Archive for the ‘Images Captured’ Category
Foggy Morning
The weather app on my phone notified me that we were under dense fog conditions first thing this morning. That proved to be a spot-on analysis.
It wasn’t all that obvious in the woods where Asher and I were breaking spider webs that crossed our trails. When we reached the fence of the back pasture, it was as if none of our neighbors existed.
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The horses didn’t seem overly worried about their limited views. They were spread out with heads up when I came around the corner, appearing well aware of my arrival.
Every morning there is obvious evidence of burrowing critter activity in and around the barn overnight. There is enough spillage from the horses’ sloppy eating that barn pigeons and rodents find more than enough motivation to hang around. For some reason, this morning a couple of rodents didn’t wait until I was gone to emerge from their tunnels to scrounge. That’s the first time I have actually seen them.
Come to think of it, I haven’t seen the neighbor’s orange cat lurking around our property of late. I wonder if Asher would be okay with us getting a barn cat to keep the rodent population from exploding. In the meantime, we will be adding some traps in the barn.
One of our ash trees near the (vacant) chicken coop is proving to be our “canary in the coal mine” when it comes to the onset of autumn.
Every year it drops leaves sooner than most other trees have begun to change color. This year it stands out more than usual for being so bare-branched so soon.
Is the middle of September early for bare branches? Sure seems like it to me, especially when we have 80°F temperatures forecast for the coming week. It still feels an awful lot like summer around here, even with a cool fog blanketing the landscape this morning.
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September Morning
It was a classic September morning yesterday and a rather photogenic one, I must say. How about a wispy fog in the valley around sunrise?
Around the corner, near the barn, we just couldn’t stop gazing at the scenic landscape.
Then Cyndie remembered she was going to pick more wild American plums from a tree beside the compost area. It is entangled with a vine that has sprouted some fruit of its own. We have some grapes!
Not much for size compared to cultivated varieties but great fun to see them appear on our totally wild vines. Maybe the growth in this spot is happy to be in close proximity to whatever leaches from the piles of composting horse manure.
Before we know it, these mornings will start to get frosty and the growing season will come to an end. As the planet warms, that’s been happening later and later every year, so it’s a guess as to how soon. The shorter hours of daylight make it seem like the change to frosty temperatures is just around the corner.
I’m mentally prepared but won’t be holding my breath in anticipation. I love September mornings no matter how they come.
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Expanding
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change the length
of your inhales
by thinking about them
while inhaling
through your nose
and make them longer
even longer
to reach that pinnacle
like that feeling
when you yawn
exhale
for even longer than that
with your eyes closed
to notice the sensation
behind your face
an expansive cavern
to the molecules
sailing through
getting bigger
in your mind’s eye
with another breath
expanding
beyond the universe
of understanding
of logic
calculations
everything that made sense
because it always did before
until you focused
on a bunch
of increasingly lengthier
breaths
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Distorted Perspective
If it wasn’t so indescribable and unrecognizable, this would have been a candidate for my image-guessing game.
What the heck is that? It’s not The Bean (Cloud Gate) in Chicago but it could be a close cousin located at the Big Stone Sculpture Garden.
I like how the zoomed-in square photo has a hint of a snow-globe vibe. I don’t know that the sculpture is recognizable from that close view, except maybe to someone who just visited the site in the last few days. Even then, I’m not sure what the official description is for this wavy-shaped, mirrored blob that would appropriately identify it.
It made for a good blog post subject though. Entertainment for the eyes.
Not to mention it served me well since I didn’t take any pictures of the horses getting their hooves trimmed yesterday. It was not an easy day for the farrier, Heather, because the horses –more specifically, the chestnuts, Mia, and Light– were more skittish than usual and were not cooperative at all about standing on three legs for any span of time.
Their equine “pedicure” was somewhat truncated. Functionally sound, but cosmetically rough looking.
The other thing I didn’t take a picture of was my solution for getting the zero-turn tractor tipped up so I could clean out the bottom of the mower deck. After surfing through images of ramps for lifting cars that I was considering buying to lift the tractor, I thought up a way to do it with material I already had on hand.
There was an old deck board on the floor in the shop garage that I cut in two and propped up on the loader bucket of the diesel tractor parked right there. I screwed a couple of scrap chunks of 2×4 on each board to lock them in position on the bucket. It resulted in enough angle that I can lay beneath it and have reasonable access to the entirety of the 42-inch deck.
It also gave me a good view of the poor condition of the mower blades. I’m afraid the amount of rocks and sticks I hit this year while learning to steer with two levers has shortened the life of the blades considerably. I don’t feel bad about it. I knew what I’d gotten myself into and consider it a cost for not getting the driveway shoulders finished yet.
I hope to remedy that before fall is over, but maybe I’m revealing a bit of my own distorted perspective about the possibility. The landscaper we are waiting on does not have a strong track record of showing up in a timely fashion, or sometimes, responding to us at all.
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Color Splashes
Shorter hours of daylight are becoming more noticeable but the colors of summer flowers are as vibrant as ever around the house at the lake. Not that the length of a blossom isn’t limited. I took a picture of one bright flower when I arrived last Thursday and then noticed how quickly the look of the whole planting had changed by last night.
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There were plenty of colors still glowing from the plantings Cyndie and Marie and helpers installed around our landscape in the spring.
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After a substantial dousing of rain a couple of days ago, we were dismayed to see how much of the beach sand had washed away into the lake. It happens all the time but is no less disturbing to see the large rocks and hard soil exposed where it was previously soft sand. Even though the DNR is against adding new sand to the shoreline, that seems to be a fix that is called for in these instances.
There is a rake being stored among other gear on our beach by the caretakers that I’ve become very fond of using. It occurred to me that I could try dragging prime-quality sand from the water’s edge using this rake to cover the exposed surface after heavy rain.
It worked better than I imagined it might. In fact, after subsequent showers the last two days, the improvements I achieved were still holding fast. I believe I have discovered a new activity to entertain me while hanging out on the beach that feels so much more productive than sand castles, sculptures, pyramids, holes, or pattern drawings that I am naturally inclined to create.
Too bad I will be departing for home this morning and exchanging lake escapades for dog duty, horse care, and lawn management. Cyndie stays up for a few more days to help Marie entertain guests, giving me a chance to pretend I live alone –a welcome feature every so often for couples who’ve been together for over 4 decades.
You know, sleeping diagonally on the bed, leaving my stuff out wherever I please, skipping a meal if I feel like it, or watching guilty pleasures on tv.
One downfall, however, I won’t have my hero around to soothe my nerves in the case of any unwelcome close encounters with our resident snakes. It’s as if they’re slithering in herds these days. Anna, our animal sitter over the weekend, sent us a picture of a disgustingly large shed snake skin that showed up on the driveway. [shudder]
I much prefer our splashes of color to come from flowers instead of wriggling reptiles.
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Pocket Pictures
I don’t understand how my phone is able to activate in my pocket when it won’t do anything in my hand until it identifies my face. Many times I pull the phone out after I’ve been mowing or using one of our trimmers and the phone is in the middle of some activity I don’t even recognize. There is usually a cancel option for me to end the phantom task but I am at a loss to understand how it woke up, opened an app, and began trying to do something.
Yesterday, I pulled the phone out after mowing and my camera was on. No big deal. I swiped the camera app away, got back to the home screen, and pressed the button to put the phone back to sleep. It wasn’t until later when I was checking my photos that I found a series of unrecognizable images and one video that I can only guess were taken in my pocket.
I was wearing green pants, so maybe that’s where that shade of color came from. The second image gives the impression of possibly being a zoomed photo of the one above. There were five images like the zoomed one, then five with the green dots, then a one-second video of the dots, and finally, one more still image of dots.
Makes me long for the simplicity of the good old butt dial. That also has happened in my pocket when I’m working and in thinking about it, I have the same questions. How did it wake up? Why did it choose the phone feature? How does it decide who to call?
I think my smartphone is a little too smart for its own good. How does it wake up and begin functioning without seeing my face or asking for my passcode to unlock?
It doesn’t make any sense to me.
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Relative Something 