Prairie Plains Banquet on 23 January 2010

On Saturday, 23 January, I rode with Bill and Shirley Snyder to UNL for a fun evening.

Based in Aurora, NE, the Prairie Plains Resource Institute celebrated thirty years of working to preserve prairies with the organization's first ever fund-raiser banquet.

As visiting the Prairie Plains web site indicates, the group maintains an active involvement with Nebraska communities and does some excellent work.

As the opening image indicates, the organization also has very cool shirts, and I made sure to get one.

The organization's first auction raised a lot of money, and I look forward to another Prairie Plains banquet. This one featured "Nebraska" food, featuring Beets, Barley, and Bison, and other non-alliterative fare.

I also enjoyed the keynote speaker's presentation. Since 1984, Jim Richardson has contributed stories and photographs to National Geographic.

Check out his blog, Working Photographer, and his web page, Jim Richardson Photography, that features his photographs taken all over the world.

You can see other pictures from the evening in Lincoln.

The evening was very special, too, because I got to photograph the new member of the Prairie Plains Resource Institute's Board of Directors, Peru State College's own Dr. Bill Snyder, featured on the far right in the following image.

Congratulations to Bill!

PSC Commemorates Martin Luther King Day

Diversity discussions and a talk by Holocaust survivor Elane Norych Geller help the PSC community celebrate Martin Luther King Day.

On Monday at 11:00 am in the Student Center, the Black Student Union celebrated Martin Luther King day by sponsoring diversity discussions during the lunch hour.

Members of the Peru State College community joined President Dan Hanson, Elaine Hanson, and Tuesday's guest speaker, Elane Norych Geller, at tables throughout the cafeteria to discuss various diversity issues with students.

And at 5:30 that evening, students and others wore blue to commemorate Martin Luther King and gathered for a group photograph.


On Tuesday at 11:00 a.m., Holocaust survivor Elane Norych Geller spoke about the dangers of bigotry, racism, and hatred to large crowd gathered in the Peru State College Theater.


One of the youngest of holocaust survivors, Elane Norych Geller was only four when the Nazis invaded her native Poland in 1939.

She shared with the college community some of the horrors at the hands of the Nazis--and both her aunt's loving care and Geller's own determination that led to the speaker's survival when British troops liberated Bergen-Belsen on April 15, 1945.

Geller shared as well her experiences as a survivor, articulating both the psychological scars that mark her days and her iron determination to confront all forms of hatred, "to recognize the disease of racism and bigotry and empower people to say something."

As she noted, "I believe passionately that activism is the only way to go." By confrontation and action, she insisted, "we can relegate those who hate to the back rooms and basements where they belong."

Geller lectures as one of a small group of "Survivor" volunteers at the Simon Wiesenthal Museum of Tolerance in Santa Monica, CA, and travels with her message of both tolerance and activism across the country.

"When you're silent," she emphasized, "you become part of the problem."

I posted some photographs from the preceding events.

Hoarfrost and Soybeans

Today, January 15, a spectacular hoarfrost coated the campus, elegantly aging the bobcat stationed in front of the Administrative Building on the Campus of a Thousand Oaks.

As the following shot indicates, the frost spiked the trees on campus--this tree looks like a magnet that attracts iron-white filings and sits in front of the CAATS Building.

I took a stroll around campus, taking a series of photographs and posted a few; you can tell which shot came from my falling in the snow.

From hoarfrost to harvest:

The photograph of the combine comes from November, when Mark Moody allowed me to accompany him as he harvested Daryl Long's soybeans.

I had never stuck my head inside the cockpit of one of these machines and so appreciated both the ride and Mark's enthusiastic explanations and his detailed description of the process.

Mark invited me along to harvest Daryl's corn, so I held off posting these photographs; however, the wet weather precluded using the combine.

I look forward to the fall harvest to experience the corn.