Hi Marie, Glad you are enjoying the assignments. Yes the more we all learn about composition, the more we see. So many factors play a part in making a good photo. The main thing we have to do as photographers is slow down and really look at what we want to take a photo of.....check out all the angles and surroundings....before we start taking pictures. Just doing this, our photos will improve. Sierra :)

All right class, this discussion has degenerated into composting bodies, so now you all have to sit up straight in your seats and listen to the tale of Miss V. and the Mystery Hole. Once upon a time last summer, I had a neighbor down the road who ran a puppy mill, let his dogs run wild, beat his girlfriend and entertained the local motorcycle gang. One day I came home to find the dogs in my yard, and for no good logical reason I chased after them. The dogs (six of them) headed into the woods down a path that we keep mowed. (Curving path for those who must know.) After a bit they disappeared, largely due to the fact that they were a lot more used to running than I was. I turned down a short spur off the main path to see if they had headed that way, thinking as I did so that I didn't remember this side path being there before. When I got to the end of that little path, I didn't find any dogs but found something far more interesting. Someone had come along and cut squares into a clearing in the forest floor. The area that was marked off into these aquares measured over six feet long and at least three feet wide. My mind immediately went into newsprint mode, and I could almost see the words in front of me: "The homeowner discovered what apppeared to be a shallow grave..." I headed back to the house and phoned my husband and son to be sure that this was not something they had done. I also checked with the neighboring Boy Scout camp to see if this had anything to do with a new scouting badge. Negative responses all around. My husband advised me to call the sheriff. The first young man who came out backed out of the woods pretty quickly. He decided it definitely had to be kicked upstairs to a higher authority. The next day, I had three plainclothes detectives show up. They asked me to grab some shovels and they headed back into the woods with me. When we got to the spot, they looked down at their suits and dress shoes, then at my jeans and sneakers, and voted me the best candidate to begin digging. I positioned the shovel along one of the lines of the squares, poised my foot on the edge of the shovel and gave it a good, hard shove. THUNK! I hit wood. At that point, I turned away and spent a few minutes contemplating the wisdom of having just eaten an Asiago cheese bagel moments before the detectives arrived. Once the brave men were assured that I was ready to go on digging, we found out it really wasn't very hard to dig. Someone had used a sod cutter to cut the squares into the ground and they were very easy to lift off the wood with a pitchfork, uncovering a four foot by eight foot sheet of plywood. At that point, I decided that I really shouldn't deprive these gentlemen of being the first to see what was under the plywood. They slowly pried it up to reveal . . . an empty hole. But what an empty hole it was! It definitely was large enough to hold a body, and it had been reinforced with two-by-fours so that a deer or other critter crossing over it would not collapse it. It had been dug at least three feet deep through solid clay. The interesting thing was that there was no dirt pile anywhere around the hole; someone had bothered to haul away all the spoils. In the end, the best theory was that someone was poaching deer in the woods and was using the hole to stash the carcass until they could come back unobserved with an ATV to haul out the meat. I still wonder about this, as someone went to a lot of trouble to build this hole. They hauled in a sodcutter, a sheet of plywood, various other pieces of wood and possibly a chainsaw or other brush cutting equiment to clear the path. They hauled out about three cubic yards of dirt, most of which was heavy clay. All of this trouble for a deer? A couple of weeks later, the neighbor shot his girlfriend's cat, was hauled off to jail and his father sold the house. I see far less of the sheriff than I used to and have found no other unexplained graves, um, holes, ever since. The ex-girlfriend ended up in a Wisconsin jail on a parole violation, a new address that just may have saved her life if you ask me. Miss V.

I had hoped for more writers too. I have been encouraged by my son, mostly, and I think that perhaps you have to be older and have that 'encouragement' to do it. My son, is (ooohh) 52, and is just curious to learn how we got to where we had been before he arrived on the scene and my remembrances of our "gypsy" life during his childhood. We 21st century old folks have lived during such huge changes in our society and in our environment...and even in our values....that we really owe our children a glimpse of how we rose to the occasion of those milestones. Just a thought! Nanny BTW....some old movies that are shown today, show many scenes that our parents aspired to, rather than the fact of life. Not always, but when I see some of them I realize that some of the ideas that my mother tried to make me believe were things that movies told her to aspire to in a subliminal way. Today's entertainment is much more realistic, or is it? I really love the writings of John Steinbeck as he told the truth about the pain of the depression and of the lives, sometimes of desperation, that many people lived. And, yes, I wonder as I see men and women "pan-handling" on the streets of our small community being homeless...are they feeling that same kind of desperation? TMI, sorry.

Greetings again, all, As I said in the earlier post, my (I like that "my"!) librarian said that they have that book in that small rural library, and I don't know whether she meant in the system as a whole - that involves over 15 libraries, I think, in our county. I remember that an older sister of a girl that I used to go with in high school told me after she'd left home and I'd written her that she liked getting a letter from me - that it was like talking to me. I think that you'll find that, once you start the memory tap flowing ... that other memories will come crowding in, and it'll rather surprise you: I guess that memory banks produce some interest. Jannie ... don't sell yourself short, please ... see, even a short message from you piqued the interest of a couple of other readers among the rather small number who have posted. jodi ... and others ... how about a tape recorder? gayle marie ... don't bother with a shrink - come here. And ... we're free! Kidding aside, many have found that ideas that they've brought foward have produced some interesting and useful responses, including things that they hadn't thought of, and on occasion a different slant on a subject about which they'd done some thinking. When we get our books written ... ... they all get passed around here, via email, right? As they'd be too thick to post here. (Or would some of us be too thick to understand 'em?). ole joyful