Originally published at davidinman(.net). Please leave any comments there.

I have been wanting to start a new series of posts on this blog, a series that I have come, at least in my mind, to call Why. Why do things work the way they do? This is not an attempt to explain the mysteries of the world and the universe and existence, just to ask questions, and maybe to find some possible answers. To explore. If I could answer such questions with certitude, I’d either be certifiably insane or the supreme dictator of the universe. I’m clearly not the latter and I hope I’m not the former, so I’m looking at this as an exploration - a journey - rather than a destination. So these explorations will typically take the form of ‘Why does [some phenomenon] happen?’ or, the shorthand ‘Why [some phenomenon]?’

Why blog about this at all? It keeps me accountable to actually asking questions - questions l may otherwise avoid out of laziness or complacency - and doing diligence to find reasonable answers. And then, ideally, I could engage in lively conversation with you in the comments and we could all come away more enlightened. Although I have some ideas of the first few things I want to look into, including some that I happen to have some insight into (for example, Why software sucks - and no, it’s not because Microsoft is evil, my Maccy and Linuxy friends, or anything so simple as that), I’d like to take suggestions of what to look into. So if you have an idea, submit in the comments or contact me.

Today is a rather light one: why economics? Not why does the economy work the way it does (clearly almost no one understands that or we wouldn’t've gone through the subprime-mortgage-induced credit crash), but what is economics and why does it exist in the first place?

Wikipedia, the world’s best source of eighty-percent accurate information, defines economics as “the social science that studies the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services.” That’s a decent enough definition, and I’m willing to accept it with one caveat: that we define the term “goods” to include all scarce resources, real and socially-agreed upon. Let me unpack why I defined it this way. General “resources” so we are not limited only to manufactured goods, but we can include natural goods like beaches, gold, fresh water, and even (in a society with slavery) other human beings. “Scarce” so we can safely exclude goods which are, for present purposes if not in reality, unlimited (e.g., air or solar energy). “Real or socially-agreed upon” because this allows us to consider things like beaches and computers alongside patents (one socially-agreed upon “thing”), and sunlight rights (which is in fact a scarce commodity among the towering buildings of Tokyo). My definition may not be expansive enough, but I feel it’s a good start.

Depending on what terms your favorite science-y author likes to use, humans are hypersocial, supersocial, or ultrasocial creatures. I first came across this concept in Jonathan Haidt’s phenomenal book The Happiness Hypothesis, where Haidt looks at the science of social animals before looking at human sociality, and applying that to human happiness. Although a discussion of how animal ultrasociality works is far beyond what I want to look at here, suffice it to say humans are the only animals we know of that demonstrate sociality that extends beyond kin altruism (helping out other individuals that share a significant amount of genetic material). Humans have developed a complex series of reciprocity-based moral intuitions and tribalism to handle altruism beyond kinship, and the upshot is that we can band together and better survive as a group but still attempt guarantee a benefit to the individual. And this also means that we live in a world formed not only (or even primarily) by our physical environment - grass and trees and apartments and grocery stores - but also in a world of complex social ties of reciprocity and altruism and betrayal and kinship and love. You and I are not cats or horses, who are concerned only with next-of-kin and finding food and copulating. We have these webs of social interactions which give rise to non-kinship relationships like friends and nations and the mafia and a thousand other things. The fact that these social webs exist, regardless of what evolutionary or other process created them, I regard as so obvious it doesn’t require defending. But here we are, and these things exist.

So if economics is the travel and distribution of goods, where do they travel? Obviously among these social webs. This distribution of goods exists in other animals too (a pack of African Dogs may “own” the meat of a kill), but at nowhere near the level of complexity as humans, because African Dogs do not have the same set of complex social interactions. Sometimes goods travel in one direction (e.g., through extortion or bribe or military conquest), but typically two entities come together and they both exchange something that the other entity wants. This is why economists say things like “economics is not a zero sum game” - usually, everyone gets something they want.

But however the details of economics play out in different societies and between societies, we have this thing called economics because we have scarce resources and we are ultrasocial beings. We don’t all simply horde what we have and refuse to exchange goods with one another, and we can’t magically create everything that we want and so are limited by how much of a good exists. And so we engage in distribution and movement of goods, and everyone tries to benefit themselves and their social webs. Economics exists because of scarce goods and human sociality. These two things both give rise to economics and they are the rules of the game.

Originally published at davidinman(.net). Please leave any comments there.

You know the drill: more photos. This time from a mini-vacation I took with my dad a month back. Zion is one of my favorite places in the world, but I was a bit disappointed at our mutual ineptitude at getting a back-country pass. Oh well, it was loads of fun anyway (with a few scares, but we’ll leave that aside).

Originally published at davidinman(.net). Please leave any comments there.

I failed at summitting Mt Adams this year. Adams is (for most people) a two-day summit, and I had been looking forward to doing this climb all summer. Granted, this was two months ago at this point, but it was very sad. I got altitude problems at our overnight campsite (called “the lunch counter” - lunch not included), and then was unable to continue after only a thousand feet or so the next day. I admitted to our hike leader that I wasn’t going to make it up (as if it wasn’t obvious from my falling further and further behind), who agreed that I wasn’t going to and we should head back down. The rest of the group - four guys in all - headed up, but the two of us started to turn back down. This alone was sad enough, but it was the next bit that was awful and embarrassing.

This past summer was unusually hot and came unusually early: the result being that the mountain was nearly-bare for our ascent. We did it without crampons, scrambling over the rocks just to the side of the remaining packed snow above the lunch counter. However, our camp leader brought crampons anyway and after I had decided to turn back, loaned me them to get back down to camp faster. I had never used crampons before and despite my friend giving me instructions and help with a couple of steps, within two minutes of stepping out onto the snow, I planted my foot, tried to turn it (feet in crampons don’t turn), and fell down and twisted my ankle.

Several expletives later, and after getting my bearings, I tried to get up off the snow. My friend was beside himself, certain it was his fault despite however many times I told him it wasn’t. But I was not walking long distances anytime soon. I found it impossible to put much weight on it, and I hop-moved off the packed snow and back to the rocks, where we made ourselves warm and tried to figure out what to do. After thirty minutes to an hour I was still unable to put weight on it and we called for assistance. It sounds simple but we spent a good fifteen or twenty minutes trying to get a cell signal, and then asking the emergency responders on the other side what to do, then waiting for a call back, then arranging for a ranger to come up and take a look, then waiting for another call back, and on and on and on.

So we waited. Nerve-wrackingly. It is cold to wait on the side of a mountain for hours (we were at about 10,800 feet if I recall). But we couldn’t've asked for better weather to have this happen in: clear skies and sunny, so we were at least heated by the sun. I took out my ankle and it was a little swollen (not as bad as I imagined - I had an identical injury on the same ankle the previous month playing tennis, and had a swollen knot the size of my fist for two days afterward) but it was still too sensitive to walk on. Eventually the ranger came up, and the rest of our party met us on their way down. The ranger looked at my ankle and tried to dress it but couldn’t do much. It would be tedious, long, and difficult to get a group up the uneven rock field to carry me off, and it would take at least half a day to get them in place, meaning it would be night or the next morning before the team could be up. Feeling the little nudge - or giant cattle prod - in my head not to be a wimp and be pulled off unless I were in the worst, most debilitating pain of my life, which this was decidedly not, I said that I would make it down. We made our way back to our campsite by glissading down the strip of packed snow that we had followed beside much of the way up. Besides being fast (and fun), glissading had the benefit of keeping my weight off my ankle for much of the way down.

We made it back to camp and my compatriots, as well as the ranger (who followed and assisted us all the way back down), were noble enough to take most of the weight of my things on their backs instead of mine, and we made our way down the five or six miles of trail to the parking lot. And I made it just fine - well, until the next day when my ankle swelled back up and hurt worse than the day before. But civilization has much more ibuprofen than the mountain wilderness.

What’s the moral of the story? A couple things:

1. To use a phrase I have only recently become acquainted with, I am athletically retarded. I come from a long lineage of tall, athletically retarded but athletically determined (and hence, accident-prone) men, and I am no exception. I know I have thin and fairly weak ankles and now I wear an ankle sleeve brace on the troublemaker whenever I know I’m going to be doing something demanding.

2. Rangers are awesome.

3. The five other guys I went with are hosses. Seriously. I wasn’t the only injured one, another friend had terribly blistered toes (not normal-blistered, made-my-skin-crawl-when-I-saw-it blistered) from his boots most of the way up and down. Another one had been on who-knows-how-many hikes and summits this year alone, and still another had summitted Kilimanjaro. And they were all both good company and kind.

4. I am trying again. Don’t know if it’ll be next year or not but I will summit it. I was less than 2000 (vertical) feet short of the top this year! Just because I’m athletically retarded doesn’t mean I’m gonna let that stop me - within reasonable limits. And next year I will know how to use crampons appropriately and go earlier in the season when there is more snow for a smoother ascent and descent.

Originally published at davidinman(.net). Please leave any comments there.

What, I have a blog?! Yes I know it’s been quiet lately…

Here are some assorted pictures from around Seattle over the summer. Most of them are from Mt Rainier because, honestly, Mt Rainier is just awesome.

Originally published at davidinman(.net). Please leave any comments there.

EDIT: I stand corrected. These are pictures of Mt Shuksan, not Mt Baker. My first time up there, so I plead ignorance.

These are about a month old, but here are some pictures taken of Mt Shuksan. They are all HDRs, some converted black and white, some desaturated. Enjoy.

Originally published at davidinman(.net). Please leave any comments there.

Don’t have much in way of posts - though I do have some vignettes in my head* and some photos I’m working on.** For now, though, let me share some links I’ve come across over the past few months.

Photography

Art Wolfe is, well, just made of awesome. I didn’t realize until recently he had a website.

This may be Trey’s best HDR - and he has a lot of them. Typically I find his HDR a hodge-podge of good and bad, but there are some stellar gems thrown in there. This is one of the best pictures I’ve ever seen, and it reminds me why I subscribe to his blog.

In case you don’t check the Big Picture religiously (as I do), here are some of my recent favorites from the past few months: The End of the Christmas Season, Tibet’s Great Prayer Festival, Scenes from Pakistan, Portraits from the Congo, Holi, and Holy Week. That’s a lot, but they’re all worth it, even on the second go-around.

Gay Rights, Etc

Sullivan responds to the National Review’s response to Iowa and Vermont. (And again to Rod Dreher.)

The exceptional thinking behind stereotypes.

This Youtube video debunking some of the common claims of gay marriage infringing on religious freedom. (Also check his video here about the difference between so-called Christian ‘bashing’ and gay bashings.)

The Box Turtle has had some quality articles the past couple months (though it’s still too many a day to put in my feed reader). I’d especially urge you to check out his coverage of the insanity recently going on in Uganda, and this brief post about Iraq.

Politics and Political Theory

Scott Sumner on economic theory and liberalism.

Wilkinson on ‘liberaltarianism’.

Glenn Greenwald on torture under Obama. (And on his overreaching, Bushian executive powers, again and again and again.)

Jason Kuznicki on nature and human nature.

Classical libertarian gripe about big government. (So delicious and painfully true).

Colbert does Glenn Beck.

On that final note, the disintegration of the GOP has been very interesting to me. It decided to align itself tightly with a particular strain of political American Christianity, and has been eaten alive by it, marginalized into that political religion’s insular corner of the world. And that religion has accommodated itself to some odd political claims. It’s a toxic mix. I’m not sure how this will all work out. Unlike many of my co-northwesterners, I’m not convinced human ‘progress’ is a given, but something that is deeply cultural and extremely fragile, which must be fought for and won. The Democratic party is now in power through no virtue of its own but because the Republican party is a disheveled mess, and I worry about an unchecked political party; what is best for the liberties of individuals is a limited, checked political power achieved through the marketplace of competing ideas. Because of the GOP massacre and subsequent flailings (Palin, Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and all the insanity that is currently driving the right), that marketplace in the US is dead right now. How will the current marginalization of the Republican party affect the drive toward greater human liberties and conversation of how to pursue them in this country? How long will this phase on the right last? How will conservative political American religion react to the aftermath of the Bush years? Fascinating stuff. But I’ll tell my inner classical liberal to shut up now.

Fin.

*Don’t expect anything soon.

**Ditto.

Originally published at davidinman(.net). Please leave any comments there.

If I were a being only slightly lighter I could lift myself above the earth and run my hands over the froth of the stratus clouds covering this country as running my fingers across the surface of a lake.  And if I were a being only slightly heavier I could descend into the sun and wrap myself in the deepest eddies and currents of its nuclear heart and let out a relaxing sigh as a man in a hot tub.  But I am a being neither heavy nor light; for I should pass through the clouds and the weight of the sun should crush me, and only water is my domain.

I cannot comprehend a bounded universe.  I am told it has an age, of a certain number of billion years.  I am told it has a width, of a certain number of billion light-years.  But I am small and long before a billion has any meaning it becomes infinite.  I cannot spread my arms and measure a billion anymore than I can spread my life and measure a billion.  I may believe in these numbers and figures, the way a man believes in the god of his father, but my heart tells me the universe is infinite.

What does it mean to me that the universe is infinite?  I am of a people and in a technological society that I might expect to live for eighty years.  If time is infinite, what are eighty years compared to two or to eighty-thousand?  Any life is only a breath in the crisp air, which is emitted as a formless fog, and perhaps if it is clever it begins to come together to make a shape, but in the end it must come apart and vanish.  But my heart knows it is better to live to be eighty than to live to be two.  How does it know this?  At two I have known so little of life.  I am nothing much more than the repository of what my environment has put into me.  I am still a child.  But I am twenty-two and think I only began to be an adult at twenty-one.  And it is still new to me, with a wide and an open domain still to be explored and understood.  What is sixty years of knowing, and ten in the prime, or perhaps twenty if I am strong?  But still it is better than only living to two, or to twenty-two.  If time stretches on and on, what does it mean to live for eighty-thousand years, and is it better than eighty?  In eighty years, most of it not at my prime, I can never truly understand what the best choice is.  Because of the shortness of it, most opportunities come only once.  Little is grasped, little is explored, only a series of baffling selections that must be made and lay incomparable one to the other: what is behind the one is left unknown and what is behind the other is a mystery only unwrapped after I choose it.  The soul may grow tired of life given long enough, and eighty-thousand years may be too long, but only those living in the harshest times – or those bitter and feeling trapped – have grown tired of life, and no one has lived enough to see if there is a limit upon the possibilities of its freshness.  But eighty is short.  Ten, or twenty, in the prime is even shorter.

What is the meaning of a person?  Meaning is all a matter of scope.  In my immediate social circle I may have some meaning, because I have some impact on the ones around me, something that is that would not be if I had not been there.  But pushed out beyond that circle to a national or international realm, my change and my impact are lost.  And so also in the scale of time, past one hundred years where I may still have some effect on to a scale of a thousand or ten thousand.  If I become a political leader or a military commander or a writer who affects the world visibly and greatly past my death, what then does that mean?  The scope may have been increased, but it is still nothing, for beyond the world to the solar system and that on one arm of one galaxy in a cluster of galaxies in a countless myriad of clusters, which acts in time-frames not of thousands or tens of thousands but hundreds of thousands, millions, tens of millions of years, and more still.  Push the scope of meaning out far enough and even the greatest any person could ever aspire to be is no more significant than the reflection of a dust mote in the eye of a flea.

The religious person may be forgiven if at first blush it seems to him that God solves this problem of his meaning.  But this is only an illusion.  For regardless of how personal his God is, the believer is still a speck among the billions of souls damned to hell or blessed to heaven.  There was a time when she was not, and her impact is still nothing: push the matter out from herself and the few souls she knows to the many and then to the incomprehensibly infinite God, and we see very clearly that the matter of eternity has not been changed one iota through her.

But the call to existence is irrevocable.  I can no more undo my own creation than make two and two equal to seventeen.  And to attempt it is to despise the call and the existence.

What is there for me in a universe whose physical and temporal size dwarfs me to nothing, or where I find myself, constituted as I am, neither heavy nor light, and have no say in the matter?  I can no more change any of this than I can become God.  I can no more make my existence less fleeting, less a breath, than I can undo the Big Bang.  I must do what I can with what I have, and be the best that I can be.  One of the most wondrous things about sentience (to me) is not the capacity to ponder one’s own existence – that just leads to existentialism (the end of all philosophy, as nothingness is the end of any system too near a black hole) and, excepting cases of extraordinary courage, it leads to despair.  But rather the greatest thing is the capacity to choose.  I can choose whether to serve the poor or not, whether to attempt to increase the amount of good in the human experience in general and that of the people around me in particular, or whether to increase the amount of bad – be it because I don’t like them, or they believe something different than me, or they vote Republican, or whatever it may be.  This mystery of choice is the heart of all morality.  It is not sad that my life is (inevitably) meaningless in the scope of the universe – there is nothing that can be done about that – but the real tragedy is if my life is meaningless in every scope other than my own.  If the meaning is there in the scope of my friends, of those close to me, then it is beautiful.  And it can be a terrible beauty, like a well-evolved virus or parasite, if I make it a terrible life and destroy the meaning and happiness of others; and it can be a glorious beauty if I increase the meaning and happiness of others.  I cannot say that I am particularly exhilarated by the thought of snuffing out like the flame on a candle after eighty years.  I am not.  Nor am I convinced that there is any God watching over this to appreciate the art of my life (for whatever skill or beauty I can imbue it with), or who will extend it in an afterlife.  But this is what I have, and I aim to do well by it, both for myself and those around me.

Originally published at davidinman(.net). Please leave any comments there.

You win a sinus infection!

Yup, so I was out almost all last week from my now-three-week-old job due to sickness. It’s great fun, especially when you’ve just started a new job and are trying to get your bearings and are finally getting what looks like a real project. Oh wait, it’s not fun at all, especially at such an inconvenient time. I’m fairly certain in my own mind that I got whatever head cold lead to this mess at yoga master’s birthday party (don’t ask - just don’t); someone must’ve coughed on the cheese and crackers, I’m sure of it. And I would’ve had a sore throat and that would’ve been that if I didn’t have allergies and the years-long developed capacity to get a sinus infection at the drop of a hat.

But I do and I did. I got antibiotics a few days ago and am no longer sleeping sixteen hours a day and feeling awful for the remaining eight. I’m virtually back to normal at this point. Yay for modern medicine!

During all this mess I also got to move out of temporary housing and into more permanent living arrangement. But how permanent is an apartment anyways? That was a nightmare unto itself; the movers (who had all my stuff in storage after shipping from Texas) couldn’t get a hold of me, and then changed my scheduled time, and then the apartment complex wasn’t ready for them so early; oh, it was a long convoluted mess and I was occasionally trying to hack up a lung during it all, popping cough drops and sudafed like they were candy.

Not that I’m actually completely moved in yet; I still have a few items to transfer out of my temp housing and am doing that tomorrow. Really, I just want to forget that this entire past week happened. Kind of like seasons 2 and 3 of Heroes.

The bad thing about moving out is that I’ll miss waking up to a view of the Olympic Peninsula.  Seriously, check it out:

But my new apartment has pretty nice views too, and I’m looking forward to it. I need to start furnishing it gradually - a sofa or loveseat, some sort of breakfast table (it’ll have to be small), I may need to get rid of my current desk and get a smaller one, and apparently I need to get a “grown-up bed” at some point (seriously, what’s wrong with a twin?), et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

Now, to move on with that life thing.

Originally published at davidinman(.net). Please leave any comments there.

I finished with school this past semester, in December, a semester short of the four-year norm. In short order, I will be going up to my beloved city of Seattle to start work in the post-college world. So, what have I learned over the past semester; and from what I know about my own past, what can I know about my future?

I didn’t share this with very many people, but since the past summer I’ve been on a dating ‘freeze.’ I dated very casually (and very briefly) about ten months ago – and nothing since that. My reason was this: I needed to figure out myself and my beliefs a bit more before getting into a relationship with someone else. Otherwise, it would be grossly unfair to him. This is not so much, as my roommate criticized me for, ‘waiting to figure out the mysteries of the universe before dating,’ but rather waiting to figure out what I am comfortable with concerning the mysteries of the universe before dating. Well, maybe he was right, but only by a little bit. In any case, as a result of the past semester I’ve tentatively lifted the ban on dating. Not that I think I’ll find anyone quick: a combination of my moral and religious views makes it virtually certain that there won’t be a very long waiting list.

I don’t think I’ve solved the mysteries of the universe. I’ve ruled out several answers and several bad heuristics to solving them. I’ve discovered what my own priorities are – I am, for example, much more dedicated to truth than to my own comfort, which is an easy and trite thing to say until the truth hurts you like a knife (but that’s when it stops being trite). I’ve also learned a great deal about psychological conditioning – the hard way. The good news is that as I’ve begun to sort all this out, and become more comfortable with sorting all this out, I’ve noticed significant – though gradual – improvements to my overall health (all stress-related issues). And even though I haven’t figured out ‘the mysteries of the universe,’ I think I’ve learned a lot about the process of figuring them out, and what is and is not reasonable, and the gulf between what is reasonable and what is possible. What a wide gulf it is. The details, I suppose, my close friends know.

I’m rather startled how arrogant some believers are (Albert Mohler, or even your typical evangelical), and astonishingly even some nonbelievers (hello, Richard Dawkins). Dawkins, if you’re unfamiliar with him, is a nonbeliever and damned proud of it you ignorant swine! I’m quite happy to let pride and certainty be the territory of the flagrantly religious (not that all religious people necessarily are prideful), and wouldn’t it be nice if instead humility and openness were elevated among the irreligious? Dawkins and his ilk don’t much help with that.

A lot of atheists have given atheists a bad rap. There are some atheists who say ‘There is no god or gods’ and others who say ‘There is no reason to believe in any known human system of god or gods.’ There is a world of difference – and hubris – between statements one and two. One is stating something that can never be actually proven and is therefore unreasonable; two is stating something that can be substantiated with good reasons, and is therefore reasonable. I actually have a half-baked ‘proof’ for the intractability of position one over two in my head. If it ever gets fully baked, I’ll post it. For the reasonable form of atheist, I’d suggest someone like Guy P. Harrison over against someone like Dawkins.

Similarly, a lot of Christians have given Christianity a bad rap. There are Christians who pretend that the (unobserved, unobservable) metaphysical realm is ‘obvious’ and the literary mess of the Bible is ‘clear.’ The interesting thing to me is that those who promote a ‘clear’ way of reading the Bible are generally the furthest away from the beliefs of the early Christians. They believe in things like penal substitutionary atonement and a tortured eschatology that includes the fabrication of the Rapture. I could even go on about original sin, which I can find no trace of in the New Testament, nor in the early church until Augustine invented it. As an alternative to some of the religious crazies (and, like the irreligious, no religious person is perfect), I’d suggest James Alison (my respect for whom has only grown) or even the blogger ‘Poser or Prophet’, or better yet a short list of personal acquaintances – I know, I need more literary points of reference here.

The rest of my life is not all that interesting – although one or another thing may have been exciting to me. I have been weightlifting with a vengeance. I did not meet my goal of putting on 20 lbs by the start of January. Rather, I had to settle for 13 lbs, but that is still much more than I’ve managed in the past. I’m pretty excited about it! I’m trying to figure out what my next goal should be, as I want to push a little beyond what I’ve been able to achieve so far – I just haven’t set a time-table because I’m in that uncertain time in-between college and post-college, and continuous access to a gym is a bit hard to have when you’re trying to live in two places at once, all while getting ready for the next big thing. But step one is to bulk up, and then somewhere around step four or five is summit Mount Rainier. Then step seven or so is hike Annapurna. I’ve realized that one big life goal of mine is to become some sort of cross between Bear Grylls and Ansel Adams: I don’t want to eat all the gross stuff Bear does, but I want to get off-trail more than Adams. But you will know when I am nearing perfection, because I will look more and more like Bear Grylls and my pictures will look more and more like Ansel Adams’s.

I have thought about this blog and what I want it to be. I have some writings I still want to put up – but more prose and story than out-and-out philosophy, as it’s such a pleasanter and more engaging read. The upside of moving to Seattle is all the hiking (and I am extremely happy about this), and there certainly will be lots of pictures. I have been eying a new camera and will almost immediately in the spring start looking at what gear additions I will need. But it’s come to my attention that when writing for this blog, there are three people I typically think of – one of whom I text my entire life to on an almost daily basis (and who I had the good pleasure of recently spending the weekend with); one of whom I don’t think really reads this (probably because he has a life), but I’ll be co-habiting the Emerald City with him; and one of whom I have managed to make myself a terribly infrequent pen-pal to (I promise to resume when I have an address again). All of these people (along with other friends who are not blog readers) I talk to and share a whole hell of a lot more heart with than I would ever put up here. So what is this place, if not for those pieces that I like and would like to share beyond a circle of good friends, and for photography? So I’d expect more of that, along with the typical infrequency, going forward.

Peace out, folks.

Originally published at davidinman(.net). Please leave any comments there.

Last Tuesday, I was up in the greater Seattle area interviewing for Some Company™ and had the opportunity, the day after the interviews, to head to Snoqualmie Falls, which I had oddly enough never been to. It was stunningly beautiful for the time of year - I expected an ‘ideal’ time to be spring or early summer, with the snowmelts feeding the falls, but it was quite beautiful in the cold! The falls were surrounded by snow and icicles, and it was even snowing for a fair amount of the time I was there. I only had my point-and-shoot, but nevertheless managed to get some shots of the place.

Without further ado:

Some of these pictures I find a bit redundant; comments on which redundancies are ‘better’ are much appreciated - it’s hard for me to tell as the photographer which people will prefer, as I can internally appreciate different vantage points and I have particular memories attached to each photograph - and my initial sample group was inconclusive. As always, I have more on flickr. And this will probably be my last post before Christmas, so merry Christmas y’all.