Photo Friday

Indian Time

I'm still climbing the learning curve of how to use my DSLR, but I managed to get a couple good photos at the pow-wow last weekend before the sun went down.

I'm very familiar with Indian Time, and its close cousin Mexican Time, and honestly I think we (white people) could learn a thing or two about not fixating on schedules. However, I'm setting the scene for Friday night.

The pow-wow was scheduled to start at 7p (Indian Time---even the FB page acknowledges it). So when some people down the bleachers asked what time it would start, I knew there wasn't a concrete answer.

I said, "What time is it now?"
They said, "7:20"
I looked around, saw no indication anything was happening with any speed or sense of urgency and estimated, "Maybe about 8?"
I heard later it didn't get started until about 10p.

Amber & Joe & Florence

I posted photos from Amber & Joe's engagement session in Stites and Kooskia on my site. (Once you're there, click on any image to start a slideshow.) Amber is a good friend (and classmate since 1st grade) and it was great meeting Joe. They're getting married in November in Mexico, so I suggested an engagement session for fun while they were visiting Idaho and they were up for it. I'm pretty happy with how the photos came out, too.

This coming weekend I'm going to do shoot the Chief Lookingglass Days Pow-wow and a woman I went to school with asked me to cover some special events during it for her family, so I am stoked to hopefully get some good, intimate shots there.

My parents and Keith and I drove up past Grangeville to check out a cabin we've reserved for us and Amanda and K2 in September. After we checked out the cabin we drove to Florence, which doesn't really exist anymore, but it's a former boom mining town in BFE Idaho.

It's all gone now, we only saw remnants of a couple cabins and all of the ditches that had been dug for mining. But at one time, the population here reached 9,000! That's amazing considering the very remote location and the fact it was the late 1800s. Gold fever, baby.

The cemetery was the most interesting part. It's been restored somewhat, as in new markers have been made for some of the graves. Though one sign we read said one person per day died on average, so there has to be more bodies buried that they just don't know about and/or have lost track of...

There were also indentations left with a sign that explained "Exhumed Graves of Chinese Miners." Hopefully that means the bodies were returned to their country of origin. There was a semi-circle of holes like this apart from the rest of the grave markers.

Related: Kooskia's internment camp during WWII has been in the news a lot lately as archaeologists from the University of Idaho are working there.

A lot of the "new" grave markers said "Unknown" but the ones with names and dates showed people who died there who came from Canada, Georgia, Kentucky. All to find a fortune mining. I don't think it worked out like they thought it might. But you have to admire the sense of adventure that brought them there.

There are also a lot of dredge ponds left over (see above) where moose are likely to be, but we didn't see any this time.

porch makeover

I had to step into the soon-to-be-shower to get this last shot.

Keith and I were pretty productive this morning - we got all the slats up on the porch. We had originally planned going all the way to the top with them, but decided we wanted the option of more air/sun on top in the winter.

We might frame an awning that would be just screened (like a horizontal screen door) that would have legs so we could prop it open if we want.

But, for now, this will work just fine.

The butcher block you can see in the top photo is from my great-grandparents' cattle ranch. We're going to set up a little outdoor cooking area so we can have dinner at our own house once in a while.

I thought we might get started on installing the kitchen counter, but we ran out of time. Another day.

Friends from Oregon are visiting and we're floating the river this afternoon, then doing an engagement session for them, then dinner. We went to some other friends' (classmates of mine) and had dinner and talked and it was nice to be acting like adults with friends, something we're not all that practiced at doing.

Also: meteor shower tonight! We saw a few stunners last night, but tonight is supposed to be the peak.

Around the tiny house lately we’ve been starting more projects than we’re finishing, which is, really, just the way we operate. (Are you new here?)

Projects in mid-stream:

1. Covered porch – still working (thinking? planning?) on getting the slats across the front and maybe the side. Until then, it still works as a hammock haven.

2. Insulation – we have maybe 1/3 of the roof insulated and some of the ceiling boards in place (to hold the insulation in the rafter bays) and it has dropped the temp in the house considerably in the late afternoon. (The roof on the porch helps, too.) We made it most of a day doing this (I’m an excellent brad nailer.) and then Keith got started prepping my parents’ house to paint…and that was the end of that.

Also we put up shelves over the doors for my camera gear. Barn wood will back the shelves. Some day.

3. Kitchen – we have shelves under the kitchen window holding our dry goods even though we can’t cook in the tiny house. Mostly for decoration/illustration, I guess. We found some yellow pipe (instead of galvanized) to support the yellow counter with our sink, so hopefully that will see some action sometime soon.

We sat in our theater seats on the front porch yesterday and talked about how we needed to make a list along the lines of Must Accomplish Before The Cold. Presumably a toilet falls somewhere on the list...