Author Archives: dawnkinster
Birds at the park
Sunday afternoon I went to a park without Katie. Don’t tell her, she’ll never forgive me. I needed some time to myself and I wanted to walk on some nature trails where they don’t allow dogs.
At this park there is a heron rookery, and the herons were all paired up on their nests high in the oak trees out in the middle of a shallow lake. (Click on the pictures to see more detail.)
There’s a boardwalk built through the lily pads and cattails where you can sit and watch the herons, and later in the season the egrets on their nests. The most exciting time is when the youngsters begin to explore and test their wings.
But right now it looks like the nests are all occupied by pairs of herons, I don’t know if there are eggs in the nests yet, but certainly there are a number of pairs getting ready to be parents.
As I was watching from the boardwalk there arose a screeching to the left – sandhill cranes make such distinctive sounds. A pair of them flew right toward us on the boardwalk, then across in front of us and on into the marsh to the right. This is where I got the hugely cropped photo that’s currently my blog header. In the photo below you can see the legs of the bird as he/she descends into the cattails. It was so cool!
THEN…on the way home I saw a pair of sandhill cranes feeding in a field near the road. I turned around and went back. They accommodated me and posed for quite awhile.
Aren’t they beautiful!
I had a great day on my own. Katie had a great day with her Dad.
Win win.
🙂
Searching for threshold
This weeks WordPress photo challenge is ‘threshold.’ That’s an intriguing idea. I checked the definition and found:
“A strip of wood, metal, or stone forming the bottom of a doorway and crossed in entering a house or room.”
And:
“The magnitude or intensity that must be exceeded for a certain reaction, phenomenon, result, or condition to occur or be manifested.”
Huh. How exciting can a strip of wood, metal or stone at the bottom of a doorway be? And how do you photograph intensity exceeded?
I also found:
“Any place or point of entering or beginning”
This seemed more workable. Sunday morning I headed down to Ann Arbor because I remembered a plaque on the steps of the Student Union commemorating the spot that John F Kennedy stood when he announced the beginning of the Peace Corp. I thought that it would be a fitting interpretation of the beginning of something significant.
As I drove past the main university campus I noted that the roads ahead, in front of the union, were closed. So I found a parking spot and walked the few blocks. I soon found why the roads were blocked as there was a road race going on, right past the Student Union!
Once I was able to get across the road I eagerly climbed the steps and searched. The plaque was gone! It has been there for years and years and years and I thought I must just be missing it…but after a through search I had to admit it was gone. And so was my idea to represent the concept.
So I wandered back across the street and through the law library with it’s Gothic doors…
and courtyard…
…and towers.
It’s beautiful, but really…not thresholds. This is the best I could find, down two levels in the basement of the law library building.
Not very interesting. But the prettiest threshold I could find. So I gave up and drove cross country on pretty back roads to my favorite park where I enjoyed sunshine, lots of birds, blue water and a good book.
But that’s another blog.
Will I have anything at all for this week’s photo challenge?
I don’t know. There’s one shot I’m thinking about, but it would be a stretch. I’ll decide later in the week. Maybe I’ll keep looking, but I don’t have much spare time this week, and I have no inspiration.
Stay tuned.
Rewind
Katie here! Hey remember last weekend when my mama took me to my park for the first time since we got all this snow? And how much fun I had even though it was wet and cold? Well today my mama was sitting on the sofa and she told my dad that it was too bad she was so tired. Because if she wasn’t so tired she’d take me somewhere fun cause it was really pretty outside.
A trifle windy!
And do you know what my dad did? He said to me…..”I bet you want to go to the park don’t you Katie, go for a ride? Do you want go GO Katie?” Dad was pretending not to notice mama’s evil eye. Well! I got so wound up that I could hardly stand it! I began to bark and run to the front door and then run back and bark at my mama and then run to the door….you get the picture…right?
Mama yelled at my dad but she really didn’t have any choice. So she put me in the car and we went to the park! I knew that bribe I paid my dad would work and it sure did! And it was worth every bit of my allowance too!
This weekend there wasn’t any snow left over at my park. Well, a little bit, but I just kissed it goodbye!
Bye-bye snow!
We got to walk all the way around the park and my mama let me sniff wherever I wanted. Except she wouldn’t let me go down the hill to check out the railroad track, I don’t know why. Sometimes my mama isn’t very adventurous.
Can’t we go down there?
She took a lot of pictures of the grassy meadow and the back pond too. I don’t understand that, she should be focused on me! But she’s weird that way and I tolerate it because while she’s doing that I can wander around. I always come right back when she calls, though, because I love her. And because she has treats in her pocket.
Pretty country at my park.
We got to walk around my pond too. It still had some ice on it, but that just made it more pretty. Of course it’s not prettier than me, but it’s nice. In a chilly sort of way.
The water looks cold!
It smelled good too. But I didn’t get too close. I’m a princess you know.
Hello frogs!!!
I had a really nice time and even mama got over being mad at dad. She says she thinks she might have heard a frog which would mean spring really is here. There were definitely a lot of birds singing there, and ducks and geese too. I only chased one robin; mostly I was interested in all the great pee-mail that was left by all the dogs before me. I left quite a few messages myself.
So anyway, I wanted to say THANKS DAD for getting mama off the sofa. I don’t think you should do it again real soon though. You can trick a mama once, but twice in one weekend would probably be too much to hope for.
I’ve got other ways to get her to take me out for adventures, don’t you know.
We’ll talk later.
love, Katie-girl.
For AnnaLeah and Mary
Many of you know that I volunteer for the Truck Safety Coalition, a nonprofit in Washington DC that works to make our roads safer by pushing for legislative and rule making changes. We work both through our members of Congress and through the Department of Transportation and other agencies that regulate the trucking industry. You know that I do this in memory of my Dad who was killed by a tired trucker in December of 2004. So when you read a post dedicated to the issue of safety on our roads you run the risk of having to listen to me get on my soapbox. I’m grateful that you humor me on this because I tend to get a bit passionate, and I know that most of you are already on my side and I’m probably preaching to the choir. Still…
Humor me one more time and listen to the story of AnnaLeah and Mary.
Last May while my family and I were joined in Washington DC with many other families who have been touched by needless tragedy, while we were sitting in the DOT board room being told by different members of that agency why they hadn’t accomplished tasks they’ve been working on for years, while we listened to excuse after excuse why minimum insurance requirements hadn’t been raised yet, why stronger rear underride guards hadn’t been mandated, why there were no studies of side underride guards at all, why the federally legislated electronic onboard recorders weren’t already implemented ..well… while we were there listening to all these excuses AnnaLeah and Mary were dying in a horrific crash. Two beautiful girls just gone, another family irreparably changed.
You can hear their mother tell her story here, she does a lovely job, but I understand if you don’t want to listen. If you want to remain untouched. If it can happen to them, it can happen to anyone. Best not to know, right?
Well, here’s the short version: They were driving from North Carolina, heading to Texas for the wedding of their oldest sister. In Georgia they were hit by another vehicle and were spun under a semi. If that truck had had underride guards perhaps the girls would not have been killed. Did you know that every industrialized country in the world has underride guards on their semi trucks? But not the United States. Next time you’re driving next to a semi glance over and see where that underside of that trailer would hit you in a crash. Even a crash that you didn’t cause.
Think about that. It doesn’t have to be your fault and you can still die. Family and friends can still die. Truck companies don’t want to put protection on their vehicles to save lives of people in cars. They don’t think it’s their responsibility. They don’t want to incur the costs. It’s all about profit. But who is really paying for their profit? You and I and our families are paying that cost. Every single day.
OK. I’ll get off the soapbox now. Please, just go to this site and read a little bit. Sign the petition that we plan to take to Secretary of Transportation Foxx in May, one year after AnnaLeah and Mary died. We want to convince him to join us in the fight on three issues:
1. Increase the minimum insurance truck companies have to carry to cover the damage to families involved in crashes with them. It hasn’t been raised in 30 years.
2. Get the electronic onboard recorders implemented to keep drivers from cheating on their logbooks and driving longer hours than allowed.
3. Act to improve the safety of trucks by requiring better underride guards.
Even if you can’t listen to AnnaLeah and Mary’s Mom talk about her girls and the trip across country that ended not in a family wedding but in family tragedy, take a moment to read to the end to find out what else you can do to help. And think about these two beautiful kids next time you’re on the road driving behind or beside or in front of a semi. Think about these kids and convince yourself it’s not your problem.
I dare you.
Pick a note
Most of you know I play in a community band. We practice on Tuesday nights. Tonight I was feeling guilty for not practicing during the week, and tired from a crazy day at work. I was thinking that maybe this one time it would be OK not to go to band. But I had music my husband had pulled from the music library that the director had requested, and I couldn’t just drop that off and run. So I stayed.
And I have to say, this evening, like every Tuesday night, I was glad I stayed to play. I let the music pick up my spirits, enjoyed the challenge of getting a little bit better at the parts I should have practiced, heard new rhythms and underlying phrases of other sections, figured out how some of it went together. I always leave rehearsal feeling better than I did going in and there’s something worthwhile in that alone.
I’m so lucky to have this outlet, a place to let the rest of the world go and just have fun; I don’t think most adults can say they have something similar. Certainly as we get older we get fewer opportunities to do something that other people actually applaud for. Music does that for me and don’t think for a minute I don’t appreciate it. Even when our audience is small I appreciate the fact they come out and clap enthusiastically. It makes those of us playing feel young again, makes us smile, makes us glad we could share the fun we get to enjoy every Tuesday night.
Tonight she handed out a new piece of music, something unique, with sounds not classical or jazz or rag. It is called “Africa: Ceremony, Song and Ritual” composed by Robert W Smith. You can listen to it here. It’s almost 9 minutes but worth the time.
At about 46 seconds in you’ll hear a weird sound, hard to describe, sort of like a metal whistle but not. Our tympani player is a high school student, and this instrument was in his part but he didn’t know what it was. The director found it for him, and he asked how to play it. It’s a metal rectangle with a piece sticking up and a wire of some sort. I can’t say I got a good look at it. She told him how to play it, he tried it out and then he grinned from ear to ear the whole rest of the piece. It was so neat to see a high school student enthralled with learning something new. I talked to him about it at the break, as he was practicing different effects out in the hall. He said it was dangerous, you could get your finger caught in it. I said it was dangerous because if it got played at the wrong moment everyone would know. He started laughing and said that was true about everything he played. Good point.
But the part in my music that made me stop, almost made me laugh out loud in the middle of rehearsal was this. Do you see it? At measure 180?
It says ‘pick a note.’ This is what went through my mind the first time we got to this measure: “Pick a note? What note? Should it be in the key we’re in? Probably not, probably it should be something weird, totally out of character. What would that be?”
It took me so long to analyze those three words that I missed playing anything at all during the two measures. As did most of the band. We all sort of petered out as our minds tried to comprehend that we could choose any note we wanted. For two whole measures we were free, and what we ended up doing was nothing much at all. I’m sure by next week we will have all chosen our note and the sound will be…well…interesting. On the recording these two measures start at 8 minutes and 37 seconds. You can decide for yourselves how strange and/or cool it sounds.
See? This is the kind of fun we have on Tuesday nights. We get to do different things, interact with different people. I wish everyone could do something just for themselves once a week. The world would be a better place.
Indulge yourselves. Find your passion. Grow a little, learn a little, meet a few more interesting people. You won’t be sorry.
And I promise, if I can get there, I’ll come clap for you.
Katie’s park
Katie here. Have you missed me? Let me tell you, I’ve been through the wringer! Between my Dad being gone, and me being sick, it’s been really stressful here! And did I tell you that our winter was terrible?! I think my Mom showed you the picture of me in the snow with only my eyes and ears showing.
(Don’t worry, I was really standing in my path and my person was over in the driveway, they didn’t really bury me!)
Well I’m happy to tell you that most of that darn snow has melted, my Dad is home, I feel great, and this past weekend my Mama took me to my park! It’s been forever since I’ve had a real adventure. I don’t count that unfortunate trip to the pet food store a couple of weeks ago when I accidentally wet all over the floor. Mama doesn’t like to talk about that. It was her fault anyway, so best not bring it up, OK?
Sunday I got to go to my park for the first time since last fall! It was wonderful! I did make my Mama carry me around this one big puddle, but other than that I had fun sniffing and checking out all the pee-mail that had been left for me.
Big cold puddle!
It was wet and muddy, my feet got cold and I got a lot of stuff stuck to my furs, but it was still wonderful! We walked way back to this little deck at the very edge of the park.
Mama likes this deck!
Mama spent a long time watching the ducks and geese out on the little lake until I reminded her that we were supposed to be walking around my park!
On the way back to the car I got sort of tired. After all this was my first long walk of the season. But Mama had treats and we worked a little bit and that got me all excited again. I was happy to get back in the car though and when we got home Mama and I took a nice long afternoon nap.
I love weekends! I hope the snow is gone for good, because I think my Mama will take me back to the park next weekend if the weather is good! I can not wait!
Weekly Photo Challenge: Street Life
This week’s WordPress photo challenge is “Street Life.” I went down to Detroit this morning and parked near Greektown, hoping for something. But the light wasn’t great in Greektown itself, so I was wandering back to my car when I saw the towers of General Motors combined with the People Mover track overhead, the red brick factories converted to shops and lofts, and the tourists walking below.
I liked it, so I stood in the middle of the empty street and shot it.
Also on the way back to the car I saw a man, maybe Niki himself, standing outside a Greek pizza parlor…
…and unfortunately, a couple of homeless people sleeping near a grate.
Combined, these images show a version of the streets in the city of Detroit. There’s much more, of course, to this city – – much that is less photogenic. I saw some of that too but was not comfortable enough to stop. It reminded me that those of us out in the suburbs, in the country, driving our big SUVs, mowing our lawns, shopping in our trendy stores, have no idea what life is really like just a few miles down the road.
So that’s my street life submission. You can see a few of my favorites here, here and here. What does the street life in your part of the world look like? I’d be interested, and there’s plenty of time. You can post your images till next Friday at the WordPress site here.
I love how these challenges take us all over the world.
Enjoy!
Of summer
Let’s talk of things summer now. Let’s skip right past the waylaid spring and move right into the hot muggy days of summer, when the frogs sing at night and the lightening bugs glow, when the grass is damp beneath bare feet and the windows stay open all day. Yes, let’s talk of summer. Of yellow gold finches and monarch butterflies and roses blooming and summer evenings that stretch into forever.
They are turning yellow!
One of my favorite things about summer is ice cream. What? You thought I was going to continue on about warm dark nights and low hanging stars? Heck no. This is about ice cream!
I’ve always said there is no bad ice cream. There is cheap ice cream and expensive ice cream, low fat, low sugar and the really good stuff made out on the farm where the cows live just yards away. But there’s no such thing as bad ice cream.
Last May I met an older gentleman in Washington DC who thought along the same lines as me when it came to ice cream. We were seated across from each other during the first meal of the conference, getting to know each other, sharing our stories. The meal came to an end and the waiter asked if anyone was having dessert. Normally I decline, but the gentleman across the table asked if they had any ice cream. As the waiter listed the meager options the elderly man said “There’s no such thing as bad ice cream, I’ll have the chocolate.” My head snapped up and I responded, “That’s what I always say!” We high-fived each other across the table and I ordered ice cream too.
I thought I’d always feel that way about ice cream. Until this week. This week I happened upon this at the grocery store, sitting innocently in the freezer next to other icy treats.
Looks yummy.
150 calories for the whole pint. “Huh” I thought. “There’s no such thing as bad ice cream, and 150 calories for the whole thing?” Into the cart it went. At home I doled out a measly couple of tablespoons because I was too excited to read the directions that said let it stand out for ten minutes before serving and it was rock hard. Chocolate peanut butter. No such thing as bad ice cream, yep, this was going to be good.
It tasted faintly of something. Perhaps chocolate, certainly not peanut butter. There was a memory of chocolate if you concentrated real hard, but in reality it tasted more like weak, cold dishwater. Distinctly soapy. I tried again the next night, another couple of table spoons, but I ended up tossing it and this post is my public service announcement. Hard as it is to believe, there can be bad ice cream. This is it.
Don’t waste your money.
Summer was meant to be enjoyed. Head out to the dairy farm for your ice cream. You won’t regret it.
We make good ice cream here.
Was going to
Was going to blog about any number of things today. Had them all lined up. But I have to tell you a couple of things not related to any of that.
Even though my yard looks like this today, which doesn’t seem all that spring-like…
1. I SAW a pair of sandhill cranes flying over Katie’s park when I was driving to Ann Arbor to go to the symphony yesterday evening! Their flight is so distinctive. I got to watch them for quite awhile, and I smiled every second of it.
2. This morning there was a red winged blackbird on my feeder, more proof they are really here. Now this sort of makes me smile, and sort of makes me not smile. They are such pigs. They eat so much food they can eat me out of house and birdseed over a weekend. But I know they’re hungry, just like all the rest of the birds, so for now I’m opting to smile. Because they are truly signs that spring is not only on it’s way, it’s already here.
3. I was just giving Katie a little shoulder massage while looking out the window and I saw a bird in my little redbud tree. Then it flew to the ground and back up again. I ran for the camera, but by the time I got back it had moved to the top of a small spruce hidden behind some bare branches of a shrub. But you can tell it’s a bluebird!! There were actually two males be bopping around the yard. I couldn’t get a good photo of either of them, the light was bad, so you’ll have to settle for this one.
I’m so happy I could sing….and I was…singing along with a clip of Jimmy Fallon’s show, but that’s another blog.
Happy happy dance.
Change Is Hard 