Some photographs of Fall and Winter 2010

I've completed six of nine pages of photographs for my fall and winter photo albums.

Here they are:

A page for the ENTI 2010 Conference in Strasbourg.

And the ENTI Conference culture tour of Haut-Koenigsbourg Castle and Colmar.

And my photographs of Strasbourg, France.

And other parts of Alsace, including Colmar.

I have some photographs from Thanksgiving and December on this page.

And more photographs from the days around Christmas are here.

I've put up some photographs from winter Boy Scout activities.

And I also have a page of general fall photographs, mostly of Boy Scouting events.

Summer Photographs.

This summer I'm planning to put up about six pages of photographs of the family and our travels or activities. I've already put up the first two photo pages. These are available these sites: page one and page two.

Social Work Logo Ideas

In January of 2003 my mom took this photograph of Jeri and myself holding our son Arthur's hands as we stood on the beach at Santa Cruz, California, facing the sea and the late afternoon sun. It's a nice image, and my mom uses it as a sort of logo for her counseling service. She let me use it as a sort of logo for my social work classes as well. (the image is copyrighted by Virginia Ives). I like how we are silhouetted so we can be almost any couple with a young child. And of course, the sea and the sun are two powerful images. The sea representing vastness, potential, possibility, and depth. The sun representing life-giving energy, power, glory, warmth, and vision. And the beach is a border, a place where two different realms come together, the land, which is known and understood, and the ocean, a place more mysterious, where we are guests, not residents.



I took the image and used it to play around with ideas for artistic designs to use with our social work club at the University of Illinois. Here is one where I try to place the image in a context of written words. On the left we have a list of social workers and people who did social work and can be claimed as honorary members of the profession, even if they were not actually trained as social workers. I didn't include the comedian Martin Short on the list, although he is a trained social worker and was considering that career before he got into comedy. On the lower level and right the words represent issues, concepts, and tasks that are associated with social work and social workers. I'm not entirely satisfied with this design. I need to arrange the text in a more artistic way according to some design, rather than just using this columns of text.


The green lettering design is in fact one the students in the social work club chose to use for their T-shirts this year. The lettering was a bit tricky to do. I'd really like to just create some fonts and then use Illustrator and Word to position the letters. I actually drew these letters (using iWork 08's Pages application) and arranged them using Adobe Photoshop. Too time consuming. But I did achieve the home-made do-it-yourself look that I was striving for, and the letters are supposed to be friendly and free-spirited, and I think they are.

Photographs of friends

I was looking for some old documents to photocopy last night, when I discovered my old middle school yearbooks. I scanned some of the pictures from the yearbooks and uploaded the images to my Facebook photo albums. And then, for a while, I reflected on friendship.

Here is one of the images from my 8th grade yearbook. In it I'm in the upper left, holding the French Horn (which I still have). There are a couple students in this photograph who had classes with me all the way from kindergarten through eighth grade, but I moved away from Indianapolis in 1982 and lost contact with most of these people in the 1990s. Now, through the Internet, I've reconnected with several of the old friends in this photograph, including Amy Wharton (Amy Shirk, front row far left), Andy Hamaker (front row on the right), Rob Deppert (front row on the right holding the trumpet), Angela Brown (Angela McCormack, behind Andy Hamaker and Rob Deppert), and John Dishinger (in the third row, on the left, wearing tinted glasses).
I wonder if, thanks to the Internet, my own sons will keep up continuously with their childhood friends all through their lives without the 20-year-gap I've had. That could be a good thing. Keeping in touch, even at a distance, makes it easier to occasionally get together for more supportive or fun activities. I find that what I liked (or even loved) about these old friends when we were children and teenagers still is present in who they are now. Rob Deppert and I are still passionate about politics, usually fairly leftist; Andy Hamaker is still involved in music, etc.

This particular photograph is one of the first ones taken of me without glasses after I started wearing glasses in 1976. I decided to switch to contact lenses partly because I preferred how I looked without glasses, as in this photograph. (There were also issues with active sports, playing in the snow or rain, etc.). These days I wear contacts and glasses almost equally. I have had some trouble with the contact lenses while commuting to work on my bike, so I'm more likely to wear glasses while riding.



The second photograph here shows me with my friends Dave Sutcliffe and Dave Wicker at the Johnston Center Renewal in Redlands California, during this past February President's Day weekend. Dave Wicker and I were roommates in our freshmen year (1986-87) at the Johnston Center. That year there were several Erics and Daves living in Bekins Hall.






The third photograph is a recent one of me with some friends. In this case I'm with a few of my graduate students, although Michael Kim had just finished presenting his master's thesis, so he was celebrating becoming a UIS alumni at this particular outing. Amy, the young woman on the left, is finishing up her master's degree with a focus on cross-cultural communication through the arts, with a special emphasis on documentary film and photography. She teaches at Robert Morris College. The woman next to her in the white shirt is Stephanie, and her master's degree focus is in environmental stewardship, with a focus on writing about environmental issues for Christian audiences. Michael Kim is the Korean-American doctor (he is a surgeon) next to me. His master's degree had a focus in surgical education. I'm the guy on the far right.

Hero of the Ebro

I'm going to post three art images I want to share with the world through this blog.

The first one is a scan of a diagram given to me by Andrew Irvin. The artists are C.A. and J.W., but I don't know exactly who they are. They must have been students at the Johnston Center in Redlands in the mid-1980s. Anyway, the letter from which I scanned the image has this note: Enclosed is a diagram CA & I made to illustrate "Irvin's Theory of Reciprocity," which he stole from me in the fall of '83 - JW










The next image is a painting by Miguel Viladrich (1887-1956) called Hero of the Ebro (El héroe del Ebro). It shows a handsome young Spanish soldier, naked except for his helmet and a towel across his left leg, rowing a tiny boat, presumably in the Ebro River. In his boat are large artillery shells. The soldier has a pensive and placid expression on his face. I'd like to know more about this painting.





The third image is some commercial art from a signboard advertising a seaside aquarium attraction in Oregon. The sign, which was photographed in 1985, asks readers to:
Visit the
AQUARIUM
LIKE A WALK on the OCEAN FLOOR
Showing the
HIDEOUS OCTOPUS
WOLF FISH
SEA ANEMONES...
"Beautiful Flower-like Animals
From the Ocean Depths"
And MANY MORE OREGON SPECIMENS!
ALL ALIVE
Displayed in 35 Glass Front Tanks
Simulating the natural habitat of marine life!

Snow in late March

We've just had a few inches of sticky wet snow last night, and as always, a snow in the spring is a lovely thing to see.  The snow clings to the trees and flowers.  I guess I've seen five or six significant snowfalls between March 25 and April 15 over my life so far, and they are always a treat.  We tried to go sledding, but the snow was so sticky we just spent more of our time throwing snowballs at each other or rolling balls of snow down the hills so they grew as they rolled.  

I took some photographs around our neighborhood, and made a page of images showing them, along with some other pictures I took back in February.  The pictures are at this page.

Lincoln turns 200

Last week marked the completion of the 200th year since baby Abraham Lincoln was born in a cabin in Kentucky. Here in the town where he settled as a young adult and lived most of his life we had a fairly large celebration. Our family went to join in an effort to have thousands of people read the Gettysburg Address all together at the same time. While there, we met our new governor, Pat Quinn. Here are a couple photographs of the event.

Family holiday photographs

Just like last year, I'm posting some holiday photographs to share what I've been doing with my family. We spent over a week at my parent's home in the St. Louis area (from just before Christmas to just after New Year's Day). My sister Jennell and her family were there during the same time, so the house was lively with six adults and four children. The second photographs shows just the Hadley-Ives family.
The third photograph shows a view of East St. Louis from the Gateway Arch. I've visited East St. Louis pretty regularly over the years, and not much has changed.
The fourth photograph shows my Thanksgiving dinner. I did have a little turkey.
The fifth photograph shows our new little niece, Angie. Jennell and Jason adopted her in 2008. She is a lot of fun.

October Holidays

I've created a quick photograph web page with iPhoto to show scenes of Halloween in our neighborhood, and some other pictures from earlier holidays in October. The page is at:
http://home.comcast.net/~hadleyives/images/October_2008/index.html. I'm afraid some of the images are quite large.

When I was young.

I was feeling nostalgic tonight, so I put up a little page with some photographs from my youth, when I was in high school and college, and those years in Taiwan before I came back to America for graduate school. So, if you want to see what I looked like when I was 14-24, visit the new photo page.

Critical Mass

It was the last Friday in the month, so here in Springfield, Illinois, some friendly people got together to ride through downtown Springfield. We joined up with the group and took part in the Critical Mass ride. These are some photographs of the event.

Critical Mass is a global celebration of bike riding.  In a town like Springfield (a little over 100,000 residents) it's possible to get around on many errands by bike, and if the city were designed to encourage human-powered transport, people could probably use bikes for much of their transport instead of relying on carbon-fueled automobiles. Do you know how many people die each year in automobile accidents?  About 42,000 motorists, 4,900 pedestrians, and 700 cyclists are killed each year in this country. Cars have their uses. Traveling more than 5-10 miles?  You'll usually need a car.  Need to pick up something bulky or heavy?  You'll probably need a car?  Is there a rain storm or blizzard?  Yeah, you're better off in a car (or bus).  But when the weather is fine, or your trip is relatively short, a bike is a sensible mode of transport.  If people used bikes for their short rides (say, under 5 miles), and the transport infrastructure was built to facilitate this as a way-of-life, think of how many lives might be saved. People would be healthier. Cities would be quieter. 

For two years I lived in Taiwan and used bikes, buses, and trains to get around. I've used bikes and buses to get around rural Denmark, urban Beijing, and for four years when I lived in Urbana, Illinois, I almost exclusively used my bike or city buses to commute to work. 

If you want to do something to reduce global warming, use public transport, bicycles, and your feet to get around as much as possible, and reduce your use of private internal-combustion engine vehicles. You can also reduce your consumption of meat, that would help as well. And, advocate for more bike-friendly and pedestrian-friendly urban planning and city design. We need more bike lanes, bike trails, and wider sidewalks.

  The deaths caused by automobiles touch all of our lives. I had a family member killed by a car while she was crossing a street in San Diego.  While I was a high school student I had a girlfriend whose father had been killed while riding his bike home from work. The Critical Mass movement reminds people driving cars to be on the look out for bicyclists, because people on bikes have the same right to the road as automobiles.

The Back Yard

We're visiting my parents in St. Louis this weekend, and I'm spending most of my time working on my online course.

Arthur was playing in the backyard while Mom and Jeri planted flowers. Here are a couple photographs showing what was going on.

Biking to work

Once or twice each week I bike from home to work and back. It's a little over seven miles each way, and I usually require about 45 minutes between office and home. It's an easy ride, but the prairie winds can slow you down. Last night as I rode home around 6:00 p.m the sun was coming out to shine on the land just before it set. We hadn't seen the sun around here for a few days.

There is a bike trail (really just an extra wide shoulder along a road) from campus to a point about 300 meters from busy 6th street, and for most of the last 300 meters I can ride on a sidewalk. After crossing 6th, there is a little over a mile of riding on a frontage outer road on the south side of an interstate freeway. There is no shoulder at all on this outer road, so cars tend to hesitate to pass. In the morning coming to school there are large trucks going to and from the construction of the new overpass and MacArthur road extension, and these trucks drive slowly past.

Once I get to the construction site I can turn north (going home) and take a recreational bike trail for about a mile up to Jerome, a small town on the south side of Springfield. There in Jerome I get to cross Wabash, a road that is even busier than 6th street. From there on home I ride through the quiet residential streets of Jerome, taking a horribly bumpy bike path across Sebastian's middle school's athletic field and parking lot before getting into my neighborhood on the south side of Springfield.

As I said, the sun was looking nice peaking out from low above the horizon last night, and I had my camera with me, so I took these photos I thought I'd share here. I didn't take photos before I got to the recreational bike trail. Up to that point I tend to be intent on avoiding traffic and taking photographs wouldn't occur to me.

Labor Day Weekend Trip

Over Labor Day weekend we took the Chinese visiting scholar from Harbin, Tianhua and her daughter Annie with us for a visit to Hannibal (Missouri), Nauvoo (Illinois), and southeastern Iowa.  I've just been experimenting with the iPhoto ability to generate photo galleries, and you can check out some photos from the weekend at this website.

State Fair Entertainment

Arthur and I had a great time at the State Fair. Arthur is 9-years-old, and about 56 inches tall, so he was able to go on rides like bumper cars and the octopus ride all by himself. He prefers to ride with friends or family, but even without someone he knew, he was willing to ride alone on some of the rides. The sun was setting as we were choosing rides, and the air was cool, it dropped from about 24 degrees Celsius in the afternoon to perhaps 20 in the evening.

When we had used up all the tickets, we went to the Ethnic Village to hear a reggae band. This was Keith Eric and the Waterhouse Band, and they were great. We tried a delicious snow cone and watched the impressive fireworks show at 10:15. This was a much better firework show than we had in Springfield for Independence Day. When the fireworks were over, around 10:40, we had a funnel cake from the Dutch ethnic cuisine booth. Arthur loved that. The music just kept getting better. The band played a Harry Belafonte medley, and played a couple covers of good Bob Marley songs. They had several good songs I didn't recognize, and those might be original numbers, but at any rate, they jammed and improvised and had many people dancing. While they were performing, an artist worked on a big canvas behind them, painting a picture of a woman in a night sky background. We watched the artist start with a blank canvass, and for the first few songs, I had no idea what he was painting. Also, his canvas was on a wheel mount, so that he kept spinning the canvas around and painting on it as the canvas moved. The artist moved his brushes in time with the music as if he was another artist, so his creation of the painting really seemed like an extension of the music made by the band. Arthur was very interested in that, and I've shared a photo of the final image here.

After the concert and funnel cake it was nearly 11:00 p.m., so we bought one last snow cone (Godzilla flavor, which wasn't as nice as the grape we had earlier, but was still pretty good). We stopped and looked at some rabbits and donkeys and goats on the way back to the main gate, where we quickly boarded a bus without any waiting, and then rode the bus back to the state capitol to get our car and drive home.

It was a perfect evening. The music and fireworks were fantastic, and all the food we bought was delicious. The weather was perfect, the things we saw were interesting, and we took breaks and rested when we were tired or our legs started to get sore. I bought a great new hat, and Arthur had a wild time in the Midway riding fun rides. I'm looking forward to next year.

I've just finished making a new web page to show off some of the artwork that Arthur has been doing.  I also gathered up some images from an old page I made in 2000 to show art my sons had done and put those up on the web page.  

The web page gives people access to some very large pictures that include bookmarks made by some of the pre-youth Baha'i children around here last spring. You can print out these bookmarks if you have a color printer, one page on each side, and then have your sheet laminated, and then cut out the bookmarks (or cut them out first before laminating them, or use tape on both sides to self-laminate them).  The bookmarks have quotations from Baha'i scriptures or reported sayings. Check them out.

Some new photograph web pages

  It's been a busy weekend.  We celebrated father's day and honored Sebastian's birthday (which is actually June 16th, but since his grandparents were here, he opened many of his presents on Sunday the 15th).

   I've also put up a few new web pages full of photographs.  Two of these show Sebastian and Arthur with their cousins, my nephews and nieces.  A third page shares pictures from a boy scout trip we took last weekend when we went to Fort de Chartres. 

  Enjoy the pictures.