Home on the Range

I love my drive home. Its so peaceful and pretty. The light only hits the fields that way twice a day and I love it.

Yesterday I pulled out of the parking lot behind a dump truck with some kind oddly hanging leather tarp attatched to a pole or something. It was practically falling off the truck and as the truck turned the corner I thought, "I wonder what that is, if I didn't know better I'd think - oh, sick.". Friends, the truck was full to the brim with dead cows. There was a lot of smoke pouring out of the truck so they were all gray, but they were very definitely cows.

I have no idea why there were so many dead cows or where the truck could possibly have been taking them. It was going the wrong direction for McDonald's. Normally I speed down the country roads like some kind of tidal wave is racing my car, but yesterday evening I was pretty sedate with 45 mph so that the massive carcus swaying on top of the load would go back to being some unidentiable gray object.

I thought that any second it would turn down a side road and I could be free of its gruesome presence, but I was wrong. I drove halfway home behind that thing before pulling into a gas station. I didn't need gas, I just needed something to do that would put a lot of traffic and many miles between my chevy and the bovine hearse.


Today we're finishing up a publication and needed pictures of school children playing on the playground so I went to a local school, signed in and started shooting (sounds awful even when you know you're talking about photos doesn't it?). One of the teachers stopped me and asked why I was there (even though I clearly had a vistor's badge!) I explained (our publications are well known around her and the schools pay us to put in pictures of the kids) and she detained me for several minutes asking what the requirements were.

Requirements? Um...that they be at the school? Oh, for us to use the picture? Um...none that I know of. Oh you have to have their parent sign something before you put it on the itnernet? Well maybe that's because its the internet. Finally she said she guessed it must be ok if I'd signed in. Ya think?

But the kids were adorable. One of the girl glares at me, "Who are you and what are you doing taking my picture?", "My name is Melody and I work for a magazine." Immediately I have about twelve girls screaming "A magazine! A magazine! I'm going to be in a magazine! Me! Me!" Hillarious. I really hope one of those pictures turned out well because the girls were so phsyched about it.

Another girl kinda followed me around shyly for a while. I never know what to do with the shy kids. They might want their picture taken, and be too shy to ask or they might be traumatized by the idea. You never know till you take the shot.

This little girl finally got up the nerve to ask me to take her photo and immediately had four friends who also wanted to be in the picture. I'm pretty sure they're backlit.
Then there were some Amish kids. Well, there were a lot of Amish kids, but Amish kids are even touchier than shy kids because they may well want their picture taken but do their parent's? A lot of the parent's do, but a lot the parents and the kids feel guilty about it because they're not supposed to want to have their picture taken.

If I'd taken them in a public setting I'd post them here, cuz I know I got some good shots, but give nthe whole teacher run-in and the fact that even though public schools are ~gasp~ public, they're amazingly closed...I'll just let you imagine the cuteness. Or you could pick up the September issue.