On Friday I got to spend a couple of hours hanging out with and photographing two homeless teens for the do1thing project at HomeFront's Huchet House, in Trenton, New Jersey, a place where family care workers and a parent educator focus on ensuring pregnant homeless women receive needed services like prenatal care and employment training. I tried something different, too, my first foray into slideshows with audio. I had just purchased a digital audio recorder, for two reasons, they have really come way down in price and my sister had given me a B&H Photo gift card for my birthday. It was delivered on Wednesday and I brought it with me as an afterthought to Huchet House and got a very little bit of reluctant audio from the girls before I left. It took me most of Saturday to learn how to edit the audio and incorporate it into a slideshow using various "new to me" programs. After I sent my still photos and slideshows to do1thing, I posted the slideshows on my own webspace. Each one is roughly thirty seconds long. I only had a couple of hours to be in their worlds, but it seems even stranger to try and tell their story in thirty seconds.

You can see them here:


www.MichaelMancuso.us/Yakima

www.MichaelMancuso.us/Tamara

What's the word I'm looking for...? Well if these people can't help, there's no hope. They are participants in The Classics 9th Annual Scrabble Invitational held at Classics Bookstore, 117 South Warren Street, Trenton, on a Sunday morning. What an eclectic mix of people! I guess word nerds (and I use the term lovingly) come in all shapes, sizes and ages. Starting with the young...

Here's the view from the top (of a bookshelf).

Ah, yes! Thinks that help you think, juice and a Dunkin' Donut.

Back to the word "nerd." Here's an expensive stopwatch. It costs $200 and it requires a $25/month data plan. I'm just jealous of the "Google phone."

It happens every year. In the northeast it gets cold. Birds fly south for the winter. I don't. I guess that makes me less than a bird-brain...

...0r perhaps a horse's ass. At least he's smart enough to wear a jacket while it was raining.

And here we have the civilized human, off to catch a train to work, no matter what the weather.

What should I call this, Mommy' s going off to war? She is. Guardswoman Sgt Zelene Diaz walks with her son David Diaz, 4 following a Departure Ceremony for the 1-150th Assault Helicopter Battalion shippiing out for Operation Iraqi Freedom.

Earlier, Sgt Richard Schwartz, right, sings "God Bless America" to conclude the ceremony.

NJ Gov Jon Corzine, 2nd from right and MG Glenn K Reith, right, Adjutant General of New Jersey applaud. The others in photo from left are Senators from NJ, Robert Mendez and Frank Lautenberg.

From left, Chaplain Joanne Martindal plants a kiss on the cheek of Madison Tolska, 8, months, held by her dad, Capt. Eric Tolska onstage after the ceremony was over. Last week, I was at the inauguration and now this today. Makes me proud to be an American.

Today I got to accompany some travelers from Princeton's Coalition for Peace Action on their journey to the Inauguration of Barack Obama as the 44th (and the first of color) President of the United States. We left at 5am and returned to Princeton at 9pm, spending more time in one day on a bus than anyone should have to, not to mention walking many blocks through the streets of downtown Washington, herd-style Actually we were so close together, near the end we waddled more like penguins to inch closer to our date with history.

Here's what it looks like at 5am on a frozen winter morning.

Once our buses arrived at RFK Stadium in our nation's capital, from left, Michele Tuck-Ponder and her daughter Jamaica Ponder, 10, of Princeton Township, pause for a photo before boarding a shuttle bus to take them to the mall.

Here are the aforementioned mom & daughter at the closest spot they could get,outside the perimiter of the mall, which starts just on the other side of the tree line.

View from roughly the same spot, a man wearing an "Obama" cap captures video of the scene during the president's first speech as president. Several people in the crowd had cameras with them ;) I don't know if was cold-induced numbness, but I don't know if the people around me fully grasped the profoundness of what had just become a reality. It reminded me of grade-school science class when the teacher has a beaker with a red-colored liquid in it. From an eye-dropper she adds one drop of a mysterious clear liquid then another and nothing seems to change until one more drop and "Bam!" the entire beaker of liquid completely changes in one instant from red to blue. Forget the comparison to red states and blue states. I don't even know which is which. I just mean that when Barack Obama became the president of these United States where (taking from his speech) less than sixty years ago, a man like his own father might not have been served at a local restaurant, eveything changed.

Did I mention there were an estimated two million people?

The St. Patrick's Day Parade, only a couple of months away, is big in Trenton, New Jersey and it doesn't just happen all by itself. It takes huge amounts of hard work and planning. Tonight, an inportant part of that planning took place, the selection of 2009 Miss St. Patrick.

Emcee extraordinaire Vince McKelvey, hosts the Trenton St. Patrick's Day Parade Committee and Scholarship Foundation's selection of 2009 Miss St Patrick, held at Msgr. Crean Division #1 Ancient Order of Hibernians hall on Kuser Rd in Hamilton Township.

The judges tally their votes...

And the winner is...Margaret Walsh, 2nd from right.

Q: Could godmother be more proud?

A: No!

There she is... Margaret Walsh, Miss St. Patrick 2009!

Once the winners are announced, photographer Dave Schofield makes the official portrait of first runner-up Megan Dunne. At right is second runner-up Meghan Simmons.

Jim and Linda Cochran, of Florence, New Jersey, remove Christmas lights from a tree in front of their home. Consider this your wake-up call in case you haven't undecorated your house and yard for Christmas, Hanukka, Kwanzaa, Festivus, or whatever you celebrate. If You still have Diwali decorations up, you're beyond help.