Category: around the yard

It snowed! This lifelong California girl is having to adjust to living in an area with four seasons.  I have vacillated between excitement and dread over the possibility of snow- and now it has happened.  Fortunately, I’ve been in training for the last 10 years or so through my visits to our daughter in Montana and Wyoming and realize this inch or so of snow is no big deal.  But when I hear Prescott residents reminisce about the winter where they had 8 feet of snow (I think it was back in the eighties) or hear my friend, Debbie, talk about HER first winter here when they were stuck inside for days at a time, I know that it is important to be prepared.

Because of our frequent trips to Yellowstone, I do own an adequate winter wardrobe, including these boots, which I love.  I photographed them today in response to the Flickr topic, something I wear.

And, in case you are curious,  here is what our house looked like yesterday morning:

Funny- I don’t think I ever posted photos of our Benicia house on my blog, but I have posted at least 4 photos of this house that I can think of (at sunset, with stars, with Christmas lights, and now with snow).   The blue sky in this photo quickly gave way to gray clouds, which hung around all day. But there has been no more snow, and almost half has melted away in the front.  No more snow predicted for this week- at least not yet!

As I sat drinking coffee and checking e-mail yesterday morning at the kitchen bar, I saw something move in the corner of my eye. I looked up to see THIS:

He had jumped up onto the little wall in our back yard and was looking at the view into our neighbor’s yard.  Fortunately, I had my camera right beside me, so I quickly snapped these photos before he, just as quickly, jumped down and out of view.  We have open space behind us and across the street, so coyotes and javelinas are frequent visitors, I hear.  Next time maybe it will be a javelina- or rather,  a herd of javelinas!

We’ve had an old milk can around the house forever.  I think my father found it at the old house he bought during the forties when he first moved to Chico to start his dental practice.  I re-discovered it in the seventies and took it to our Petaluma house where I used it for a dry arrangement, which included pampas grass, as I remember. The milk can’s claim to fame was as the unexpected hiding place for my keys, which my son Matt dropped in there when he was a toddler and we didn’t discover until several years later after we moved to Sacramento. It has moved with us each time, but has always been in the garage- never having a real place, but too cool to get rid of, even during the last extreme purge of our possessions before our move to Arizona.  During the last few days while my husband has been out of town, I’ve been playing around with places to put it and have it currently placed on our front patio.  I bought a few tall “sticks” at Joann’s to put inside, and also cut off some of the tall shoots from one of my mystery plants out front.

Here are some detail shots of the milk can and pods from the mystery plant- both converted to black and white.

What does one do on a brisk October night in Arizona?  Well, having just seen Gravity last night and having discovered that the beautiful Arizona skies are full of stars, I decided to try a night shot. I googled photographing stars and discovered all sorts of conflicting information. For example, one photographer mandated a wide angle lens set at the sweet spot of 2.8 (my wide angles don’t go to 2.8. . .) with a high ISO- and then adjust shutter speed. Another said f/22 for maximum depth of field and at least 30 seconds at ISO 200. The last one made more sense to me, but then I discovered that 30 seconds wasn’t long enough at f/22- and that I needed to set it on BULB and use a shutter release (my wireless one isn’t working- and not sure that would have helped anyway).  SO… I did what I could.  I used the widest aperture I could (5.0), a shutter speed of 25 seconds, and a somewhat high ISO (640), depending on Lightroom’s noise reduction to do its magic.

There are a zillion stars over my house!

Here’s the view looking out from my driveway.  I had to crop it, because the lights from the house next door were lighting up the left half of the frame. I found it very difficult to compose a shot in the pitch black night!  You may notice some lines in the sky; I think they’re airplanes- or a satellite debris field- Aaaaaaaaa! Ignore that last part if you haven’t seen Gravity.

I’m making a slight attempt to catch up with my Flickr and 2B (Beyond Beyond) challenges today.  The 2B challenge I’m working on is creating textures.  Kim Klassen makes it look so easy, but my first two attempts have been epic FAILS.  The test of a good texture is that it should enhance a photo, right?  The two I created were fun to do and looked okay until I added them to photos.  Back to the drawing board, er… wacom tablet!

One of my Flickr group’s topics this week is weather.  Since I’m a bit obsessed with the weather in my new home in Northern Arizona, I kept that topic in the back of my head. Last night  I had just joined my husband on the couch to watch football when he said, “Now there’s some clouds for you to photograph.” (he is always pointing out things for me to photograph). I looked out our east-facing window to see lovely puffy, pink clouds, a reflection of the sunset in the west, behind our house.  I saw all this explained on the Weather Channel, but don’t remember how and why it happens that way.  I grabbed my camera and went out front to take a few shots. Then I turned around to go back in. Oh. My. God.

The changing colors in the skies after dinner last night captured my attention.  There were no towering thunderheads- just some wispy white and pink clouds.  They made an interesting backdrop for closeups of plants out front .

Russian sage against pinkish clouds.

Our neighbors’ pampas grass.