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Wednesday, March 27, 2019

SPRING IS OFFICIALLY HERE ~~ FINALLY, A HALF-DECENT ONE ~~ WHAT A DIFFERENCE A WEEK MAKES ~~ ARTY PHOTO OF THE WEEK ~~ PARTING SHOT

SPRING IS OFFICIALLY HERE


It is now officially Spring in Yakima because the crocuses are in bloom. They are the first things to bloom each year, and we impatiently await them after the long, colorless winter. Linda got this picture last Wednesday, as the snow was quickly melting away. 


FINALLY, A HALF-DECENT ONE


This past week we had the appearance of the last Super Moon for 2019. It has been cloudy in Yakima lately so I figured we wouldn't get a chance to see it. But, as luck would have it, it was clear that night, so I made a spur-of-the-moment decision to try and get a picture of it. Every other time I have taken a moon shot, it just turned out to be a white blob. This time I finally got a picture which you can tell is of the moon. It's not the best in the world because I should have had my camera on a tripod with the remote shutter release. But it was a quick decision to even try, so I didn't have time to do all that. I am still proud of this picture, and hopefully next time I can do better.

That's no moon...LOL

WHAT A DIFFERENCE A WEEK MAKES


This past Saturday we decided to take a walk over at Randall Park again to see the ducks and geese.  We were out and about that morning so it was kind of on our way home.  It was a very different scene that greeted us compared to just a week before.

Top picture taken 03/16, bottom taken 03/23

The snow had completely disappeared. I knew it had been warm, but I didn't think the frozen-over pond would be totally thawed out, yet it was. The critters were very much enjoying it.

Spring was definitely in the air because there was a great fuss the entire time we were there. I think the younger geese and ducks are pairing up right now, getting ready to set up household on the pond. This couple below was one of the more vocal pairs.



We have noticed when we went to Randall Park in the dead of winter, it seemed like there were way more ducks there than geese. This time, it was the opposite. It's almost like the geese came out of the woodwork! I got some really great shots of them. The first photo is especially nice because you can see the water drops beading up on the goose's feathers. I am not familiar enough with Canada Geese to be able to tell the male from the female, so I don't know which this one is.

Those white specks are water, not dandruff

Here are some more pictures of the geese, along with a sleepy mallard.











ARTY PHOTO OF THE WEEK


I haven't had one of these in a while, and I think it's about time. Linda takes the spot this time with her beautiful photograph below of the view in front of her. This monochromatic shot of the dry grass, fluff from the trees, and a couple of leaves is absolutely stunning. A study in brown.



PARTING SHOT


Summer Girl has been in and out, in and out all morning. The snow is gone and it looks beautiful outside, but once you get there it is still quite chilly. She's having trouble making up her mind whether she wants to be outside in the cold, or inside on top of the big bed. Guess which option won out.



This week's blog is a bit shorter than usual because I'm struggling to type. I injured one of my fingers yesterday and it's really hard typing with only 9 of them! I'm hoping it will be better as time goes on. Join me again next week to find out!






Wednesday, March 20, 2019

AT LONG LAST... ~~ LOOKING BACK ~~ PARTING SHOT

AT LONG LAST...


Spring is finally on the way!  We have had our last significant snow for this season, although I'm not ruling out the chance for a random flake or two. The piles of snow have mostly melted by now due to the very welcome 50 and 60 degree temperatures we have been having.

When it starts to turn warm here, all we want to do is get out of the house. Saturday we decided to do just that, so we headed to Randall Park with another bag of cracked corn for the ducks and geese. Other birds are welcome to it, too, but I'm not sure the duck and geese are willing to share.

As soon as we pulled up in the truck, a number of ducks came over to greet us. They didn't follow us as we carried the bag of corn over to an area where the snow had melted. We cut open the bag and dragged it around to disperse the corn. Immediately the ducks were there on top of it, celebrating the Cracked Corn Festival, denoting the impending arrival of Spring.



Those African Geese sure are noisy, you can certainly tell when they arrive. While they were eating the corn, there was a large white goose hanging around the male African Goose. She took a nip at the female African Goose at one point. I told Linda that the male must be having an affair with that white goose.

It doesn't take them long to gobble up a whole 40-pound bag of cracked corn. We love standing there and just watching them. They don't seem to be afraid of us. I snapped this picture below while this beautiful couple of Mallard ducks were eating right in front of me.

Mallards

There was still quite a bit of snow around on that day, but in the time between Saturday and now on Wednesday, I bet most of it is gone.

Still snow around the park

It was around 32 degrees when we were at the park, but we were glad to see that part of the pond has thawed out. The ducks and geese were enjoying taking a dip that morning. I caught a couple of Canada geese coming in for a landing.

Perfect 3-point landing (2 feet & tail)

I decided to try to get some in-flight pictures of the birds because I always admire the beautiful in-flight shots that my friend Alyssa Davis takes (check out her Facebook page View From My Window Photography). I managed to get a few that weren't too bad (examples above and in slideshow below). I adjusted my shutter speed to 1000 to be sure to freeze the motion. It worked out pretty good, if I do say so myself.

While at the pond area I watched several ducks up on the shore. In this picture below, you can see why the female Mallard has the coloring that she does. It does a good job of helping her blend in with the surroundings, so that she is pretty well hidden when she is sitting on her nest.

Can you spot both females?

At one spot in the pond the ducks had left their footprints in the ice. It made for an interesting photo.

Ice prints

I made a quick, two-minute slideshow of some of my pictures below. Although I would love to claim the music on this video as mine, it isn't. I used the music that came with the iMac Photos program. It seemed to fit the mood very well.



One last video to finish out our visit to the park. This little guy decided to take a stroll on the ice to get from one side of the pond to the other. (This video uses a percussion "loop" that I found on GarageBand).


LOOKING BACK


Since I have so many pictures that I transferred over from the PC, I thought I would start a new feature to include some of them in the blog. I'm not sure if I will put this in the blog every week, but it will pop up from time to time, depending on how long the blog is that week. This week's "Looking Back" picture was taken probably around 1976. It shows me with my first "real" camera, a Minolta XE-5. I absolutely loved that camera, it took the best pictures and was so easy to operate. Little did I know back then what cameras would become in the future. And little did I know that EVERYBODY (almost) would have one with a phone attached to it.

Is that really me?

PARTING SHOT


With the advent of warmer temperatures, Summer Girl has been spending more time outside (sometimes reluctantly). Linda managed to catch her waking up from a short nap in the sun, and grabbed this shot below.

My, my, what a big mouth you have!


That's all for this week, friends. Please check me out again here next week!


Wednesday, March 13, 2019

PROJECT FINISHED! ~~ MY NEWEST OBSESSION ~~ PARTING SHOT

PROJECT FINISHED!


We had what I hope was our last snow for this winter in Yakima on Monday night. The temperatures immediately went up and things have started to melt. Hopefully Spring will not be far behind. It will still be cold here for another couple of months, but nothing like what we have had the past two months.

I have finally finished the computer project of transferring videos and pictures from the PC to the Mac. I had to go through 5,817 pictures and 701 videos, but I whittled it way down to a fraction of that. As you can probably guess, I had an abundance of pictures of birds and flowers, but I transferred only a few of those. In the end, what really matters is your pictures and videos that include people. I had such a good time going through all of them because it brought back so many wonderful memories.

A few years ago, Linda and I set up a slide projector in our spare bedroom and I projected all of my Daddy's slides onto a whiteboard and took pictures of them with my camera. The slides had been stored for years in a box, first in our shed in Lumberton and then in our garage in Yakima. So they had been subjected to a lot of temperature extremes. I decided to get them into some kind of digital media so they wouldn't deteriorate anymore. This was the easiest (and cheapest) way to do it, and I must say it turned out better than I thought it would.

Since I have been working on transferring the pictures to the Mac, I took the time to crop, adjust, and retouch all of the slide pictures. I got a few comments last week from people saying that they really enjoyed the old photographs, so I will most likely be including a few in future blogs. Below is one of those pictures that had a lot of dark splotches on it. I was able to retouch the digital version to get a pretty good picture. You can still see the smaller spots, but I was able to get rid of the bigger ones. This is a picture of my mother and father. Check out that tie. Snazzy!

My parents, taken in 1940's

Fast forward a few years to this picture below, probably taken around 1954. I am on the left, my sister is in the middle, and our cousin Rob is on the right. We were quite a gang back then, when we were little.

Original gangsters

Taken a few years later, the picture below shows my sister and me in front of what we always called "the pink house." My father loved the color pink, so he had the whole house painted pink with a red front door. Needless to say, it stood out from all the other houses in the neighborhood. You can tell that the hot summer sun on that pavement was burning our feet, because we are both holding one foot up as much as we can.

Our car, with gangster sidewalls

I cherish these pictures of the old days. It's the only way we have of traveling back in time, at least until someone invents a time machine. So I would like to urge everyone to take as many pictures you can of the people in your life. You (or your descendants) will one day be glad you did.


MY NEWEST OBSESSION


I don't think I've mentioned lately how much I love being retired. For years I looked forward to retirement because it would enable me to do things that I just didn't have the time (or the inclination) to do while I was working. Since I got the new computer, I have been busy working with pictures and videos. But the other day I discovered a program on the Mac called Garageband. I decided to check it out and I am so glad I did! It is a music generating program. I was glad to happen upon it when I did because I had recently been searching the internet for music to accompany my videos. Any music I used would have to be "royalty-free" so I wouldn't have to worry about being sued for not paying for the rights to use it. However, most of what is out there for free is terrible. When I discovered Garageband, I thought to myself, "I could create my own music for videos!"

Basic Garageband setup

Easier said than done, though. It has been decades since I picked up any kind of instrument or even attempted to read music, so to say I am rusty is an understatement. Still, I jumped right in and using my computer keyboard as a "piano" of sorts, I managed to knock out a decent little composition to go along with my "Icicles" video on the blog last week.

The "musical typing" keyboard

The beauty of this program is that you don't have to actually have any knowledge of music to be able to create some fun tracks that actually sound pretty good. It is available as a download for Mac and iOS, as well as PC and Android. Below is a short video of some pictures that were taken right before and shortly after we moved to Washington. I used the same musical composition in this video that I used in the "Icicles" video, but I worked on it yesterday and cleaned it up a bit. I hope you enjoy it, and I promise I won't use this music again for a while!


PARTING SHOT


Since the snow has started melting around here, everything is a yucky mess. As a consequence, I haven't taken many pictures this past week, so therefore I am using one of Linda's pictures that she took of Summer Girl yesterday. The little rascal was being quite angelic, sitting there on her momma's lap!



That's all for this week, see you again next week!




Wednesday, March 6, 2019

TAKING A BREAK ~~ BACK TO THE PRESENT ~~ MAKING KIMCHI ~~ PUZZLE UPDATE ~~ PARTING SHOT

TAKING A BREAK


I hate to dwell on the snow week after week, but honestly, that is all that has been happening around here for about two months. As I type this it is snowing again. The snowfall count so far this season is now at 40" for Yakima. This is most likely way more snow that I ever saw fall in North Carolina for the entire 55 years I lived there! So enough, already. We are so ready for Spring!

As you have seen on my blog lately, there is nothing much to take pictures of except the snow...and the birds in snow. Of course, everyone knows that birdies are one of my favorite things. I thank my mother for this, because she sure did love her birds.

I've been going through some old photographs that I have transferred from our old PC computer to the new iMac computer, and it has been a bittersweet undertaking. I have been taking a walk down memory lane looking at these old photos. While wading through hundreds of pictures I took of flowers and birds in the distant past, I came to the conclusion that the pictures I like the best are the ones with people in them. I thought I might share a few of my favorites this week on the blog, as a respite from all the snow pictures (although there are some of those here, too).

Below is a picture of my mother not too long after she and my father got married, so this is probably from the mid or late 1940's. They had visited a place in Miami, Florida, that had lots of macaw birds, which were very tame.

Colorful Macaws

Here is a picture from the late 1970's, when we had a big snow in Lumberton. Momma was filling up her platform bird feeder in the back yard, assisted by my doxie Siegfried.

Gotta keep those birdies fed!

Here is a picture of our house during the big snow. We usually only got an inch or so of snow each year in Lumberton, if we were lucky.

Our house on 14th Street

To take a break from snow pictures, I thought you might enjoy seeing my mother's "Happy Place." This was our mobile home that we had at Holden Beach, NC. She loved going there, and in the summer spent most of her time there. I love this picture of her because she looks so happy...smiling, and sitting there bare-footed.

A little piece of heaven

When she was spending time at the "beach house," this was her favorite thing to do...

Collecting shells

I have many happy memories from those days, and I am thankful that I took so many pictures. This was back in the day when you had to buy film, and then you had to get the film processed into photographs or slides, which wasn't cheap. I probably spent a small fortune back then on my photography, but what I am left with today is priceless.


BACK TO THE PRESENT


I have been struggling to get some good pictures of the Varied Thrush and Spotted Towhee. Getting the exposure right with all that snow in the background is proving to be difficult. Also, I am taking most of my pictures through a window, so that doesn't help with having a sharp focus. Still, I don't think I am doing too bad in either department.

Spotted Towhee

Varied Thrush

Checking out the feeder situation

The snow has been melting a bit, off and on, but doesn't make much headway because it continues to snow and add to the pile already there. Still, it does create some beautiful icicles hanging off of roofs. Check out this short slideshow below. (Sound up!)



I hope you enjoy the music on the slideshow above. It's something I made up on a new program I found on the iMac, called GarageBand. Let me know what you think!

My little raccoon statue is covered up

Speaking of raccoons, a couple of weeks ago I was reading before going to bed (and by reading, I mean collecting recipes), and I thought I heard a commotion on the back porch. I went to investigate and when I turned on the back porch light, I could not believe what I saw. There were three of the HUGEST raccoons back there, just messing around. When I started opening the sliding glass door they scampered away. I called for Summer Girl, who was hiding out in the vegetable garden area, and she came running up, all covered with snow. I sat out there with her for a few minutes just to make sure the raccoon gang wasn't coming back. I wish I had gotten my camera to take a picture, but I was more concerned with making sure that Summer Girl was okay. Trust me, though, they were the biggest raccoons I have ever seen!


MAKING KIMCHI


Last week I decided to try my hand at making kimchi. I got all my ingredients at the grocery store and got out my DIY Fermentation Kit that I got for Christmas. It wasn't a hard process to chop everything up....



...add salt and massage it in....



...put it under pressure so the salt would drive out the liquid...



...and cram it all in a jar...



...then wait 3-4 days for it to ferment. It sure did look pretty.


OH YUCK! Let me tell you, it was awful! I haven't had a food fail this bad in I don't know when. Down the garbage disposal it went. I don't know if it was just a bad recipe, or if I did something wrong, but I took one bite and spit it out in the sink. Terrible! So, today I am going to try my hand at pickled fermented beets. Hopefully that experiment will go better. I will report back on it next week.


PUZZLE UPDATE


Linda has been doing most of the puzzles lately as I am keeping busy with the computer project. This past week she picked out one of her favorite puzzles. It also happens to be the HARDEST puzzle that we have, due to the fact that the pieces are tiny! I tried to help her out a little bit, but I'm afraid I wasn't much help. Still, she got it done in about a week, so I am proud of her.

The Barcelona puzzle


PARTING SHOT

Summer Girl is giving the birds a fit from inside, and they just stick their tongues out at her because they know she can't get them!

Get 'em, sweetie!

That's all for this week, join us again next week!