Lawn Ornaments

Some people decorate their lawns and gardens with statues, gazebos, painted truck tires with flowers in the centre or motorcycles pasted with 'For Sale' signs. Our back field, which JG mows and I guess should qualify as a Very Large lawn, is decorated, this summer, by a doe. We see her (I am just guessing that it is just one her, but the behaviour is characteristic) almost every day. She checks out the feeding station, nibbles with more or less enthusiasm at the plants in what used to be my rock garden, and reclines here and there on the mown grass, ears twitching. She is very decorative.

The header photo shows her, with a lot of editing, wandering in the dusk. The editing was necessary because the light when I shot this was pretty poor and I got a blue cast on everything. It will do until I get a better one. Although, I do have a lot (erm, far too many) deer-on-the-grass photos. A disciplined photographer would purge.

Over the last week or so she has been joined, from time to time, by a turkey and twice by a small and somewhat nervous varying hare. Or two; the hare size varied. It is more than a bit distracting, actually, as I should be getting on with the housework instead of peering out the windows.

If one must self-isolate, it is surely a fine thing to be able to do so here.

Of Time and Tides of New Baby Leaves

A little while ago I saw a blue jay perched on a branch of a birch tree. There was soft sunlight turning the new leaves to shining green but the jay was, in the shadow of the trunk, soft blue gray. It was a painting in the making. In fact, all around me the last few days have brought incipient paintings, the green gold of the flowers on the sugar maples, small keys forming a halo around each branch, the muted red madder of the red maple flowers, soft cream and pink of the hawthorn bushes, silver gleam of the tiny oak leaves, just barely visible. There is green of every describable colour and some shades so pale, so transient, that they are barely there. A camera would not capture them, but paint might.

Down in my basement drawers is a box of oil paints, an easel, stretched canvas. I haven't touched them for a long time, occupied and preoccupied as I am with my volunteer work, my computer (haven't been posting lately, but I am inspired to do better), my bulbs, the yard and garden, changing the winter clothing for summer weight, spring cleaning urges. ( JG had a spring cleaning urge yesterday and sorted all his clothes, getting rid of a huge number of garments he had not worn for years. A shirt and trousers boasted Eaton’s labels; Canadian readers will know this store has been closed for well over a decade.) But I could paint today. If the tubes of colour were still good. If I weren't writing about it instead of doing it. If the windows were all clean. If there were not raspberry canes laughing at me in the iris bed. No, not today. But sometime soon.

I think, from time to time, how the immediate tasks and preoccupations seem to take over from the long held, the dearly held, things we want to do. The immediate necessity pushes in, shoving other things further back. At one time I thought that when my children were grown, when I stopped working for a salary, I would have so, so much time. Free, unencumbered hours to spend as I wish. And I do have time. I don't manage it well. I do not fill the unrelenting hour with even thirty minutes' worth of distance walked. I read, I watch the birds, I putter at household tasks that could be accomplished in half the time it takes me, stopping to check out a newly arrived grosbeak at the feeder or what Time has to say about the Wedding. It feels luxurious to do things this way. But it's sure not efficient.

Those of us who have raised children and managed a household and worked outside the home at the same time did not have the luxury, while doing so, of being 'in the minute', of pausing to admire a blue jay on a branch, of reading the magazine as soon as it arrived in the mail. Children need, as a matter of immediate necessity, the meal should be somewhere close to being on time, the man is out of clean socks (as are the children, for that matter), there are so many urgent tasks, deadlines, voices calling. Now that there is no stress in my life that I do not create for myself, I treasure the luxury of putting off, I give myself permission to loiter and look and dream.

I might enjoy the birds more, though, if I could see clearly through the kitchen window. 

 One of a host of golden daffodils.

 There is a carpet of dutchman's breeches in the woods

 JG and Shammy investigate windstorm damage

 Shammy investigates the dutchman's breeches

 Crunch.  One of the mature maples the wind pushed over.

Last three photographs courtesy of the YD.

Spring is Whooshing In

There is a mad April wind whirling around the yard, melting the snowbanks as I watch (and revealing lots of stuff I will have to police off the grass), whipping the trees to frenzy, drying the mud and the YD's dog's bed.  As the clouds race by the sun flickers, strengthens, pales to shadow and returns.  And here I am at the computer.  Still. Again.

About the dog bed?  We are dog sitting again.  The YD's dog is a sweet but contrary 'Doodle' mix, with a long, wavy white coat and a puzzled expression.  She moves from the inner city where there is no yard for her and all her expeditions are supervised walks to our acreage where she can go and do what she pleases.  What she pleases seems to encompass, mostly, staying outside. 

She refused to come in last night and so we put her bed and water out on the front porch for her.  The edge of the porch is mostly shielded by a big roof overhang, but last night the rain blew in and when I looked out this morning there was a wet dog, a wet bed and, to make everything perfect, evidence on her no-longer white sopping wet fur that she had stuck her head into the bottom of the incinerator.  She had the grace to look sheepish - wet sheepish at that.
Her majesty finally deigned to come back inside about noon and I am now letting her dry off before tackling her with a brush and carding comb to see how much mud I can remove.
Meanwhile, I have stuff done for my Thursday meeting, but not for two of the three I have scheduled for tomorrow.

Pause there while some dog brushing took place.  I got some of the muck off - I now think she may have rolled in something lovely and muddy, but there is definitely soot in there too.  Luckily she likes being brushed. The dog hair blows downwind as fast as I brush, and I envision some deliriously happy bird or small animal lining a nest with it in due course.

The lids all just blew off the trash containers downstairs.  This is a strong wind.  And, yes, it is a west wind.  The birds are not crying, however.  I suspect they are hanging on to branches with beak and claw, muttering to themselves.

Playing In the Middle

184/365.
This is one of the shots I took for the 365 project a while back.  it was bland and uninteresting but has become a lot more fun with the contrast enhanced and the gamma twiddled.  (How professional I do sound, I don't think.)  It was, though, supposed to be shot right down the gap between the red wine glasses and I blew that.  So, 'not in the middle' might be the better title.

I use Corel's PhotoPaint to edit photographs.  It is an immensely complicated program and I have never mastered all of its features, but it is a lot of fun.  The rose I have just put in as the blog title photo has been altered with one of the 'Effect' choices in PP.... it's called 'ZigZag', for obvious reasons.  You can also choose to apply the effect of a conté crayon or watercolour or many other artistic choices, or make the surface look like bubbles or stained glass, and on and on. I can play for hours, alas.

A while back I was whinging about organizing my photos.  I picked up a copy of Corel PaintShop Photo 2010, but I'm not impressed with it.  Too complicated and some of the features are not obvious (like applying tags.  Ggggrrrrr).  A couple of days later I was poking around in Blogger where I was offered a free download of Version 3.8.0 of Picassa 3.  The download only took a few minutes and when I activated it I found the best picture sorter I have ever seen - at least, for my purposes.  Unlike PaintShop Photo, you are not stuck with using trays (although you can), the red eye fixer is stellar and, best of all, the program organizes photo folders by date taken but also retaining the label I gave to the folder when I created it.  This mirrors the way I think, unlike the Adobe organization tree that doesn't, and I find it fantastically easy to use. 

It also cranked up all on its own (a bit disconcerting) and did face recognition on all my photos, with an easy to use labelling system for the faces.  Excellent quality recognition, best I have ever seen.  Once this was finished, the result gave me a good indication of how many doubles (and triples and quadruples) I have among my picture folders.  And what a lot of photos of my grand daughter's smiling face I do have.  Best of all, if you double click on any thumbnail, an option comes up that allows you to identify the exact folder where the thumbnail originated.

This software is so easy to use that I am now gearing up and sorting and cleaning up all (almost 1000) photos I took on our trip out west last spring.  I am doing the flowers first, and am going to use some of the edited shots as 365 material, since editing and labelling can be a big part of photography.

185/365  This is a shot of a bunch of California poppies taken last May not in California (although we were there) but in a park along the Columbia River in Oregon.  The flowers were ubiquious throughout our drive along the coast and they are spectacular.  This one was in the middle of an island in the road into the park.  The rest of the grass had not greened up around them but there they were and aren't they glorious.  Contrast enhanced and cropped.

Olio

I have been trying to get the photo a day thing under control and have ended up with this weird, weird mixture. 

037/365.  Summer Rain.

The object was to get the raindrops as close to in focus as possible.  ISO up as high as it would go.  Alas, the result looks more like snow.

038/365  Puddle.

Our deck railing is made from slightly cupped 2 x 6's.  I took a whole series of these and none of them worked all that well.  Hard to decide where to focus and not enough light to get an infinity focus.

039/365  Corners
I am still playing with the porch screen and light effects.  Here I like how the pine branches look through the shadowed part of the screen.  Note that the weather has improved.

040/365  September 2nd.
The first hints of fall colour in the stressed trees (water levels are high in the ponds because of a lot of rainfall).  The white stuff all over the water is seed fluff.

I am thinking that I may do a series of vegetation shots, maybe from a set point, to document the colour change this year.  I've got a pretty full calendar for September and if I take my camera with me (anyone have a way to permanently attach the camera to the dumb, forgetful photographer?) it might work out.

Love this project, I really do.  I am putting up failures as well as successes because that is what makes sense to me.

Along the Roadside

Maybe you have heard of purple loosestrife?  It was originally a garden flower but it escaped from captivity and did so well in the wild that a few years ago it threatened to choke native growth out of the damp boggy ground it prefers.  It was declared a noxious weed and people devoted their spare time to uprooting it.  Finally a bug was identified that would eat it and not cause even more harm to the environment, the bug was released and the infestation has been reduced.  There is still a lot around, however, especially in my Canadian shield environment where boggy ground and stream sides abound.

What the worriers missed, in my opinion, is that purple loosestrife is beautiful.  Even one clump packs a punch; and seen against a green or blue background, with other flowers for contrast, it makes spectacular scenery.  And so, to finish up the 'bold' keyword, here are three photos of a wetland near my home.

022/365

023/365

024/365

All of these were taken using autofocus - it was really windy this morning and the vegetation was doing a lot of bending and waving.