There I was Tuesday last ready to post a pile of links when I received a call from Candi, my ex-wife, telling me Bill Feeley had died in his sleep the day before.

I first met Bill in the late 1960s. We both did sports car rallies. In the early 1970s I switched over to bicycle racing and lost touch with him until the mid 1970s when I ended up working in the same group with him at Boeing. We became friends and that even survived his selling me a two-stroke Saab with a frozen engine. He had rebuilt the engine but when he fired it up he forgot to put coolant in the radiator and the poor little thing froze up. I found another engine for a replacement and would go over to his house several nights during the week to work on it.(I lived in Seattle and Bill lived in Kirkland.) I didn't have a car at the time so he would take me home with him. One evening he said he had to stop by a friend's house for dinner so I tagged along. That friend was Candi who I later married and was the mother of the three most perfect children in the world. In the late 1970s Bill moved to Whidbey Island. We moved to Vashon Island and then Los Angeles. We came back from LA in 1987 and decided to move to Whidbey Island since I would be working in nearby Everett and we had developed a liking for island living. We slept on the floor at Bill and Nancy's for a month until we found our own place. Our lives changed, Candi and I split up and eventually so did Bill and Nancy but we still kept in touch. When ever we would see each other we would stop and fill each other in on out adventures. I would borrow his beat up Ford pickup and would help him stack his wood pile. His passion was astronomy and chasing total eclipses of the sun. He taught astronomy locally. A while back he sold his house and moved in with Donna. The last time I saw him was at the Freeland post office. He said he had a mild heart attack. Apparently he was doing worse the last few weeks and had been taking some tests at the hospital. He had been using oxygen at night and Sunday Donna had him use it during the day. Sunday night his sleep was restless until he slipped away. His memorial will be a potluck at the Deer Lagoon Grange at Lone Lake on the 24th at 3:30. Bring food and memories. I miss him. He was one of those anchors in life that is now no longer there.

Then later in the week I had a couple of tooth extractions followed by a rush to finish up a web site Friday night. The web site is an interesting one. Don was a young photographer back in the early 1960s in Los Angeles. He has started selling some of his photos. Some historic drag racing photos at Rare Photographic Moments. He has some other interesting projects coming up.

Most of the rest of my strobe lighting stuff is in and now I need to start putting it together. A part of that was getting my own digital Pentax *ist DL camera for chimping the lighting.

I had been borrowing Zoe's DL but that just wasn't working out. We both use it differently and use quite different settings. I'm going to be using mine a lot for checking lighting, even when I'm using film. The DL has been replaced by the K110D so used ones are going for a reasonable price. Zoe's was $600 new, which was a great price. You can get used ones from $300 to $330 on eBay with lens and $255 to $275 without lens. Mine was $301 with lens. A helluva deal. Now we have matching cameras.

Last night we went over to my daughter Katie's to see the painting. It finally made it home and is on the wall.

It's big. When she put it on the wall she noticed how dusty it was so she and Robby dusted it off which brightened it up considerably. The on-camera flash doesn't do it justice. When I get my off-camera strobes set up I'm going to be taking them over and get a proper shot of it.

The plywood is in for my 5x7 camera case so I will be going over to Vern's this week to start cutting it up and I have a new website to start putting together so it looks like another busy week. I will start getting links up later, for real.