Calla Lilies at Doud Creek – Big Sur, CA, by Chris Axe
This a lovely photo! I can say this in all modesty, because I didn’t take it, my brother did. I’m looking for someone who has a subscription to the magazine, Popular Photography. My brother’s photo will be the cover photo for the January 2015 issue. This image won First Place for Landscape/Nature in the 2014 Popular Photography readers contest. This magazine publishes two covers, one for sale at the newsstands and the other is for subscribers only. His photo is on the subscriber’s edition. If anyone has this issue and is willing to part with it, I would really, really appreciate it. If you are interested in helping out make a comment and I’ll contact you by email. Thanks in advance for your help. Have I told you how much I would appreciate it?
Last Sunday was a beautiful and unusually warm day for the last day in November. Then the bottom dropped out. I thought I had heard sleet that night and when I got up, I found that I was right. A quarter-inch of ice had coated the cars, with lesser amounts on the sidewalks and streets. I think that this ice storm caught the weatherman by surprise, because I never heard any warning of it. Anne and I began running both cars, while chipping at the ice. The Prius was thawing way faster than Anne’s car, so we decided to table defrosting Anne’s car and I drove her to school. The parking lot was unusually empty there and I wondered then if we should have checked on school closings. Turns out that it was just on delayed start and since she was already there, Anne decided to stay. After that it was a slough into work, but I made it before most of my coworkers.
Today, I got a nice surprise at work and also had a breakthrough. I can’t say anything about the surprise, but the breakthrough could not be better timed. Next week I’ll have my annual performance appraisal, so there is still time for this to affect its outcome. I showed one chart to my boss today and he seemed visibly impressed. Another colleague complemented me for “thinking outside the box”. That’s an inside joke. Please don’t be put off by my seeming chest thumping, because the truth is funnier than you think.
I like to schedule one and only one breakthrough per appraisal cycle. I have found that one is enough and more than one is just more work. Along my lengthy career I have also learned that scheduling a last minute breakthrough is way less work than one that occurs at the beginning of the year. Any last minute breakthrough is still fresh and full of promise, while one that is made at the beginning of the year requires intensive nurturing throughout the year to still bare any fruit. This trick is way easier to pull off, it you already have a proven breakthrough that people have forgotten about, because you can then just recycle it and trot it out again.
