Another day of hunting

I went out in search of anything moving in Tennessee and Georgia. Here are a few of the finds. The first is the community duck pond in Rossville, Ga. The 2-year-old was very suspicious of me (I had the parents' permission, I swear!). The mother confessed that the daughter leaned over to her and asked why that strange girl was following them. I climbed up an embankment and through what used to be Chattanooga's "tent city" of homeless people to take the second. Speedy Smith was hauling railroad ties. Yes, that's his real name, it was his father's, too. The last is a 7-year-old who was sorely disappointed to be sliding back down the ramp at the skate park,

The end

The nine-days of chaos is over. The curtain has dropped from the stage. This was a difficult assignment. Most of the people sweeping garbage from the streets were serving a community service sentence for having committed a crime. The stage hands were the only exception. They were catching the scrim as it came down from the second story of the stage, which was floating on a barge on the Tennessee River. Good catch. None of it went into the water.

Metro dog

We have this position come available sometimes in the photo department. It usually arises when our director of photography walks through the door in the morning to discover no one has assigned any of the art for the Metro section of tomorrow's paper. I've had a number of phone calls in the last week to go find something that was overlooked and has become and emergency. These are a few of those.
Left turn laws on divided 4-lane highways are deemed illegal in a federal court in Georgia. Employees clear out a chicken processesing plant that closed down on Wednesday. And barbershops are booming in the tough economy.

Riverbend

Riverbend has passed. The chaos of 9 days with 150 concerts and all of humanity in the streets is over. I wish I had seen more of it, but here's a taste. The last one is all the high school students that clump together away from their parents. I don't think they all came out to hear Little Richard perform.

Tis the season

My younger brother finally graduated from high school, with much pomp and circumstance for a single weekend. That's the last time I cover an event and try to look good at the same time. I thought my feet were going to fall off about halfway through. It was a lot of fun to follow him from start to finish. The two of us even made the local newspaper's coverage of the graduation ceremony!

Summer starts with a splash

I was surprised to find a couple hundred people dotting our local beach on a Monday afternoon. Sand between your toes is a good start to any work day.

Keeping cool

The temperature suddenly decided to hit 90 degrees on Monday and has been relentless since then. This man has figured out how to use the heat from his attic to warm up his pool. The cold water running through pipes also cools his attic. He found it quite challenging to retrofit his 5-year-old home using more energy-efficient techniques. He says his daughter, left, would swim in the pool if it were 50 degrees rather than the 84 degrees registering on the thermometer.