More than you ever wanted to know about Alabama native Joe Watts
These are photos I’ve taken over the last 5 years or so from the rural part of Southwest Alabama. Some are just a few weeks old. Others I took back in 2003. I’m putting these on my blog as much to test adding Slideshow Pro Flash files as anything else. Seems to work. Watch for more slide shows in the coming weeks!
Just looking back and realized that this newsletter (finished this afternoon) is the 30th newsletter I’ve done for the Alabama Chapter of the Sierra Club. All but the first 3 have been printed on 100% recycled newsprint. One of the fastest, most economical printers for that I’ve ever found is located right here in Birmingham (jsprinting.com). They print primarily newspapers for local high schools and colleges. Anyway, here’s the 30th newsletter (shown here in color, but actually printed in black and white for cost savings).
Wow! I’m really impressed with how well photoshop creates panoramas from multiple images. Had I been a bit more careful, I think this would have turned out even better. There is a bit of distortion–mainly from using my 17-40 mm lens at the widest setting. The photo below is a compilation of 8 photos taken last weekend. Even with my relatively wide angle lens, I couldn’t quite get the whole Tutwiler Hotel in the frame. This hasn’t been doctored by me very much at all–there are a couple of rough spots along the roof line, but nothing that a little touchup can’t fix. This took just a few minutes–and most of that was just processing. This would have taken a lot longer before they added the photomerge feature to Photoshop.
I recently compiled this information for my friends at Your Town Alabama. I really enjoy doing this blog–one of my favorites.
1. The newsletter went out to the largest number ever: 625 email addresses (some bounced back, but that’s pretty typical)
2. Since February 16–the first day of the blog, there have been 101 entries in the blog! (I meant to highlight it at 100, but got carried away…)
3. Prior to February, our average daily traffic on the website was a high of 286 (this was June 2007, so that sort of makes sense as it is the month of the annual workshop). Most months averaged under 175 per day, however. Currently, we are averaging over 300 per day. People are also looking at considerably more pages of the website as well–most notably the blog section.
4. This one is mostly for Paul: If you google our town Alabama, the Your Town Alabama website is currently number 1. The same goes, obviously, for googling Your Town Alabama.
5. We’ve gotten some nice comments from folks. Lee Sentell and Charles Ball, particularly took time to respond to the email with a thanks and positive thoughts.
6. In keeping with what I said in the email I sent out, I’ve made a particular point to update the blog since sending out the email–anyone that checks it again will be pleasantly surprised, I think, to discover new information: I’ve added 4 posts in the last two days–mainly to cement in the heads of people that the blog does get changed frequently.
7. We saw a significant increase in traffic on the day of the update email and the day after. Our average traffic per day prior to the email for the month of May was about 320. On the day it went out, our traffic increased to 479 and the following day, it was 384. That isn’t quite the jump in traffic that emails once generated, although it is still a larger amount of traffic. I chalk that up to the increase in general traffic–I think that more people already check the blog for information and don’t need an email reminder, though clearly some people do.
Visit the blog at yourtownalabama.org/blog.
Well, today isn’t actually Mother’s Day, but Ann and I will be gone tomorrow and thought I’d just go ahead and put this out today.
I believe in Mothers. I guess I almost have to…growing up, I had six: my real mother, of course, and my five older sisters. When I was young, everyone took care of me. I guess I was lucky that way. I don’t recall, of course, but reportedly I didn’t speak for the first couple of years. I only needed to point to achieve the prize I wanted, for with a simple point or a quiet honk, I had five sisters snapping to attention to fetch something for little baby brother. Oh, those must have been the days.
And my real mother was magical. She had the experience of raising five children before I came along. (All different in so many ways, but more alike than any of us care to admit.) She had the wisdom of age—she was forty-five years old when I was born. She had the patience of a saint. We went for long walks in the woods, often resulting in my little legs being exhausted before our return home. We’d stay out in those woods for hours and hours, reading stories, looking at bugs and just listening to the sounds of nature (almost always soothing but never silent). When it was time to head back to the house, she’d often carry me home. I really don’t know how. I’m not forty yet, but I doubt I could carry a 4-6 year old child a mile on my shoulders or back. But somehow, she always managed to get us home, and often with a lovely assortment of new sticks or pine cones or leaves. (Once, in the fall, we brought home a collection of beautiful and brilliant red leaves. They turned out to be poison oak leaves, but that’s for another story.)
Those walks in the woods gave me the wisdom to believe in nature, to love the outdoors and to enjoy the simple beauty of an oak leaf or a weed in bloom. The walks in the woods really prepared me for my future. Sure, college, graduate school and years of working and networking gave me some preparation, but the time in the woods getting to know myself and learning from Mama really cemented my personality. Those walks also gave me the strength to endure what was to come.
Just a little over a year ago, my belief in the power of Mothers was sorely tested. Murdered. It is so very hard to type that word that I really can’t express it. My fingers freeze and continue to hit the wrong keys. But that’s what happened to my Mama. Murdered as she was getting ready to enjoy her favorite time of the year—spring. The flowers were just starting to bloom. In fact, she had come to Bessemer to meet several of us for lunch at the Bright Star restaurant to celebrate her 83rd birthday just the weekend before. As we were preparing to part ways after lunch, she reached into the trunk of the car and pulled out a bouquet of jonquils and daffodils for Ann and me. I was so pleased to have them then.
Now the flowers brighten my heart and mind when I think back about them—doubly so when I saw the few bloom this year that I have transplanted from our home place in Octagon to our yard here in Birmingham. Immeasurably so when I saw the thousands blooming in Octagon this spring.
But the flowers are nothing compared to the woods. I’ve gone walking in the woods more in the last year than I had in many years past. I’ve fought my way through blackberry brambles, I’ve slipped through muddy patches and I’ve crouched through wisteria vines wrapping themselves around trees. I’ve paused in the deepest, darkest of these places to think, to pray and to be with Mama. It is at those times when I truly feel her presence, telling me it will be okay, reminding me of the power of those deep woods.
I can really think when I’m in those deep woods, so very changed from my youth but still remarkably the same. I can think, too, when I stare into the bloom of a jonquil or, more recently, an iris. Looking closely, I can make out the beautiful color variations, the intricate details and most importantly, the power of the earth and the power of my Mama. And that’s what all this really comes down to: my belief in my Mama. Those woods and those flowers sustain her today. I feel sadness when I go to the cemetery and put flowers on her grave, but no overpowering connection. Sure, I cry each time and I feel the deep loss that we all feel.
I feel sadness when I walk behind the house to put flowers on the place she was found. Certainly, I feel anger here as well, something I’ll hopefully work my way through in years to come.
But it is in those woods, that land, that dark red, unbelievably muddy, sticky as glue earth that I feel the true power of Mama. I feel love and strength and the gentle beauty of nature, I feel my love of the outdoors, and I feel my Mama when I go to the deep woods. Those woods sustain me. And that is why I believe and will always believe in mothers.
I’ve just about wrapped up a new website for the American Institute of Architects, Birmingham, Alabama Chapter. We’re still in the testing and review stage, but I’m particularly pleased with it right now. It involves using the many good photos that they have–and we’ll change these photos out regularly–in a Flash slideshow. The Flash was pretty easy to accomplish using Adobe Photoshop Lightroom and an optional plug-in called Slideshow Pro. I’ve used it before, but never with Lightroom. It worked really well, but not flawlessly. I had combined it with a Spry menu to manage the links (easy to set up by itself as well). For some reason, these two things didn’t play well together. A bit of hair pulling and then a quick search on Google helped me to track down the solution. Once that was in place, all worked as planned–what a nice change!
I developed the look of AIA’s previous website as well–still really like the look of it, but it was time for a change as the website was about 3 years old. Here’s a before and after.
Before:
After:
