Need I say more?

I hardly can leave home without seeing a deer, or a turkey, or a crowd of the other critters that inhabit our bit of wilderness – fox, bobcat, skunk, coyote, possum, raccoon.  But although my neighbors see the occasional bear I’ve never seen one till our return from school this afternoon.  Momma and her three cuddly cubs hastily scooted up a tree and we were able to inch close enough to get a decent snapshot from the wide angle iPhone camera.

Another advantage of the Prius – it’s a good car for stalking wildlife when on battery power. I practically ran over a red-tailed hawk devouring a woodpecker in the middle of the road the other day; only rolling down the window and sticking the iPhone out for a snap excited him enough to take his lunch elsewhere.

While I’m at it I don’t think I ever posted my pic of the small bobcat that peeked in through a window at me before enjoying some r&r poolside a couple of months ago.

Wishing everyone a last minute happy 4th of July, and for those of you who missed fireworks this year, here’s a couple of photos to hold you till next year.  Full Flickr set here.

This picture I made of the Gold Country Fair got picked up on the Placer Valley Tourism web site, after they asked my permission to use it.  Cool!

I’m not a big amusement park lover.  I prefer stillness and contemplation to noise and excitement.  But my kids don’t seem to take after me in that.

So when they want to go to the County Fair, I’m willing to take them, and enjoy their enjoyment.  Even better is for them to bring friends along to go on the rides with.  Then I just tack along and play with my camera when they’re swinging through a constellation of lightbulbs in the dusk.

The photoset is here.  A couple of my favorite abstracts below.

As of yesterday, we have a couple of new family members, a little black Barbados lamb (a twin on the losing end of sibling rivalry for milk), and another little guy to keep her company.  They currently live in our shower at night while this cold snap lasts, and in their new paddock during the day.  Kids are loving the regular bottle feeding necessary to build their strength up.  And just like the rhyme, the lambs now follow them wherever they go…

Welcome to the ranch Samurai Jack and Lotus!

Photos here.

Uploaded a few photos (some private) of the Loomis Thanksgiving Parade which the 4-H miniature horse project participated in on the morning before Thanksgiving.

Got a couple of interesting small town shots I think.  The one at right is probably my favorite, though it’s a bit hard to explain why.  My eyes just travel around it for quite a while before they’re ready to move on.

Wet, foggy, and generally miserable weather here today.

However, since nasty weather is such a rare occurrence, the change in the colors of the landscape is intriguing to me.  Thus a small set of Misty Roads shots.

Also, as I’m thinking more on "vision" lately (both physical and the "where am I going" type), I found some metaphorical interst in empty roads winding off into the mist.

Update 11/30: Added even more misty road photos.

We had our first rain of the fall last weekend. Not counting one thunderstorm in September, we haven’t seen precipitation since early June.  I walked up to the barn to feed animals the next morning, and relished the change in color from the moisture.  The sun was breaking through the clouds, highlighting familiar views in a new way.  I took a few photos, now posted on flickr, to capture the change in color that moisture brings.

While feeding the horses, I heard a commotion behind the shed. I snuck around to see about thirty turkeys (they begin flocking in large numbers in Autumn).  A coyote, amazingly close to the flock, decided I was move interesting than his quarry, and stared for a few seconds before vanishing down the slope. I was too slow with the camera to get a shot, and had to satisfy myself with a shot of a turkey up a tree.  All around me turkeys were dropping ungracefully to the ground to scamper off.

First rain of turkeys of the season, too, I suppose…

Played around with the nighttime presets on my Casio Z750.  A small selection of the results are posted over on flickr (trying to overcome the picture size limitations associated with MSN Spaces).

Each photo has some minimal levels tweaking to increase the contrast, and some cropping (hard to frame moving targets perfectly in the dark with 2 sec exposures).

Enjoy!

Our small end-of-the-road neighborhood (if neighborhood isn’t too grandiose a term for a few houses sharing a private road) only has one access road.  Which makes it difficult when you are preparing to leave town for the July 4th weekend and a tree is down across that road.  Even more difficult is when your chainsaw blade is simply shot, and the replacement you bought the last time you were at Home Depot only has 72 drive links instead of the 84 your saw actually requires.  But if you’re lucky and the tree is hung up on another, you might be able to sneak carefully under and trust that a hard-working neighbor will clean up the mess while you go on to visit your mom.

But then, when you return home, you might just find another tree down (a previously unobserved effect of the start of scorch season after an abnormally wet winter?)  That’s OK if the branches in question were too big and dangerous for an amateur to tackle, and you really wanted to head off quickly for firework watching anyway.  Who knows, someone might have trimmed off enough of the small stuff to squeeze your car under, with breath held, by the time you returned so you could sleep in your own bed without a two mile midnight walk first.  And if your luck really holds, you might find that someone else had cleared the whole thing by the next morning.

You may even have felt a bit fortunate that you didn’t have to invest significant labor to address these problems yourself (although I admit that emergency chainsaw work is kind of fun), unless of course you just thought it to be a kind of karmic justice after spending several hours of the holiday with a pole saw in your mother’s driveway - you guessed it - trimming trees.