I got a couple of tips (thanks DailyMusing!) about how to maneuver through WordPress’ blockhead editing system, particularly with images.
So here goes….I should be able to delete a photo. Guess I should insert a photo first:
Then I’ll see if I can remove it….one moment please…
OH!!!!! That worked!
But wait….now there’s nothing there, and you can’t see the image…because…I REMOVED IT! 🙂 🙂 🙂
So here it is again…
It’s just a barn taken on my trip home from the night sky camping trip I took a week or more ago. In fact I have a few other barn images from that drive home. It was prime farm country, after all.
She gave me a tip on how to do a gallery too, let’s see if I can do that:
More barns!
Well, THAT was interesting! I don’t know if there’s a way to decide what goes where, but at least it’s a gallery!
The trick now will be for me to remember what I did.
Always something.
Edit: I just figured out you can click on any of the pictures in the gallery and see them bigger. They’re really better bigger.
Katie and I are sitting on the deck. I’m indulging her, letting her nap in a puddle of sun before the day gets so hot neither of us can sit out here.
I think the sun makes her old joints feel better.
I’ve filled the bird feeders and now listen intently as the sound of wings begins to overshadow the sound of a far away lawn mower.
The birds are used to us sitting out here, and they take the calculated risk of coming in for a bit of seed, even though it’s only a few feet from the dog and me.
My two nuthatches are the first to arrive. I hear their soft whining before I find them high up in the trees. Each ventures, headfirst, down a trunk, scurrying in a race to reach the seed first.
Under the deck a chipmunk causes a ruckus running into the roof gutter drain. I guess he’s not as brave as the little birds.
The chickadees have shown up, a whole flock of them this year. As youngsters they were shy, but now they’re old hands at stealing a seed and whirring up into the tree to eat it. There are so many I can’t keep track.
A cardinal has risked landing on the flat feeder, several feet away. If we sit still he will sit there and eat until something bothers him. He has the flat feeder all to himself for the moment, just the way he likes it.
The titmouse is late this morning. Usually she’s the first to come in when they hear the seed can being opened. She flies so fast, through the limbs of the honeysuckle to grab her share.
And there’s a little downy woodpecker, hanging upside down on the tube feeder. I haven’t seen him in awhile, it’s nice to see him here this morning.
Katie gets anxious, wanting a treat for herself, but I can’t leave yet — the hairy woodpecker has arrived. And now the hummingbirds, the male and female ruby throated, are chasing each other among the pink leaves of the beach tree.
But she’s barking now. A princess isn’t required to be patient.
So we go in and let the birds have their breakfast buffet in peace.
As most of you know, Trent hosts a weekly blog that gathers posts from all sorts of people who are talking about smiling. These days we can all use a smile or two or ten.
Flowers always make me smile.
I don’t always get a smiley post done every week, but I sure appreciate the work he does to remind us all to look for smiles even when we don’t feel like it.
There’s been lots of bad news lately, but I’ve still had plenty to smile about. For example, a neighbor stopped by with his new puppy and we did a little photo shoot, mostly with his camera.
Meet Oliver, the neighbor’s new puppy!
I got this image of little Oliver on my camera. He’s only about 3 months old, but he’s as big as Katie and strong like a bull. In this shot he reminds me a bit of Winston Churchill. I think it’s the stick he’s chewing like a cigar, and his eyes.
But mostly, this week, it’s Katie-girl that makes me smile.
Mama! There’s yogurt on my nose, you can’t post this!
We made it out to her park one evening, though most days it’s just too hot. Even that day she sat under the picnic table and we didn’t even attempt to walk around the pond.
It’s hot out here, mama!
Tonight we went out back and smelled the roses, just one more thing to smile about.
If this doesn’t make you all smile, I don’t know what will!
I hope you all had plenty of things to smile about this week, and that next week is even better for us all!
These smell good mama! I hope everyone out there can smell them too!
This post is going to try to figure out how to insert other types of pictures. The old WordPress let you do collages, and small images, and place them to the left or right. The new blockhead WordPress, so far, hasn’t let me do any of that.
So here goes.
Nope that didn’t work….but I can make headings….
And I can add a picture and words in the same block…
And I found a sort of collage, see above on the right. I don’t know why it ended up there…or why it’s all crunched together when I preview it, it’s not that way in the edit mode…but that’s the way of WordPress’s blockhead new program. I wonder if I can find other things.
And you know what else? I can’t figure out how to eliinate an image I insert. Once something is there I can replace it with something else…but not eliminate it totally. Well. That’s odd. And annoying.
Forest.
Even a child knows how valuable the forest is. The fresh, breathtaking smell of trees. Echoing birds flying above that dense magnitude. A stable climate, a sustainable diverse life and a source of culture. Yet, forests and other ecosystems hang in the balance, threatened to become croplands, pasture, and plantations.
I can add an image inside an image, but I didn’t choose the forest, it got chosen for me.
I don’t know….all I’ve figured out is that there’s a lot more to find if I take the time. But not everything works the way I think it should.
I guess I need to keep digging.
The randomness is intentional, because that’s the way I feel about the “new” WordPress.
Let’s see. The last I knew you were all looking at barns because barns are so much easier to photograph than stars. I don’t suppose I can ply you with more of them?
Look! It’s a barn! (From my drive home on Friday.)
No? I understand–you’re wondering how I could have been at a dark sky park for three days and three nights and not produce something worthy of all that time.
Packing up my campsite Friday.
All three evenings we had nice sunsets, and I hoped that the skies might be clear enough to see some stars. But clouds rolled in after the sun went down and we had two nights of torrential rain and wind.
This little guy had to be presuaded not to hitch a ride home with me.
Definitely no star shooting those nights! Though I did see a couple meteorites each night before the weather turned really wicked.
Wednesday night’s sunset.
But I really wanted to spend a few hours on a warm summer night watching the sky, and behind those clouds I just knew there were hundreds of meteorites flying. It was frustrating.
Thursday night’s sunset.
Finally it was Thursday night, my last night at the park. Weather predictions were that Friday, Saturday and Sunday nights would be clear. But there wasn’t a campsite or a hotel room to be had over the weekend, so all my chips were on the table for Thursday night.
The stars from the campground beach about 10:30 p.m.
I walked down to the beach after dark to see if there were stars or clouds. Turned out there was a bit of both. I took a few pictures, but it wasn’t really dark, so I decided to drive to the dark sky park one last time.
And I’m so glad I did.
No that’s not a meteorite. It’s just a plane.
I arrived shortly before 11:00 p.m. and the parking lot was very full. You could feel the excitement, all those cars, headlights off, dark shadows of people scurying around with tripods and red headlamps.
Light from town interferes with the Milky Way.
I finally found a block of three empty parking spots and I quickly pulled into the middle one. Just as I was turning in I realized there was a person in a chair in the first empty spot. That shook me as I could have run right over them!
So many stars.
I got out of the car, intent on apologizing for almost mowing him or her down when I heard snoring. There was a very large man in a reclining beach chair full on asleep. I made a lot of noise, not intentionally, getting my gear out of the car and he never woke up.
The other end of the Milky Way.
I decided there were too many noisy people, including what appeared to be a whole group of school kids at the other end of the parking lot. I was already seeing metorites overhead, so I headed back into the dunes to see what I could see.
Most of the Milky Way was directly overhead.
Lots of people out there too, red headlights bobbing around, but the people were quiet, more respectful of the wonderful show going on overhead.
As the sky got darker and darker the number of meteorites bursting overhead increased. I was standing at an intersection of two paths and several people stopped by to chat about what a wonderful night it was.
There were a few clouds but they just added to the interest.
One young man in particular asked me right away what appeture I was using, and we ended up in a long conversation about lenses and iso speeds. He had a camera in the car, shooting film. We debated if it would work, and he went to get it.
Turns out it was color, with a speed of 200 (I can’t remember how we phrased that back in the film days) but he did have a really low f-stop. So I set my camera for 200 iso and shot 20 seconds to see what he might get…which ended up being a big, totally black rectangle.
It was such a beautiful night.
So he took one picture anyway, just for fun, but didn’t waste the rest of his roll of film. Then we talked about him going to the University of Michigan, and me having done that many years ago, and his road trip to NYC and my roadtrip to Baltimore, and his granparents (who aren’t much older than me), and photography composition, and today’s real estate values skyrocketing, and my dad’s truck crash, and his planned kayak trip the next morning. Then he headed back to his campsite, and I stayed out there and shot the sky for another hour at least.
Just after 1 a.m. the sky lit up with metorites. And I was lucky (and it’s all pure luck) that one appeared to dance right through the frame of one of my shots. I squealed as I am want to do in situations like this, then impatiently waited for the 15 seconds to elapse, and then the long wait for the noise reduction to work itself out before I could check to see if what I thought had happened had.
I still can’t believe I got this curly que meteorite!
And yes it did! HOW COOL IS THAT?
I could have stayed out there staring at the sky all night. But by 1:45 I thought I had captured all the angles of the few trees out there. And I had that drive home in the morning. So I started walking back to the parking lot. But then there’d be something else that was pretty so I’d have to stop.
There were lots of other people still out there, too, though some were also packing it up for the night.
This is what it looks like when a whole group of people with flashlights and headlamps walks through your 15 second exposure.
I’m sure there were several dozen back in the dunes still gazing up at the sky when I finally left, I hope they weren’t asleep like the three young ladies I found on the grassy berm in front of my car. I woke them up when I used the remote to unlock the back and my headlights turned on. I hadn’t seen them there asleep on a big blanket. At least they weren’t snoring.
It was such a wonderful night I’m having trouble deciding which images to show you. There was still quite a bit of light coming from town, but I guess that just adds to the effect.
I don’t know what planet that is on the left, but it was soooo bright!
I wish you all could have been standing right there with me. It’s really kind of hard to express how awe inspiring it is to be under those stars hanging so bright in the sky with metorites flitting through them which evoked oohs and ahs from people all over the park. It was better than the 4th of July fireworks.
I sweated through three days of heat and humidity and held my tent to the ground by sheer determination in two monsoons in a campground with no bathrooms for that one perfect night, and every bit of all that discomfort disappeared as soon as I was in the dark on the warm sand looking up on a clear night.
Hard to describe.
I heartily recommend this kind of experience for anything that ails you. And it’s OK if you bring your beach chair.
Just don’t snore.
PS: I recommend you look at the night images on something bigger than your phone, and probably turn up the brightness of your screen.
Every year I reserve a camping spot somewhere up north for mid-August in the hopes of being in a dark place to wittness the meteorite showers. Almost every year I am foiled.
Drove right through farm country.
Back in March I booked the last campsite at Port Crescent State Park which has a Dark Sky Park just a couple miles down the road from the campground.
But the sky didn’t look promising.
Of course, booking in March for August means you have no idea what the weather will be like once you’re there. And of course this year, while last week was clear with no chance of rain, this week, when the meteorites should be peaking, is forecast to be hot and stormy.
Harvesting in the heat.
A great debate ensued as my departure date grew nearer. Should I cancel or should I go north and see what happens? The debate grew more interesting when I received an email from the state park indicating there would be no restrooms, due to a sewer problem. Right. Stormy and no bathrooms.
Heavy skies, but lots of barns.
The answer seemed obvious. I should cancel, especially since they’d refund my registration money.
Do you see the red/orange left on the barns? I thought it looked great with the orange lilies below.
So I went anyway.
When the soybeans turn yellow this will be stunning.
The drive up was not encouraging. The skies were overcast, then filled with heavy clouds.
This little barn, with the queen anne’s lace, is one of my favorites from the trip north.
But my navigation system, instead of sending me up the freeway, took me on all backroads. Right through farm country. Filled to overflowing with barns.
The cows didn’t seem to be uneasy about the weather. Of course they get to see stars every clear night.
So. Even if I didn’t get to see meteroites or stars or anything I was after, I’d be sure to catch a few barns. So it was a win, right?
I liked the yellow stripped field against the purple clouds and the white windmills.
Well sort of. Just before I left I was messing around with settings, reading my manual and moving through the menus. I did something so that every image was severely overexposed. And I couldn’t figure out how to fix it.
Barns and windmills and perhaps sugar beets.
So I drove north frustrated with the weather and my camera, and the fact I couldn’t find my Kindle so nothing much felt right.
Held up by the vines.
But I added almost 2 hours to the 3 hour drive, because, well, barns.
Barns were everywhere. But so were the clouds.
And when I finally, FINALLY, made it to the lake the sky was clearing.
The cool blue sooths me.
There just might be a chance that my very first night I’d get the shots I’ve been dreaming of.
Might see some stars tonight!
Unless…
Not much of a sunset. But there is hope for the night sky.
Well, you’ll have to wait and see.
Saw this guy as I headed to my car for the trip to the Dark Sky Park.
I took this photo last month on my way to meet my college roommate for a couple hours of peaceful kayaking at Kensington Metro Park.
The light caught my eye.
For whatever reason I never looked at it once I downloaded all the images from that day. I guess I was focused more on our time together and the water.
But I turned around to get this image, early that Sunday morning, and I think it deserves some time in the spotlight, because it definitely made me smile that day (I think I may have squealed. Out loud.) and again today after I found it in my archives.
This week I’m feeling some anxiety, so I was having trouble finding a smile. I don’t think it’s wrong to reach back a little when grasping for smiles, do you? We’re all lucky if we have those memories to grab when we need them.
I hope you have found your smile (or maybe even multiple smiles!) this week. Thank you, Trent, for reminding us to keep looking for them!
Change Is Hard 