Larry and Jane Conklin examine the camera found in their luggage

I’ll save the nuts & bolts of this story for WYFF4.com.   In short, the Conklins found a mystery camera in their luggage after returning from a trip.   After excellent sleuth work, they traced it to a man in Winston-Salem, North Carolina who is none other than former USC basketball star Danny Traylor.

Conklin found Traylor with help from a television station in Winston-Salem that agreed to broadcast his picture.  A local viewer identified the “7 foot tall” man as his daughter’s school teacher.

News 4 Chief Photographer Don Jackson gets the shot

I’d love to do more stories just like this one.

Larry & Jane Conklin and Tim Waller

That’s me.  The sweeps guy.  The Looking Out 4 You dude.  The reporter who blows the lid off of…something.   But what?   Don’t worry.  It’s not like I’m sitting here starting from scratch.  I have my eye on several big investigations.

They are somewhere to the left of the box of microwave popcorn.

Yes.  No.  Maybe.  Hard to say.  You see, demand for Putney’s locally-produced eggs is already high.   Just ask Whole Foods Market on Woodruff Road, where Putney’s eggs are proudly sold.

Donna Putney of Honea Path

The fun part was watching News 4 photojournalist Johnny Bates trying to get shots of hens sitting on their eggs.  “The girls,” as Putney calls them, were quite nervous.  I guess they don’t like having their pictures taken.

JB zooms in for the shot!

We left Putney’s home with a new appreciation for her “free range” chickens that produce eggs of different colors.   She even gave us an awesome new coffee mug that says, Upstate Locally Grown Market.

Thanks Donna!

Tim Waller and Donna Putney

…when I went to the City of Anderson, SC with photographer Mark Lyon for a Project Economy story.

Mark shoots the obligatory "postcard" shots of downtown.

Equal to, and perhaps even more important than the story at hand was, when did this restaurant open, and why didn’t we know about it?

J. Peters Grill & Bar in Anderson, SC

Fortunately, we resisted the urge to try it.   Doing so would’ve been  “expensive.”

Ticketing cars outside the restaurant

But what?

Give me a while to figure that out.   Until next time, here’s a crazy picture to look at.

“You must not blame me if I do talk to the clouds.” ~Henry David Thoreau.

I know.  It’s been four months since I’ve updated this pitiful blog of mine, and what do I come back with?   A post on clouds!   But stick around.  You may actually like it.

Here’s the deal…

My wife and I were in our car last weekend when we came across the most awesome display of clouds.  She’s a cloud-lover.  A regular student of clouds.  She loves naming the different types of clouds.  And me?  It takes something special for me to get all gaga over clouds.  I like ‘em as much as the next guy, but that’s it.   These were different.  These were clouds that made you realize just how small we are.

So out came my camera-equipped Blackberry.   (Click-click.)

Cirrocumulus or altocumulus? You decide.

Of course, it was just a matter of time before we began discussing what type of clouds these were.   My wife insisted they were stratus clouds, but me being the reporter that I am, I wanted to be sure.  The following Monday, I took my photos to News 4 Chief Meteorologist John Cessarich.   Surely he would know.   He’s geekier than my wife (love ya, John) when it comes to clouds and other weather-related things.

How many cloud types? One or two?

John said there are two types of clouds in this shot:  Cirrocumulus and altocumulus.   To prove his point, he showed me a website that lists more cloud-types than I remember from fourth grade.   If you can’t find your favorite cloud on Weather Whiz Kids dot-com, you live in a different solar system, I’ll tell ya!

So where is this going?

Nowhere, really.  That’s pretty much it.  But this post has afforded me the opportunity to show off my cloud shots.    Like this one:

Major, major clouds.

I was so excited by these shots, I even created a “u local” account on  WYFF4.com, where I uploaded ten of them.   Remember, as Judy Garland once said, “Behind every cloud is another cloud.”

Whatever that means.

But can what?

According to my trusty canning book (thanks Amazon!), Zesty Salsa™ looked doable.

Fresh garden tomatoes.

I started with five cups of homegrown tomatoes.   Peeled and chopped.  That took…let’s see…about 5 hours!    Next came bell peppers.  Another five cups worth.  Diced into little salsa-sized cubes.

A bevy of bell peppers from our garden.

Add to that five cups of onions.  Store-bought Vidalias.  Um, peeled and chopped.   Then I added 2-1/2 cups of banana peppers.  Hungarian Wax.  Hot, but too hot.   I topped it off with three cloves of chopped garlic, one tablespoon of salt, two tablespoons of cilantro and 1-1/4 cups of cider vinegar.

Place into a large pot and bring to a boil.

Stirring the pot.

After boil, I reduced the heat and cooked (while stirring) for another ten minutes. As this was going on, I heated the jars and lids in the giant canning pot my wife and I bought from Wal-Mart.

Next, I ladled the salsa into the hot jars, leaving a half-inch of space at the top, and making sure there were no air bubbles in the liquidy-substance. I screwed on the lids (tight, but not too tight) and submerged the jars in water, making sure each jar was completely covered.

Rapid boil for fifteen minutes!

Boil those jars!

After fifteen minutes, I turned off the heat and removed the lid, allowing a 5-minute cool-down. Carefully, I removed the jars from the pot, placing them in a row on a towel, where the magic “vacuum” process would occur.

It did, but overnight while everyone was sleeping.

A dozen jars of Waller-made salsa.

Thankfully, my first “canning” was a success.  The lids on the jars were properly sealed.

Zesty salsa close up.

And while this doesn’t look like any salsa I’ve ever eaten, it tastes darned good.  Garden fresh!

We’ll be eating it from now until winter.

Coco contributes nothing to the canning effort.

Enter Mr. John’s Beach Store.

Hippyesque wristband.

Surprisingly, I was the one who found the leather bracelet with the faux Native American stone attached to it. I was off in a corner killing time because I knew the girls would be awhile.  As it happened, when I picked up the bracelet, my oldest daughter rounded the  corner and said, “Dad, that bracelet would look awesome on you.  Try it on!”

“Me?  You want me to try on this bracelet?”

So I did.

By this time, my wife had also shown up and agreed that the bracelet was “just what I needed.”   Knowing what a boring, straight-laced person I am, she said, “You can just wear it at the beach if you want to.   But I think you should get it, you know, for the girls.”  I agreed, but needed the opinion of one more girl.  The one who would “give it to me straight” without mincing words.

Claudia.  Age 13.

I found her on the T-shirt aisle.  She was eyeballing a tie-dye Folly Beach T-shirt with some cute phrase on it.  (I can’t remember what it said.)  I had a pretty good feeling I’d be buying that shirt before the Mr. John’s Beach Store party was over.   The least she could do was give me her honest opinion on the bracelet.

“Claudia, does this bracelet make me look cool?”

She looked down at my wrist, then looked back up at me.

“Yes, if I didn’t know who you were, I would say that bracelet is very cool.”

Pause.

“What if you did know me?  Would it still be cool?” I asked.

I could see a smile forming on her lips.

“Dad, I’m just saying that I do know you, and I happen to know you are not cool.  That’s all.”

I bought the bracelet anyway, and wore it throughout our vacation.  It’s been on my dresser ever since we’ve been back, but today I slipped it on for the fun of it.   If I forget to take  it off and you see me out somewhere wearing it, pretend you don’t know me.

You might think I’m cool.

Who's cool in this picture?

Miles and miles of seaweed.

It’s as though the ocean had coughed up a lung.

The beach was covered with rotting seaweed, and it was still washing up on shore.   In fact, staring out at sea, you could see large bands of seaweed –100 yards wide, 20 yards deeps– rolling in the surf, making their way inland.   Watching it was amazing.  Swimming in it was downright creepy!

Eeeeeew!

The question on everyone’s mind was why now?  And why this much seaweed?   Someone two towels down was overheard saying there had been a storm the night before, and it loosened all the seaweed.  Maybe, but I wasn’t convinced.  There hadn’t been a dark cloud in the sky since our arrival.

When in doubt, Google it.

Spring, it turns out, is seaweed season along the coast.  And while May is the peak month, it’s not unusual to see invasions of seaweed in June.   In fact, environmentalists say seaweed doesn’t stop washing up on shore until the first week of August, give or take.

And what exactly is seaweed?

There are many varieties, as you may’ve guessed.   The “stick-type” found on along the Atlantic coast, and on Folly Beach, is known as sargassum.   Dr. Lou Burnett, director of the Grice Marine Lab at the College of Charleston, says the brownish weed, which provides a habitat for sea life, appears in huge floating masses in the Sargasso Sea of the north central Atlantic.  Sargassum, he says, is a of species brown algae that hitches a ride on the Gulf Stream, which heads straight for the Lowcountry.

Nice.

Seaweed nipping at my toes.

Next question:  What was the City of Folly Beach going to do about all this seaweed?   The beach was full, and the ocean was belching up more seaweed.  Wasn’t this a public works issue?   During my research, I found that other coastal cities have battled the annual invasion of seaweed:

Large Amount of Seaweed Invades Corpus Christi Beaches

With this much seaweed, I expected bulldozers (or hay bailers) to make a sweep of the beach late at night or early in the morning.   But the next day, the seaweed was still there, and further Google searches revealed why.   It seems those stinky piles of rotting algae are teeming with marine life.   The crabs seemed to love it, and for Sandpipers seaweed is an all-you-can-eat plant buffet.  “Beach wrack,” it seems, is a pivotal part of the ecosystem along the shoreline.

So no, there would be no bulldozers.

Seaweed Patrol to the rescue.

Fortunately, a tanned beauty from the Folly Beach Seaweed Protection Agency (FBSPA) rolled up on her boogie board to see if I was okay, and administer first aid if needed.

Two sets of legs wash up on shore.

By the end of our session, all twenty toes were accounted for.

And still attached.

The garden where it all began.

The timing was awful.  Not what my wife and I had envisioned when we planted our garden in early May.  Who knew the cucumber, squash and zucchini plants would produce so quickly, and in such abundance?  How could either of us have known we’d be up to our eyeballs in veggies the very week my wife was out of town visiting her mother.

Cucumbers I can deal with.   But zucchini?   Puh-lease!   What was I supposed to do with a sink-full of zucchini?

The bounty.

“You could always make some yummy zucchini bread,” my wife insisted on the phone.

My first thought:  Why would someone do that?  Zucchini bread?  Eeeew!

“Yes dear,” I said, and Googled the recipe:

Zucchini Bread IV

Ingredients:
3 eggs
1 cup vegetable oil
2 cups white sugar
2 cups grated zucchini
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
3 cups all-purpose flour
3 teaspoons ground cinnamon
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon baking powder1 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup chopped walnuts

Directions:
1. Preheat oven to 325 degrees F ( 165 degrees C). Grease and flour two 8×4 inch loaf pans.
2. In a large bowl, beat eggs until light and frothy. Mix in oil and sugar. Stir in zucchini and vanilla. Combine flour, cinnamon, soda, baking powder, salt and nuts; stir into the egg mixture. Divide batter into prepared pans.
3. Bake for 60 to 70 minutes, or until done.

I have to say, it was a little freaky plopping two cups of grated zucchini into the batter.   But who was I to second-guess centuries of tradition?  Besides, the recipe had garnered 4-1/2 stars on AllRecipes.com.

Fast-forward an hour and ten minutes.

Zuchinni bread times two.

I don’t want to brag, but my zucchini loaves looked and smelled absolutely scumptuous!   And why shouldn’t they?   The bulk of the batter was sugar and cinammon, raising the question, would we even taste zucchini?  We, as in me and my two teen daughters.  Trust me, if they scarf down a slice, anyone will.

We all scarfed…and scarfed…and scarfed.

Half-eaten zucchini loaf.

Man it was good, especially served warm, and it didn’t even taste like zucchini!   For that matter, does banana bread taste like bananas?   Or does carrott cake taste like carrotts?   If the answer is no, then why go to the trouble of lacing perfectly good bread or cake with vegetables?

Why?

Because when you’re stuck with a fridge-full of your least favorite veggies (excluding the cucumbers), you have to do something to get grown men to eat them.

Squash cookies anyone?

Man with a green thumb.