Average Tree

Here is an average tree. There is nothing particularly special about this tree, but this was the tree I was looking for. And it gave me a little story, which is half of the fun.

As I mentioned in Quick Turnaround, I decided last Saturday to head out to Shawnee Mission Park, which is a large park on the Kansas side of the border. After driving around inside the park for a little seeing what the place had to offer, I found a nice spot that was relatively less crowded than the rest of the park. I grabbed my camera and tripod and hiked off into a grassy area off the beaten path. I took a few pictures here and there and then sat down in the shadow of this tree to get my tripod and camera all set up. After taking the photographs for this picture I looked down to see a tick crawling up my jeans!

In case you don't know; I hate ticks with a passion. Although it's been found that a protein in deer tick saliva interferes with the ability of the AIDS virus to attach to immune cells, and the same protein may help treat immune disorders like asthma and multiple sclerosis, I still hate ticks; they just bug me (Haa! Sorry..).

Anyway, I quickly jumped up and brushed the little guy off, only to see one or two others making their way up my pants in similar fashion. Quickly brushing them off, I began searching my legs for any more of the little buggers. Finding a few more, and what appeared to be a baby tick, or some sort of underdeveloped tick, I brushed them off, grabbed my camera and retreated to the concrete path to regroup. I did my best to search the rest of my clothes for ticks, and luckily my jeans were light colored, and I had a white t-shirt on, so it wasn't too hard. Finding no more I headed back to my car with my next destination in mind.

I'm not afraid of ticks by any means, and I've had many bites, so I can remove and dispatch them with ease. This was an ambush though and I was caught off guard. I would like to go back though; there were some nice hiking trails into the woods that I'd like to explore sometime. I also saw a number of deer while I was out there, just wandering around.

Lesson learned: Use my industrial strength tick spray (the stuff I use for work when I do fieldwork) on my clothes before I go to the park again.

Even though this is just an average tree you could see just about anywhere, I like this photo, and it gives me something to show for my battle with the ticks that day.



In other news, I took 3rd place in my category in the art show at work. Should have placed higher, but I lost to another HDR photo that was physically bigger than mine, and simply overpowered mine. There were numerous technical problems with his, but they didn't matter because it was big (this has been a developing trend with this art show). The thing that was in second place is pretty indescribable. Seems to be something created in Photoshop, but I'm not really sure what it was other than that.