What I did over Christmas vacation

046, originally uploaded by edrahe.

My wife and I spent Christmas with her parents in Oskaloosa, Iowa, a sleepy farm town (population 11,000) 49 miles southeast of DesMoines.

On Dec. 22 there was last minute Christmas shopping and my mother-in-law was finishing the last minute preparations for our big family gathering that afternoon. I, however, didn't have anything on my schedule and I read in the morning paper that Barack Obama would be making a stump speech at the Oskaloosa Middle School at 9 a.m. Sounded a good thing for a political junkie to do on his vacation so I grabbed my camera and went.

It was an interesting experience all around. And I talked my way into the press area (I knew that battery grip on my XTi was good for something), and probably got as good a picture as any of the working press. In fact, my shot looks very similar to the one that ran in the DesMoines Register the next day. The local newspaper, the Oskaloosa Herald, apparantly couldn't send a photographer. While they had a good write up they used a stock shot of the canditate. Had I known they needed a good picture I wouldn't let them use one of mine.