Time away, honored to be honored, amazing justice and dying slowly on the floor...

So hey out there, yeah I've been off here for awhile and man it's been crazy.
I actually don't have any pix to share, as some of you may have read on here before, about two weeks ago I injured my left hand which has made it pretty hard to shoot (though I muddled through a football game and a volleyball match) I haven't shot anything since.
A few days later I would find myself in the ER again, but this time for much more serious (and painful!) reasons.

Last Wednesday morning I awoke with an incredible pain in my back on the lower left side. Over the next 45 minutes it proceeded to increase so much that I found myself writhing on the floor in amazing pain. Not knowing what the hell was going on I honestly thought I was dying and can recall actually telling my wife that I thought I might be dying. I could not get up so an ambulance had to called, which carried me the quarter mile to the hospital (yeah that's like $700 I wish we could get back). As it turns out I had kidney stones, one of which was fairly good sized and was working its way toward the bladder. I know it doesn't sound so bad, as they are very small in the grand scheme of things, but I have talked to a number of people since who agree with me that it is quite possibly the most painful natural thing to encounter, save for childbirth.

The doc gave me an IV, which I wasn't too thrilled about as I'm needle-phobic, but by that point I didn't really care. Once in they were in they were able to give me Dilaudin (sp?) a powerful pain reliever that was easily my most enjoyable pharmacuetical experience once it kicked in..... After a CT scan it was confirmed and I spent the rest of the day in bed, popping Oxycodone and drinking a ton of water. I'm happy to say that I feel a lot better now, though I still get a twing every now and again, which may indeed be the other two worked themselves out (my friend Zack told me that he passed like four in a week a few years back). So I guess it's pretty lucky that I already had the next two weeks off to continue to take it easy and recover.

A couple days after my episode I was in Yakima at the WNPA annual convention where I was a speaker on the multimedia panel. My friend Jay Cline from the Sequim Gazette was the moderator and he has set up a discussion board on multimedia production for those interested on the Gazette Web site, which you can check out HERE if you like. Friday night was the awards banquet where the results of the WNPA's Better Newspaper Contest were announced. My paper won 32 total awards, including second place in General Excellence. It was the first time in the paper's history that it had been honored in that category.

As for me it was pretty awesome, as I won 23 individual awards — 18 for photography, three for multimedia and two for page design. You can read about it on our Web site HERE if you like. There is also a gallery of my winning pix online HERE. It's pretty crazy to win so many, though I am not blind to the fact that there is not a great amount of competition, it is still pretty cool to be honored. Maybe this year the bigger photo contests will like what they see too? Who knows?

For those of you who happen to be repeat readers you may recall reading about me having some camera gear stolen out of the trunk of my car a few months ago? Well, thanks to my friend David Plechl, who happened to be checking out some stuff at the Astoria everything-store, the Mallternative, my stolen camera and one of the lenses was recovered by police. To make it even better .... when the store bought the stuff from the guy they got all his personal info and got him on tape during the transaction on the store's surveilance camera, so the dude's gonna get charged! Better yet, maybe when they pick him up they'll find the other stuff that was taken too..... That'd be pretty killer.

SO anyways, save for the IHS homecoming football game that I offered to shoot this Friday, I am out of commission as far as pix go I think for the next couple weeks. Though I will be driving down to Cali to see the folks for a few days, and that usually leads to a few pix, so we'll see. I think I'm just gonna take things as they come for awhile.
cheers,

-DKM