Posts Tagged ‘photography’
Puzzling Thoughts
There are hints in this transition toward the months of spending more time indoors than out, that jigsaw puzzling season is going to start very soon for me. The increased hours of darkness are a significant influence on my thinking, but I have also noticed lately that my photographic eye is trending toward images that deserve to be cut into a thousand pieces.
Maybe not each of those, but I’d enjoy a crack at assembling a puzzle out of the first one. I’m a sucker for the period when the seed plumes of our ornamental tall grasses show up and look a little like fireworks displays.
I started the day yesterday with a 6-month teeth cleaning appointment which is a necessary evil that isn’t all that fun to endure but feels great when completed. The day only gets better after that, even if the only real work undertaken involves managing the manure composting area.
It has been hard to keep the piles cooking lately. This time of year the composting process slows down, forcing me to move some piles before they have broken down as much as I’d like. It helps me to have as many piles as possible cleared out to leave plenty of space for dumping loads of frozen manure throughout the winter months.
This year we are still using the composted material to fill low spots around the edges of the driveway pavement remaining up by the house. It’s rare that I don’t have uses for the custom soil cultivated from our horses’ manure, but after the driveway landscaping is completed once and for all, I may be looking for a spot to stockpile accumulating inventory.
The horses never slow down their production, regardless of my finding new ways to put it to good use.
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Autumn Walk
The ground has started to dry up after the most recent soaking and the sky slowly grew sunnier and sunnier yesterday afternoon making for a particularly picturesque leash-walk with Asher.
Warm, however, was not how the air temperature felt.
I have no confidence that Asher is able to associate being confined once again to the leash with his recent rash of unacceptable sprints across the road to disrupt things at our neighbors’ but it’s the only solution immediately available in our bag of tricks.
The challenge it creates for us is finding ways to burn off some of his big energy with games and exercises in the house. He got a little wound up in the house but he was amazingly tolerant of being tethered every time we went out.
I thought this flipped-over oak leaf with the deep puzzle-shaped recesses was particularly eye-catching. I didn’t recall ever noticing leaves with this shape on tree branches. A few minutes down the trail, boom! There’s a small oak with the same shape of leaves. Doh!
The trail in the woods offered more mystical nature specimens, especially this classically shaped toadstool.
Had me looking for a troll sneaking around in the trees nearby, especially the way Asher was sniffing the ground.
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Side Views
Asher and I spent a little time out behind the house yesterday morning in the space that I think of as our “side yard.” It produced this collection of views that caught my eye…
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I hope these provide a sense of the beauty and tranquility that we are blessed to enjoy in our little paradise. Maybe not so tranquil for the burrowing rodents that Asher seeks to root out, but otherwise, heavenly in the fall, under majestic old trees on a bright, sunny day.
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Grass Gripe
While I have been toiling to prepare the dirt along our driveway and in the back pasture for grass seed, one thought keeps going through my mind. We are working hard to nurture grass seeds to germinate. 
Preparing the soil, distributing the seeds, raking the seeds into the dirt, spreading straw over the top, and watering the area in an effort to establish a carpet of green where previously there was none.
Meanwhile, grass has grown in front of our hay shed despite a total lack of effort from us to make that happen.
Over and over yesterday while raking, my mind reviewed the unlikely fact that grass seed falling from baled hay lands on the hardened gravel drive. The soil wasn’t prepared for seeds. We never watered that area. It gets too much sun. Vehicles drive over it. We don’t want grass to grow there.
Despite all the reasons grass should not sprout there, it has done so with unbelievable effectiveness.
It’s just plain wacky. It’s an imbalance in the universe. It defies logic.
Don’t mind me, that’s just a little grass gripe I harbor. Let’s end this post on a more positive note. How about a photogenic ground cover in the rocks just beyond our front steps?
Add to that a shot of the golden sunset Cyndie captured the other day:
Beautiful, no?
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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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Next Game
Occupying time while waiting a turn on the pickleball court, I took pictures.
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Lake life can be like this. I was told Cyndie had signed me up for a pickleball tournament the Wildwood gang announced. Someone said 4 o’clock. Steve and I made our way next door where various Whitlocks were congregating on the deck. As the appointed hour came and went, Steve and I decided to head down to the court. One of the Whitlocks went in for a nap, none of the others followed us.
One game was in progress when we arrived. They wondered aloud where everyone else was. Two of the current players had a dinner reservation at 5 o’clock, so they were done after the game in progress. The couple without dinner reservations stayed around to give us a game.
Steve and I won, 11-1. We immediately declared ourselves winners of the tournament.
Rumor has it a series of games are planned for sometime today. We will declare it a different tournament if that is the case.
Earlier in the day while I was floating on my back in the lake, an eagle showed up overhead. It circled over me at a surprisingly low height. It came around again and was so directly above me I pleaded for no poop. I kept my eyes on it as the circle descended into an attempt to grab a fish a short distance away.
No luck on that attempt. Rising from the water, empty-clawed, the eagle came around to perch on a branch in the large pine tree in front of our place. I wondered if there was an (admittedly anthropomorphic) element of embarrassment for not getting the catch but the whole spectacle was wonderfully majestic to see from such close proximity.
The eagle will no-doubt find success in its next game.
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Great Getaway
Let’s just say the lake place was sublimely beautiful when we arrived yesterday.
Downright picturesque.
Ideal breeze off the lake, comfortable temperature, and just a hint of fall coloring the landscape.
Topping it off, we received a wonderful report from home about Asher and the horses from our first-time sitters. Oh, and we had our favorite Coop’s pizza for dinner.
We are fully prepared to usher in a holiday weekend. Hello September and goodbye summer.
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Spidey Senses
If I were more industrious about capturing snapshots of the endless number of spiderwebs we encounter this time of year, I might luck out and do one of them justice. Alas, I find myself lamenting the shortcomings of my undisciplined methods when we happen upon a most spectacular specimen of a web but cannot get the iPhone camera I’m carrying to pick up the detail of light reflecting off the individual strands of silk.
Nothing I capture with a lens can compare to the real-life stereo-vision image that my eyes and head movement provide.
The time I came upon a small leaf that appeared to hover in the air on a single line of silk across one of our trails, I had to resort to recording a video and moving the phone around to show the leaf was “magically” floating in the air.
I took a crack at this web on the side of the barn because the lines reaching out to the ground were particularly interesting.
I ended up liking this picture more for the angle of the fence and background field, trees, and sky, and how they contrast with the repeating lines in the metal siding of the barn.
Still, I gave another try to get those strands to the ground.
Just doesn’t come close to what I was seeing with my eyes.
I sure hope all the spiders are feasting on flies around the barn. We are definitely noticing the lack of free-ranging chickens around here by way of the increased amount of nuisance insects since we paused keeping hens.
August isn’t over yet and here I am yearning for a good hard frost to kick off the season without irritating flies and mosquitos. A momentary lapse in my being fully present in the moment.
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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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Relative Something 