Posts Tagged ‘images’
Spring Arrives
Today is the first day of spring on the calendar, so that means only a few weeks, or maybe a month, more of days when we might experience significant snow events. Yesterdays’ little excitement is already melting fast. I did need to plow the driveway when I got home from work, but it was relatively easy and the remnants left behind on the pavement melted quickly, leaving the driveway mostly clean after minimal effort.
Unfortunately, I was doing some cleanup with a shovel and leaned into it, sliding the snow to the edge, when a disc in my back went kablooey. It’s impressive how quickly a person can go from standing upright, to flat on their back on the mucky wet ground. It’s also interesting how blissful it can seem to be laying down with no pain, regardless the fact it was on the wet pavement. I was feeling content to lay there for the rest of the night, but Cyndie happened along and inspired me to make my way back to my feet again with the enticement of Chinese takeout she brought home for dinner.
Today is not a day for whining, it’s spring! I’ll celebrate with a shot of Cayenne posing in the bright March sunshine. Green things won’t be far behind.
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Snowing Again!
As of last night, it looked like this out our back door:
Cyndie ended up staying in town overnight, and I am trying to get out of here in the dark wee hours of the morning to get ahead of the mass crush of other commuters, on my way to the day-job. Sadly, that means dragging Delilah out of bed before she is awake, to put her outside in her kennel, and then trying to get horses fed a couple of hours earlier than they expect it, in the wet, snowy darkness. Oh joy.
Those tricky tasks are on top of my otherwise tight routine of simply waking up and getting in the car to get on the road as early as possible. If I don’t leave here early enough, it’s traffic jam city and commuting anguish for me.
An overnight winter storm doesn’t help things one bit. It’s a good thing I signed up for this adventure, or I could become one grumpy bunny.
Actually, I’m a little bit of a grumpy bunny anyway, this morning. Yesterday afternoon, I learned that the plaque detected in my heart by a recent test places me on the wrong side of the healthy curve for men my age. I have been welcomed into the club of aging folks who must take cholesterol medicine and the once-a-day baby aspirin to keep that bad boy from rearing up and surprising me someday when I least expect it. “Preventive medicine.” Gee, my favorite, except I like it to be from exercising and eating well, not from taking meds for the rest of my life.
Actually, when I asked the doctor how long I need to take them, he gave me an out. He said I would probably only need them for another 40 years.
I wonder if I will actually follow his prescription… Right now, I’m thinking that my previous ignorance was bliss. I was just fine until I went in for my latest “well-health” physical.
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Nature’s Course
There is no getting around the fact that we are at that time of year when the weather can flip from enticingly spring-like to “as winter as ever” in a single day. It can be a tough blow at the end of a harsh winter to be walloped by storms that give the impression the weather is headed in the wrong direction. Today is expected to be one of those tough blows, but it is not clear what the precise position of the storm will be. We are on the edge of a suspected path which could swing either to freezing rain or heavy, wet snow.
For the time being, I’m going to enjoy this image of our paddock from Saturday, when the snow had been cleared off the ground and the clouds were gone from the sky. We’ll have more of this type of enjoyment in the days ahead. We just need to tolerate a small setback to a winter storm for a few days.
That’s Dezirea munching hay, with Legacy standing by, on watch.
A couple of days later and it looked like this (although, in fairness, this one was taken with my phone looking through a dirty window from inside our sunroom):
At Delilah’s desperate urging, I let her outside to chase a squirrel, or squirrels, which had been tugging mercilessly at her predator instincts while she was trapped indoors. I followed her with my eyes as she sprinted deep into the neighbor’s woods to our north, much farther than she normally explores. The unconscious chase left her in new territory, and I would have been surprised if she just turned around and came back into our yard.
She disappeared for quite a while. When Delilah finally reappeared outside our windows, it wasn’t a squirrel she had as a prize, but the bottom portion of a deer leg. It is most likely that she happened upon a carcass that was left by some other predator(s), but she looked so much like a wolf out there, gnawing on that limb in the heavy falling snow, I felt a renewed appreciation for why our cats appear so wary of her.
She’s just doing what comes natural, but it can be almost scary seeing how incredibly proficient she is about it.
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Directing Flow
While walking through the muddy driveway in front of the barn I noticed that one of the “fixes” I tried last fall to control runoff appeared to still be doing the job this spring. Previously, the water on the barn-side of the hay shed would flow straight across the drive path into the paddock. I made a little channel at a diagonal across the driveway in hopes of directing the flow toward the far side of the paddock.
With all the snow piled up beside the driveway, there was nowhere for the water to go, so it began to pool up. I grabbed a shovel and set about remedying that situation. While I was working on it, Delilah showed up to help. She had already been racing through the mud that is beginning to appear in several places, so I guess I should be happy she likes playing in the puddles, too.
When it was time to head in, Delilah was a mess. Aaaah, spring. She has already started digging up the dirt that is becoming exposed at the front two corners of the hay shed. She appeared to be trying to get as dirty, muddy, and wet as was possible in the short time she had to run free after I got home and let her out of her daytime kennel.
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Snow Motion
Last time it snowed during the day here, I tried over and over to capture a picture that would show how many flakes were falling. No matter what I tried, the moment in time of the snapshot would render the majority of the flakes invisible. The only way I could see it working was in a video.
With an assist from my son, Julian, we got the video converted to a gif image. Seems like it would be a great idea for a holiday greeting card.
Happy Winter of 2013/2014 Everyone!
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Thank you so much for the gift of your time and energies at a time when you are especially busy, Julianbert!
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Photo Op
Shot yesterday during a visit to our neighbor’s farm. Sure, they had animals, but there I go, looking up and capturing building and sky. I am short of words after allowing myself to be taken on a journey of films last night after watching the celebration by the people who make them, The Academy Awards.
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Overactive Snowflakes
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It was an otherwise innocuous passing flurry of barely 3 inches of fluffy light snow. Delicate flakes, each one unique, falling in a graceful dance with the air, moving in a randomly synchronized patterned performance. How many snowflakes could there be? They pile up. They land on every available surface, and swerve to reach places not so available.
Yesterday’s snowfall draped itself softly over the wind-hardened drifts in the driveway to complicate an already challenging chore. I had walked over those drifts the night before when I took the garbage bin down to the road. They were packed so dense that I could walk on them without breaking through. It’s like walking on water. It’s just snow, so logic has it that a boot would submerge, but not when it gets packed this tight. Across the top I strolled.
Delilah is finding the latest snow conditions to be confounding. Sometimes she stays above, and sometimes she breaks through. At the speed she is usually traversing, it causes her to do a face-plant into the deep. Then she has to swim a bit to reach a place where she can switch to her deer-like leaps to bounce through the deepest parts.
When the snow stopped falling yesterday, there was plowing and shoveling to be done, again. Those light, teeny flakes that fall from the sky change dramatically when they come to rest en masse. They foil the attempts of machines that try to move them, causing the wheels of the tractor to spin in place against the weight of the snow.
Walking our property has become unthinkable without snowshoes. If I had time to get down to the labyrinth, I would verify that it was entirely invisible at this point, buried beneath the biggest accumulation of the year last week that was followed by the gale force winds and then topped off with the several fluffy inches yesterday.
Snowflakes are beautiful and brutal. I think that’s what makes them great.
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So Many
We have collected an awful lot of pictures over the last few days. Everywhere we look there are captivating views. The photos our cameras are able to record hardly do justice, but that doesn’t stop us from trying. Here are a select few (as always, you can click the image for a larger view)…
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Relative Something 