Wordless Wednesday
Tag Archives: fun stuff
Mini adventure
Last week a friend and I decided we needed an adventure, but neither of us had time for a long, fully planned and packed adventure.
But I have been feeling a keen need to find something amazing to photograph, something outside my own home and local parks. My friend had explored a colorful place, several weeks ago, just an hour north of us.
I asked her to take me there.
I mean — Saginaw Michigan just screams adventure. Right?
Of course right!
Saginaw is near the Shiawasee National Wildlife Refuge where you’ve all hiked with me to see pelicans and eagles and sandhill cranes.
Saginaw is not far from the Chippewa Nature Center where I’ve brought you along to find stunning color in the fall.
Saginaw isn’t even far from Midland Michigan and it’s Dow Gardens complete with a walk in the tree canopy. You’ve been with me there too, at least a couple times.
But this time we went to visit the Saginaw Shine Bright Mural Project.
And let me tell you, this place satisfied all my photography cravings in one big ole splat of gorgeous color.
Though I don’t know that it’s a location I’d want to explore alone, and certainly not at night, it was fun to spend a bit of time there with someone else who appreciated the art. It’s huge and it’s bright and it will definitely make you smile.
No matter the angle you view it from, whether you sit in your car and admire it from across the river or get all up close and personal, it’s well worth the visit.
And on the way home we stopped for a barn.
Of course.
Orange you glad…
Most years the orioles arrive at my feeder around May 5. Hummingbirds too. But a friend of mine, living about an hour west of me, had an oriole on her feeder Easter Sunday!
So I put my feeder up a few days ago and Friday evening, during an hours long torrential downpour, my first oriole visited! I wasn’t sure I saw him, –it was getting dark and the rain was coming down in sheets.
I didn’t get a photo.
But the next morning, after I went out and emptied the water from his feeder and filled it up with grape jelly, he showed up!
He was still skittish and I got no images, but I stayed very still, holding Penny tight, and watched him eat his fill.
And late in the afternoon, as I stood across the room, I saw him again. My camera was within reach and I got these images, focus soft, but capturing the joy I felt to see him here.
And guess what? Later in the evening I realized there are TWO of them here! They chased each other around the beach tree which acts as the landing area for all birds visiting our feeders.
I can’t wait to set the camera on it’s tripod and use a remote shutter release. We’ll see what we shall see.
And today the hummingbird feeder goes up. If the orioles are here, the hummingbirds are too.
Lots to report
Shhhhhhhh! It’s me, Penny! I’m trying to give you an update on things I’ve been doing without letting the mom know. Cause as you can see, she’s not giving me nearly enough online exposure. So I’m doing what they call an ‘end run’ around her and getting on here myself.
She’s sharing lots of stuff about her silly birds, and hardly anything about me and my adventures. All you’ve seen of me is the Easter picture. And to be honest I did that under duress. I mean pink is not my color!
Anyway.
Since I last wrote to you all I’ve been very very busy. I had a play date with Levi at his dog park which is about an hour away from my house.
We had lots of fun and I made Levi chase me a few times.
Mostly we did our own thing, you know? He was into running and chasing his frisbee…
…and I was just into running.
Levi is a very handsome dude and of course the moms wanted a picture of the two of us together. And of course, as is stipulated in the sheltie bylaws, we made it very hard for the moms to get said picture.
Sit next to each other? No way. But maybe on our next play date we’ll be nicer to the moms. I guess it depends on the quality of treat being offered.
And I also did a Rally Trial where mom signed me up to do two runs. A run is where you and your mom or dad walk around in a ring doing a bunch of stuff at little signs. You’re supposed to take your cue from your mom or dad who is supposed to be able to read the signs correctly.
Frankly it’s a bit boring because they don’t let you have treats while you’re in the ring. And without treats, what’s the point anyway?
I did real good on the first run, I got 96 out of 100 points and second place in my group. But then mom rushed me right over to the other run without any breaks (and no treats!!) and we were all of the sudden in there walking around and I was sort of more interested in getting out of the ring, and also I forgot what the word “sit!” means.
I guess I just had a mental block. I don’t know what the big deal is, mom has those all the time! I still got a qualifying score, 80-something, but I didn’t place. Mom says that’s just fine. She says we have two legs of the three we need for a title in Novice Rally.
I’ve been taking her to doggie school every week to practice reading the signs. Between you and me, this past Tuesday afternoon she couldn’t read much of anything right and I got really frustrated with her. So I decided I didn’t know how to sit straight anymore. Or heel. Or wait. Waiting is my hardest thing anyway.
Mom says we’ll be in the basement working on that stuff this week.
In fact, talking about the basement, my friend Lance and his folks came over and Mom and I did some work in our new basement, teaching me the tricks of Beginner Novice Obedience! Mom say she has great plans for me. I say I’m all in as long as there’s cheese involved.
Oh – and on Friday evenings I’ve been going on group walks with another trainer and a bunch of other dogs and their people. We’re walking around small towns and getting used to traffic and other people and other dogs. Mom says it’s working. I don’t go as crazy now when we’re out and about as long as mom has treats on her. She’s pretty happy with me and we have a lot of fun on the walks!
I just know there’s more news to tell you, but mom’s almost done cleaning the kitchen so I better go inspect. Have I told you that the kitchen is my favorite room in my house? I call it the Food Room. You never know what will appear from hidden places there.
Talk later, your gal Pen.
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.
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.
The jig is up
Hi everybody, Penny here.
Well.
Mom and daddy say that it’s time that I stop all my temper tantrums at home and the barking and lunging at doggies at school, and the chasing cars and joggers and bicycles thing. Also my very loud and insistent objections to things like the shower being turned on, or the refrigerator door being closed without me getting anything.
You know, stuff like that.
So they had a lady come over to the house to meet me. She’s very nice and has the best treats! After initially barking at her and then jumping on her I decided to show her my very best behavior and I sat. I sat a lot and stared expectantly at her.
And every time I looked at her while something noisy was happening in the house she gave me a teeny tiny barely there treat. I thought this was the best game ever!
So now mom and daddy are trying to anticipate my outbursts and get my attention before I go off on them. I seem to be getting more attention and more treats lately. We’re only a few days in but I like it!
Then yesterday mom took me out to a park and we practiced heeling and downing and sitting and coming and stuff. Lots of treats there too.
I may have hit the jackpot!
And then…last night, just when I was settling into my after supper nap which leads to my after supper sleep, mom woke me up and put me in the car and we went to a little historic town nearby where we met up with the same nice lady and another family with their dog, and we walked around town!
Well! I’m not real happy about being near noisy cars and I was a little bit hyper but the nice lady and my mom would just make a sound that reminded me to look at them and then I got a treat!
Mom brought cheese!
We walked around and around and around this little town and I was mostly good. Sometimes I couldn’t help it and I’d forget to look at mom and start barking and twirling over something, and a couple times she had to hug me to calm me down, but overall I am beginning to learn that mom’s got my back and I don’t have to protect her from anything.
Maybe.
I bet mom and I will be having more of these adventures. I can’t decide if I like them better than my park adventures, but if there’s cheese…well…I’m in! Right after I take a nap.
Change Is Hard 