Archive for the ‘Images Captured’ Category
Daylight Moon
In an all-blue sky the other morning, the faint apparition of the crescent moon stood out as the only disruption.
Late yesterday, I walked the driveway to more accurately measure how much length remains of unfinished asphalt edges. My last estimate of 80 yards was wishful thinking. If we do 40 yards a day, we should have it finished in 3 days of work. That effort will have to wait until next week. Cyndie and I are going to the lake this weekend and taking Delilah with us.
I had always planned to work on finishing the driveway slowly and methodically, so this is not a problem. However, there is no denying that we are both getting eager for the day when we rake the last portion of gravel over the final exposed edge of asphalt out of the roughly 600 yards that needed attention.
It’s a good thing that we love having a long driveway. If we didn’t, all this work would seem to be much more effort than it’s worth.
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Nature’s Best
Stormy skies can be a scary thing for some people but rainclouds also provide the backdrop for one of nature’s best spectacles. The weather pattern yesterday was a little chaotic with many periodic episodes of rain rolling by amidst hours of otherwise sun-bathed summer scenes.
It was the perfect recipe for a rainbow and that is precisely what we got.
Another highlight of the day involved multiple viewings of videos captured when Joni Mitchell surprised the world by showing up at the Newport Folk Festival. What a triumph at 78 years of age, after her brain aneurysm in 2015.
Joni is another one of nature’s best.
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A Speck
Cyndie has wowed me with another sky pic. I have cropped it to exclude the ground, leaving a spray of thin clouds smeared across the blue with a half-moon all lit up in broad daylight.
But there’s more.
Up near the top there is a speck that she hadn’t noticed at the time. I tried to brush it off my screen.
A high flyer soaring almost out of sight.
For as inconspicuous as it is, I think it disproportionately adds a lot to the image composition. Even though that dark spec barely catches my eye, knowing it is there provides added depth for me.
Or, I’m just thinking too hard. I simply like the image she captured. Down to the last speck.
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Heavy Sky
Who doesn’t like posts about the weather? It’s like a friend that everyone knows. We interact with the weather every single day. It’s our common denominator, even though it could be completely different for us at any given moment.
We didn’t receive the hail that our children in the Twin Cities reported, but the wild weather was swirling all around us. Poor Delilah was on full alert trying her darnedest to scare away the intimidating thunder with her most energetic ferocious barks. She leaped straight into the air to get after one particular rumble in the sky.
She puts out an incredibly valiant, yet futile effort to combat the ominous sounds and flashes of thunderstorms. The noise and her frantic energy quickly get tiresome to our weary ears and fractured ambiance.
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While out feeding the horses, the clouds put on a spectacular show that became very difficult to read. I wished I had taken one of the skywarn classes offered by the National Weather Service. The rain came in several waves with just a scattering of lightning and thunder. Between each, we saw moments of sunshine and general calm.
On an evening with a looming threat of severe weather, we lucked out as the worst cells slid either north or south of us. As nightfall descended, we walked out to deliver the trash and recycle bins to the road and got a good view of the backside of one of the big cells.
Our sky was beginning to look much less heavy already.
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Clay Bennett
I have no words. The artwork and message of Clay Bennett speak for me today.
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Synchronized Sleeping
Our herd of four like to pair up in twos and yesterday at their mid-morning nap time they looked downright synchronized.
Mix and Swings have their snouts on the ground while they are sawing zzzzzs and Light and Mia are about as side by side as possible pretending that they are not nodding off during their shift on watch.
During the afternoon feeding, Cyndie took advantage of the food distraction to detangle a snarled dreadlock in Mix’s tail that was never going to come out naturally. Mix seemed to understand what was going on back there and gladly tolerated the activity.
I have no idea how wild horses must deal with this kind of thing.
In ever so small steps, the horses are showing hints of developing the beginnings of a possible bond with us. If I could hedge that statement any more, I would. I’m not sure that it is any more them adjusting to us or the other way around.
Yesterday morning, they were almost perfectly matching our intentional routine without a fuss until Mix made one slight gesture toward Light and Light accidentally smacked her neck against the corner of a fence post in her frantic attempt to instantly exit stage right.
Think of how you feel when you stub your toe in a major way and that will inform you of how Light looked in the ensuing seconds.
She stood on three feet while flexing her front right leg for long enough I began to wonder if there was a bigger problem than just stinging pain. Then she set it back on the ground and shook her head like she was trying to get out cobwebs. She repeated both actions one time, in shorter intervals and then seemed to be over the worst of it.
I looked at the fence post and found a surprising tuft of her hair lodged on the corner. My gosh, that must have hurt. Checking her neck, the spot of impact was obvious but hadn’t broken her skin. It looked a lot like the places on their butts where they get bitten by each other.
Makes me think about how much those nips must hurt. That explains why they react so frantically to get the heck away when aggressors pin back their ears. Keeping their butts just out of reach of a biting threat is a high priority born of experience.
Next thing you know, they are napping together peacefully.
Thunderstorms and sunshine.
War and peace.
Do we really need the first in order to appreciate the second?
I could do without the warring part of the equation, thank you very much.
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Winter Leaves
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Paired Photos
Yesterday morning I was taking extra pictures to chronicle our morning routine for a photo exercise occurring on my virtual community, Brainstorms. Members all over the globe were capturing their lives in images for four days and posting them to provide a simultaneous glimpse of our varied locals and activities.
Of course, mine involved horses and I came up with two sets of images that work best when shown as pairs.
It was a cold morning that was going to become a warm day, so… Blankets on / blankets off.
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I then stepped up beside Light and was taking a picture of her gobbling pellets from a feed pan. She turned to see what I was doing.
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There’s something about a horse’s nose that is just so great up close in a photograph. For all we know, that could be a moose!
Don’t tell her I said that.
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Relative Something 