Golden Moments

The photography and the editing are mine, but I borrowed the idea for the  editing style. I saw something similar to this in a poetry book that was illustrated with stunning altered photography.  The original photos were made beautifully soft through an editing style that applied blurred color overlays.

Published in "Cat Fancy Magazine" March 2011

Nicholas is my beautiful two year old Maine Coon mix. I shot this picture when he was on the porch watching birds and submitted it to Cat Fancy Magazine as well as www.catchannel.com. It won "Cat of the Day" on the web site, and later appeared in the March 2011 issue of the magazine.

I was not pleased that they cropped all but his face for the magazine, but he won a nice prize none the less.

The Gatherings

This shot was made during a wave of extreme heat and humidity in the Southeast. Our indoor  thermostat stays around 79, definitely not frigid, but it was so hot when I stepped out that the lenses of my camera fogged up.


I may  use this scene on a calendar project someday.

Annie

When I was thirteen, I received this rag doll, Annie, for Christmas. At the time, I didn't show very much appreciation to my mother for the gift because I thought I was too grown to be getting dolls for Christmas. Now, I treasure Annie because of all the hours and love that my mother put into making her, just for me. She told me once that she made her for me because she realized that year that I had never had a rag doll. 


As I have stated in some of my scrapbook journals, my mother always worked throughout the entire year making things and storing back little things she could buy so she could wrap them for us to have lots of presents on Christmas Day. She had to be strong throughout the year every time we went shopping to say "No" to our wanting everything we saw in stores, but she did it because she knew Christmas was coming and she knew if she bought extras for us along and along, there would be nothing for Santa to bring us; her budget was just that limited! She wanted us to be thrilled at the first sight of the tree and all the gifts underneath it each Christmas morning and she always succeeded.  We always were ecstatic, almost beyond control! She did all she did for us with her own hands and with cash she saved from her household and grocery money, no credit cards. And she shopped wisely for good quality things, she didn't buy junky toys. In fact, a testament of the quality she sought lies in the fact that I still own many of the gifts I received as a child. Thank you Mama--you're the best mother ever! 

Melody the Mockingbird, A Tribute

Unless they possess some unusual characteristic, I think it is almost impossible to distinguish one mockingbird from another mockingbird. Our Melody had such a characteristic: her extensive repertoire of songs and her love for performing them. She lived here several years and she never tired of being in full verse for us when we ventured outdoors. Whatever we found to do outside, didn't matter to her--she would tag along with us and sing her songs for us. Visitors often were stricken with her audible accomplishments and made such remarks as “That is one happy mocking bird.”

Eventually, we became so curious about all of her happy chirping that we began attempting to explain and justify it as a natural result of some rescue encounters we'd had with those birds:

The first memorable encounter occurred several years ago when a late afternoon thunderstorm swept through here and we found, afterwards, that a baby mockingbird had been tossed from its mother's nest. We made the decision to intervene and rescue it because we didn't want it to become the victim of ants or night roaming creatures. It survived and we released it soon afterwards. The second very memorable encounter occurred a few years later and was much more dramatic. We noticed a mother mockingbird fearlessly dive bombing at an object on the ground and upon closer inspection, we discovered she was self-sacrificially trying to divert a large snake away from her nest of young hatchlings. We killed it (snake) to try to save her and her family. From the human perspective, we thought either of those occurrences, if connected to her in some way, could be justification for her liking us so fervently.

Unfortunately, we think her exuberant singing was what led to her demise this spring (2011). We found when walking through the yard one afternoon, a heap of mocking bird feathers scattered just below a favorite perch Melody liked to use to perform her songs. We hoped it wasn’t her, but evidence  that it had to be her became more and more undeniable. For instance, we Immediately realized the music had stopped and soon noticed that no mocking bird was following us about anymore. Therefore, we concluded that the feathers were  indeed  hers and that she must have been so busy rehearsing her songs that she didn't hear her stalker approach.  

We continue to have mocking birds sharing our property, but our presence doesn’t entice them to burst into jubilant singing and they just can't do "happy" the way Melody could do happy. 

My Perfect Rose

Shasta Daisies

Christmas Tablescape 11

Our 2011 tablescape  was a very impromptu arrangement. However, before I go on I must quickly interject that I don't think , heretofore, the word “impromptu” and I have ever shared the same galaxy, let alone the same sentence or paragraph.  Normally, I have to and love to plot and plan things, extensively.  But there simply was no cerebral prodding required here. When we completed all the other decorating, we had not agreed upon a centerpiece for the table, and we had not found a place for the mirror, reindeer, cookie jar, poinsettias,  and the winter wonderland twigs. Wallah! The unknown variable in our Christmas centerpiece equation was solved when we shoved all the left behinds to the center of the table. Entirely too easy.

Christmas Party Tablescape 10 / For Tuesday Lunch Bunch Party

We arranged this tablescape for the central table used for the Tuesday Lunch Bunch party we hosted in 2010. 


Our menu consisted of a potato bar served with  an assortment of toppings that included butter,  chili, green onions, sour cream,  cheese sauce, and smoked Boston butt barbecue. For appetizers, we prepared finger sandwiches; Santa Fe' wraps; roasted bacon-wrapped water chestnuts (moose balls); pigs-in-blankets; and party picks stacked with cheese, olives and pepperoni.  For the beverage, we prepared a lime sherbet punch.

Several guests brought additional holiday dishes to share.

After our meal, we played a simple  Christmas word game in which  the hostess (that would be me) wrote  scrambled holiday words on a dry erase board. For each scrambled word, all contestants were given the same clue to solve it. The first person to  successfully unscramble each set of letters and form the right Christmas word won. Each winner then went to the Christmas tree to pick out the prize of their choice from a large selection of wrapped gifts.  Gift prizes were wrapped, inexpensive dollar store items that included the beloved rubber chicken, won by Carroll this time. 

Christmas Tree Closeup

Blueberries

My mother and I assembled this stuff for me to try out my new camera, the Olympus SP565uz,  when I first got it. Every time I look at  this scene, it reminds me of her father. This is not his old hat in this picture, but he always wore one just like it. Plus, he loved growing blueberries. I had this image printed 11 x 14 so I could see the quality of the images the camera produced and I was very pleased with the print quality. 

Great Crested Flycacher

These little birds are like little Rod Stewarts with their spike-top hairdo's and  unusual voices. But they are pretty and he's, well, not. They have been returning to our backyard every spring for a number of years. They usually prefer the most dilapidated bird house on the property. If the other birds don't stop them, they will fill most of the other available bird houses with dummy nests. And we discovered they are very clever about the way they fill all those other birdhouses, too.  They leave a snakeskin in them  to frighten off the other birds. We were disturbed by the first skin we found when we cleaned out the houses, well  after mating season ended, and naturally jumped to the conclusion that a snake must have gotten their babies. But we found the same evidence in each house we cleaned. Later, I was browsing in a  bird encyclopedia and it corroborated my discovery with a statement  that said what I just said, that placing snake skins in dummy houses is something they are known for. 

More Blueberries

Harvest Selection

Catch of the Day

My father  was proud of his nineteen pound catfish in this photo. He and a neighbor set out lines at Burnt Fort to land this big fellow. No one  remembers how many other fish they caught on that trip. Personally, I never understood why they wanted Tommy and me to touch that fish for the picture--we didn't catch it and I completely did not want to touch that thing! Tommy,  on the other hand,  was not the least offended by  fins, slime, stench, and teeth.

Pretty as a Picture

Sisters forever!

A Man of Honor

Whether he was serving his Lord, his country, his family, or his community, my stepfather was always a man of honor. He was my best friend and I greatly miss him.

Christmas Past

I wanted to try a digital scrapbook page to honor my mother for all that she does to make Christmas special. The people in these old photos are my parents, my sister, and me.

Even though cash was scarce during my parents’ marriage, my mother was a great manager and she worked the whole year through for us to have wonderful Christmases. She would start in January and go until December tucking away everything she could sacrifice to buy and make with her hands so my sister and I could be thrilled with the experience of receiving and opening a bunch of gifts.  

One of the ways she made Christmas so exciting for us was by allowing us to open presents in the wee hours of Christmas morning immediately after Santa left (my sister was the deliriously excitable insomniac who knew the exact moment that was). As the days of our  childhood stretched into adulthood, the tradition of watching and waiting an exact moment to open presents changed only slightly. Now, we spend Christmas Eve waiting for the stroke of midnight to announce the arrival of Christmas day as our designated time to share our treasures and  thank each Giver.

Welcome Fall

Because I always love, immensely, this season of the year, I decided to try a digital scrapbook page using this photo of our fall driveway display since it  almost didn't come into being. 

We decided three years ago to commemorate this season by constructing a scarecrow sometime around the first of October, to display until Thanksgiving. But our commemoration idea came to a abrupt end this year, the third year after its inception. Someone, and I'm not naming names, lost our autumn friend's burlap head.  He was really a neat looking guy, too, like the one from Oz. Minus the best part of the whole, we were left with three choices: (1) we could proceed and create a headless Halloween creature out of Ozy man's remaining parts, (2) we could entirely scrap the  lawn display ritual, or  (3) we could  pay homage to fall with other symbols of the season. Obviously, we chose (3).