Allison is becoming an absolute fanatic with her little orange Sony camera.

Here is a shot she took of me on Saturday”

I started looking for a specific photograph last night and ended up using my film scanner to process more than 240 negatives at 4800 dpi into an average size of 15MB (5600 x 3600 ) digital files. That’s almost 4GB of new images if anyone’s counting.

I ended up covering 1983 — the year I lived in Washington DC — to 1985, two years before I moved to Houston and eventually met my partner.

Here is a quick sample:

I spent a month in Cody, Wyoming during the holidays running the local Senate office

I worked for a senator from Wyoming in Washington DC for all of 1983

Two of my nieces in Wyoming

Me at Christmas at some friends’ in Provo, Utah

My niece

A bevy of beauties from Wyoming

My parents, aunts and a cousin visiting the FBI in Washington DC

One of my company’s planes taxis out of Newark, NJ

My parents, aunts and a cousin visit the World Trade Center in New York

I went back to Brazil five years after my mission

Me at Liberty State Park – a few miles from my home in Jersey City, NJ

i was looking through old photographs and negatives last night in search of a specific photo from 1984 and I came across this self-portrait from November of 1983. Amazing how clear-eyed and innocent this 25-year-old was!

As a former employee of Continental Airlines (I would have celebrated 25 years on January 3, 2009), I was saddened to hear of the aborted takeoff and subsequent low-level crash landing in Denver late last week.

Whilst perusing the London Times, I found three illustrative photos of the ‘totalled’ 737-500 aircraft:

As usual, I was the photographer at our recent family gathering in Mesquite and as usual, the candid shots tend to be the best ones.

After taking a couple of carefully-composed shots, this one suddenly appeared spontaneously from my honey and his his brother and two sisters. His dad just laughed, apparently not as jaded as the rest.

The weekend is fast ending!

We had brunch with Allison & Rawlin, Rob & Lee this morning at Over the Counter. Scotty bailed, but we gave him a pass because he’s got a new dog. (but that’s the last time, Scott)

I’ve spent the later afternoon updating my photoblog with images from our trip to Rome in 2006. Lots of memories sprang up. In spite of being back from Mexico only a week, I’m ready for another vacation.

I wonder if the economic issues facing the US and the rest of the world will impact us directly. These are scary times.

And writing of scary times reminds me that I think I mentioned that we early-voted on Thursday. It feels good to have that out of the way and to watch election coverage with a less-than-vested interest. My blood pressure is lower.

I guess it’s not a secret that I didn’t vote for McCain and 2012 candidate Palin.

Latest scuttlebutt is the $150k spent on new clothes to make her presentable to the common man. They could have saved money by shopping at Wal-mart.

The $22k bill for two weeks pay for her makeup artist bordered on obscene.

I remember rapid right-wingers screaming because Bill Clinton and later John Edwards had $300-400 haircuts, which made them “elitists”.

I suppose that if I had hair and money, I might spend that much to look good as well. But probably not.

I’ve posted a few photographs from our Cancún and Tulúm trips on my photoblog.

Click HERE to see them.