Penny would like to wish everyone who celebrates a Happy Easter.
She’s hoping for ham, but I fear she will be sadly disappointed.
But I might take her on a walk in one of her parks. That’s better than ham.
Right?
Happy Easter
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Going earless
Once upon a time, a long, long, time ago (more than 35 years), my husband and I were dating. As Easter approached he bought me a solid chocolate rabbit as a gift. We left it, in it’s box, on an end table in the living room when we went out for the evening.
When we got home the rabbit was partially out of the box, but still in place on the end table, and it’s long chocolatey ears had been bitten off.
The cat immediately pointed a paw at the dog who looked slightly, but not completely, guilty.
Long before we knew anything about dogs and chocolate we laughed at how Daisy the Sheltie managed to nibble the ears off while leaving most of the rabbit still in the box on the table. And to this day when it’s chocolate bunny season we remember Daisy and what a delicate and polite girl she was
No dogs were injured in the making of this post. A hollow chocolate rabbit was, sadly, sacrificed.
And everyone lived happily ever after
I’ve been worried for weeks. I even had a nightmare about, of all things, spaghetti. Whenever I expressed my concerns, which was often, I was assured that things usually work out.
The thing I was worried about was the Clarkston Community Band’s concert this last Friday evening. You all know I’m a natural worrier and I generally hold pre-concert jitters inside as the performance time approaches.
But this was different because we weren’t just responsible for the music. This time we were attempting our very first fundraiser, and feeding 100+ people a spaghetti dinner while we were playing music from around the world.
And so I imagined the worst case situations. Most of which revolved around food and getting said food to the venue, and cooked and presented to our guests while most of us were busy, dressed in our concert blacks, playing music.
You know…playing the fiddle while Rome burned. But that’s a different story.
Many of the band members arrived at 4 to help set up the venue, a large room, essentially a gym, at a local church. The kitchen was at one end of the room, and we arranged the other end as a concert stage. In between we set up 16 round tables, eight chairs to a table, complete with table cloths, a candle and a flowering plant.
By 5 almost the entire band had arrived, many people taking time off from work to settle into our role as hosts and musicians. We tested the sound as we warmed up, tuned, played a few difficult transitions. Surprisingly, in such a large room filled with hard surfaces bouncing the sound around, we were pleased by what we heard.
The food was being warmed in the kitchen, the room looked great, the musicians were relaxed. I started to let my shoulders down just a bit.
The doors opened at 6 and there was a line of people waiting to get in! As we greeted our guests I finally let the nightmares go. Regardless of how the spaghetti got from the kitchen to the table we were ready. It was, as everyone had assured me, going to work out.
And it did.
The place was packed, every seat filled and more people sitting along the sides. The music was fun, our guests were engaged, the atmosphere was casual, spaghetti and meatballs eventually made it out to the tables and at the end everybody ate cake.
I’m so proud of our group. A couple weeks before we had only sold 14 tickets, had no volunteers for essential duties and some of the music was pretty rough.
But, as always, we pulled together. Everybody pitched in, hauled tables and chairs, set up the silent auction tables, unloaded percussion from the box truck, heated food, delivered meatballs to the tables, played music, cleaned the kitchen, packed up percussion, put away tables and chairs, emptied the trash and smiled all the way through.
And our 100+ guests smiled, too, as they walked out into the darkened parking lot, humming, I’m sure, bits of Funiculi, Funicula or Hey Jude, or Live and Let Die, or the Stars and Stripes.
In fact I’m still humming some of that myself.
PS: I just listened to the sound recording of the concert. Man, that was a fun one. And listening to the audience sing Hey Jude when the band cut out…that just made my heart smile. What a good time.
PT fixes more than my shoulder
I started physical therapy this morning to strengthen my shoulders. Years ago I had an issue with my right rotator cuff, and did PT in an effort to avoid surgery. It worked. Lately I have noticed the same pain in both my shoulders so I asked my Nurse Practitioner for a script to start PT.
I’m scheduled for four appointments, 2 this week and 2 next week, all at 7 a.m., at a physical therapy place about 6 miles away from home. Should be easy. But as we all know….
The state of Michigan is working on the freeways around here, and all 3 of the nearby entrance ramps, going north or south, are closed. So when I left home at 6:40 to go the 6 miles to my 7 a.m. appointment I shouldn’t have been shocked to see all the surface streets bumper to bumper.
But I was.
What was I thinking? I’d forgotten about how awful commuting is around here, especially when the freeway is essentially closed. I’ll spare you the gory details but I was 15 minutes late for my first PT appointment.
After my workout, in an effort to find a more strategic route before Wednesday’s appointment, I drove around in ever expanding circles, trying to find a way onto the freeway. Eventually it was obvious that wasn’t going to work. The freeway is not an option. (I guess thousands of commuters had already come to that conclusion, hence my morning.)
I headed home, down a dirt road I rarely travel, through farms and woods, with little traffic. Which was good because I had to come to a dead stop to avoid running over a bunny rabbit skipping across the road in front of me. And shortly after that, at eye level on a tree right next to the road was a male pileated woodpecker with most of his face inside a tree. If I’d been in my passenger seat I’d have been able to reach out and touch him. He was so focused he didn’t move as I drove slowly by wishing for my camera. And as I drove up the last bit of dirt road, close to home I had to stop again as a muskrat ambled from one swampy area and across the road to another.
If I hadn’t been late to my PT and attempting to find a better route I’d never have seen the rabbit, the woodpecker or the muskrat. The combination of all three made me forget my morning commute frustrations. I’m still smiling.
I don’t have photos, but I know you have a sense of imagination…so I’ll leave it to you to picture it all. And later today I’ll go out and figure out a better way to get to that next appointment, but it feels like I’m going to have to leave home at 6 a.m. to make it on time.
Golden proof of spring
Here in Michigan spring can be a long time coming. Oh, I definitely have specific things that herald winter’s exit, like the sound of red winged blackbirds and singing frogs hanging at the pond across the street.
And there are the marsh marigolds brightening up banks of our local streams.
Still, we know that the snow could return any day, and likely will. We dream of warmth and trilliums, still a few weeks away.
Goldfinches turning yellow are a definite sign we’re finally on our way out of the gray, cold weather.
In the winter both the male and female goldfinches are an olive green. But once the weather warms up the males start to sport bright yellow feathers. I began to notice the color change last week, even as the icy rain continues.
Today I glanced up and my finch feeder was full of birds, all cold and hungry. You can see the patchy yellow on the male birds.
I could feel sad about all the grey skies and cold rain. But it’s impossible to feel down when my finches are turning gold!
Spring is here, I’m positive. And I dare mother nature to even think about snowing on us now!
Randomness
I am between laptops, the old one is being migrated over to the latest version of wonderfulness. (That was sarcastic, you know I hate change.) It’s a slow process, mostly because of pictures. So while I don’t have full access to stuff stored there, and now other places, I have been trying to wean myself away from the camera.
It’s not easy.
My husband says I had over 250,000 images stored on the laptop. No wonder it was just chugging along. I know that I don’t need all of those and I had started the process of weeding. But I got bogged down, and that was before I was knew and became intimidated by the sheer number.
Anyway.
I will find some images to add to this post, pulled from an external hard drive, of which I think I now have 4. How about I randomly just pull some pretty pictures and stick them here and there in this post and see how it turns out?
I’ve been wondering, but not seriously, if I could pick just my favorite images and put them in a file folder and let the rest go. Of course this wondering was way before I knew there were 250,000 to choose from.
I wonder how big the favorites file would become?
And would the favorites have classifications? You know, like Katie, and night skies, and barns and Penny, and Alabama, and camping, and family and my Great Lakes?
Wait. That’s kind of what I have now.
Maybe I should just find another hobby to obsess over. But I haven’t learned all I want to learn with photography yet.
It’s the same with watercolor painting. I like to paint, but what do you DO with all the stuff you produce?
I need to learn to be ruthless and throw stuff away.
We remodeled the basement, and in that process moved everything that was piled down there out to the garage, into the guest rooms, the dining room, the living room. What once were slightly disorganized piles of stuff hidden away are now slightly disorganized piles of stuff all over the house.
The remodel is essentially done and it’s time to move this stuff back. But would it make more sense to put most of it at the curb? Perhaps without even looking at it? Because if I look, well, that’s how I ended up with 250,000 images stored on my laptop and me with decision paralysis.
Stay tuned. Or not. We can always figure it out tomorrow. Or next year. I think I’ll go look through some old image files.
The moon also rises
You haven’t heard from me in awhile, but there’s a very good reason. It was the moon’s fault.
You remember back a couple three weeks when we enjoyed the lunar eclipse? Well you know I was out in my backyard attempting to capture the beauty of it all.
I thought it was going to be easy.
I went out early in the evening, before the eclipse began, and shot an image of the moon just to make sure I could focus and get the light right. The camera auto focused on the moon and I was happy with the image.
So I went to bed and set the alarm for 2 which is when the news people said we’d be close to the full eclipse. But that was silly. Because when I got out there after 2 a.m. I had missed the whole first half of the eclipse. I don’t know what I was thinking!
I did, however, get to see the full eclipse. I wasn’t really enjoying it in the moment though because I couldn’t get the camera to focus.
Turns out there was so little light coming off the moon that the camera couldn’t figure out what to focus on. The focus ring kept moving, the lens trying so hard to find something to latch onto, but it continued to fail. Meanwhile the eclipse was moving right along on schedule. So I changed it to manual focus and tried to do the best I could, using skills learned in my Milky Way class.
I went back to bed at 5 a.m., cold to the core, but happy knowing I had 191 images. Of the moon. And even though I knew a good percentage of them were garbage, I knew a handful would probably be good. Or at least good enough.
In the morning I downloaded the images to an external hard drive because my laptop memory is pretty full. But when I went to open up my first image all I got was colored lines.
I and my husband have been trying off and on since then to figure out what the deal is. I’ll save you all the details, but it turns out if you shoot in RAW you need to have special software to read the data and see your image. At least you do with my new camera, the Nikon Z6iii. It’s confusing because I know for a fact that I haven’t had trouble shooting and reading RAW images in the past. All my night shooting has been in RAW and this has never been an issue.
It’s a lot like those running shoes I used to wear. As soon as I found a pair that felt good the manufacturer would change something and I’d have to find a new shoe.
Anyway.
Today husband finally figured out that we needed to download Nikon’s software which he did on our desktop computer and I finally got to see my moon images for the first time since sitting out there in the cold, all those weeks ago.
Today I deleted lots of images. I kept lots too. But this one, the one below turns out to be my favorite because of the stars shimmering around the moon.
Now I know you can’t actually see the stars, I usually have to lighten up images quite a bit to post them on WP or FB. But oddly tonight when I tried to edit this image the entire Lightroom Classic edit page is different. I can’t find the crop. I can’t figure out how to make the stars shine brighter. I can’t find much of anything. So…tired and feeling defeated, I give up.
What you see is what I’m able to figure out. I’ve spent way too much time today trying to get stuff to work. Tomorrow, I promise, is another day.
And right now I’m going to go back to the desktop with it’s big screen and look at this image and sigh, remembering a magical night under the stars.
You guys will have to take my word for it.
Change Is Hard 