John & Anne Wiley

2011/11/10

Connection

Filed under: Flying,Happiness,Has Photos,Inner World,Nature,People,Random,Relationships,SB Region — John @ 03:48

Connection seems to be very important in this phase of my life. Closeness with friends and family, a marriage founded on Commitment to Connection, and predictably: Internet. It seems that when we’re without full internet access for a time, life is quite different. We do have decent internet on our “large” screen Droid X phones, but that’s still a pretty limited form of connection in the net sense. Blog posts don’t tend to happen, and even less likely would be anything added to my Photo Page. But it’s not just output, because many of the connections we have are via Internet so with limited or no net access we lose track of some friends and family. Paradoxically, a few friends and family prefer txt messages so with any cell service we still have connection with them. I’m working on setting one of our phones up as a wifi net hotspot, so we’ll see how that goes. Meanwhile, here’s a completely different kind of connection.

7738 Connection With Beauty

7738 Connection With Beauty

As we flew over Santa Barbara at sunset tonight, we felt a deep and colorful connection with beauty, each other, our home town, and ourselves. Looking at this representation of Connection just now, I breathed a deep and nourishing sigh. 🙂

2011/10/30

Oh, High

Filed under: Flying,Happiness,Has Photos,Inner World,People,Random,Relationships,SB Region — John @ 05:55

When we flew to Santa Paula yesterday, we took a detour via the nearby town of Ojai. Last time we drove there with friends, we strolled the central shopping area and the park across the street.

7446 Ojai

7446 Ojai

I feel an energy in Ojai, maybe from having visited Beato (Beatrice Wood) there some years ago. Perhaps the spiritual centers on either side of town, one for a guru and the other for an organization he’d once been affiliated with. Plenty of Santa Barbarians love to go there, but for some reason I find it easy to go only rarely. I guess if they had an airport we’d go more often. 🙂

2011/10/29

Traffic Stop

Filed under: Flying,Happiness,Has Photos,Inner World,People,Random,Relationships,SB Region — John @ 01:57

My “feathers” got a good scratch today, because we flew Dad to Santa Paula. It’s such a delight to share flying with someone who loves it. Dad’s logged thousands of hours flying for the Navy in WWII, and he loves it more than most.

Along the way, I was treated to a traffic jam on the 101 freeway. I say treated because of a sadistic personality defect developed since getting my pilot license. Anytime the roads slow I remember years of sitting in such surface congestion, when I used to glance longingly up at any passing plane.

7433 Traffic on 101

7433 Traffic on 101

Looks like maybe the driver of this semi truck had a medical issue. Traffic was slow in both directions as people slowed to take in the scene.

7432 Sudden Change

7432 Sudden Change

Whether the trucker or someone else, anytime we see or hear an ambulance we think about what a sudden and dramatic change such vehicles portend for someone. I’m reminded of the 5am ride Anne had a few years ago after a routine medical exam the day before went horribly wrong. The sound of a siren is almost like a mourning wail to me now. I’m glad we three were all happy and healthy flying slowly and quietly past, and hope it all turned out ok down there.

2011/10/25

Immigrants On Top

Filed under: Flying,Happiness,Has Photos,Inner World,Nature,People,Random,Relationships,SB Region — John @ 08:14

Both pix I chose for today’s post seem to have immigrants on top. First the church in the upper Montecito Village that looks like it has walls three feet thick. In this pic you can see they’re pretty much standard walls, but the recessed windows give the effect of a centuries old adobe with massive walls.

7367 Walls & Roof

7367 Walls & Roof

If you click to see the larger version you can make out the worker on the roof who’s wearing a hat of the sort favored by local migrant workers. Today’s other pic strikes me like an impression of Disneyland. Maybe the “colonial” look, or the tidy and symmetrical landscaping, or the color scheme.

7373 Fantasyland

7373 Fantasyland

If you click this one to see the larger version, you can make out another migrant worker at the top doing something with his pickup truck. After presumably working in or around this manse, he’s turned attention to the aging vehicle that takes him to a very different part of town.

There’s something about flying over scenes like these, noticing something, snapping a pic, and then looking at the full-size version days later. Often there’s something I hadn’t noticed, or couldn’t even see from the air, that explains what caught my eye or moved me to snap. Sometimes there’s some detail more interesting than the overall scene, that was invisible from the air (like the two people in these pix). Now and then there will be a combination of overview and detail that adds greatly to my enjoyment, and an example is this second pic. I love the impression and feel evoked by the mansion and estate, and the contrast provided by imagining a guy who helped create and maintain that opulence but can’t afford a reliable work truck. Guess I’m officially a Liberal, whatever that means. 🙂

I’m going to toss in one more pic I like from that flight, of a shirtless guy in a boat looking at the seals on the buoy just outside the Santa Barbara harbor. Does this (or the other two) evoke anything for you?

7385 Buoy Toy

7385 Buoy Toy

2011/10/21

Flashback

Filed under: Flying,Happiness,Has Photos,Inner World,People,Random,Relationships — John @ 07:23

I’m in a sentimental mood, remembering past family times as I look at more pix from our flight from San Diego family to San Jose family. We passed over Lake Nacimiento on the way, and I remembered trying to drive a car up a dirt path I’d taken down to the shore.

6908 Lake Holiday

6908 Lake Holiday

It was on the left bank at the bottom, and my Dad was sitting and watching from the right bank. The episode ended with the car’s clutch burned out and a kind 4wd owner towing it up. Seems like another lifetime, that holiday weekend at the lake only a couple of decades ago.

As sunset approached we passed the airport at Hollister where there’s this family fun farm with pumpkin patch, go cart track, and other attractions including a giant maze.

6919 Fly-In Memories

6919 Fly-In Memories

Most families probably drive there, but there must be some who fly in and walk over to the farm. Regardless of how they arrive, some of those who go will be remembering their family time and how they thought it would go on forever.

It’s always interesting to see another aircraft when we’re flying, because most of the time they’re only distant dots. So when ATC pointed this helicopter and Tripp out to each other near Morgan Hill, I had to snap it. Having just passed another family fun pumpkin patch place, it looked like a flying pumpkin flying

6949 Flying Pumpkin

6949 Flying Pumpkin

along the old Monterey Highway we drove when I was a small child in the back seat watching telephone wires seeming to sweep rhythmically up and down as we droned past. One night I heard the whistle of a steam train, and all those sensations are now mingled into this flashback that will soon be forgotten forever. How long before even our most vivid recent and delicious flying memories fade into darkness?

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