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Friday, September 12, 2008
I don't know how long it will last.
So, um, I started posting pictures in the View from Here photoblog again. Flickr is good for doing lots of pictures, but some photos just look so much better big, and with a dark background. And frankly, I'm feeling photographically inspired these last few weeks like I haven't in... a long time. I don't remember how long. There's an RSS feed there, which is great if you should happen to want to follow the blog of an unreliable person like me, because that way you don't have to load the page every single day just to see the same old image staring back at you.
Speaking of Flickr, I uploaded some canning photos today. Why, you ask? I'm not entirely sure, except maybe that I thought the jars looked so pretty. I did explanations of each post at Flickr, and I'm totally supposed to be transcribing right now, so I'll skip copying the explanations here and let you view them there if you're interested. Which you're probably not. Oh ho, Rachel, why do you ever blog when you're tired? It should definitely be a no-no.
Thursday, August 16, 2007
day 47 - imperial barbecue
The Star Wars fans in our household are not terribly fond of Ewoks or the Gungans (I can see their point, especially regarding the latter). Neither, obviously, are the storm troopers, the Emperor, or Darth Vader, as is evidenced in the Lego art installation created by my eleven-year-old son and preserved for posterity in this photo.
(You do get that those are flames under there, right?)
Wednesday, August 15, 2007
day 46 - leaves
Just a shot of some backlit leaves. I had walked to school, thinking it would be too dark on the way home to take pictures, but not able to stop and grab any on the way. But class got out (very) early, and on the way back home I saw these hanging over the path by the library.
Saturday, August 11, 2007
day 42 - baby possum
(other days are at flickr. I didn't blog them. I had a few other things on my mind. Plus I wondered how long I had to go without posting before nobody ever came here again.)
Another busy day. (I know. What a shock.) More packing, more schlepping of boxes to my parents' garage -- this time it was the entire contents of our overhead crawl-space, two truckloads full of stored baby memories and restoration parts for my husband's car and religious books and music books and who knows what all. In the midst of this, my daughter had a birthday party to attend; on my way home from dropping her off, I saw what I thought was a rat, behaving in a most un-rat-like manner as it crossed the road about fifty yards from my house. It was moving slowly, no skittering at all. When I parked the car I took my camera (of course) back to see what was going on, I found a BABY POSSUM crossing the road. I very nearly died of the cuteness, which is funny, because when they're full-sized, American possums are not cute [i]at all[/i]. Here he is, telling me he will CUT ME if I even THINK about getting any closer with that big black thing because he is a BIG BAD TOUGH GUYRODENT MARSUPIAL . As anyone can see.
Also, here he is looking more sedate.
And here he is in all his full-length hairy cuteness (he was pretty much exactly the size of someone's pet rat, just for scale.)
When I went back out later he was gone. I hope he's old enough not to need a mother, or that he found her, or she found him, or whatever.
Saturday, July 28, 2007
day 28 - barn rafters
This is the view from a storage room in the loft of the barn on the ranch where I spent most of my childhood, one way or another. My grandfather and his father built the barn in the very early 50's with their four hands and a Ford tractor. It was constructed to house a commercial egg ranch operation, which it did for a decade and a half or so, before my grandfather's heart condition required him to "slow down" (this was the advice they gave you in the 60's, none of this new-fangled 'go out and get some exercise' stuff), so he sold off the chickens and took up teaching school.
Anyway. This barn, aside from being a veritable breeding ground for the Hanta virus and possibly a rather unsound structure (see above re: built in 1950 with four hands and a Ford tractor; did I mention that they mixed the concrete foundation themselves with sand dredged from the creek, sand which you could scrape off of the bottoms of the walls with your bare hand even when I was a kid twenty years ago?), was one of the preferred play areas for my dozen maternal cousins and myself when we were children. This storage room was our playroom -- mice-infested mattresses and all -- and many was the hour we spent there, inhaling all manner of dust and organisms while playing House or War or whatever else popped into our heads. (It is my theory that these many hours of hanging out in such an unsanitary environment are the reason why my immune system is so robust today. Maybe I should open a spa there.) When I was a little older and I lived at the ranch, it was sometimes one of my jobs to come down and feed the (drastically reduced flock of) chickens and gather their eggs in the morning and evening; in the winter this meant it was dark, and even at the ripe, mature ages of eleven and twelve, tough country girl that I am and all, I had a phobia about the barn in the dark. So many shadows. So many creaky, unidentifiable sounds. The moment when I had to reach my arm in through the door and throw the massive switch that turned on all the lights in the place was sheer terror. One time my brother was with me -- here's the part that ties in with this picture -- and he wickedly whispered that I had better check the rafters before I went in, in such fear-instilling tones as only a big brother can master.
Confession: I'm thirty-two years old and, thanks to my darling big brother's words so many years ago, I still get a shiver if I have to be in the barn after dark, especially when the light from the flashlight bobs around these rafters from the feed room below.
Photographically speaking, this is far from perfect, and it's not square, but oh well. Maybe I'll reshoot it someday. If I can bring myself to go in the barn again after reliving all this, that is.
Thursday, July 26, 2007
day 26 - fire extinguisher
We were loading the truck with more auto parts this evening, in preparation for taking them to my parents' for storage tomorrow. One of the things we pulled out of the garage, which I had forgotten we owned, was this antique fire extinguisher. As far as I can tell, it's just a canister that would have been filled with fire-extinguishing powder, and you'd unscrew the top and pour it on the fire.
Hey, it's a lot more interesting-looking than the box full of MoPar power-steering pumps. I don't know how many power-steering pumps a guy really needs, but apparently, according to my beloved husband, it's a lot.
Wednesday, July 25, 2007
day 25 - air conditioned
I LOVE THIS OLD SIGN.
This sign, which I've wanted to photograph for a long time and finally did today when I was in the valley, has always made me a little bit sad. It's a relic from the days when Highway 99 was a two-lane highway and not an eight-lane freeway -- when a trip through California from north to south necessitated an overnight stay, or three or four overnight stays. To imagine it in its 1950's heyday, and then to see the motel in its current state (as a drug-addled "studio apartment" complex)... sigh. (Ask me if I liked the movie Cars.) There are similarly depressing leftovers from a bygone era in a lot of locations along 99. Sometime I'll take a photography trip, and get some more of them, before they're all gone.
Monday, July 23, 2007
day 23 - goodbye
LT built this fort entirely with his own hands, mostly when he was about 9, although he's added bits to it since then. Now that we have to move, he's been taking it apart very slowly; this was taken right before we did a pretty intense demolition session that left only the one main part of the platform standing. He's pretty philosophical about it -- he says when we get our own house, he can build a better one. Maybe even one that won't make Mom worry for his life and limbs every time he's on it. :)
Sunday, July 22, 2007
day 22 - turkey
We went out to my parents' today, to put some of our larger need-to-move items (read: car parts) in storage in their barn. They "have" a flock of wild turkeys on their ranch -- meaning the turkeys have chosen a tree in their backyard for roosting -- and Dad has taken to scattering chicken feed for them. Watching the whole crowd of them peck around the birdfeeders and bird baths meant for much smaller birds is quite funny. This particular hen was checking me out, making sure that neither I nor the black thing that seemed to frequently be attached to my face were going to harm her or her family, or -- heaven forbid -- take away any of their food.
Just basic normal processing on this, except that I cropped out a bright green (and hence very distracting) garden hose.
Saturday, July 21, 2007
day 21 - 36-inch
Today we traveled to the Lick Observatory, which we do at least twice most years. This time it was for the Summer Visitors' Program (read: we got to look through some of the telescopes instead of just looking AT them). It was my first time doing this, although the Ts have gone to this event three or four times. We had a lot of fun -- it was a lovely long drive (and when you can drive across California's central valley in July without A/C and still enjoy it, you KNOW it's a nice drive) and the viewing through the telescopes was just wonderful.
This is the observatory's 36-inch refractor (note: the measurement is the diameter of the lens, not the length -- it's more like 60 feet long). When it was built in the 1880's, it was the largest telescope in the world. In 1610 Galileo discovered four of Jupiter's moons; in 1892, scientists found the fifth one with this telescope.
Grainy, noisy photo, because it was very dim in the building.
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