Internal Torture Device

My brother Steven has an internal heart debrillator that he calls his internal torture device. On Sunday last, it saved his life.

I took my inflatable kayak out of the truck and started to inflate it. About half way through the pumping process, I was rudely interuppted with a shock therapy. This therapy like almost all the others was totally unexpected. I just stood there trying to weather the anxiety attack that follows these so-called therapies. My friend showed up right after this episode and could tell something was wrong.

Read his entire post for a chilling look at a near-death experience.

Oh yeah, Steve’s my younger brother. Mom also had heart problems. (Though it was cancer that took her away decades too soon; she was only 66.)

No time for a proper post, but here’s a link to our latest images (Monument Valley) posted on Flickr.

Ok, just one …

I had the very special pleasure to attend my first Midsummer’s Day festival in Lindsborg yesterday. It was a beautiful day, sunny but not too hot and the north(Swensson) park in Lindsborg was filled with people enjoying the day. There was a wide variety of good food available, and many local artists and crafts-people were on hand sharing the products of their creativity.

Sheryl and I had a lot of fun. We were a little busy at first, tending to our Midsummer’s Day committee responsibilities*, but for the most part we got to simply enjoy the day. For me, the were two highlights that stand out. They both speak to the timelessness nature of festivals and celebrations such as Lindsborg’s Midsummer’s Day.

In the mid-afternoon, watching the youthful Swedish dancers dancing to Swedish songs peformed by their classmates and leaders, I was struck by the thought that a very similar scene was likely played out a couple of hundred years ago, in Sweden, by the distant relatives of those I was watching perform. Timeless.

Later in the day, at Heritage Park (near the Smoky Hill River), came the traditional raising of the maypole. This was followed by more Swedish dancing, including one number that involved almost 1/3 of the audience. Charlotte Anderson, the dance director, did a wonderful job with this dance, especially considering how many of the audience had never done anything like it before. It was something to see!

I took around 280 photos yesterday and pulled out 39 I felt were worth sharing on Flickr; they are located at my Midsummer’s Day photo set; they’re also available as a Midsummer’s slide show. From that set I have posted 9 here**.

Simu-posted at All the Pages and Little Sweden, USA.

* Sheryl is on the Midsummer’s program committee and I did publicity. That included working with local radio personality James Keith; he did 5 “live remotes” from the park, and I was the opening and closing guest.

** A note about my use of Flickr. I’m once again hosting my own images on this blog, and providing links to more images on Flickr. I’m in no way dissatisfied with Flickr; it’s just that I wanted this site to by augmented by Flickr, but to not depend on them for something as fundamental as the photos I’m blogging. Also, and this is secondary to simply wanting to host my own blog images, none of the available Flickr sizes quite worked for me. They were either too small or too large. Hosting my own images also means setting my own image size. I like using flickr for previously stated reasons: sharing with a larger audience, ability to view images in different sizes, and so on.

For the past few years, after the completion of some of our travels, I’ve taken all the related postings and reassembled them into a single large page. The individual entries on the page appear in ascending date order, which makes for better reading after the fact, compared to a blog where orders are posted in reverse date order, with newest coming first.

Without further ado, here’s Mike & Sheryl’s March 2005 West Coast Trip Journal

Links to this, and prior journals, may be found on the left side of this site.

Here’s the final entry* in the journal of our trip out west in March of this year. These photos were taken on March 20th, between Blythe, California and Phoenix, Arizona. This was a very wet spring, and as a result the wildflowers were especially numerous and colorful this year.

* After these photos were taken I spent 3 days in Phoenix on business, and after that, being both a bit burned out and homesick, we drove pretty much straight home. Took a few photos along the way, but nothing really worth sharing.