Dads

Everybody do me a favor. Call your dad, give him a hug, buy him a gift, take him out to dinner. But do it on friday, or saturday, or monday, or tuesday, or any day. Please just don't do it on sunday. Do it every day.

And if they piss you off, or if there's animosity between you, make the first step towards starting the healing process. Best case scenario, you can reconnect before either of you is gone. Worst case, hopefully, you'll be more at peace that you put forth an effort, if something should happen to either of you.

Just love your dads as much as you can while they're still around. I took father's day for granted for 30 years, and can never make up for it now. And it's eating me up inside knowing I'll never be able to make right with him the things that weren't. We'll never get to have the conversations that needed to be had. I'll never get to tell him I loved him.

And don't leave out mom either. Fuck it, just love everyone in your life as much as you can while you can.

And for those of you who have unfortunately lost your fathers like I have, I can only offer you my most sincere and deepest sympathies. Father's day was never an earth-shattering day for me, but from now on, it will hurt. This first one is excruciating. The next one won't be as bad. The next one after that, will be less painful, etc. But there will always be an ache in my heart when this time of year rolls around. I can only hope that all of you who have gone through what I'm going through this year have been able to find your own special ways to remember him on this holiday. And if this has upset you in anyways, I truly apologize. I'm doing this for selfish reasons to help myself, and never intended this to bring pain or discomfort to anyone, please know that.

Vacation Pictures

I've got a gallery of pictures I took while on the trip. I only took pics about 3 or 4 times while down there, but ended up with quite a few. Oh and for those of you questioning my photography skills in the later pictures on the beach, I was told by someone ( who will remain nameless ) to act like I was taking pictures of my family, but in reality focus on a woman in the background, so I could get pictures of hot women on the beach. So that's why some of those beach pictures look like I'm not really trying to center on the family member in them, because, well, I wasn't ;-) I'll highlight some of my favs here, but you can see them all by going here..

Vacation 2006 Pictures





I liked how the sun just sort of looked to be sitting on the top of this little area of trees.




I liked how I caught the gull and the sailboarder in this one. I came really close to getting the sailboarder's sail around the sun, but he wouldn't cooperate ;-)




Not sure what it is about this one, but I just really like it.




I tried to frame the sun on the point of one the lower fence posts, but it didn't quite do what I wanted. I still like the picture though.




The fence from the preceding picture was surrounding this little local cemetary full of graves from back in the 1800s, some of the people buried there hadn't lived more than days or months before passing away.




There's probably a technical photographical terminology for this, but I just really like taking pictures with this kind of perspective to them





What would a set of vacation pictures be without a picture of a wave crashing on the beach?

Post-Vacation Update

Well, we made it back to northeast ohio last night. We left the beach house at 7:45 in the morning, and pulled into Rootstown at 7:10, so we made it back in a little under 12 hours. No problems on the drive back, was very smooth.

For those of you who didn't get to see all the videos I did, here's links to all of the vids:

Day 1 and 2
Day 3
Day 4
Day 5

Overall it was a good trip. Had some fun, relaxed. There wasn't much going on after day 5, so that's why the videos stop there. We hung out at the house and just relaxed most of the last few days. On friday night we all went out to dinner as a family, then went back to the beach and had a little moment for dad. I had picked up some golf balls that had dad's name on them, 2 of them. I took one and threw it out into the ocean and will keep the other one. We also took one of his old outer banks hats and threw it out into the ocean as a family. It was so painful not having him there with us. I'd done good the whole trip until the last day when it really hit me that he wasn't there with us. But I think he would've approved of our trip, I think it would've lived up to his standards :)