The Motherfunky Musical Mashup

Holy crap. Check it out.

My Motherfunky Musical Mashup from Joseph Catté on Vimeo.

Found on a  fantastic blog en espanol -  Bubbles on my Planet - which has amused and entertained me endlessly this evening.  Where I find things like this:

Life is so damn short.
For Fuck sake Just do
what Makes you Happy.

Indeed.


What a great place to stumble onto tonight, thank you Pinterest. I recommend stopping by and clicking translate for a nice visit.

I'm sitting curled up next to the fire on a cold windy snowy late March evening with a nice glass of chardonnay and I feel fine.

What Remains

Dilly dallying pretty much sums up my week. The sun came out. The weather warmed up enough for me to remember sunny happy days and being warm, inside and out.

I got out the camera and played. I daydreamed and dabbled. It was good.

Here is what remains...

Ginko leaves, so golden and creamy after two - or three? years in a box.

Butterflies, moths, bits and pieces of lovely creatures who have come and gone in my little yard.

The limits of my camera lens are boundless. I can capture a hint of the intensity of color, or a bit of the luxurious texture, or a hint of the complexity, but never all at once, never quite true. But still.

Leaves keep their color and interest for years, once pressed and kept out of light. Years of fun.

Gulf of Mexico, Indiana reservoir, Illinois plains, North Carolina hills - treasures.

I kept the lid on the camembert. There's creepy crawlie spiders and wasps and hornets in there. I don't always feel like looking at them. They're there if I need them.

This is a piece of wood, stained by nature. I feel the need to make something out of this someday.

Sometimes I need to really look at these bits and pieces and feel the wonder of it all, this amazing crazy colorful mysterious world under my very feet.  Such beauty in death. So much still remains. Hope of renewal, resilience, remembrance. Evidence of something magnificent.

There is no end to my curiosity or to the treasures I find wherever I look, or to my need to collect little pieces of what I see, and hoard not just the collections, like a curator, or a magpie, but the pictures that try to tell their story as well. 

I'll end with this funny I found on Pinterest, which is where I go to lazily lounge in lovely things other people have scoured the internet to tag for my amusement. My latest, greatest time waster and inspirational obsession, Pinterest. For when I'm too tired to blog, but not too tired to click things I like to look at, and occasionally laugh at.

Ha ha, right?

Happy doing or admiring whatever it is that sustains you.

Albedo

Oh, albedo. The definition I memorized in 1979 was "the percent reflectivity of a surface" and I think of the word more than might be normal. I even like saying it, it's a fun word. Albedo is also latin for white, because white is the most reflective of the colors, black the least.

A co-worker once told me his amazement watching a blind man run his hand along the side of a cow, knowing exactly where the white ended and black began,  thinking it was a mystery. Nope.

It was albedo. The black hide was warmer, and even if you don't know what albedo means, you can probably relate to the temperature difference between black top and side walk on bare feet on a summer day. Oh, summer. Remember summer and bare feet?

I have a persistent patch of snow in the yard thanks to the row of south facing evergreen trees. I was traipsing around with Tucker and noticed these wonderful leaf imprints. Our most recent dusting covered the oak leaves and stopped them from melting further, but they still sat almost an inch below the snow pack surface. Lovely imprints, and really hard to photograph in sunshine.

I found a few perfect silhouettes in the snow. I'm grateful I have a dog who doesn't like to go outside and play alone. He begs me to go out with him many times a day, and I try to stomp around with him as much as I can. I'm always rewarded with some treasure or another. I would have certainly missed these if I didn't have a needy dog. And they wouldn't exist without albedo.

This has been one snowy, cold March. Lots of time for me to think of things big and small.  I wonder what the weather will be like in the long term, when my kids are grown, as our ice caps and glaciers continue to melt, in a snowball effect. The less ice and snow there is, the less light can be reflected, the warmer the water gets, so more melts. Add in dirt and particulates and dust from air pollution and volcanic eruptions and the snow gets dirty and darker and further speeds up the process. I think extreme weather systems and broken records for highs and lows will be the new norm in this changing landscape. Thanks, albedo.

There's a documentary I'm ITCHING to see, decades of lovely images from glaciers around the world, as they recede and calve at shocking rates. Beautiful and horrifying. Here's the trailer for Chasing Ice:



On the home front, my snow can't melt fast enough. These snow abstract shots are a week or so old, and I'm finally getting around to posting them. Only a few mounds remain, for which the emerging chipmunks are very grateful. Tucker is a fierce rodent hunter, though he's never actually caught one yet. I wish he'd catch them all, the little rascals. They have a resort condo under my front step and hibernation is over for the season so it's mayhem out my front door. They must have multiplied in their little dens because there are so many this year.

I found this rock on a summer walk in the park, along an abandoned railroad track. With Tucker of course. It never ceases to amaze me that the rock story tells of ancient lake or sea beds, right here in the middle of the plains. I brought home a bunch of these and whacked at them with a hammer to see what I could find, mostly these little clam shells.

Who knows what comes in the next thousand or million years or so. Another ice age? A dust bowl?  Giant ferns and eagle sized dragonflies? I like to think the pendulum swings back and forth, slowly over the millenium, as the earth corrects for these changes, ever adapting to the natural and the man made. I do try to stay optimistic, because pessimism is so depressing. And you know? We just never know. We can't. We can only try to reflect some hope and intelligence out there into the world, in our own little ways.

Happy Wednesday.

Something to make you smile...

A college student asked Billy Joel if he could play for him and Billy said yes. Wonderful. Enjoy...



Guys got chops :)

Magnificent Chickens and Such

Seriously. This Slate article about chickens and their portraits is wonderful. Now I know there is another photo book of chickens I have to buy, The Fairest Fowl, Portraits of Championship Chickens, by Tamara Staples. I want her job. I would love going to state fairs to see and photograph the livestock. Especially the chickens.

I already proudly display my coffee table book Extraordinary Chickens, which my husband says combined with my moth photo books is maybe a little oversharing at first glance.




But we love what we love, right? For me it's a toss up between fancy chickens and giant moths, mostly because they so beautifully illustrate the incredible variation among species, and maybe because I grew up around enough of them to make me notice.

It's a good thing there's no coffee table book of Tardigrades, also called water bears, these amazing creatures that live in moss. They might frighten some people off, but aren't they fascinating? I encountered this guy on NASA'S photo of the day website, which seems odd until you read we're shooting them into space because the can live anywhere. Literally. This electron microscope photo is mind blowing. I went and learned all about these guys last night, and I'm just beside myself how much I don't know about this planet and it's creatures, despite a lifetime trying to learn all I can. Maybe they didn't catch my eye until the technology to photograph them made them come alive. He/she's no chicken or furry moth, but I think it's cute in it's own way.



So if your curiosity is piqued, you can go to youtube and google them and be amazed some more, just like me. Wonders never cease.

Happy Friday.

Snow Day

We got over 10 inches of snow yesterday. School was cancelled, and our school almost never cancels due to weather. Volleyball practice was not cancelled, and I'm glad my husband was home to drive, because driving in this weather stresses me out. Nothing stresses my husband out, he's the yin to my yang. No wonder I keep him.

I'm not going to complain one bit about the snow- I have to admit, it's lovely. I took way too many pictures stomping around in the yard with the dog. And since my husband was home, I didn't have to use the snow blower to clear the driveway - not my favorite job. Instead, I made chicken soup, and peppermint bark with my daughter and I finally took down the tree, in hopes that putting away the snowflakes inside will help ensure an end to the snowfall outside. We shall see.

Here's some scenes from our snow day and night. Tucker had a wonderful time and probably ate his weight in snow.

Is it any wonder I spoil this dog? Look at those eyes!

Until next year, my pretty snowflakes.....

I got my favorite chair back next to the fireplace and my husband and I spent the evening curled in front of a nice fire with our computers and a glass of wine, warm and cozy. It was a perfect ending to very good day. 

Happy March?

February was a complete blur. I'm still messing up writing 2012 on checks, so March? I'm trying to get with the times. But look at this:



It's hard to feel March with this coming. I hope school and most of the daily routine are cancelled in anticipation of 7-10 more inches of snow. Woo hoo.

We went to Wisconsin for the weekend, to the Dells for our annual Volleyball Tournament.
It was fun. Even colder there, though. Our team did well, finishing 17th out of 55 teams in a very competitive field.





Our daughter must jump this high at least a thousand times a week. I can't even imagine. The top of that net is slightly higher than 7'4" and she's working to jump higher. I hope her knees and her love of the game hold up.

In other news, I'm admiring the twinkly lights and fake snowflakes across the room right now.
I don't think I'll make it to the solstice to take the tree down, but March 4 is a new record, regardless.

It's time, though. I'm starting to itch to put it away so I can have my chair back next to the fireplace for these last few cold winter weeks.








That snowflake hanging on the top right? Daughter made that one, taught herself to crochet on youtube.  She's currently wrapping up a rainbow hued snuggie that is a lovely burst of color, just like her. She is a wonder, that girl. It's almost incomprehensible to me how the years have flown by with both my kids. I'm turning 53 next week and when I was young, I never imagined farther out than the year 2000, when I would turn 40. I could never have imagined this future, and I wouldn't change it for the world. Well, except maybe for feeling older and achier than I wish I did. But it beats the alternative, right?

Hope all is well and twinkly in your lives.