I’m a big city boy, but I love small towns. The county courthouses, the eclectic main streets, the attractions and ideas of artwork – they draw a picture that is comfortable to me. Maybe it was the small town where my grandparents lived, and the summers I spent there as a boy, but small towns always just feel like home to me. And who is FiDENCIO LOPEZ, anyway?

I think San Antonio is my favorite city in Texas. It is the mixture of the old and the new, the spiritual and the secular, the historic and the modern, that keeps bringing us back here. The kids love the Riverwalk (mostly the hotels we stay in on the Riverwalk) and the attractions, and they tolerate me taking them to the historic sites and Spanish churches. Really, I suppose, it satisfies the two sides of me – the city boy and wanderer who wishes he lived in a different time and place.

I’ve heard the songs from The Little Mermaid hundreds of times. And not just from watching the Disney movie over and over again when my kids were kids. No, my daughter was Ariel in the Cypress Academy of Performing Arts’ (CAPA) production of the musical. We heard the songs so many times around our house that our son decided to try out for the play and why not, he definitely knew the songs. But even though I knew the songs by heart, too, I was not prepared for what I saw and heard when my baby, my 12 year old daughter performed on stage. My wife has called her a princess from the day she was born. Now she IS Princess Ariel. Photographs do not do her performance justice. You would have to have seen her take command of the stage and heard her voice rising through the theater to have any inkling of what Daddy felt.

I have been posting more of my photography on Instagram than on this site lately. I continue to be intrigued by how I am able to present images in the square format, even though some IGers (I think that’s what they call themselves) show landscape or vertical images with white letterboxing, and which images are more popular. Here is a new set of Instagram images that have risen to the top in my “Likes”. Interestingly, the first two are different crops of the same image. Come see what you like @pbwomack on Instagram. You’re still invited.

I entered a little corner of my daughter’s world about three months ago. I started using Instagram. It was really just to keep an eye on what she was posting, but now I’m hooked. I’ve posted nearly 300 images and have over a hundred followers (not many considering lots of folks have thousands, even my daughter has more followers than me). There are a couple of the interesting things about it, though. First, the images are all square which means my penchants for negative space and off center subjects is constantly challenged. In fact, some of my favorite shots won’t work in the 612 x 612 space. Then there is the phenomena of what images people like. What they like are not necessarily my favorites, and sometimes what I think is a really great photograph doesn’t get much attention at all. Theses five images are the ones that have the most “Likes” in my library. Some of them have been posted on mywastedspace.com before in their full frame dimensions, some I never considered posting before. Come see what you like @pbwomack on Instagram.

I went to Florida to see where I had lived there, maybe play a little golf and definitely devour as many blackened grouper sandwiches as I could. Thought I would take some pictures of the place to keep as reminders for my failing memory. But all the time, there the kids were. In the back seat. On the beach. Sitting across from me and my blackened grouper. And I’ll be darned if that wasn’t me with a camera in my hands taking pictures of them. Where did it all go wrong? Well, it didn’t go wrong. Here are a few of the shots I got of them. You be the judge on which are the better memories.

Anna Maria Island is just south of St. Petersburg in Florida, over the Sunshine Skyway Bridge. We spent the week there during Spring Break. These are some intimate images of the place. Pictures of the kids will come later. I had forgotten how much I missed the Florida life. I lived in St. Pete for a few years almost twenty years ago now. The light and the sounds and the taste of the air are all part of my memories. Going to the beach is something you plan here, but it is just something you do there. I was glad to have a small glimpse of that again during our time there.

Samson Brandywine Womack (Sammy to his friends, and everyone is his friend) is 8 years old. For my kids, he’s been a brother for as long as they can remember, and we’re sure he’ll be a member of the family for years to come. I don’t know why, I just wanted to celebrate this 100 pound, AARP member (in dog years) puppy. He won’t be around forever and I’d hate to be doing this as some sort of memorial. Picture his whole body wagging, just his tail just isn’t enough, when he sees you, and charging at you like he’s going to run you over when all he wants is a little scratch behind the ears. And don’t let him out in the back yard, even on the coldest days, or he’ll be in the pool before you can say…well, there’s no time to say anything. These images of Sam are in chronological order. In the first he is about three months old and the last shot was taken this past winter. In between, he’s grown into his paws, survived heat stroke and a Great Dane attacking him, and taken his rightful place as elder statesman of our home. We love you Sammy. Happy birthday old man.

It is in everything we see. It is in everything we do. It is in the hand held out to help a child, the way the suns breaks through the gathering clouds, the naked amazement of something discovered for the first time. Each moment in this every day miracle we call life is a reminder that there is more, a revelation of the everlasting. Did you glimpse it today?