It sure felt like I must have today. As the dogs and I went for our walk today, I’d swear it was late March. The sun shined in a cloudless sky
that reflected in large puddles
and patches of melting ice
At 45°F in glorious sunshine, I thought I must be taking an early-spring rather than mid-winter walk. We meandered our favorite path through mud and muck without complaint.
Teddy thought it a fine day for a stroll through the freely flowing stream, while I enjoyed taking this handsome collie profile with sun-sparkly water in the background:
The calendar did indeed say January 28, not March 28 when we arrived home. If this is Mama Nature’s way of perhaps righting some wrongs of last year, I will take it! Thanks, Mama, for a lovely day!
Can you believe Christmas is only 2 weeks away? The past few days have been a flurry of activity in preparation for the upcoming holiday. Many miles have been logged by hubby and me as we’ve gift shopped, Christmas tree hunted and made multiple trips to get what we needed for decorating. Had there been snow on the ground, a sleigh ride probably would’ve been more efficient! As we got busy putting up the tree, I put my iPod on Pandora and chose Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas” as my “station”. That’s one of my favorite Christmas songs. Want to see a clip of one of the cutest danceseverto that song? Okay:
Yes, that’s my Meghan, about 5 years ago. I wish I had video available to post of the whole dance – it was adorable.
Okay, ahem, sorry about that little diversion. I still have “Sleigh Ride” stuck in my as I heard it in many variations throughout the weekend, hence the title of my post tonight.
In the process of putting up the tree, we discovered that my favorite strings of red, white and green lights – alternating on single strings- were burning out and we wouldn’t be able to use them. This saddened me a bit because I have never been able to find exact replacements for them. We bought individual strands of red, white and green to help fill in a few years ago, but those weren’t working this year. I don’t know if it was the tree or us, but nothing we tried seemed to make it look right. Then Meghan offered to pop out lights from the 3 different colored strands and pop them back together to make 3 new strands of the type that I like. I sat down to help and got a lot popped out pretty quickly. Upon attempting put the lights back in, we discovered the different bulbs would not go on the other strings of lights! ARGH. We gave up and went and bought different lights. But not before Teddy had a chance to try out the decorations:
After much more work than it should have been – there were issues with the stand too **SIGH** – the tree was finally done:
That was yesterday. Decorating continued today with putting up my Christmas village. I told you about my village last year in this post. The village changes a bit each year in the pieces I choose display and how I choose to display them. I have two sections of village this year. The first section is my downtown/suburbs area:
This year I added a quiet “countryside” area:
When I get around to pulling out the tri-pod, I’ll show you some of the neat close-up details on some of these pieces.
My back is aching, and Christmas tunes are still playing in my head, but I feel very accomplished at the close of this weekend. My Christmas shopping is not done, but a large chunk has been taken care of, and the decorating is done. Unless I decide it’s not. I have another idea in my head, but time will tell whether I actually do it. We have a party to go to next weekend, and sometime in the next two weeks, this house needs some serious cleaning since we are the hosts of Christmas dinner. OH, and I still need to get my 4 seasons assignment for Scott posted!
I was going to write several posts tonight and schedule them for later in the week, but I don’t think the back is going to allow. Hopefully, I’ll get a couple more posts in than I did last week. I hope your holiday preparations are coming along nicely for you!
Scott’s assignment is due tomorrow – did you finish yours yet? Here’s my contribution.
We have been picking raspberries in my backyard for the past couple of weeks. My younger daughter Sarah has been going out and picking them faithfully, despite the fact that she doesn’t like them herself ( I know! Weird, huh?). One morning she brought in a huge berry, and it happened to be the day after Scott announced this assignment. I wondered if it would make a good showing scale photo. I compared it to a “normal” sized berry figuring most folks could probably make that connection:
(This shot was harder to get than I orginally thought! I ended up placing my camera on my deck railing, setting the self-timer, and using live view tried to arrange my hands in front of the lens. Even though I was out in bright sunshine, I needed a fill-flash so that the berries’ color looked right and so that my hands did not look like gray zombie hands!)
I wasn’t content with just this shot however. A new-to-me flower this year is bee balm. I’m doing my best to make my little hummingbird happy this year, so I planted this perennial this spring. I’ve been fascinated taking its photo as it blooms. I showed you its early stages in this post a couple weeks ago. Yesterday, I took this shot:
If you aren’t familiar with this flower, you really have no idea how big it is from this shot. I thought I could show some scale with this bloom:
Here it is with a dime in the center of the bloom. While I was setting up this shot, another idea occurred to me for a way to show scale:
And it gave me an excuse to show my handsome boy Teddy too!
“What kinds of things can you excavate that speak of these inner workings? Look for magic today. Of life. Of hope. Of beauty. Of all the wonder that is happening right under our noses.” These were the words of Ms. Clark today. Today in Western Massachusetts, we are having our first “real” snowstorm of the season. School was cancelled. I’d say there’s somewhere in the ballpark of 15 to 18 inches on the ground. I wondered, how, on a day like today, would I ever find something to go with Ms. Clark’s lovely words? Well, the excavation part probably wouldn’t be too hard, but I didn’t really think that was the type of photo the prompt was looking for. After trying several different ideas today, this is the picture I took today that pleased me the most:
Teddy got to be my sign of life. There was something about this shot of him lying in the middle of the snowstorm, taking it all in. Normally, Teddy is a very large force in our lives, but I think the perspective here makes him look small.
This is certainly the most snow Teddy has ever seen. All this after I was just blogging about how we rarely seem to get hit with more than a foot of snow around here. These shots were taken around 8:30 this morning and it is still going. I’ll be back later today with the photo prompt picture, when I figure it out, and probably more snow pictures. It’s a snow day today – no school for us.
Ahhhhhh…. a rare moment: I am home alone. Girls are each at friends’ houses, hubby is out working an extra detail. And what am I doing? The dishes stacked in the sink? Nah. Folding the laundry? Nope! I’m eating chocolate and writing a blog post! That’s a good use of my time, right? I thought so too.
“Watch out for the Blizzard of 2010! Winter Storm Adrianne is on its way! Ten to fifteen inches of snow!” the media screamed. I’ll believe it when I see it, I thought to myself. It did snow. And many areas, it appears, did get quite a bit of heavy, wet snow. Here in my little corner of the world? Maybe four inches. It is very hard to say because it was extremely windy. There are parts of the yard where the snow was blown much higher than 4 inches, but under some of the trees, the grass is still visible.
I took this picture yesterday from inside the comfort of my house while the wind howled outside. But look across the street there. See? Grass under the trees.
I live in what seems to be a somewhat protected little pocket of Massachusetts called the Pioneer Valley - at least here in the southern part of it. When storms rage across New England, other parts of Massachusetts often get piled on with snow. I could probably count on one hand the number of times this area has received more than 18″ of snow from one storm in the years since I’ve been married. The weather media is always threatening us with 10-12″ with an incoming snow storm. I scoff. I rarely believe them.
Although we did not get the predicted amount of snow, it was our first appreciable amount of snowfall this winter. The dogs have been happily romping through it and the girls and I went sledding today for the first time in a long time. It was also Andre’s first snow. I admit, however, to feeling lazy about wanting to go outside for pictures. I took a few (from inside the house) to mark the occasion for Andre.
Light, dry snow blowing up the road in yesterday’s wind.
The view from my favorite summertime spot, my deck. Yes, those are my dead mums still swinging in the breeze, and no, I didn’t get the garden hose put away before the snow came down!
Unlike me, Teddy doesn’t mind the chilly temps and cold winds we’ve been experiencing. He goes outside and lays down in the snow. With the winter coat he’s grown, I suspect he barely feels cold. I thought he looked rather handsome highlighted by the bright, white snow.
This photo leaves me with a question for those of you who’d be in the know. After my recent discovery of starbursts at a small aperture, I was curious about what a small aperture out in bright sunshine might bring me. The sun was still too high and too bright to try to make a star out of it, and I know some of the the shape and color here is known as sun flare. My question is, where did that perfect pentagon of sun flare come from? Does the shutter of the camera shut in that shape? Inquiring minds want to know! Please enlighten me if you are able.
ETA: I just tried out the video feature of my new iPod. Here’s a little clip of the dogs having fun in the backyard:
Observe relationships and capture a connection that makes you happy was the theme of today’s prompt. This wasn’t a difficult decision for me to make concerning my subject. Luckily, they complied with a shot that I thought fit today’s prompt perfectly:
Reminds you a little bit of that famous scene from Lady and the Tramp, doesn’t it?
I took about 30 shots in process of finding one to share for today’s prompt. Not all were well focused, but I thought enough of them were amusing enough to share a little slideshow, especially for dog-loving readers:
