Posts Tagged ‘happy accident’
Unplanned Shots
It was just a normal walk with the dog that ended in a play session in the front yard. Cyndie directed my attention to a leaf standing up on its stem in the snow. The spectacle seemed photo-worthy to me, so while she was tugging and throwing Asher’s favorite outdoor toy, I crouched low to capture the interesting phenomenon.
Not convinced that this was the optimal angle, I repositioned myself to try again. As I did, Asher took interest in my movement. In my haste to get off another shot before he arrived to obliterate the scene, I heard my phone camera clicking off a burst of photos.
As quickly as I could, I leveled the phone for one last try before Asher arrived.
I like how it turned out.
He didn’t entirely flatten the leaf; its stem remained frozen to the ground, but he disturbed the surrounding snow enough to make the scene a much less interesting mess.
To complement the fun photo shots of our natural environment, we’ve also been listening to a lot of catfight sounds the raccoons have been making for whatever reason raccoon conflicts might be occurring. (See: sounds raccoons make during mating season.) While walking through the woods this morning with Asher, I heard a wonderful owl hoot. When we caught up with Cyndie in the barn, I told her about having heard an owl.
She said she heard it, too. She then told me she’d recently read up on the sounds the raccoons have been making, and it said that sometimes a raccoon can sound like an owl screech when mating. That would have spoiled it for me, except we both agreed the sound we heard was not a screech at all. It was definitely a perfect, pleasant hoot, and we’re going to go with it having been an owl.
Our natural world at its finest.
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Unintentional Art
Cyndie borrowed my phone to take a picture. She took three. When I got the phone back, I showed her the last one and asked if she meant to take it.
She hadn’t.
I like it. It’s got an aesthetic that appeals to me.
A happy accident.
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Latest View
It happened by accident. This week Cyndie unintentionally sent me a text of her location. We were involved in a text conversation on an unrelated subject when I received the surprising reply. Curious, I tapped the screen for more information. In the background I could see an image of our property and recognized immediately that it was a recent satellite view showing the gravel driveway around the hay shed we put up the first year we were here.
Try as I might, I couldn’t figure out the navigation to give me a full view. Since I have been anxiously awaiting the Google map view to get updated, I decided to check that for comparison.
Nope. Still the old view from before we bought this place. I checked the view from Bing. Still old. Next I contacted our son, Julian, for his insight on the apple map app. I had thought it was just on iOS devices, but he clarified that it was on my laptop, as well. He provided a link to the view of our address.
There it was, plain as day. I can hardly stop looking at it. Finally, I can see our fence lines, the paddocks, the new hay shed and added driveway, new sand in the round pen, the gazebo, and even our cherished labyrinth. The bright red pickup truck stands out, too, but the biggest treat is seeing the 4 horses out grazing.
I’m posting an old mock-up of the possibilities we were considering before even starting to install new fence, to provide a reference for comparison with the latest view.
I can tell the new view was taken sometime last summer, close enough to autumn that some of the trees were starting to turn color, because the pasture north of the driveway had been mowed.
You can barely make out the outline of our arena space, over by the driveway, not where we were originally thinking it might fit. Also, for now we have settled on one round pen, instead of two. When we were thinking about the essential horse infrastructure back then, we had yet to decide where the labyrinth would end up.
I think the labyrinth is in the perfect location. Can you find it?
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Relative Something 