The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Miss me? I missed all of you for the past 3 weeks. I had a lot of things happening that impacted my availability and ability to post, including a 2-week trip to the beautiful Colorado Rockies where I photographed some wonderful scenery and bountiful wildlife. I’ll be featuring this trip over a series of upcoming posts.

But back to the basics. The title of this post pretty much sums up my pre-trip activities:

The Good: On early June 22, I drove to Des Moines, Iowa, where I was invited to display my nature prints at the Des Moines “Artfest Midwest, “The Other Art Show”. This is a heavy traffic art festival and I had a great and fun time! I met some wonderful art lovers, sold a lot of prints/note cards/nature magnets, and had a lot of nice comments about my work. The festival ended on late Sunday afternoon, June 24.

The Bad: Within an hour of the festival concluding, I was busy taking down my framed artwork, when a framed piece slipped from my hands (this was an indoor festival, but as soon as the festival ended, they cut off the air conditioners and opened several overhead doors so the artists could transport their booth displays to their cars) and the broken glass sliced across the back of my right hand (coincidentally, I’m righthanded!) causing blood to start gushing from 2 fingers. I immediately wrapped my hand in some paper towels and headed to the festival check-in table for first aid. As luck would have it, they had only 2 band-aids. After applying the band-aids, blood began oozing from around them. Step 2 … wrap the 2 fingers tightly with paper towels, followed by a heavy application of duck tape! Then duck taped the entire hand. Looked kinda nerdy, but it worked! Finished taking down the display booth and packing into my car, then a short trip to the nearby hospital. Six stitches later, I emerged from the Emergency Room (ER) with a sense that I would live. And speaking of stitches, I think I had the entire ER staff in stitches as I entered the ER with duck tape all over my hand! But we all had a good laugh and livened up the normally somber ER!

The Ugly: Well, with the stitches, I had a very difficult time using my right hand for such tasks as typing, writing, and even a bit of a chore to photograph (although I managed to put a splint on my worst finger, to keep from tearing out the stitches, and wrapped it well and did some shooting). But the real “Ugly” was just starting. On Tuesday morning, June 26, I posted (took forever, with only one good hand) about my woes of the weekend, just to find that my website began having some real issues including “losing” my blog posts from May 02 through June 26! My web developer was unable to devote any time to the problem and I’m certainly not “tekkie” enough to figure things out on my own, so I decided I just needed to give my stitched hand a break and work on getting it healed, and leave the blog alone for a while. On July 09, my personal doctor removed the stitches and I began packing for my Colorado trip. In the meantime, one of my good friends noticed I had a website problem and helped to get it stitched up (hmmm, that makes 2 of us!) so at least visitors could access the site’s remaining blog posts and the website pages. We are still working on a permanent fix, but I expect things to be ironed out soon (I appreciate everyone’s patience!). In fact, this post is basically a “test case” to see if the stitched-up website fix is capable of operating satisfactorily for continued posting, until a permanent fix is implemented.

Looking Forward: If all works well with this post, I will begin posts of my recent Colorado trip (just returned home yesterday). Here is a preview of one of the trip highlights:

This is a Yellow-bellied Marmot (Marmota flaviventris), sunning on a rock in the Maroon Bells area of Colorado. I had many encounters with this beautiful mammal along the journey and will be sharing many more images soon!