Bereft of Daffs

The daffodils have been busting out all over due to the crazy warm weather we had for the previous few weeks, except for here in my yard.  My daffodils are planted on the north side of my house, in the shadow of the house for most of the day, therefore they are the last daffodils in all of agricultural zone 5 to bloom I believe!

These are not my  daffodils.  In a “normal” spring, most folks’ daffies in this region begin to bloom in the beginning of April.  Mine are literal “late bloomers” generally popping out mid-to-late April.  I’ve been longing to photograph and share them – although at this point, they will seem  rather boring, I’m sure, since you’ve all been seeing them for a while now.  I couldn’t help myself, however, when I was at the Cape last weekend visiting my mother.

After we had lunch at Captain Parker’s Pub ,(I had some of their famous, award-winning clam chowder -mmmm!) I couldn’t help but take pictures of the flowers surrounding the restaurant.  My mom, daughters and sister waited patiently in the car while I grabbed a few shots.  There was even hyacinth:

Back at home, I’m still waiting for my daffies.  I had hyacinths too, but some underground critter helped itself to a meal of the bulbs a few years ago.

The forsythias in the neighborhood are blooming like crazy and I’ve really been wanting to photograph some, but I don’t have any on my property.  Same goes for dogwood and magnolia trees.  I’ve been trying to decide if there’s a place that I could take pictures of someone else’s and not look too creepy doing it, LOL.

My hybrid rhododendron azaleas have traditionally been early bloomers as far as rhododendrons go, but to have them budding in March I think is a record for them.  The buds on it are in various stages right now.

Some of the buds that were a little further ahead aren’t faring so well in the return to more normal March temps.  We had some nights this past week that went down to the 20’s.  I’m sure that was a bit of a shock to flowers that had experienced 70’s and 80’s just a short time ago.

I looked back in my archives, and found this photo from April 30th last year:

That makes these blooms almost a month ahead this year.

Hubby and I are headed to a wedding later today.  I can’t help but feel a little sorry for the bride.  After almost two weeks of above normal temperatures and sunny skies, today’s forecast is for a high of 48° and on and off drizzling rain and wet snow.  I guess that’s the chance one takes planning a March 31st wedding.

I’m hoping to get April’s photo hunt list posted tomorrow.  I’m still trying to come up with ideas for the list.  If you  have any suggestions, please feel free to leave them in the comments.

Quick Hello!

Hello friends! It has been a while since I’ve posted, but I want you to know I’ve been thinking of you! I didn’t get to do my usual weekend catching-up with blogging – visiting, commenting or posting. That’s because I’ve been here this past weekend:

I did take a few pictures this weekend, but I won’t have the time to review them and post tonight because this starts tonight:

It is starting in just a few minutes as I type!  Hope you had a great weekend and I hope to catch up with you soon!

Happy Spring!

Spring officially starts in less than 4 hours as I am typing this post.  It has sure felt like spring in most of the country for a couple weeks now.  I’m not complaining!  I’ll jump on the band wagon and share a few fun signs of spring from my little part of the world.

Lilac bud

Daylily sprouts

Chives sprouting in my herb bucket

My bare feet!

See ya later!

Pickity Abstracts

Time is running short to get an entry in for Scott’s current assignment.  I took advantage of our visit to Pickity Place (fabulous food as always!) to look for some natural abstract photos in the gardens that surround the restaurant.  Here’s what I was able to find:

This last photo isn’t abstract at all, but I definitely thought worth sharing.  Dessert from yesterday’s Pickity luncheon:

Thoughts on a Friday

It’s Friday afternoon.  I feel like writing a blog post.  I’m going to do what Kathy tells me to do when I’m blog-blocked.  Just start typing and see what happens.

I started doing what I normally do when I want to write a post and checked through my pictures. Sometimes I find something that sparks a memory of something I meant to blog about, but never got around to it.

I found some food pictures that I think I meant to share with you and tell you about something fabulous that I ate.  I’m not sure, maybe the food wasn’t so fabulous?

I found some pictures that I took in hopes of completing Scott’s current assignment, but none of them moved me. **sigh**  I kind of like this one that I took quite a while ago:

but we’ll see if I can do better.

I considered creating one of my silly animal conversations with pictures of cardinals,

but my humor/wit doesn’t seem to be flowing concerning Mr. & Mrs. C’s possible domestic situation.

I thought about flipping through some photo albums (yes REAL photo albums,  not on the computer) and trying to recall some funny story from my early days of motherhood to tell.

That would require pulling out the photo albums, finding the ones from the mid-to-late 1990’s, plucking the photos from their carefully nestled positions in the albums, hauling my clunking old scanner up from the basement, connecting to my laptop, scan the photos, put them back, put the the photo albums away.  It’s Friday!  Nope, didn’t want to do it.

I considered mentioning that it is only one month until we leave on our cruise and blathering on about how excited I am and how I went to see the travel agent today to ask a bunch of questions and about how I’m even excited to start my “electronic check in” procedures on Carnival.com, but I thought who’d want to read about that? (oops, I kind of did that anyway didn’t I?)

I could blog about the fact that we are off to Pickity Place once again tomorrow, but how many blogs have I written about that?

Many of my favorite blogs, including Robin’s and Holly’s, have been proclaiming the joys of early spring and showing lovely signs of it.  It’s about time I took a stroll around my yard to find some of that myself,

but today is a bit drizzly and cool (funny to be calling 50° cool at this time of the year, but that’s how it feels after the week of 60’s and 70’s we’ve had) and not inspiring me to go poking around outside.

So what happened when I started writing a blog with no plans?  I think I just wrote my first blog about not blogging!

Fly Like a…

Time keeps on slippin’, slippin’, slippin’

Into the future

Time keeps on slippin’, slippin’, slippin’

Into the future

I want to fly like an eagle

To the sea

Fly like an eagle

Let my spirit carry me

I want to fly like an eagle

Till I’m free

– Steve Miller

This isn’t an eagle, of course.  It’s a hawk: red-tailed, Cooper’s or Sharp-shinned, I’m not sure.  That classic song by the Steve Miller Band came to mind this afternoon while I watched this beautiful bird in the clear, blue sky.  Every time I see one of these gorgeous birds of prey, I’m drawn in.  I breathe deep, appreciate and try to imagine what it must be like to soar so freely above.

The days do keep slipping away, the future at our doorstep.  Have I become all I will ever be or does the future have more in store?

Some days, I really do want to be just like that bird, free to be whoever I want to be.  Free to explore, off into the blue.

How it seems…

Saw this “Rhymes with Orange” comic in Thursday’s paper and knew I needed to share!  I love Hilary Price’s funny insight on the basics of life.

As I’ve said before, the number of blog hits that I get don’t really matter to me, but I do love knowing I have faithful readers.  I love the interaction of the comments section – I’m truly grateful for those of you who take the time to leave one.  I think WordPress’s new feature of letting you know that someone replied to your comment is pretty great – and if you leave me a comment, you will almost always get that notification from me! Have you seen this feature?  It looks like this when you are signed in to WordPress:

If you haven’t noticed it, the little orange number in the upper right corner of your screen alerts you to comments, replies and “likes.”  I didn’t have any unread notifications at the time I decided to write this post, so I did some editing with my “mad skillz” (LOL) in Paint.  But you get the idea!

This feels strange for me, writing a blog post with no photos to share with you!  Hopefully that situation will  change very soon.  By the way, if you haven’t seen it yet, Scott’s got a new assignment posted for this month that should definitley give you some shooting ideas.  I know I need some.

 

Caw-cawphony

As I stepped out of the shower this morning, I was surprised by the sound I heard outside the closed-tight window.  It sounded almost like a strong wind, which I thought strange since I knew a mild day was forecast.  The end of my shower coincided with the official sunrise time for my area, 6:14 am today, and I peered through the blinds to see if the trees appeared to be swaying to-and-fro.  Barely a rustle of the branches was visible.

Still quite curious about the sound I was hearing, I quickly toweled off and dressed and went out to the sliding glass door to the deck for further investigation.  The large group of blackbirds that distracted me from my chores recently, appeared to have taken roost in the trees of the neighbors’ properties.

Once again, my lens was not powerful enough to allow me to see what type of birds these were, but I’m going to assume they were grackles and red-winged blackbirds like the last time.  I was so astounded that a group of birds (many more than are pictured here) was able to make enough sound for me to hear through my closed bathroom window, I decided to try to record it for you with the video camera on my iPod:

Any birders out there able to confirm the identity of the blackbirds from the song?

Whatever type of bird they were, I can’t help but think it is a sign of spring to hear birds greeting the dawn! 🙂

ETA: Wow!  The amount of birds I saw this morning was NOTHING compared to what I just saw as I was driving my daughter to dance class!  I pulled over into a parking lot and took this little video because I was having trouble believing the amount of birds that were in front of my eyes.  Sorry about the quality of the video since the sun has just set, but you’ll get the idea!

Leaping into March

If February hadn’t had an extra day this year, we would have gotten out of it without any accumulating snow.  As it happened, a large storm pushed its way across the country, and arrived here in the early afternoon of February 29th.  It wasn’t too big by the time it got here, leaving us with only a few inches of snow, which are currently melting away on this rainy day, with temperatures promised to get up to 50°.  Since I may not have many opportunities for this type of photo  this year, here’s a few pictures of our little storm:

I’ve found a new bird feeder problem this winter.  Some of you may remember my tribulations with the “squirrel-proof” feeder last year.  I replaced the broken feeder this year with glass and copper feeders.  Twice now I’ve come home from work and found them unscrewed from their hooks and lying, mostly empty on the ground.  The problem this time around seems to be a pack of grackles; so many of them land at a time that their weight gets the feeders swinging and they come unscrewed. I wrote last year about not having a problem with this so-called nuisance bird, but now I’m starting to understand.  Each time I fill the feeders, a group of about 20 birds flocks to the seed, and bullies away many of the smaller birds.  I’m wondering if changing the location to my back deck would help at all.

I took the feeders down, and this morning, Mrs Cardinal showed up on my window sill looking in.  She seemed to be saying, “Hey Lady!  Where’s the seed?”

If anyone has any bird feeding suggestions that won’t cost me a fortune in seed, I’d be happy to hear them.

I also took the opportunity to try a few macros while the flakes were coming down.  I got out the extension tubes and the tripod, put a black glove out in the snow, and this is what I managed:

Those are extremely cropped shots; the extension tubes don’t allow me to get that close.

Just for fun, here’s a couple shots of Teddy and Daphne having a grand time in the snow:

“Hey Daphne, whatcha doin’?”

“Rolling in the snow, of course!  You should try it! It feels great!”

“Oh yeah?  How’s this feel?  Get up and plaaaaayyyyy!!”

“Teddy!  Ugh, little brothers can be such a pain!”

“GetupGetupGetupGetup!!!!!!”

“Alright, alright, already!”

The result of this little storm was a delayed start to our school day the next morning.  Everyone knows how much I love those!  So far, March is kind of coming in with a whimper rather than a lion’s roar.

We’re off to a Mardi Gras party this afternoon (yes, we’re aware Mardi Gras was more than a week ago). I hope you all have a great weekend.