So, I blinked and a whole week disappeared...

During the last week I have returned to my usual complement of meetings of the volunteer organizations I work in and, as well, I have been co-opted into a group of folk who are trying to provide tools for a civil debate in our upcoming municipal election.  Our township council has been split four to three for much of its last term and the result has been in-fighting, chaotic or no decision-making and a wild assortment of letters to the editor of our local paper.  This paper is published weekly and does not have a lot of space and so, in the interest of keeping a good thing going, I volunteered to run a 'forum' type blog for a while.

Although the group has decided not to endorse candidates openly, I am comfortable in giving advice to the people we think should win.  I have been editing letters and putting together election material, printing stickers and getting the publicity out for the blog.  Meanwhile, my camera has been sitting around, whining that no one is playing with (him, her, it?  Does anyone anthropomorphize a camera? And is is 'z' or 's'?).  Is that even a word?  By the time I finish putting a candidate's thoughts into succinct bullets, my brain is like jellied aspic.  The green kind, with marshmallows.  As we all know, marshmallows can't spell.

However, we did have another day of alternate rain and sun, and late in the afternoon the sun shone through the rain and I had a tiny rainbow in my front yard.  Alas that it did not photograph at all well.  However, the cold rain on the hot rock in the back produced lovely mist. 

041/365

I also got this.  Grasshopper floats in space.  Kind of neat, eh?

042/365

We have had a young pileated woodpecker squawking around the place for the last week or so.  It's at the stage where the parent is leading it to a food source, feeding it once and then leaving it to continue finding the food on its own. Over the weekend, the food source was the wild cherries ripening on the black cherry trees along our side yard. The youngster eats a bit, slips off the branch, yells for a bit, eats a bit more, moves to the tree trunk and tries to find a bug.    Having listened to the wretched bird yelp and squall and whine for mommy most of the day, I took my camera out onto the kitchen porch, cranked up the telephoto lens and got these results.

043/365, 044/365, 045/365, 046/365.

And if he isn't pretty, he sure is dramatic.