This is really a tribute to everyone who's taken care of a parent or family member with dementia.

"Hey, let's have Mom come live with us.” We thought it was just kind of a mild thing, and it was going to be a comfortable experience having her there, and all the pressure would be off her. But one thing about dementia that we never knew was how good people could get at hiding their illness. She lived by herself in her own apartment. Although I don't know how she actually made her meals without killing herself, it was incredible what we found out and how hard it was to see.

So when moving day came, that very day, she said, "Nobody ever told me I was moving". That was our first clue as to how serious it actually was. We thought that we would have a little bit of easing into our new normal lives. Well, that never happened. Mom became a 24/7 needy person on day one.

I was the caretaker in general, but my wife took care of all of Mom's morning rituals. I would do the
shopping, I would do the cooking, I would do everything having to do with mom's keeping her safe and
helping her with the things that she needs during the day, making sure her TV is working right, taking her
to doctor's appointments. That was my job. But in the morning, those first two hours, that was Janice.
Janice had to be at her desk, ready to go at 8:30 every morning. Her company had a system that they used
for working from home, which involved logging in to their server, so they knew if she wasn't at her computer. Janice had to log in by 8:30, which meant that anything I wanted to do had to be done in that 2-hour window where Janice and my mom were doing pre-day duties.

Usually it meant that I was going to the market because I shop daily. I would go to the market and shop at
6:30 a.m. I did the shopping, I would prep the day, but it was debilitating. In the first few months we didn't think we needed any real help. We didn't realize we were gonna need help from my sister and my brother. Sure enough, about four to six months into the process, we came up with a system where they would help on weekends, and we would get some desperately needed time off.

The images that you're going to see on this site are all shots from what I call my 20-minutes-a-day. If I got my shopping done early, I could make that 25 minutes, and occasionally even had a 30-minute window, but I had to be in the driveway at 8:20 because Janice had to check in at 8:30.

After the shopping, I would take off and drive up to Lake Castaic or around our neighborhood. It was
amazing how I almost always found something cool to shoot. I became a believer in slowing down mental
processes. I would go to Castaic Lake and just drive around. So I would drive around and take my 20
minutes, 25 minutes, half hour, and look for things to photograph.

This is a compilation of one year of 20-minutes-a-day. As I look back on it, I know that God was in it. I
saw great blue herons, I saw coyotes, I saw all sorts of different varieties of birds I never even knew
existed. Even at only 20-minutes-a-day, usually something showed up. Roadrunners in my neighborhood
—I never knew there were roadrunners in my neighborhood. Acorn woodpeckers. I learned a lot.

This became a cathartic process, and really, it was one of those things where God showed me favor by
allowing me to be able to see all of this during a time that was quite debilitating.

I hope you can enjoy these images.