Some Summary, Part 1 of 3

I have a lot to catch up on, and I feel bad about getting so far behind. Granted, I've been busy, but since I anticipate being busy for the foreseeable future, I'd better figure out a way to deal with that and get stuff posted anyway. On to the summary.

May

On the weekend of the 16th-18th, we made a road warrior-style short weekend trip up to Pennsylvania for three events. On Saturday, we celebrated the Prizer Family Reunion at Cousin Linda's house, and at Grandad's pond and meadow, and on Sunday morning we went to Coventryville United Methodist Church for the dedication of an AED (Automated External Defibrillator) in memory of my Mom, Annette Prizer Roth, and in the afternoon we celebrated Cousin Bob's wedding reception at the Four Seasons Hotel in Philadelphia. From there we drove back to North Carolina. Phew!

Saturday

Enjoying the pond and some fishing with Grandson Andy, aka Uncle Andy


Fellowship on the Patio


We went up to Owen J. Roberts High School campus to watch a baseball game of Great-Grandson David Raifsnider. While we were there, Andy and I took the opportunity to photowalk the stadium and sports fields. They were completely different from when we went to school there.
Evidently, the Owen J. Roberts school district now how has tons of disposable income, and doesn't mind spending it on superfluous things like astroturf football, girls lacrosse, and soccer fields, new bleachers, and union teachers.

Sunday

We made the kids pose in front of the 200+ year old house where their fathers lived as children.



From there we walked next door to the church for the 8:30 service to see the AED get dedicated. It was great to see that the money that so many people donated may help somebody else avoid Mom's fate.

We drove from there to Ambler to drop off the kids with our Uncle Roger, and then down to Center City Philadelphia to the Four Seasons Hotel. The celebration was great, and we all had a wonderful time.

Bob Prizer, Man of the Hour

Prizer Girls: Shelby Prizer and Rachel Prizer


Jennifer at the Party


Cousin Ski: Bob Bedi


A Brunch of Flowers


Contrasts

Back up to Ambler, picked up the kids around 5, and made the eight hour drive home. A whole month's worth of fun in two short days and 800 miles.

Next Chapter: Pig Pickin' 3: Triple Figures

Order a Pig: Check

In preparation for Pig Pickin' 3: Triple Figures, I've secured one pig, fully dressed-out at 75 lbs. (34 kg) for pickup Friday from our good friends at Satriale's Pork Store (a.k.a. Tom Inscoe's Wholesale Meat Products.)

Next Step: Pig cooking. Due Date: 25-May.

The current weather forecast at the TravelingRoths compound: Mostly sunny, High 83F, low 60 F (28/15 C)

Penn State North Carolina License Plates

According to the Triangle Chapter of the Penn State Alumni Association, PSU North Carolina license plates may be available soon.

From the chapter's website:

To: Penn State Alumni, Fans and Friends in North Carolina

From: The Triangle Chapter of the Pennsylvania State University Alumni Association

Date: April 16, 2008

RE: Obtaining an officially-issued Penn State license plate in North Carolina

Dear North Carolina Nittany Lions,

Would you like to see a Pennsylvania State University license plate in the state of North Carolina? It can be done! And when we do it, we’ll be the first university from the commonwealth of Pennsylvania to have a state-issued N.C. license plate.

There are more than 7,500 Nittany Lion Alumni statewide in North Carolina. We only need a minimum of 300 paid applications for the state to establish the PSU license plate. Fans and family can purchase the plate as well as alumni!

You already pay $28 to $33 per year for your N.C. license plate registration. Why not show your Penn State pride by paying just $25 extra a year! The extra cost of the PSU specialty license plate is distributed to the National Heritage Trust Fund and the Special Registration Plate Fund (part of the Highway Fund, which among other things, beautifies our highways) so you’re also helping the environment and the local economy! More information on costs and fees can be found in the accompanying Frequently Asked Questions sheet. These charges are established by legislative action in the state of North Carolina and, like all laws, are subject to change.

Feeling creative? You may also personalize your Penn State license plate for an additional $30 per year in addition to the standard registration fee and the collegiate license fee.

The Triangle Chapter of the Penn State Alumni Association has volunteered to help coordinate the Penn State University efforts to establish the specialized PSU plate. If needed, applications will be accepted until Dec. 31, 2008, although we want to submit 300 applications and payments to the NCDMV as soon as possible. The faster we reach 300 paid applicants, the faster the plates hit the road.

If you want to help establish the groundbreaking Penn State University license plate, please complete the accompanying application which can be found online at < http://www.trianglepsu.org/license/app.pdf > You may mail your check and completed application form to :

Triangle Penn State Chapter
P.O. Box 1215
Morrisville, NC 27560-1215

All applications will be collected and the monies held in a special Penn State license plate account by the Triangle Penn State Chapter. Please include your email address and phone number along with your application so that we can contact you if necessary. An email will be sent to you to confirm that your form and money have been received. Email will also be used for follow up communication if necessary.

If your information changes before we submit the forms and money to the NC DMV, please send an email to license@tripsu.org with your new information and it will be changed on your form(s). Also, if you move out of state before the application is processed by the DMV, simply request a refund of your Penn State license plate fee and we will refund your payment minus a $5 processing fee.

We would like you to keep in mind the accompanying artwork is proposed until verified as official by the NC DMV. However, the artwork as shown conforms to guidelines the NC DMV has given to us, and to the guidelines the university has for use of their logo so we anticipate little if any changes to the artwork shown on the website. The proposed artwork is at the top of this page. We have included the original Authorization letter from the Penn State licensing department sent to the NC DMV.

We hope you will support Penn State and support this license plate endeavor and make Penn State University the first university from the state of PA to establish a collegiate license plate in North Carolina.

For the glory,

Adam Morris
Triangle Chapter – Penn State Alumni Association
License Plate Committee Chairperson
A l m 3 8 1 @ p s u a l u m . c o m

Jeff Blum
Triangle Chapter – Penn State Alumni Association
President

Application form:
http://www.trianglepsu.org/license/app.pdf

We plan on signing up for two, and hopefully, the requisite minimum of 300 will be reached soon. I do wonder about the mock image above though, as I doubt it's accurate. If you didn't recognize that logo, you'd have no idea it stood for Penn State. And just as a matter of preference, I'd rather have the Nittany Lion Chipmunk Head than that crest thing, but that's just me. I'll take what they offer and like it.

Postcards from the Edge: Morocco

This one comes to us from Eileen Jefferson, a very nice lady from our church, who just got back from a two-week trip to Africa. It was very sweet of her to think of us and send us this card.



La poésie au quotidien
CASABLANCA - La grande mosquée HASSAN II
Elle est l'illustration spirituelle du verset coranique "Le Trône de Dieu était su 'leau".

Hi guys,

I'm in your beautiful Morocco. In Fez at the time, heading for the desert. Has been very hot and busy. Long days and lots of food.

Take care.
Fondly,

Eileen J.

the people are wonderful to us.

PhotoChallenge

Trevor Carpenter, a contact from Zooomr, runs the PhotoChallenge.org site. Trevor's reason for creating the PhotoChallenge site is that:
This is the number one place for challenging yourself to take your photography to the next level.

I'd certainly like to take my photography to the next level, so I've decided to take part in this month's challenge. Here's the description.

As you know, this challenge has us shooting a new object each week of May. This week is the first week in May, and right now I’m announcing the first object.

beverage

It’s that easy. Select a beverage and shoot it for the next 3 days. If you have speed-lights or strobes, set up a studio and get creative. Get out and shoot it as many different ways as possible.

So here are my first three submissions for the first theme of May:







Granted, I didn't photograph the same beverage each time, but if photography is an art, then I'm taking artistic license with the rules. Besides, I'm not going to let these libations go to waste after I've finished taking their picture, so I figured I'd enjoy a different beverage each day, and that would be inspiration in itself.

Keep an eye out on my Zooomr stream, and my now Pro Flickr stream (thanks to Andy for the gift of the pro membership) for upcoming submissions to Trevor Carpenter's PhotoChallenge, and check out the PhotoChallenge photo pool on Flickr.

Rent the Pig Cooker: Check

In preparation for Pig Pickin' 3: Triple Figures, I've secured one charcoal-fueled pig cooker for the weekend from our good friends at Satriale's Pork Store (a.k.a. Tom Inscoe's Wholesale Meat Products.)

Next Step: Order a pig. Due Date: 19-May.

It's All in the Eyes

That's Where You'll Find Me

If you're reading this, then you have a de facto knowledge of what a blog is. But there's so much more to the Internet and social networking than blogs. There's more to The Traveling Roths on the web than just www.travelingroths.com. There are other places to find and follow us. Places with more frequent updates, places where updates can be sent to your phone or instant messenger client, places for photos, places for videos, and places where you can leave your feedback and interact.

Here are a collection of those places where you will also find us.

Zooomr http://www.zooomr.com/people/TravelingRoths (pictures!)
Twitter http://twitter.com/travelingroths (mobilog with real time travel updates)
Pownce http://pownce.com/travelingroths (another mobilog with pictures and links)
FriendFeed http://friendfeed.com/travelingroths (all my feeds in one place)
Flickr http://www.flickr.com/photos/travelingroths/ (more pictures!)
GoogleTalk diamond dave roth [a t] gmail [dot] com (remove the spaces) (instant messenger)

And if you follow that Grand Central link over on the right, you can make a free call to us, wherever we are, using any ordinary telephone. How cool is that? One phone number, works wherever we are; home, work, or out-and-about.

So stay in touch, and be in touch. Let us know where we can find you.

The Baker's Wife

Springtime in Mebane means more than longer days and warmer temperatures. It also means that The Mebane Acting Company puts on their annual adult musical production of their season. This year, that production was The Baker's Wife, a story in which the bickering residents of a small Provencal town at last find peace and contentment in the heavenly bread of the newly arrived baker and his attractive young wife, but when she is lured away by the attentions of a handsome young gigolo, the middle-aged baker loses all zest for life and baking, throwing the community into chaos.

Jeff Overstreet was once again running the musical end of the show, so I happily agreed to play in the pit orchestra. Rehearsals were Monday-Thursday, with performances Friday-Sunday. Since I have a decent camera now, I was able to get a few shots at the rehearsals and warm-ups. Regrettably, I didn't take enough pictures. I don't have shots of everyone, nor shots while people are performing the show. Remind me next year to get these!

Click here for the full Mebane Acting Company smart set.

Director Tamra Kress (with Marilyn Fox playing bass in the background)


Musical Director Jeff Overstreet


AIMABLE CASTAGNET - Wayne Leonard


GENIVIEVE CASTAGNET - Joni Creekmore


DENISE - Ann Imrick, and THERESE - Blair Dowling



ANTOINE - Mike Lopp, and PIERRE - Christian Moore


M. LE CURE - Joshua Benjamin


DOUMERGE - Ross Hurteau


M. MARTINE - Thomas Drago


PHILLIPE - Matthew Enig and SIMONE - Jenny Smith (my apologies to Matthew)


BARNABY - David Lynch


M. LE MARQUIS - Ed Kroliczak


CLAUDE - Jim Bailey


DOMINIQUE - Michael Williams and INEZ - Lysandra Penn-Bartoo


Apologies to NICOLE - Mackenzie Lunden, and HORTENSE - Vivian Senical whom I didn't manage to take any decent photos of, as well as the rest of the crew, producers, etc. Maybe next year I'll take a shot list with me.

So keep an eye on the Mebane Acting Company's website for all the great upcoming performances, including dramas, comedies, childrens, musicals and improv!

It's Almost Spring

It's still winter, but spring is in the air, and so is Easter. This past weekend included two Easter Egg Hunts, and lawn mowing, two sure signs of spring.

Saturday's egg hunt was at Cedarock Park again. This year, Tristan and Zoe had a strategy. The plan was to sprint to the far end of the egg field, and start working backward from there, putting as much time/space between them, and the horde of slowly forward-moving kids that started from the start line. Tristan executed it flawlessly, even ignoring the "official" who admonished the kids "No running!" Yeah right. Zoe got sidetracked, making it about halfway back through the field, as the lure of all the easy eggs she was overstepping on her trip to the far end was too much for her. None the less, both kids made out great, although they didn't find any of the holstein cow-looking eggs (and their year's supply of Chik-fil-A kid's meals) nor the legendary "Golden Egg," which may or may not exist.


The Easter Bunny (Rabbit of Easter) obviously does exist, and he wears Docksiders.

Sunday's egg hunt was at the Mebane Presbyterian Church.


This one went more traditionally, as the egg:kid ratio was pretty high. T and Z really moved, and ended up with a goodly amount of eggs.




We brought our neighbor, Foster (who was also at the Cedarock Park Egg Hunt, btw). And since he was the only kid there in his age group (he's 2), he scored as many eggs as he could fit in his basket.

Tristan escorted Foster home, and thus concluded another successful egg-hunt season.

Peach

Fourteen years ago when I moved to Georgia, I gave my mom rose bushes that grew peach-colored roses, for her birthday, to remind her of me. Today would have been her 70th birthday. Happy Birthday, Mom.

Birthdays

It's not every day your young woman turns eight.

In what's become a Roth Family tradition somehow, Zoe was determined that she was now able to tackle her first Big Mac. We had our doubts, seeing as the weight of the beef alone in the Big Mac is about 0.5% of the weight of an uncooked Zoe. Since Zoe is not one to be told what she cannot do, she did it.


We hurried back to the house for present time. The big gift was a Canon A570IS digital camera.


Opa came down to celebrate with us, so on Saturday, we partook of another birthday tradition: the birthday meal of teppanyaki-style Japanese food at Kanki. The kids always request Kanki, so we've been going there two times a year for several years.






No birthday is complete without a birthday party, so on a different Saturday, we had one of those. Zoe, seven of her friends, and Tristan spent 90 minutes being gymnasts at Kidsport in Burlington.






That's probably enough for one birthday. Keep an eye out on Zoe's Zooomr stream for new and better pictures from her and her new camera.

Random Asides: Grand Central and Happy Robot Town

With not much traveling going on, here are a couple other things I'm finding entertaining at the moment.

Grand Central
This is a service from Google where you get a phone number, and all calls made to that number can be auto-forwarded to your home, cell, and/or work phone. You can do real-time call screening, block unfriendlies, and have many options for how to handle voicemail. You never again have to give out any of your "real" numbers. I've just started with it, so I don't have a fully-formed opinion, but so far, it seems pretty cool.

As an added bonus, you can click on that Grand Central badge on the right side of the page, and make a free call to me. . . not that you would probably want to, but you could all the same.

Happy Robot Town

This is a video made by one of my new contacts over on Zooomr. It's very cool, plus she takes some awesome photos to boot. Check them out.

Snow Days

We got an unexpected taste of winter the other day. I say unexpected because usually when there's even the slightest possibility of snow in The South, the local media initiates a public freak-out, and the reaction (particularly by school administrators) is based on the hysteria as opposed to the weather. This snow didn't even show up in the news until mere hours before it happened.

In our town, we got maybe three inches.

That's a lot. That's probably the largest single-event snowfall we've had in several years. It started as rain, turned to snow that melted on hard surfaces, and then eventually iced-over as the air temperature dropped. All the streets in Mebane were completely ice-covered, and it appeared that not a thing was done to prevent this.

But in Chapel Hill, where the kids go to school, they didn't get any snow, so there was no delayed opening or cancellation. When I drove the kids to school in my 4WD truck (and actually had to use the 4WD for a minute), a lot of kids pointed at us in astonishment as we were the only vehicle in the lot that was covered in snow. Pretty cool.

Fifteen Minutes

Back in January, 2005, the kids and I were sitting around the house on a bleak and bleary Saturday, when Jennifer arrived home from somewhere, and said "How could you not notice that huge fire just up the street?"

Huge fire? We gotta see that!

So I grabbed the camera, and the four of us headed up the street to see the fire. I got some pretty good pictures of it with my Minolta Dimage 7Hi, the most significant of which being this one.



That picture sat around for probably two years before I uploaded it to Zooomr. From there it took on a new life, garnering plenty of comments and a lot of 'faves' from other users. It was probably my second most popular picture.

In November of 2007, I submitted it to JPG Magazine, an international photography mag that relies at least 80% on user submissions. It was submitted in the "Emotion Capture" category. I solicited votes from my photographer friends, and the picture got a decent amount of attention on JPG's site. But I didn't think too much about it.

That is, until I got an e-mail from JPG saying that my photo had been chosen for publication in issue 14. As if that wasn't cool enough, they were also sending me $100 and a free one-year subscription to the magazine. How cool is that?

So everybody reading this, run out to your local newsstand, Barnes & Noble, or Books-a-Million, and pick up Issue 14 of JPG Magazine, and flip to page 23.

Zoe appreciates your attention.

Where Did My Pictures Go

In the ongoing saga of Zooomr, and their growing pains. . . some good news, and some bad news.

The good news is that my most recent photos are back online! They were moved from servers in Santa Clara, California to Tokyo, Japan, restored to Zooomr's Japanese servers, and accessible once again. Uploads have resumed too. w00t!

The bad news is that my recent, but not most recent photos, including blogged photos from late-September through mid-January, are now offline. Evidently the file backup program missed a whole bunch of pictures, and they were left in the California data center, which is now decommissioned. The Zooomr team is working on getting these moved by boat, or possibly by plane, to Japan pronto. wh00ps!

So at least for now you'll finally get to see the Winterplace ski trip pictures, plus whatever I shoot from now on. Hopefully, you've caught up on all of my old posts (yeah right) and seen all the mid-term blogged photos.

So if you need pictures to look at, you should visit Andy's Photo-a-Day project over at www.roth365.com every day.