A long weekend

What a great weekend! First off, the weather was absolutely spectacular. Finally, tons of sun and some solid heat (Northwestern heat is very mild compared to the rest of the country's concept of heat). Today, we went for a bike ride in the middle of the day when it was the hottest. Good ride, though I'm still a little pooped from it.

On Friday night, we drove up to Smoke Farm in Arlington for an event called Symposium. I went two years ago to the inaugural Symposium but unfortunately, missed last year's. There is a general Symposium theme that each of the presenters builds a talk around. This year's theme was "All that is solid melts into air." Here is the program so you can take a peek at each of the talks.

Although the presentations are always interesting, the real joy of the event is the peripheral conversations that occur between talks, over meals and during walks around the property. I joke about needing to bring my "big brain" to Smoke Farm - there are always thoughtful and engaging conversations happening. The people that attend events at Smoke Farm are also high-caliber. I had interesting conversations with a number of people who are doing interesting things in their fields including a Seattle ceramic artist named Kathleen Skeels and a writer named Pete Brook. Pete writes about and runs a website dedicated to prison photography - I visited the site today and was amazed at the amount of articles he's written and the research he's done. I also spent some quality-time talking and drinking coffee with Scott Schuldt, who is the resident artist at Smoke Farm this year.

I spoke with many more people than those I named and was able to take some photos of quite a lot of the attendees. Hopefully, the Mamiya will come through for me (though really, it's not the equipment, it's the photographer, right?). I'll be dropping off this round of film when I pick up the other rolls from the lab this week (hopefully).

In addition to all the humans, there were quite a few dogs attending the event. Here is Bunny. She's one of my favs since I had a dream about her trying to move into my tent during the night. Plus, she was just so cute.