Memory

This week's prompt is 'memory'.  With Remembrance Day tomorrow, what else could I post.

This is my father in the uniform of the Royal Canadian Navy Volunteer Reserve.  He joined in January, 1940 and was discharged in 1946, in pretty rough shape.  After a stint doing convoy duty across the North Atlantic in a corvette and a brief reprieve as an ASDIC instructor, he joined a destroyer as Executive Officer and ended up in the Mediterranean.  He never talked about his war to me or, I think, to my mother, but by the time my daughters were adults he could bear to tell them things.  This was a great joy to him as was his love for and pride in his grandchildren.

This is my father-in-law who joined the army in, I think, 1941 and fought his way through Italy.  After that he was in the Netherlands at the end of the war and the first weeks afterward.  He had some very amusing stories about the Netherlands, but not about Italy.  He was an artillery spotter in the Italian campaign.

Two wonderful men, gentle, thoughtful, intelligent.  Both scarred by their years of fighting.  Both able to carry on, look after their families, find happiness in the small pleasures of life.

Courage, and love of country, look like this.

Shades of Grey #2

I love to play with photos almost as much as I love taking them.  The 'grey' prompt is, for me, an invitation to get out the photo editor and have fun.

I do have another grey squirrel shot, though.  I was really torn between the two of them (see post below this one) but went with the other one as the model was in coffee pot mode.  This shot is at extreme telephoto, hand held.  I love my camera.

I hauled out several shots from earlier exercises and played with them.  Moved them to grey scale, inverted, played with the intensity and generally had fun.

102/365 inversion.  Should have cleaned the background here.

103/365 geranium.

104/365  pond scene

I also wanted to show you where the squirrel shots were taken.  Little Stuff and her dad have turned their back yard into a bird restaurant.  The squirrels, while not invited, are also ubiquious.

Shades of Grey #1

 101/365 Coffee Pot

Like a small grey
 coffee-pot,
 sits the squirrel.
 He is not

 all he should be,
 kills by dozens
 trees, and eats
 his red-brown cousins.

 The keeper on the
 other hand,
 who shot him, is
 a Christian, and

 loves his enemies,
 which shows
 the squirrel was not
 one of those.

Humbert Wolfe

Running Hard

I have just deleted a whole paragraph of whines about old age and too much to do.  I got tired of listening to myself complain to myself, if that makes any kind of sense.  Tomorrow I head off to the city to grandkid sit for part of the weekend, although not much sitting will be involved, I am pretty sure. Little Stuff and I are going to be making pies because the big fund-raising event at the local Community Hall takes place on Sunday.  It's called the 'Hunters' Dinner' because we hold it during deer hunting season - there are a lot of hunters and hunt camps around the area.  We feed over 300 people usually in a couple of hours, and we have a reputation for good quality pies and lots of them. 

There are lots of orange figures staked out through the bush this week and the four-wheelers are humming in and out of the hunt camp on the next lot over from ours.  I don't think they have any deer yet because no one has arrived on our doorstep with a dripping bag of liver  - JG told them we like liver and we have had a gift of one every November ever since those unwise words.  And I am having the annual attack of driving nerves I have every hunt season since I hit a spooked deer and crunched up the front of my poor Jeep.  (Okay, poor deer also.)

There are fewer deer visible this fall than during the last several years, but we still see them most days because we put feed and corn out on a rock at the bottom of our back field.  Here are three of them, looking hopeful.

096/365  I think this is a mom and two almost grown children.  We haven't seen a single buck this year.

Alas, it is November.  Frost and wet rain and wet snow and falling temperatures and dark, short days.  I find it hard to keep my spirits up until the Christmas rush overwhelms me and there is no time at all to brood.  I've been admiring other people's frost and first snow photos; here are my attempts.  Please don't notice that the planters are still on the porch and not cleared away until next year.

097/365 Please note the stylish snow tam Mr Pumpkin is wearing.

098/365  Flash frozen geranium close-up.  

099/365  Hoar frost.

I'm still also playing around with self-photos in my trifold mirror.  This one is a little better than the last try. 

100/365  Looking over my own shoulder.

Yahoo.  100.  I am now going to find out what the prompt is for the coming week.  And admire some of the other 365ers' work.  There's a link to the list in the upper right corner of the right column -- go and take a look.  Some of the work is truly excellent and all of it is fun.

Spooky

We went to Montreal over the weekend and I hopefully lugged my camera along, wanting a fine vista from Mont Royale and some last-of-the-autumn shots.  Rained out.  Sigh.

However, we dropped in on Little Stuff and her parents to help her prepare for her Halloween outing and eat pizza and I now, finally, have some photos of the jellyfish costume and her mother's classy spooky decorations for the great night.

As of this morning, I am told that the costume was a great success - she got a lot of compliments and interest - and candy, of course.  Which were deserved; she worked very hard to make it.


091/365 - the Jellyfish girl is admired by all.

092/365 A tour de force jack-o-lantern face.

093/365 Decorated for Hallowe'en

094/365 The full jellyfish rig.

095/365 bat light

She also had glow-in-the-dark face paint.  I have no idea how her mother got her cleaned up.