liberty Memorial is so tall you can't see the top!

They checked regularly online for the cricket scores.  There was a  big game in Perth, Australia, against South Africa.  Australia’s national cricket team is the highest ranked in the world.  Cricket is played in a hundred countries.  High-level “Test cricket” games can last up to five days with time outs for lunch and tea. I still don’t understand American football, so I can’t begin to explain cricket.  All I know is that they use bats and wickets, and that one of the incarnations of Dr. Who wore a cricket uniform.

We visited the National World War I Museum underneath the Liberty Memorial.  Again, I saw the world through a different perspective.   Their visit lasted too short a time. The next time I hope they can see our city in the summer.   Soon I’ll be seeing the world from their point of view (and be a lot warmer, too) when we visit them in January.

What is Cricket?

What is Australian English?

National World War I Museum

Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art

 

Our young guest from Sydney, Australia, contemplates the snowy view. Beyond, Auguste Rodin's "The Thinker" ponders the giant shuttlecocks that seemed to have landed on the snow in front of the Nelson Atkins Museum of Art.

Six Random Things

I was tagged by "Anna's Bee World." In her honor, I'm posting this photo I took of a honey bee at a nearby nursery in October.

 Anna’s Bee World tagged me.   Anna says it’s time to play the “six random things” meme.
1. Link to the person who tagged you. (Click on Anna’s Bee World above.)
2. Post the rules on your blog.
3. Write six random things about yourself.  (I’ve written about some of these on my blog.)
4. Tag six people at the end of your post and link to them. (You can use the same ones as other blogging friends.)
5. Let each person know they’ve been tagged and leave a comment on their blog.
6. Let the tagger know when your entry is published.

So here we go…six random things about me:

1.) I take my camera almost everywhere with me. I’m considered a menace. Symphony in the Flint Hills.

2.) I save news clippings, some of which I try to force on people who might be vaguely interested in the topic.  I also do the same thing with plants I’ve started from seed.  Confessions of a Savoholic.

3.) I love Star Trek, especially the original series. From any thirty in the original series, I probably can tell you which episode it is.

4.) I love road trips, especially if I don’t have to drive and am just in charge of the map. I love maps. I collect maps. I love google maps, too. Awesome Utah.

5.) I love my cat, Malcolm, who’s 16.  Malcolm, Old Friend. 

Malcolm.

6.) I’m the happiest when both of my adult children are asleep under my roof.  It doesn’t happen very often.

Here are the links to the blogs. They touch on a wide range of interests:  humor, teaching, organic farming in England, sports, photography, book and movie reviews, poetry and daily life — and much more. 

• DR Corner
• Elisse Stuart
• Locks Park Farm
• Planetjan
• Poet Verse
• Ripple Effects
• Thinking Outloud

Check them out.  Yes, I know there are seven, not six.   I’ll focus on some other notable blogs later.  Anna introduced me to some great new blogs, including Photographic Haiku.

Fenway Victory Gardens and Fenway Park

Article about gardening books from the New York Times

As a college student, my daughter lived along Boylston in Boston in one in a row of old apartment buildings. The woodwork was thick with paint, the walls were peeling, the plumbing leaked.  The floors were stained, and the sink was rusty.  One night she had to stay up to bail water from the tub because it wouldn’t drain nor would the tub faucet stop leaking. 

From her windows on the back of her building, my daughter could look into Fenway Park baseball stadium.  Her blinds couldn’t block the glow of the lights, and she heard the roar of the crowd at every game the Red Sox played — this was 2007, a year when the Red Sox won the World Series, so there was a lot of roaring. Every home game was sold out.  The streets were jammed.  Unfortunately, she wasn’t a baseball fan…..

Still, her neighborhood did have one glorious aspect.  The front of her building faced the Fenway Victory Gardens.  I appreciated the gardens more than she did.   She rushed past them to and from her classes at the Berklee College of Music.  The weather was usually bad.  She’d heard rumors about the strange activities along the fens that bordered the gardens to the east, some of which we saw for ourselves.  Men strode back and forth, hands in their pockets, along the tall rushes.  Here and there, short paths had been beaten into the rushes. “They find bodies there,” she said.

I loved the gardens, which I could appreciate as a summer-time tourist and a gardener myself. I wasn’t in a rush and no one bothered me as I wandered the paths, while gardeners worked quietly in their plots.  On some of the narrower paths, I stepped over used condoms and cigarette butts, which hinted at the different kind of visitor the gardens attracted at night.

The Fenway Victory Gardens represent the nation’s last remaining of the original victory gardens created nationwide during World War II, according to its website. www.fenwayvictorygardens.com   During World War II, because of the needs of the troops in Europe and the Pacific, there was rationing and shortages for those on the home front.  President Franklin D. Roosevelt called for Americans to grow more vegetables.  The City of Boston established 49 acres, including the Boston Common and the Public Gardens, as “victory gardens” for citizens to grow vegetables and herbs.

The Fenway gardens are on seven acres of the Fens, one of six Boston Parklands designated as the historic “Emerald Necklace” by celebrated landscape architect Frederick Law Olmstead in the 1800s.  The gardens have more than 500 plots, each about fifteen by twenty-five feet.  More information is on the website listed above.

ALS: Courage, Hope

 

“A Latter-Day Gehrig Survives, and He Demands to Be Heard,” link to a story about ALS from the New York Times

 

A few people you meet will have a huge impact on your life, even when you don’t realize it at the time.  Keith Worthington was such a person.  I met Worthington in 1982.  His courage and dedication greatly affected me, but I had no idea then how his mission would later be so important to my family. 

I was assigned to write a news release about a new center for a disease I knew little about: ALS. Frankly, at the time I was glad that meeting him was just part of my job.  I was grateful not to have any personal acquaintance with the disease he was fighting.     I’d heard the story about Lou Gehrig retiring from baseball years ago because of a paralyzing disease that was later named after him, but when I met Worthington I saw the full expression of that disease. Worthington was totally paralyzed and on a ventilator. ALS is a terrible, progressive neurodegenerative disease, and there isn’t a cure. Yet, he radiated cheerfulness.

Worthington was at the University of Kansas Medical Center, where I worked, to help open a new ALS Research Center.  When he was diagnosed, he found little help or information anywhere, and he created, with his wife Sue’s help, an organization to help people with ALS and to raise money for research.  That organization, which later joined the national ALS Association, is 30 years old this year and is named the Keith Worthington chapter.  It’s one of more than 40 ALS Association chapters nationwide.

Worthington died two years after I met him, but I didn’t forget him or his courage to help people even when he knew he would never benefit himself.  When my father was diagnosed with ALS in 1995,  I felt punched in the gut, shocked, in denial.  I immediately thought of Worthington and knew the fate that awaited my father.  But I also knew that because of Worthington, there were care, support and equipment resources available to my father.

The Keith Worthington chapter has many devoted supporters, including baseball legend George Brett, who was Worthington’s friend, and golf legend Tom Watson, whose long-time friend and caddie Bruce Edwards died from ALS.