All Hallows’ Eve (2)

My wife’s handiwork.

The Prisoner

We have these green frogs all over the place where I live. This little fellow somehow found his way into the house a few days ago and was hopping weakly across the tile floor in the kitchen, which must have seemed like an endless expanse of stony desert to him (or her). I picked him (?) up to take him outside and he looked so amusing peering out of my grip that I took this picture.

 

I’m experimenting with Google’s Picasa picture editing program; it’s pretty cool—lets you post to your Blogger blog straight from the program. But without the preview feature, so I don’t actually know what this is going to look like.

Summer Afternoon

This hot-weather image is about out of season now, so I’ll go ahead and post it before it becomes even more so. Summer is over, astronomically speaking, but it takes a while to phase out here. I went outside a little while ago in my usual warm-weather off-work uniform of shorts and t-shirt and found the temperature almost cool enough to be uncomfortable, at least with a breeze blowing—somewhere in the low 60s (F, 16 or so C).

(Click for larger)

Demonic Peachdroid Menaces Interstate Travelers

Ok, I admit I’ve been taking pictures while driving again. This is from a few weeks ago when I made a trip up to north Alabama. (For the full effect, click through to the larger version.)

Up in Chilton county, 200 hundred miles or so from here (300 km or so), they grow really, really good peaches. And they are very proud of their peaches—so much so that they built and painted their water tower to look like a peach. I really wanted to get a picture of this rising out of the trees like the moon as I approached, but I missed it and didn’t want to go back. Next time...

Heron

I walked out the door one day last week and heard a repeated low buzzing sound that I’d never heard before. I finally realized that it was coming from this heron perched in a dead tree across the creek. The normal heron noise is loud and ugly—something like a crow’s call but lower in pitch and considerably louder (these are big birds, if you can’t tell from the picture—probably something like 5ft/1.5m in wingspan). It can be a little alarming if you get close to one without seeing it and it suddenly leaps screaming into the air. I don’t know what the low sound was about.

(Click for larger)

Now that I have a camera, I want a better one. I wanted to zoom in further than this, and the auto-focus is kind of unreliable—this really should have been sharper.

Coon Wars & Hummingbird

My wife recently developed an enthusiasm for feeding the local bird population and put up several feeders, two of which hung from lightweight steel poles. There followed a week or two of coon wars, in which raccoons came at night and pulled down the feeders, opened them up, and ate all the bird seed. Here’s a morning-after scene (click for larger images as usual):

She also put up a hummingbird feeder, and it has been a great success. While I was outside taking the above picture, a hummingbird kept flying around me—they make sort of a low buzzing sound, like a really big bug or a really small airplane. So I stood there for a while with the camera poised, and eventually got this lucky shot:

It’s fairly blurry but it may very well be the best I ever do, so I’m posting it. It really was just luck: since the camera has a fairly slow reaction time and the bird is in position and in flight only for an instant, I just pointed the camera at the feeder and snapped the picture as soon as I heard the buzz. This is the only one of a couple of dozen shots where he appeared at all.

The coon wars have been won, by the way: she bolted the poles to the deck of which you can see a corner in the picture.

Drop

I know, a picture of a drop of water is a cliche, but I like the way you can see the reflection of leaves on the tree (the live oak in our front yard) in it. You might have to click through to the slightly larger version to see that. Too bad it isn’t in better focus—there really wasn’t enough light.

(Yet More) Translucence

I thought this banana leaf picture was worth keeping, too.

(Click for larger)

Beach Houses in the Rain

From that day at the Gulf a couple of weeks ago.

(Click to enlarge)

Translucence

I was about to post another rainy picture, then thought maybe I should vary the atmosphere from time to time.

(click to enlarge)

Rain at the Beach, Part 2

Or rather, after the rain at the beach. Here’s that other picture that I couldn’t find yesterday (click to enlarge).

Rain at the Beach

We went to the beach (the Gulf beach, not the bay) last Sunday, for the first time in a long time, even though we're only 45 minutes or so away. This is one time I wasn’t especially pleased to see rain. But at least I didn’t get the sunburn I was expecting. (Click the pictures for larger versions.)

This cloud is scary, isn’t it?

Somewhat to my surprise, this next photo actually captures the pearly quality of the sky immediately after the rain:

I had a rather nice post-rain picture in which the sun is shining on the face of a tall cumulus cloud which emerged ten or fifteen minutes later, but can’t find it at the moment; I hope it’s on my external hd at home.

A Few Images from the 4th

My wife’s sister and her husband (not my wife’s, her sister’s) live on a bayou that opens onto a bay that opens onto the Gulf of Mexico, a thirty mile or so drive from here. They invited us down for the Fourth of July and we had a wonderful time. These are a few of my souvenirs. Click on the images to see larger versions; click a second time for even larger.

They half-live on this 34-foot sailboat; it’s docked at a little house in which they also half-live. They have lived on it altogether at times, and have crossed the Atlantic in it, twice, which totally boggles my mind.

Standing on their pier:

Standing on the pier looking down:

Just trees, mostly a live oak. Ok, it’s boring; sorry; I like trees and I like sky. I had a better picture but I ruined it by accidentally saving it while experimenting with the editing software.

Unfortunately I’m not a good enough photographer to have taken some night-time views from the beach a block or two away, which looks toward the condos on the Gulf, a string of lights on the horizon over which distant silent explosions of fireworks appeared from time to time while we were mildly and happily drunk; at least I was. God bless the U.S.A., y’all, and God bless my in-laws.