Who Loves Ya, Baby!

I was playing around with my camera a couple of days ago, taking pictures of myself to fool around with in Photoshop.  It's hard to take a picture of yourself.  I kept getting my eyes and the top of my head, or my chin and chest.  I was being silly and making faces.  These are two of my favorites.  They make me laugh every time I look at them.

SNARL!

GIGGLE!

Yet More Pictures

Washington State is a perfect environment for green and growing things. We have a maritime climate--lots of rain and mild winters (usually) and also lots of sunshine. Rain and sunshine have been in abundance this year, and as a result things are growing as fast as a speeding bullet. (Case in point: the apple above, taken in bright sunshine right after it rained) You can almost hear the vegetation growing in the pasture. So I've been taking lots of pictures lately. Pictures of the cats and dogs playing, of the horses playing, of flowers blooming, of trees in all their leafy glory. Lots of pictures. Here is a sampling.

This is the underside of a leaf from the apple tree. Love the veins!

And if you don't believe in our rains, here's a picture of part of my driveway during a huge rainstorm.

This is a single tree in my pasture, an ancient alder with three trunks. Quite a rarity for an alder.

And last but not least, one of my favorite pasture pictures, showing a meandering path made by my horses and wild critters. I find this picture very calming.

Sweet Puppies

This will be short and sweet, as I'm headed out to the pasture with my backpack sprayer of Roundup, on a mission to kill poisonous plants before my horses can get to them.

Last night my two dogs were sleeping together. As they always do when sleeping, they have to have a paw touching each other, or even better, their bodies touch. It is very endearing. So here's a cute picture of Nova and Asterisk sleeping on Nova's bed (which I made extra wide to accommodate both dogs). Isn't it just the sweetest picture?!!

Asterisk has her own crate to sleep in at nights, but during the day she is able to sleep anywhere she wants. And she almost always wants to sleep with Nova in her bed, one paw touching Nova. Or in the yard, one paw touching Nova. Or on the deck, one paw touching Nova. And so it goes.

OK, end of short post. Now I'm off to do battle with buttercups, tansy ragwort, bracken ferns, and dock.

Leaves as Art

Yesterday at the monthly meeting of the South Sound Adobe Users Group I demonstrated how to make a light box, and then we raffled off three light boxes I'd made as give-aways. We had lots of fun, and several members had brought items to place inside the light boxes to practice photographing.

One of them, Larry Weakly, brought a most unique item: a skeletonized holly leaf that was utterly gorgeous. Being able to photograph it in a light box allowed for a nonintrusive background which highlighted the beauty of the leaf. In fact, I'm going to tromp down to the pasture later today to see if I can find any alder leaves that have been skeletonized over the past winter.










For those of you who aren't into photography, a light box is simply a box that has had the sides and top cut out, then covered with white, translucent fabric or paper (so as to allow light through). The inside is lined with white paper. Objects placed inside the box can be photographed without shadows and have a seamless background. Commercial photographers use this method to photograph jewelry, toys, etc., for advertisements.

I may be weird, but I think the skeletonized holly leaf is beautiful.

Spring Flowers

Pat Rice posted a picture of her lovely clematis on her blog site, and lamented the fact commenters couldn't leave pictures of their own in the comments section. I agree. I would love to see other people's flower pictures! I love looking at (and smelling) flowers, so I decided to post a few of my own here. I hope you enjoy them!

The yellow picture is a perennial called Basket O' Gold that is one of the first things to bloom in the spring. It cascades over the railroad ties in my landscaping in wild abandon. Their bright yellow flowers are so cheerful. This is a hardy plant that thrives on neglect.

The purple picture is the clematis of a friend. I love how the ruffled edges of the flower remind me of the ruffle on the hem of a Regency debutante's dress.

The green picture isn't of flowers, but of bracken ferns. I liked the pattern of the ferns as well as the bright green color. In case you couldn't tell, I like doing close-ups. *g*

The single flower in the next picture is a columbine, another cheerful little perennial that is blooming in my whiskey planter tub right now.

And the last picture is yet another hardy and determined little flower, the first harbinger of spring: a primrose. These primroses have survived hail, snow, sleet, and driving rain, and don't seem adversely affected by any of it.

Oh, wait, I have one more picture to post. The pink rose is the only rose plant in my garden. I call it my Rose Stick Plant, because it is just one single stalk that sticks out of the ground and it never branches out, nor does it produce more than one single pink rose each year. Originally, it produced a single blue rose, a hybrid I bought through mail order and which I highly prized for its rarity. Then one year the goat I used to own ate the rose down below the graft point, and now all I get is the pink rose, since the stalk the blue rose was grafted to was for a pink rose. Alas.

So these are just a few of my flower pictures.

Tap-tap-tap. Hello? Can you hear me?

I've been unable to get into Blogger to update my blog, but today the powers-that-be finally allowed me in. Praise be. Now, what to talk about? New Year's resolutions? I do 'em. Cooking/baking/recipes? I do 'em. Photography? Bingo!

I live in rural Western Washington, and in case you hadn't heard, we've been having perfectly awful weather: 4 snowstorms in December, one right after the other, and another snowstorm and record-setting rains in January. Weatherwise, it's been pretty spectacular.

The child in me still loves the beauty and novelty of snow, so I grabbed my trusty camera and headed outdoors. I ended up with some of the prettiest pictures I have ever taken, and I share a few of them here with you. These pictures were taken on my property, mostly in my paddock and wooded pasture. All pictures are copyrighted, so be forewarned. :-) If you lift them without permission, the embedded tracking device will allow the boogy man to show up on your doorstep demanding a Large Fee.

#1 - My mailbox stand

#2 - Paddock (foreground) & pasture (beyond fence)

#3 - My back yard

#4 - Tree in paddock

Pictures Posted at Flickr

I posted a few more pictures at Flickr. http://tinyurl.com/32fe5f Alien space invasion of hundreds of planets. *g*