Hello, my name is Thomas Garza this is a little about me and my journey through life. I use my blog as a therapeutic release from the grind of everyday life. I'm glad you're checking out my site. Hope you enjoy it.
So this is part two of our trip. I did not take HDRs the whole trip so I thought I would break it up a little. The next place we found from TexasEscapes.com was this bell town in Italy Texas. It was just a weird little building, we thought it was on out house at first.
So after we shot that I noticed some old tractor equipment behind this building and had to go check that out. Here are a few pics of them.
Next we found this old gas station with this old truck. Not sure how long its been there but it was really old.
I guess maybe it was an old car wash where the guys run out and hand wash your car?? I don’t know.
I really liked this picture of the steering wheel and the rusty speed odometer. OK so we finally found an old house that kind of looked like a ghost house. We did not go in cause it had a nice lean to it. After that we found this really old church, but apparently its still being used. This was taken with my fun tilt shift lens again. I like it.
So the last place we went cause we were running out of day light was to look for this old bank. Once we found it we also found that there was a sign up front asking for $5 to take a pictures of it. It was way not worth the $5 and we took a picture anyways from the street. Pretty sure that free!
As you can see there was not roof to this bank and it looks like someone had already broken in and stole all the money. That is too bad because that is what we planned on doing. So that concluded our quick day trip of towns around Waxahachie TX. I do have some fun pictures of my Hummer H2 flying through a huge puddle of water, but I will save those for another post. Hope you liked the pictures, please feel comment if you like!
So last weekend, some friends and i decided to go on a quick photography day trip. We picked out a few locations from TexasEscapes.com and hit the road. I have been wanting to see the Munster Mansion so we went there first.We did not go in because people actually live there year around, notice the SUV that got in the way. So we just shot from the street. So then we headed out to a few other little towns. The funny thing is all we had found were some really bad pictures from this websites and a town name. We did not know exact locations so we had to drive around and find them. The strange thing is we found all of them with in a block or two of where we randomly turned.
This is the court house in Waxahachie. Its a really cool building, I was trying out my friends tilt shift lens and you can see that only part of the building is in focus. Its a cool effect I really liked playing with that lens. Our next stop was the big town of Forrestion TX. We got some nice pics of the main building there!
Its a really big town as you can see. We had a great time there mingling with all the people and ummm ok we saw no one there. he he. But the pics we took here were nice. Here is another one of my favorites from this location.
Around the corner we found this!!
Apparently someone uses this place to shoot photos and colored the tires. Its a cool picture!! So in the same area of this building, still in Forreston TX, we found these doors in a building that had caught on fire and for some reason the doors made it.
So yea! That was the HDR’s I shot from this trip. I will do a phase two to our trip but they are not in HDR. Had a really good time. Its amazing how much fun you can have when you plan things last minute. Its highly recommended!
I have decided to change my hobby from chasing Politics to chasing Photography. Photography has recently become my new favorite hobby to chase. I have always loved to take pictures, I remember in elementary school playing with my moms camera. It had that disposable flash that had 6 flashes, then you throw it away, and that funny film that had a roll on each end. I remember thinking it was the coolest thing ever. Then my mom would come take the camera away from me cause I was wasting film and flash. I got my first camera in 5th grade. It was a disk camera. The new film at the time that was on a round disk. It was a top of the line disk camera with a built in flash. I took about 1000 photos with that camera of everything and everyone. I liked being able to capture fun and exciting memories of my friends and family. I still have some pictures of one my birthdays at the skating rink with Darth Vader wearing my parachute pants, I was so cool. I keep those pictures stashed in the back of my closet in an old shoe box. Sometimes I take them out and sit for hours looking through them remembering all the fond memories of my childhood. I am not sure I would ever remember those memories if I did not have those old pictures.
So up until now I have always enjoyed taking pictures, but I have never really had a friend that enjoyed taking pictures as much as I do. Everyone just thought it was great that I had my camera and was taking there picture. Recently, I got introduced to a girl that loved photography and was trying to start her own business as a photographer. I was excited to meet someone that loved photography more than me. It was like meeting someone famous for the first time, I had a ton of questions for her which let to more question and more questions. I am not going to say this person willing took me under her wing to help me learn more about photography, I more less wedged myself under her wing hoping she would let me learn from her. Surprising she let me stay and befriended me. She became my new “roll model” so to speak, but I never told her that. I quickly learned from her that there was way more to taking a picture than I could have ever imagined. Who would have known that learning photography was going to be a life long process. When I got to hang out with my new “roll model,” I felt like a little kid playing in a major league baseball game. I was amazed at the talent of my new friend, she would chase a perfect picture in a blink of an eye and capture it before I even knew what she was doing. She could see angles and views that I had no idea existed. After watching her for awhile I got a little discouraged, I thought I could never be this good, I am not creative, I am an engineer. I chase numbers, computer logic, black and white stuff. I don’t understand imagination, creativity and color shades and what is dept of field. In the blink of an eye this beautiful young women made me realize there is a whole other world out there that I knew nothing about, but I wanted to learn.
So this is why I have changed hobbies to chasing photography. I may never be as good as her, but it will be a fun life long chase. And isn’t that what life is about, the chase.
An economics professor at a local college made a statement that he had never failed a single student before but had once failed an entire class. That class had insisted that socialism worked and that no one would be poor and no one would be rich, a great equalizer. The professor then said, “OK, we will have an experiment in this class on socialism. All grades would be averaged and everyone would receive the same grade so no one would fail and no one would receive an A. After the first test, the grades were averaged and everyone got a B. The students who studied hard were upset and the students who studied little were happy. As the second test rolled around, the students who studied little had studied even less and the ones who studied hard decided they wanted a free ride too so they studied little. The second test average was a D! No one was happy. When the 3rd test rolled around, the average was an F. The scores never increased as bickering, blame and name-calling all resulted in hard feelings and no one would study for the benefit of anyone else. All failed, to their great surprise, and the professor told them that socialism would also ultimately fail because when the reward is great, the effort to succeed is great but when government takes the reward away, no one will try or want to succeed. Could not be any simpler than that. What a profound short little paragraph that says it all:
“You cannot legislate the poor into freedom by legislating the wealthy out of freedom.
What one person receives without working for, another person must work for without receiving.
The government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from somebody else.
When half of the people get the idea that they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them, and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work because somebody else is going to get what they work for,that my dear friend, is about the end of any nation.
You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it.”
From Johanna Ernst Runnels Member of the Heritage Alliance
No, she was never a Pat Buchanan supporter; even when Buchanan claims she was, she was on the board of Steve Forbes’a campaign in Alaska.
No, she’s not anti-semitic. In fact, she has an Israeli flag in her office. (Contrary to popular belief, the usual Evangelical thinks Israel has a right to exist, granted by God.)
No, she’s doesn’t believe that the Iraq War was directed by God. Yes, she did pray that proceeding with the war was God’s will. (Ever hear the phrase “Not my will, but Thine, be done”?)
No, Buchanan doesn’t support her now; in fact he’s supporting Obama. (Buchanan did think her speech was amazing, but then so do 80 percent of the people who saw it.)
yes, she was pregnant when she got married
Yes, barring immaculate conception, Bristol appears to have had sex with her fiancee. No, Bristol didn’t receive only “abstinence-only” sex ed.
yes, she did fire the public safety guy — but he said in the Anchorage paper that, for the record, she never, and no one else in her administration ever, tried to make him fire her ex-brother-in-law
and yes, the state trooper (her sister’s ex-husband) she was worried about did: tase her 10 year old nephew; drive his state patrol car while drinking or drunk; did threaten to “bring her down”; and did threaten to murder her father and sister if they dared to get an attorney to help with the divorce.
yes, she did ask the librarian if some books could be withdrawn because of being offensive; no, they couldn’t; yes she did threaten to fire the librarian a month later; no, that wasn’t over the books thing but instead over administrative issues; no, the librarian wasn’t fired either; yes, the librarian was a big supporter of one of her political opponents; yes, the librarian was also the girlfriend of the Chief of police mentioned above; no, this is not the first time in the history of civilization that someone has been threatened with being fired over a political dispute
yes, she apparently believes in some variant of Intelligent Design
no, she didn’t try to force the schools to teach it; she said if someone brought it up, it was an appropriate subject for debate.
No, she doesn’t believe in “abstinence only” education. Yes, she thinks abstinence is an effective way of preventing pregnancy. Duh. Yes, she believes kids should learn about condom use in schools.
yes, she kills animals and eats them, and wears their skins
yes, she has on occasion tried to get money from the federal government.
yes, she was vetted extensively, not just in three days — I’ve got links to press reports about people coming to Wassila on 29 May, and we had her on our Veepstakes at PJM from the first day we ran it.
Yes, Sarah Palin’s acceptance speech was written by a speechwriter. Duh. No, none of Obama’s, McCain’s, nor Biden’s speeches were impromptu off the cuff things either.
This is where the blogosphere can come into its own. It is the ability to specialise, to be the reference point on one small topic very well, and everyone then links to you. Martin has had huge traffic since the big US blogs started linking to his Palin Rumours page.
Provide Middle Class Americans Tax Relief
Obama will cut income taxes by $1,000 for working families to offset the payroll tax they pay.
Provide a Tax Cut for Working Families: Obama will restore fairness to the tax code and provide 150 million workers the tax relief they need. Obama will create a new “Making Work Pay” tax credit of up to $500 per person, or $1,000 per working family. The “Making Work Pay” tax credit will completely eliminate income taxes for 10 million Americans.
Income tax is paid out once a year. So $1000 and a tax credit of $500. So maybe I will come out ahead on taxes or break even now. Once a year. Oh wait! I’m not a working family. It’s just me working.
Under Obama, the wealthiest 1 percent of taxpayers, those making roughly $600,000 or more, would see their taxes go up on average by $93,709 in 2009, according to an analysis done by the Tax Policy Center, because Obama would begin implementing his tax changes even before the scheduled expiration of the Bush cuts.
Under McCain, those same taxpayers would see an average reduction of $48,860, reflecting in part additional cuts he is proposing.
By contrast, the bottom 20 percent of taxpayers, those with taxable income of roughly $19,000 per year or less, would see their taxes cut by an average of $567 under Obama’s program and $21 under McCain’s plan, the tax center estimates.
For the 20 percent of taxpayers right in the middle of the income scale, making roughly between $37,600 and $66,400, the tax break would be $1,118 under the Obama plan and $325 under the McCain plan in 2009, according to the analysis done by the tax center, a joint venture of the Urban Institute and the Brookings Institution, two Washington think tanks.
Ok so what about me between the $66,000 and $600,000? I guess I don’t get any tax breaks from either candidate. Darn!!
So the rest of this article is really interesting and deserves more reading. Here are a few facts!
The economic plans that McCain and Obama have put forward do include the billions needed to deal with the AMT plus extending the Bush tax cuts. McCain would extend all of them except the total elimination of the estate tax, while Obama would extend only the cuts for individual taxpayers making less than $200,000 annually or couples making less than $250,000.
With those big-ticket tax cuts plus the impact of other changes in the tax code included, McCain’s plans would slash revenues by $4.2 trillion over the next decade while Obama’s reduction would be a slightly smaller $2.9 trillion. Both would transform the CBO’s small surplus over the 10-year period into big deficits, according to the tax center.
CBO is the Congressional Budget Office.
The two campaigns argue that it is not fair to hold them to the unrealistic CBO baseline. Rather, the campaigns like to compare their proposals to a current policy baseline which assumes the Bush tax cuts are extended and the AMT is patched every year. Under that baseline, according to the tax center, McCain’s plan would cut taxes by $596 billion over the next decade; Obama’s would increase taxes by $627 billion during the same period, reflecting the fact that Obama is raising tax rates on the wealthy and boosting the taxes they pay on dividends and capital-gains earnings.
I am not sure how they came up with McCain’s cutting taxes $596 billion and Obama’s increase taxs $627 billion. But as I read through Obama’s Plan on his website. He has billions and billions for every paragraph. So I guess most of that money will have to come from taxes. (My Opinion) He wants $50 billion to just “jump start the economy” and then $65 billion for heath care and $150 billion for clean energy. I am sure there is a lot more in there I just got tired of looking. So let see that is $265 billion more than our current budget, that no one likes. Humm… (Oh! The link to this info is on Obama’s website starting here http://www.barackobama.com/issues/economy/ )
So trying to find some facts for Obama’s health care I decided to go to his website and read what he had to say about it. It all sounded good but I wanted to know how he was going to pay for it. This is what I found. Oh! and here is the link to look for yourself.
Q. How much will it cost us taxpayers?
A. The Obama plan will cost between $50-65 billion a year when fully phased in.
Q. How will we pay for the Obama plan?
A. The Obama plan will realize tremendous savings within the health care system to help
finance the plan. The additional revenue needed to fund the up-front investments in
technology and to help people who cannot afford health insurance is more than covered by allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire for people making more than $250,000 per year, as they are scheduled to do.
So Obama is not going to see any of this money until 2011. So when is he going enact his national health care? 2011? And does he really think he is going to get 50 to 60 Billion off those that make more than $250,000 per year. Did they really get that much of a tax break? I need to research this!
Obama, focusing on a theme of many past Democratic campaigns, seeks to target his help to the squeezed middle class and address the growing income inequality between rich and poor. He would retain all of the Bush tax cuts for families making less than $250,000 a year, but would do away with Bush’s cuts for people making more than that.
The money raised from tax increases on the wealthy would be redirected by Obama to tax relief for lower-income Americans.
I thought he was going to use the money for health care? Oh wait tax relief January 11, 2011. Either way there will be no healthcare or tax cuts till 2011. But how is that helping the econmey today or tomorrow? Hummm…
Its a really big town as you can see. We had a great time there mingling with all the people and ummm ok we saw no one there. he he. But the pics we took here were nice. Here is another one of my favorites from this location.
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