this was sunrise after a n'or easter and the beach was astoundingly coated with shells and driftwod.....

this is the pool at Ned & Michael's - it's a tad bit quirky but pretty with the autumn sun and leaves.

this is the long winding walkway from the main boardwalk to Ned's house....

This is one of my dearest friends in the world, Ned....

Ned (short for Nenad,) is originally from Croatia, but I met him when he and his partner, Michael, were living in NYC where Michael was on the partner track with a consulting firm across the street from my job at Booz Allen & Hamilton and Ned was doing his PhD in Paralinguistics. They moved back to europe about 8 years ago alrady...and now that Michael is a partner and Ned is a house husband, they spend most of the year in London while Ned visits his elderly Mother in Croatia often. This past february, Ned beat me to the big 40 and as a grand way to celebrate, he and michael bought a house on Fire Island in the Pines....what a great gift idea if anyone has a million + dollars to get rid of !!!!I am one of the single most fortunate people I'll ever meet though because due to my friendship with first Ned and then Michael, they have always got a bed reserved for me in their house at 631 Fire Island Boulevard. Granted, they rent the house 1/2 of the season to pay all the expenses, but they're here for atleast 4 weeks or longer in the summer and so far, I've spent nearly 4 months of 2008 at their beach house, usually alone, and when i'm lucky, with Ned, just enjoying the wild life and the beach....I took Ned exploring, he'd never sat in the giant chair on the other side of the island from where they bought their house (the "poor people side" of the island....) Ned looks just like a little kid all the time, but the chair really was a great prop for the photo opp! Thanks to Ned, he found the 22 point buck I'd been trying to photograph the entire month of october while out there, but i seemed to only run into him after dark without my real camera and my telephone camera and video equipment just didn't capture him so he was visible. Great call on this one Nedella!

this is a nose to nose shot, same buck but i was nervous and it is blurry

have you ever been literally face to face with a 22 point buck?

yesterday i managed to turn 40 without any fanfare....

and yet somehow, it seemed like there should have been music, or atleast champagne and roses to mark my final passage from childhood and innocence to adulthood and the cold hard truth of what it means to be alone in the world.....


this picture...the single most perfect photo i've taken in a very long time, from last month on fire island, pretty much sums up the entire journey i feel i've completed by turning forty....everything is perfectly clear, life is totally in focus and yet, with all the ebb and flow of the violent waters of life pulling at my roots and tearing away my support systems, i'm very much like the storm fencing that washed ashore after a n'or easter and just managed to cling to the shoreline long enough for me to get this one gray and sad but totally beautiful shot......

this is david...he was so serious and deep...yet even with all the pain from the broken ribs, his sense of humor pervaded everything!!!

some people make you laugh and laugh and laugh...david is another of those people....witness barney in the photo below....between david, barney and chris, the majority of my photos came out too blurry to be salvaged...yes, i was laughing that hard for my entire holiday!!!

this is barney....he's from croatia and lives in london....he just laughed and laughed and laughed the entire holiday!!!

my attempt at green graffitti...you know, rock art that didn't hurt anything but still showed i'd been there....

can you see the sailboats...?

i thought it was clever of me...of course i'm biased...but when i looked out of the bedroom and saw the cascade of sheared off rocks coming out of the cliff side, i couldn't help but want to leave a mark that i'd been there....as have hundreds, maybe thousands of goats and probably tens if not twenties of monks and possibly sailors as well....no matter who was there, they couldn't help but be in awe of the simple yet overwhelming splendor of the sailboats entering and exiting the port....this is my tribute to the greeks, the romans, the phoenicians, the turks and the egyptians who all traded and trod upon this particular sea route since before recorded time....

even bright and early, as barney and david slept in, christopher and i, along with a pantheon of strangers were out and about.....

this absolutely idyllic scene is a little cafe about 30 or 40 minutes from the house by car...up and over the mountains....

first morning, eager to explore, i asked if chris wanted to go to town with me, never thinking it would be thriving....needless to say, this is where he navigated us to as i drove the little wind up car....how exciting....turns out this is near the secret steps leading to the heart of the town which was astounding when i finally had the chance to walk them and explore on my own....this day, i was on a hunt for a bakery....where the loaves whole wheat free formed loaves were just coming from the oven...too hot to hold without wrapping in brown paper first....too delicious and fragrant not to rip into it immediately - sans butter or preserves...and i'd carried the best lime marmalade ever found on the planet earth all the way from london just so i could eat more of it on vacation...that says a lot about the bread (and the fortnum & mason jams!)

breakfast in the sun on the front of the house, steps from the entrance of the chapel of the monestary....

christopher and i were up bright and early every morning in sifnos....sometimes it would be barely 6 a.m. greek time, but the sun would already be burning fiercely over the mountains behind us, even though it wouldn't cast a shadow for hours...

i really enjoyed the early mornings with christopher the most, since he would make a pot of fresh greek coffee (so finely ground that you couldn't help but either toss out the bottom of the cup or drink the grounds...tradition says you don't swallow the bottom of any coffee drink here....) as we sat and talked, or more likely laughed riotously (can't even tell you what we laughed about so much...) we were sure we were waking up barney (in the bedroom right behind us with the windows shuttered) or david, in the bedroom right behind barney...alas, they weren't bothered by our good time....

this is a series of photos to show you the scale and scope of height from the house to the swimming hole in the aegean sea below......

this is the path behind the chapel and the monastery leading away from the old donkey shed and dove coterie to the well house (corner barely visible just above on right corner of picture)...see how the house looks all flat and tiny??? it's not...it's actually high ceilinged and very airy inside...which shows that i've taken this from a distance...

i particularly love the series of pictures of this one black and white wild mountain goat...


as i managed to figure out the telephoto feature on christopher's new digital camera even as the wind blew up his fur....










what you can't see from this series is that even though he's perched (yes, i was able to verify on his departure that he's indeed a he....!) atleast 300 feet above the aegean on a huge boulder with nothing holding it up, there were like 50 more of his friends and family bleating him on....which may be what he's turning and looking for, but i chose to believe he's looking to see what moron (i.e. me,) was bleating from the house trying to get him to laugh and/or smile for the camera without running (or worse, falling into the sea!)

the view from the monestary over the aegean sea to the port of kamares where we got off the high speed ferry and walked the donkey trail.....

this was our first day out on board the "doris"....a new power boat named after a sea nymph of ancient mythology....or so we're told.....

the second table from the left is us, christopher in bright teale, david and barney in the straw fedora...i of course and making nice with the lobsters in the harbor....this is how you decide what's for lunch.....

if you go out for lobster and they ask which one you want....

if the lobster aren't sitting in the ocean with net, you aren't actually getting the freshest seafood of your life....that said, the lobster consumed on this day after taking the boat out of port in kamares and anchoring in couple of little harbors over, was succulent, larger than life and just the right accompaniment to greek salad with sifnos cheese, hummas, house wine and tziki...why don't i eat greek food every single night? this does make me wonder....and now, i've got a hunger that must be sated!!!

this is christopher with the sunsetting over the aegean behind him.....

we were on our way out to dinner and i just happened to think to snap it in passing....the little dome topped chapel is immediately behind Chris to the right (just at the top of the steps) with the house straight back from there to the edge of the earth....

my homage to the sea faring ways of the ancient greeks....little sailboats....

the cliffs around the house were sliding into the Aegean at such a clip that at one point as i was rock climbing and dangling a good 100 or so feet above the jagged waterline below, i felt the rock in my hand above me give way and pummel through me to crash and bounce over everthing in it's path to the sea...luckily, i had firm footing and was able to cling into the rockledge for shelter and dodge the majority of the impact...i did however eat silt, sand, goat-poo and god-only-knows what else as the dirt drifted into my nose, mouth, ears, bathing suit and anywhere else it might fit....oddly the rocks tumble and break into almost uniformly symetrical pieces that i found made lovely sailboats when balanced on themselves....to give you an idea of the size, again, the base of most of these rock boats was about a foot in length and 5 or 6 inches wide....i left a trail of boats from the top of an out cropping down to the edge of the aegean, in all, there were 9 flat surfaces that i put them on, cantilevered and cascading from several hundred feet above the water to just where the waves became petulant....i'm curious to see future pictures from this area so i can see just how stable the arts community is.....

barney, david, christopher and myself in the late afternoon heat....

this photo captures us almost to the top of the kastro....we've had a very rough day of it so far in this shot....without a single complaint from david (it's now 3 or 4 days since the boat incident caused by very high and choppy waves), i found that the on-going pains in his chest around the heart area have slowed him down considerably and find myself insisting that we take him to the doctor for some medical attention...only then do i discover that he's been concerned enough with the discomfort to have already scheduled an appointment for a week later once back in london....why is it men won't stop for directions and seldom can admit they're in pain??? the medical attention here was fantastic - that is once we climbed through the language barrier and got to the second floor of the clinic instead of waiting for another 2 hours with all the village children who were apparantly having their eyes tested....note to self, buy a greek phrase book so i can distinguish between eye exam and chest exam...

david got some lovely pain meds as well as two souvenir (not to be confused with souvlaki, also greek!) xrays of his chest....one broken rib and atleast 2 fractured on either side of it....turns out that doris, the sea nymph (and speed boat) is one with a vengeful take on foreigners on her high seas!

a "small" 3 masted schooner laid anchor on it's way into kamares...later we would get up close and learn it had more than 150 passengers on board....

just to give you a sense of scale between the arches and the distance down to the water and across to the boat...all very grand and very wide open...it's the kind of sight that makes a person fall in love....no matter if it's a boat or a goat....when you're standing right here and watching this day unfold, you know in your heart of hearts it's love like no other!!!