Posts Tagged ‘photography’
Morning Shadows
Yesterday’s sunrise was fun to watch through the windows overlooking the lake, but it was the golden light hitting the walls inside and the shadows cast that triggered me to pull out my phone camera to capture images.
Day two of my assignment at the lake was even easier than the one before. Our contractor, Brad, didn’t take me up on an offer to help lift or carry anything, so it was another day filled with reading, writing, puzzling, sweeping a dusting of snow off the steps, streaming movies and TV shows, and finding ways to somehow make a respectable dent in all the food Cyndie sent up with me.
I looked up from my puzzle and spotted Brad loading a tall, old gas wall heater into his truck he’d uninstalled from Cabin 3. I have no idea how he got it off the wall and down all the stairs by himself. A short while later, he was hoisting the old gas range and oven onto his tailgate that he’d wheeled down on a two-wheel dolly hand truck. He is a very independent worker.
We are done dealing with the smell of micro-leaks of propane from the vintage appliances with no plan to replace them. (I apologize in advance to Thomas, who must cringe at the thought upon reading that sentence.) The small cabin isn’t winterized, and no cooking ever happens there these days. It makes a great overflow space for sleeping in the summer with multiple beds, a full bathroom, a refrigerator, and a kitchen sink.
Don’t know if I’m heading home this afternoon or tomorrow. I won’t complain if I get to stay one more day.
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Watching Steps
We now have just enough of a snow blanket to conceal areas where ice has formed from hydrostatic pressure pushing water to the surface. There is a short curve in our North Loop Trail that gets frequent use, and it has become rather precarious as a result.
When surveying the variety of tracks in the paddock, I noticed that the horses are keen about staying off Paddock Lake.
Yesterday morning, I was looking around the mound that protects the area where drain tile from the barn reaches the air. Just beyond that, a broad span of ice builds up from runoff. It is not entirely clear what happened there, but my first thought was to question why the horses would have risked walking on that mound of ice.
It looked like somebody had laid down there. My second perception involved the possibility it was an unintended lay down as a result of a slip. Yikes. Happily, none of the horses showed any sign of injury.
On the other hand, we do have Mia behaving unusually. She doesn’t seem like she is in any pain, but something seems different. She is more distant than usual and becoming more solitary, isolating herself from the others more than normal. We haven’t seen her drinking water recently, but she was eating more normally yesterday. There is no evidence to lead us to believe she isn’t drinking when we’re not around to observe.
Last night, Cyndie went out to check on Mia after dark. With the sky clear, the moonlight was brilliant and Cyndie took a picture of her in the hay field.
The streak of light is a passing car on the road.
We are hoping the warmer weather expected over the next few days will reinvigorate Mia and dispel any concerns about her overall health.
We would welcome a break from the nagging feeling there is something more we should be doing for her.
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Watchin’ Football
During halftime of the Orange Bowl college football semifinal playoff game last night, I switched to the weather channel and watched snow images in Little Rock, Arkansas. They were doing a feature listing all the ways people tend to get injured trying to clear snow.
They were telling kids in Memphis to be ready to make snowmen and have snowball fights in the morning. In a blink, they switched to a commercial warning about some moderate to severe affliction for which pharmacology wanted to sell solutions. That was my trigger to switch back to the football channel. There was a concert going on in the Hard Rock Stadium in Miami Gardens, Florida.
One fascinating feature of live team sports competitions is the aspect of momentum. It can be so easy to discern sometimes, especially when it really starts to roll. Oftentimes, it is the sudden shift in momentum from one team to another that causes it to stand out. The team that is on the wrong side of momentum appears helpless to stop the landslide of energy flowing against them.
As a fan, I feel frustrated when momentum goes against my team, and coaches, players, and fans all seem incapable of doing anything to interrupt it.
In last night’s football game between Notre Dame and Penn State, momentum swung around a couple of times. As one who watches games that don’t involve a team I support, I am inclined to multitask and rely heavily on instant replays to catch interesting action when announcers get riled up. That wasn’t working so well for me last night because the teams were running offensive plays so quickly that there was no time between downs for slow-motion replay.
I needed to start actually paying attention. I’m glad I did. That was one heck of a playoff game. Notre Dame fans enjoyed the ecstasy of victory in the end.
Cyndie received a quote on replacing the spoiler stolen from her car. They couldn’t find one from any of their scrap parts sources (which might explain why spoilers are a target), so they told her it would require painting, take a full day, and cost us almost $1000. It’s just so sad. The clips that held the spoiler in place broke when the thief pulled it off and will need to be replaced as well.
With the significance of the losses occurring for so many people in the California wildfires right now, the criminal damage we suffered is not something I should be whining about.
(In case you wondered, I threw in the picture of a window on the barn that I took yesterday for artistic effect. It doesn’t have anything to do with the football game, momentum, or the stolen CRV spoiler. The framing was just something that caught my eye.)
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Wild Sunrise
I thought the photo I included in yesterday’s post was an interesting sky but then I captured this view of the sunrise while feeding horses:
Just another day at the office for me.
And I gotta say, these four wonderful horses we take care of have been especially charming to be around lately.
Being a couple of old retired people, Cyndie and I took in a Tuesday matinee at the Hudson Theater to see “A Complete Unknown.” We both thoroughly enjoyed it. I feel sorry for the folks who got upset at the folk festival where Bob Dylan “went electric” in 1965.
It’s really wild to be reclining on the bed in the den with Asher sleeping on me one minute, and then after a mention of the movie idea from Cyndie, find myself sitting in front of the big screen an hour later. If I thought the horses were being charming, Asher is making a case that he is rather irresistible himself.
Timothée Chalamet had me thinking I was hanging out with a young Bob Dylan for a couple of hours there. I found Edward Norton as Pete Seeger to be wonderfully convincing. The movie had me wishing I could relive the unique experience of hearing these Dylan songs for the very first time like so many people in the film were depicted doing.
There are plenty of artists whose music doesn’t grab me until I’ve had time to discover and develop an appreciation for it. I tend to think that would have probably been my experience with Dylan’s early songs if I was old enough at the time to even know they existed. When he was all the rage in the New York folk scene, I was playing with toy trucks in the dirt outside or on the perfectly patterned floor rugs near the bay windows in our old farmhouse.
I do have a memory of hearing “Hurricane” for the first time in 1975 and being mesmerized by the way he told such a dramatic story within the captivating melody.
It’s kind of like looking up to unexpectedly find a fascinating sky at sunrise, unlike anything you’ve seen before.
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Waterway Scenery
Compared to the days and weeks before Christmas and New Year’s, the second day of the year was pretty serene around here. There isn’t enough news to fill barely a minute of a Garrison Keillor Lake Wobegon-style monologue. If you’ve never heard one of those rambles from the great storyteller, GK, look it up.
I wonder how long it will be until no one recognizes what I am talking about when I reference the old Prairie Home Companion radio show.
The highlight of my day yesterday was capturing a couple of photographs on a walk with Asher in the waterway along the southern border of our property.
When it rained last week, there was enough runoff to create some flow in the waterway, as evidenced by pools that froze over in low spots. The water beneath has since dried up, leaving a beautifully decorated layer of ice about the thickness of a skinny pane of glass.
I also paused to take a picture of a wonderfully constructed nest in a young oak tree we’ve been nurturing since discovering it.
The birds didn’t winterize this structure, but maybe they’ll return in a few months to put their summer home to good use.
That’s the extent of excitement around here yesterday. Oh, I suppose I could add the jovial visit from our “This Old Horse” rep, Johanne, who dropped off bags of grain for the herd and picked up a few bales of the hay that our mares don’t like. She has horses and mules that’ll eat it.
I spent time reading a Pierce County book about historical log houses and a bunch more newspaper editions from the 1870s. I haven’t come across any new details about my ancestors who lived here at the time in my recent reading, but every day, my impression of what life was like in this area back then becomes better informed.
As in, the sights I found in the waterway are likely very similar to what my great (and great-great) grandparents were seeing on walks in their days. Although, back then, they probably would have seen these things in November instead of January.
That’s yesterday’s news from the ranch, where the horses are strong, the meals are good, and Asher’s intelligence is about average.
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Precarious Footing
Yesterday afternoon, we received a wonderful surprise in the form of sunlight and a visible blue sky after days of being socked in by a persistent fog.
The view when we headed down to feed the horses was spectacular!
Too bad it didn’t last. Not long after darkness fell, my phone pinged with a weather service warning of dense fog again. With the large dose of moisture lingering after yesterday’s rain and the airborne water vapor coating surfaces as the temperature hovered around the freezing point, Cyndie found the driveway dangerously slippery when she snuck out to retrieve the feed buckets.
This morning, it is even worse.
The asphalt of the driveway was too slippery to navigate on foot, so we backtracked and cut through the side doors of the garage to get to the backyard for a route to the barn.
The horses were coping but didn’t look too pleased with the conditions either. The poor pigeons were having quite a time of it when they tried landing on the metal roof and couldn’t keep from sliding.
It will be a good day to stay indoors, where I can finish my next jigsaw puzzle and watch the Vikings/Packers matchup with a glowing fire in the fireplace.
That blue sky yesterday afternoon now feels like it was just a mirage.
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Fairy Flakes
Contrary to what is headed our way today, (…WINTER STORM WARNING REMAINS IN EFFECT FROM 3 AM THURSDAY TO 3 AM CST FRIDAY… * WHAT…Heavy snow expected. Total snow accumulations between 5 and 7 inches.) there was no evidence of precipitation visible on the radar yesterday. Yet, all day long there were perfectly formed snowflakes floating down out of the sky.
The beautiful flakes weren’t melting on the horses, which teased me to try getting some pictures. Unfortunately, none of the mares were interested in accommodating my attempts to zoom in close.
They didn’t want to stand still with me holding out my phone camera toward their backs. I don’t blame them. It did seem kind of creepy.
There were times when the clouds overhead were so thin I could see blue sky, yet those flakes kept falling. I decided to call them fairy flakes after the “fairy knots” that show up mysteriously in the manes of horses. These flakes didn’t appear to be coming from snow clouds, so fairies seemed like the next logical explanation.
I eventually noticed I could capture some of the crystalline flakes that landed on the surface of our frozen landscape pond.
If we are going to get a plowable amount of snow today, that will be too much to get a clear picture of one individual snowflake.
I mounted the plow blade onto the Grizzly ATV in preparation and pulled out snow shovels in advance of today’s activities. Wouldn’t you know it, Cyndie spent the night in the Cities after a holiday gathering with some friends. It’s probably for the best. I’d have let her help do some shoveling, and that wouldn’t look good on my record, putting her to work out in the cold so soon after her recovering from pneumonia.
Sure would be nice if there were such a thing as “fairy snow shovelers.”
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Relative Something 