North Carolina Randoms (and a little rambling)

I know I’ve been slacking on the whole blog thing. Shoot me, see if I care. Honestly, I feel the importance of spending every waking minute of my life on a computer posting, blogging, tweeting, facebooking, myspacing, emailing, flickring, and whatever else there is out there in eWorld to be rather sad. There’s a lot of pressure on us to do that sort of thing here at Ride BMX. Really, there is. Uggh.

There’s good, there’s bad. I love putting up great photos or content on ridebmx.com, knowing that a ton of you are seeing it and reading responses (positive and negative) is, overall, a great thing. I prefer magazines, but there is a cool satisfaction to putting certain things up on the Web. To date I have never tweeted. I fart a lot, but I don’t tweet. I’ve never had a personal myspace page. I’m on facebook, but I like to use it to keep in touch with friends, not to see a kid from Indonesia’s crappy Web vid. Sorry, there needs be some disconnect from work at some point. Overall, I don’t blog that often because I’m pretty damn busy, I’m not that interested, and I have no idea if anyone is even reading these. I also don’t feel the need to race to be the first to post something I think is cool that I found already on the Internet. Unless you’ve created it, you’re already late on it. I don’t find the every day happenings in my life to be so great that I want to share them. They’re not that interesting to me, so how could they be to you? Then again, maybe it shouldn’t be about me, maybe just things going on at Ride? Does this make sense? I don’t know. See here’s another reason or two; indecision, and difficulty getting the point across. I’ve never been that great with that. The thoughts in my brain don’t translate well to words. That’s why I picked up a camera years ago…

Where I am going with this? Nowhere. I had a few photos from a trip out to Raleigh/Greenville that I figured I could put on here. I was shooting some photos of Craig Mast for an upcoming article and I stayed with Leigh Ramsdell while I was out there. Any time with Leigh is a good time. The photos are nothing special, but I figured I hadn’t put much up on here in a while, so I might as well puke something out and throw it up for the world.

Shit, I’m sure there are things that would be interesting to you, so if you’re reading this leave a comment and let me know what you’d like to see in my blog. I’m not against blogging, but if I’m gonna do it, I’d like to know that there’s a purpose.

Anyway, here are the digis…

Leigh was watching this dog for a friend. My mind is shot, so I’ve already forgot the dog’s name. He (she?) was a bit camera shy and also kind of…special. I don’t know if it had a disease, was old, or just mental, but I really liked this guy.

This is Leigh and his wife Katie’s doberman. I forgot this one’s name and sex too. I’ll go with male. He was cool, too, and if you would put your digi camera’s red focus light on the floor he would try to get it and would stare at the spot on the floor long after it was gone.

Driving from Raleigh to Greenville, Leigh’s car had the shakes. At first Leigh thought it was only a low front tire, but it got violent and we pulled over. It turned out to be a rear tire that was shredding apart. Another mile or two on it and it would have been a bad scene. Here’s a happy Leigh pumping up the donut with a zebra wearing sunglasses T-shirt on. 

Pirate Up? ARRRGH! I wish I got to see the goon who drives this.

Sorry, I don’t have it. And I don’t get it either. Definitely don’t want it.

Here’s Leigh at his desk at Eastern. The guys at Eastern are awesome and it was cool stopping in and saying hi to Jon Byers and the boys. I always love visiting different companies in the BMX industry and seeing their setup. I was impressed by the tiny photo area (in the background) that Leigh had. For a really tight space Leigh makes it work. People tend to think you need a crazy setup to get good photos, but that’s not always the case. If you know how to use your equipment, you can make almost anything work and get great photos.

Leigh probably got this free with a meal at the local Bojangles’. They’re famous for chicken ‘n biscuits, and Leigh is a fan. 

That’s it for this one. I’ll see what else I can drum up…

?Keith