So this is the pond Katie always got her picture in front of.
I bet you’ve been wondering what I’ve been up to, and since mom is off doing dishes or laundry or some other boring thing I thought I’d tell you about last weekend when I got to visit my sister Katie’s park and I walked all the way around it for the very first time!
Is there something back there?
I’ve been telling Mom I was a big girl and I could walk around that park, but for some reason she’s never taken me. I think she just wasn’t emotionally ready to handle it, you know?
It’s really nice here, mom!
I know this is Katie’s park and it’s not like I’m asking her to rename it or anything. But sometimes mom is a little slow to move forward. So I waited patiently (I’m really good at patient) for her to be ready to share the park with me, her new little girl.
We stopped at the memory tree. Mom didn’t have to explain it to me. I understood.
Well. Let me tell you it was worth the wait! Though I am not thrilled about sitting on some rock in the parking lot. Apparently Katie would pose for her there. I don’t see what the point is, so I declined to pose.
Tell me again why you want me up here, mom?
I am my own girl. Mom said that was OK, I’m allowed to be me, and she loves me just the quirky little girl way I am.
Mom says she always takes at least one artsy-fartsy image. I guess this is it.
Anyway…mom put a long line on me so I could wander further away from her. But she kept calling me when I wasn’t paying attention.
Did you call, mom?
I’d turn right around and run back to find out what she needed. And to get a snack.
This is a pretty fun game, mom!
Mom says I’m very good at something called distracted recall. She says that’s a very very important skill to have. Whatever mom, if you bring the snacks I will do recall all day.
Are you coming, mom? Katie says you lag a lot on walks.
The park was pretty the day we visited, and mom promises to take me back again real soon. I can’t wait. I liked this park a lot because we weren’t in the deep woods and I could see the sky.
Is there something back there?
Mom is figuring out I like to be in open places the better to make sure there aren’t any monsters around.
Sometimes mom focused on stuff that wasn’t me! Incredible. Katie told me to get used to it.
It’s possible to be an Adventure-Girl and also a little nervous all at the same time. Mom says that’s OK too.
I think I’ll get braver and braver the more adventures we go on. Mom’s going to put up another tent in our back yard after it stops raining. She says it has a little window down near the floor and maybe I’ll like it better. I don’t know, mom. Right now I’m thinking daddy has the right idea about camping.
Mom got a lot of pictures like this too. Tee hee.
I guess I’ll have to trust you, mom, and check out the new tent when you put it up. Maybe I’ll turn into a camping dog eventually. Dad reminds mom that I’m still just a baby.
I took a nap when we got home. Mom woke me up when she took this picture. I was not amused.
Finally. Since my mid-May camping trip to Sleeping Bear in northern Michigan I’ve been working on my night sky images. I’ve also been backing up my laptop, and experimenting with an external hard drive.
The Platt River, flowing into Lake Michigan, with lots of light pollution from a nearby town.
You know how new things, especially technical new stuff, flummoxes me. So many days went by when I looked at my laptop, sitting over there on the table and didn’t feel smart enough to try.
Looking up the river toward the Milky Way that was just coming up.
But more new photos are filling my camera’s memory card and I have this rule that I can’t download new images until I have finished processing the ones already waiting on the laptop.
Waiting for the Milky Way to rise, I turned the camera to the east at this tree. You’ve seen this image before but I loved it so much I decided to put it in this post too. That’s the northern end of the Milky Way to the right of the tree.
Silly rule. I have so many more pretty things to show you and I’m still wallowing through these stars.
Barr Lake and the Milky Way on my second night of shooting. Do you see the dark horse?
I guess that’s not such a horrible problem to have.
So I’ll show you what the night sky looked at back in May. Recognize that you won’t see the sky like this just by looking up wherever you are, even if you’re in a very dark place.
The tail end of a star-link line of satellites, it was very long, and right behind me as I was shooting the Milky Way over Barr Lake.By the time I got the camera swung around this was all that was left to see.
The camera sees much more light than our eyes do, and then I’ve processed them to bring more light out so that you can appreciate the shapes and patterns that hang out up there.
To the west of me was an outlet for the lake to flow into Lake Michigan, which is just over those dunes.
I’ve tried not to process them too much, but I do have to lighten them some because WordPress and Facebook both post images darker than they appear in my work on the laptop.
I hope you enjoy looking at the night sky. I like having company when I’m out there, and I often think of all of you while I’m shooting, hoping you can feel a little bit like you were there too when you see the images.
This is a stacked, horizontal, image of Barr Lake. That means I took multiple (11) images and stacked them together to weed out image noise.
I can’t wait to get back out there and bring you more.
Last October my aunt died at age 87. She was the woman that shared her beloved Ann Arbor Symphony with me for more than 30 years, who took me to see musicals and concerts, even the opera. This past week I learned another woman who mentored me in art and work had died at age 86. I watched her memorial service online and wished I’d had more time with her.
It seems the women older than me, those I looked up to and learned from, are moving on and now, when I look around, I realize I am the older woman.
I was struck by this concept last night before our Community Band spring concert while talking to our first chair clarinet who would be conducting a piece for the very first time in his young life. He was nervous and excited and kind of jumpy. I told him not to worry, that we as a band wouldn’t let him down. He smiled and nodded and skittered back to his seat.
He’s just completed 10th grade. I don’t even remember 10th grade.
Maybe they were somewhere in the audience, listening and smiling.
Last night as we played Benediction by John Stevens I thought of my aunt and my friend and hoped they were somehow listening. I said a silent thank you to them both.
Later, on the drive home, and after a pounding rainstorm had slicked the roads with a shimmer of water, the brilliant orange sun emerged from the clouds and lit the wet pavement in front of me. For a few minutes the road led directly into the setting sun, a ribbon of rose gold, seeming to lead right off into forever.
It was a perfect ending to a good day, and this older woman from a previous generation knew enough to notice and appreciate it, thanks to all the good mentoring I’ve received.
This week I’ve been ‘camping’ in the back yard. We haven’t had rain for a long time and none is predicted for a long time into the future. So I’ve been sleeping in the tent without the rain fly.
The first night, a cool breeze touching my face and tucked under my blankets, I was looking up trying to see the few stars that shine in my light polluted neighborhood when I noticed a flash, almost out of my line of vision. I stared in that direction for several seconds but didn’t see anything, so I returned to my search for stars.
The flash happened again, higher but still almost beyond the open space above the tent. I stared some more. Nothing.
And then it happened. TWO lights blinked, right above the tent and I realized the lightening bugs had arrived for the summer! I couldn’t contain my smile. Lightening bugs, stars and a cool late night summer breeze. A perfect summer night in Michigan.
I have no pictures, but I’m sure if you close your eyes you can imagine it all for yourself. And I’m thinking you’ll smile too.
Some of you know that I spent most of my career in banking. The last 13 years of it were spent in mortgage banking, but the before that, for about 7 years I was management in retail banking. IE, a branch manager.
I managed different sized offices during that stint, some really small, some really big. All of them were busy, back in the days before electronic paychecks and even before ATM machines.
I remember lines out the door on General Motor’s weekly paydays. And cars constantly lined up in the drive-throughs on Friday evening when we stayed open late.
Working with the public can be stressful. I get that. But somewhere along the line customers got cut out of the service equation.
This week I realized my credit card was expiring at the end of May and I hadn’t received a replacement card. I’ve had this card since 1980. It says so right there on the plastic, and I’ve never had an issue like this.
So I figured I’d just call in and find out when I might expect the card. It wasn’t like I had any grand purchases planned, but it’s handy to have. I called the 800 number on the back of my card, the number for Customer Service.
After listening to several instructions to push 1 or say yes or no, I listened to a few advertisements for things they could do for me, none of which I was interested in. And interspersed between the ads, were suggestions about how much easier it could be if I’d just download the mobile app. Or perhaps I’d like to go to their website where surely I could solve all my problems.
All of this repeated for many long excruciating minutes, with ugly background noise disguised as music enhancing my enjoyment. They were experiencing a ‘high volume’ of calls and the wait time might be unusually long.
Huh. On a Tuesday night at 6:30 they were experiencing a high volume of calls? OK, I needed to go to band rehearsal, so after waiting for 15 minutes I decided to try again on another day.
Early Wednesday morning I called again. The same irritating music, the same ‘high volume of calls.’ I waited almost 20 minutes and hung up in disgust. It was obvious they were not interested in talking to me.
So I decided, what the heck, I’ll just drive to my local branch with my expired card and have them help me figure out what to do. Seemed so simple I don’t know why I didn’t think to do that from the start.
This afternoon I stopped by my branch.
There was nobody sitting at any of the customer service desks. The lights on that side of the building weren’t even on. There was a stock broker in a suit sitting in his office, but he wasn’t the appropriate person to fix my credit card issue.
Behind the teller line was one man, talking to a customer about a problem. It seemed quite complicated. At the far end of the teller line counter was another man running money through a counting machine. I couldn’t see it, but I’ve been around equipment like that enough to recognize the sound.
He never looked up.
I waited at the “enter here” sign for the employee to finish with the only other customer in the building. I waited a long time. And I noted he did not provide a solution to the customer’s problem.
Finally the man with the problem left and I approached the teller window. “You’ll need to go down there,” said the employee, nodding his head at the man on the end, still busy counting money. “I don’t have any money.” And he began to walk away.
“I don’t need money.” I said.
“Then what do you want?” he asked.
Yep, I’m feeling really weird about this whole place now. No customers, no staff, not even a teller working the drive-through, the curtains there are drawn, there’s no equipment on the counters, something seems off.
“Are you still a full service bank?” I asked.
“Why do you ask,” said the guy still counting money.
“Because there’s no one here.” I responded.
“We just had a bunch of people call in sick.” he replied.
Sure.
Anyway, I told the employee about my expired credit card and he said he couldn’t do anything from the branch and gave me a phone number to call.
An 800 number.
Apparently it’s my responsibility to fix this problem. And I’m not going to get any help from my local branch. If they’re even a branch at all.
I know I’m not alone, but when did customer service stop being a thing? And why must we only deal with people far away in call centers which must be so understaffed that exceptionally high call volume is really the norm and not an exception at all.
Maybe I’m just an old baby boomer who likes to reminisce about the way things used to be. But you youngsters should have been around when customer service ruled. When you got to talk to people face to face. And when they did their best to solve a problem rather than pass it on.
Or back to the customer.
Yep, those were the days. You’d have been amazed.
Note: images are from a walk last month at my favorite park. I never got them into a post, so I figure even if you don’t want to read about banking, and who would, you might enjoy the birds.
On the drive up I stopped for this patch of trillium.
A friend and I were camping in the Sleeping Bear National Park earlier this month specifically to spend as many nights as possible shooting the stars in that big beautiful dark sky country.
Arriving at site 312. It had electricity!
But let’s be honest, I took a lot of other pictures too. After all, what does a photographer do all day while waiting for it to get true dark?
All set up for our 5 night stay.
Well, we sat in camp a bit. And cooked lovely meals.
Yum. She brought the fish, I brought the chicken salad and bread.
We enjoyed the campfire in the cool evenings.
Trying to get warm.
And we got a little shuteye as we waited for the Milky Way to rise.
All buttoned up for a nap.
Of course we also went on a hike or two through the countryside, enjoying the newly greening forest…
This hike it was all about the late afternoon light.
…and the wildflowers pushing up from a long winter nap.
I can’t remember what this is, but it sure was pretty!
There’s plenty to do while you’re waiting for the stars to come out.
Hiking past a lake made during the times of glaciers. We were cold just thinking about that.
I haven’t even begun to process the images of the old barns and the orchards in bloom that we saw. And I still have seven stacks of star images to process.
Pretty sure it’s not edible.
So there’s going to be plenty to share once I get all the work done.
While you’re waiting you might want to go on a walk somewhere pretty too.
Penny here. Mom says she has more star pictures and camping pictures and barn pictures to show you, but I told her you’d rather see me! Cause I have to tell you about my date with Lance!
My friend Lance
Yep, my mom and Lance’s mom arranged a play date on Tuesday. Lance turns 1 year old tomorrow, so he’s about 6 months older than me. Isn’t he handsome?
I was smitten as soon as I met him. We hit it off right away because we both love to run! All four of our folks sat in chairs in the shade and talked and watched us play.
Our first nose touch.
Of course they made us take breaks pretty often, but we still played a lot!
Our first run together.
And Lance told me lots of secrets about how to get what you want from your parents. After all he has six more months of experience than me. I appreciated the intel.
He gave me lots of good advice.
But mostly we were just two crazy dogs having a wonderful time.
You can’t catch me!
And in between runs we got treats! What a wonderful day!
An excellent break from all that running!
Neither of us could believe our luck, to have a nice sunny day and a big yard to play in and four people to pay attention to us and provide drinks and treats!
Lance has the biggest water dish ever!
I’ll tell you a secret. I think Lance sort of likes me.
I think he’s blushing.
And I sort of like him too.
Whispering sweet nothings in his ear
Then of course the moms decide they should get a picture of the two of us sitting together.
Hey Lance! Let’s make them work for it!
Why do moms always do this? Does it seem like a good idea? I haven’t even graduated from puppy school yet, why would I want to sit and stay?
What is this stay thing you keep asking for?
Yep, it went about as well as you could expect.
OK, get the shot quick, cause I’m not sitting here one more second!
And just to add another little wrinkle to this photo shoot idea, they brought out Payton, Katie’s half sister, and decided they wanted a picture with all three of us!
This should be interesting.
Well. Payton is an old pro and sat stoically while all sorts of shenanigans went on beside her. It helps, I guess, that she’s deaf.
Stay means jump really high. Right?
I’m sure she was tired of sitting there, but finally mom got one shot of the three of us.
Payton was pretty disgusted by then.
We weren’t exactly all sitting. Ahem. But I did the best I could.
Mom ended up just taking pictures of the other two….
Handsome brother Lance and beautiful sister Payton.
…and then just of Payton, because mom says she looks so much like Katie, she couldn’t help but take a bunch of pictures of her. Mom was really glad she got to see Payton again.
Mom’s eyes leaked just a little bit.
And I got jealous and decided maybe I did too want my picture taken with my sister’s half sister.
Hey! Maybe I’ll pose for a picture after all!
And then Lance and I went back to playing!
Hey Lance! Wanna PLAY???
We played and played, and I started a lot of it!
I think we’ve met our match!
I couldn’t resist jumping on him to see if he’d run with me.
Come on! Let’s PLAY!!
And then the folks said we should go for a walk! A walk? Are you crazy? Lance and I just ran about a gazillion miles!
This was the perfect way to end our first date!
But their property was so pretty and shady that we all had a wonderful time exploring. Next time I expect I’ll be able to be off my leash and explore even more, just like Tally, Lance and Payton’s really big sister, and Payton.
Meet Tally. She’s such a good girl!
Isn’t she beautiful?
And then, after our walk when I thought we were going home, Lance’s mom and my dad got my loose ear glued down again.
What the heck, people!
And then it was time to say goodbye for now.
Three little shelties all in a row. Then mom said one had to go.
Boy I had a wonderful time.
Bye for now, Lance!
Today I sat by one of my windows and watched the clouds go by and dreamed of running in a big field with my friend Lance.
Saturday morning I walked in one of Katie’s parks along with 10 other people and an expert guide, to see the wildflowers blooming and tour some of the projects the township is working on to make more of the area open to the public.
One of several steep hills we climbed.
It was two plus miles of hills and wetlands, lots of little things blooming, and a cold, sunny day. I was very glad I’d worn waterproof shoes, and three layers of shirts!
Our guide told us what this was, but I can’t remember the name of it now.
I had just driven back home Friday afternoon, after five days of camping near the Sleeping Bear Dunes in cold, sometimes rainy, weather. I was kind of tired and thought about skipping this guided walk. It would be so easy to sleep in.
Tiny little white lady’s slippers just beginning to bloom.
But we were going to explore parts of the park I’ve never been to and I didn’t want to miss that, so I went. And I’m glad I did.
A lone trillium.
There will soon be so much more of the park available to explore, and I think it will be nice to have areas of the park that are new, without memories of Katie, that can be Penny’s alone.
Wild germanium
I can’t wait to show it all to her. They say the bridge from the parking lot to the new sections should be ready this fall. I don’t know, it seems like there is still a lot of work to do. But our guide, who is in charge of all the township parklands, says he’s confident they’ll get it all done.
Lupine
Meanwhile I’ll probably take Penny over to walk the trails Katie and I used to wander. The last time Katie and I were there she had a really good walk. Where before she had often refused to walk down the big hills, on this last walk, in the fall of 2021, she was eager to go.
I don’t know what this is, but it was pretty!
She walked much further than I expected her to, and even jumped over a tree branch that had fallen over the trail.
How fun! We got to go down trails that were normally off limits!
So I have those good memories to ease me into sharing her park with her new little sister, Penny.
Remnant.
The guided walk helped me, too, to see the park without Katie, but to realize she’ll always be there with me, just like she is in so many places.
Change Is Hard 