Saturday, around the Lester’s household, is time for cleaning. We get up and do our chores for the first few hours, except for our pampered pup Hobbs. Hobbs just assumes the position, at the top of the stairs, where he can supervise everyone and make sure that we are doing a good job.
What a life!
Shot with the Lensbaby 2.0
You never know how an image will affect someone. I find it interesting. I guess that it all depends on one’s outlook on life at that moment in time.
When I took this picture, I had a feeling of awe and appreciation. Here I was standing at the top of this ridge and all I could see for miles around was stunning beauty. Then, in the distance, I saw someone sitting upon a rock and admiring the view.
She looked so tiny compared to the landscape. But, I thought that it was a grand sight. I thought that she had the same appreciation for what she was seeing as I had.
Today, someone who visits, and posts, almost daily said:
“That’s exactly where I am and how I feel. I’m hating life.”
Wow! I, personally, would have never gotten a feeling of isolation out of this because the colors are too bold and the feeling is too good, but that is probably because of my having been there and my internal association with fall colors. They please me. I guess that it is all in how you view life and what you are going through at the moment.
Pictures have such power sometimes.
This was not to single out any particular person, but that post was extremely powerful and I have nothing but high hopes for this person to be able to rise above the current problems and focus on the great things that life has brought him/her.
I’m not kind to my automobiles. I’ve never been kind to automobiles. To me, they are simply tools to be used to get from here to there a lot more quickly than walking! However, I never intended, yesterday, to do any off-road or near-off-road driving.
I was just finishing taking some pictures of Boone Fork creek, came back to my car, got in, was thinking about my next stop up the road, and backed out my from the end parking space. Unfortunately, I didn’t back up quite enough and when I went forward, my right front tire rolled up on the curb and totally smashed my hub cap!
On this picture, it shows to be scratches, but the hub cap, top-right, is severely bent. Oh well. I didn’t let it spoil my day. At least the tire didn’t puncture! When I got home last night, I ordered a new hub cap. Yeah, I’m about $40.00 lighter in the pocket, but what a great day it was! 
Better to miss the $40.00 than to miss the trip!
Funny. From then on, I was really careful about making sure that I had enough room when I backed out! 
OK, so I went to The Blue Ridge Parkway again. Full is in full effect right now and I just have to see it on a week by week basis! Besides, I haven’t covered all 469 miles of the parkway, only about 100. I won’t be able to cover all of the miles this fall … there’s always next year, too!
Today was no less spectacular than any other day. I’m never disappointed when I go. Today I had intended to cover from Boone to Linville (North Carolina), which is modest 30 miles. Further, I was going to include Linville Falls, which I’ve never seen (still) and Linville River. I had high ambitions, but short attention span as the leaves and overlooks kept vying for my attention … and getting it. Soon, there was no time left!
I left home about 1:30 in the afternoon, drove to Linville, which is about 120 miles, but takes about 2.5 hours. I arrived there sometime after 4:00 … gotta have a potty break, you know!
After doing lots of “ohhhhh” and “ahhhhhh” during the trip down the parkway. I found that my time was rapidly expiring, so I abandoned my original plan and decided to just make it to the Linville Viaduct, which I did!
’twas a great day of color, wonderful temperatures, lots of people, and blues on the radio. It’s always a treat. This is why we moved to North Carolina!
comes great responsibility. — Uncle Ben Parker to Peter Parker – Spider Man. Just because it came from a movie, doesn’t make it any less true, I suppose.
Not too long ago, July 7th, I posted some pictures of a small pond at the end of my street. Since then, I have visited that small ecosystem frequently. I like to pause and have a look as I’m walking my dog. All through the summer, I was greeted by the familiar sight of a green heron feeding in that pond.
There were minnows, tadpoles, a green heron, cattails, innumerable insects, water spiders, etc. Now, all of it is gone. Shea Homes decided that it would cost them more to leave it than to remove it and build a home upon that site. I asked. So, this last Monday, in came the bulldozers, backhoes, and dump trucks to destroy a habitat that had existed for years and years. In a matter of mere seconds it was destroyed, lost, and forgotten.
How swift we are to intervene and destroy nature just because we have the power to do so and because we want that thing that we’ve all agreed is so valuable. Money. We destroy, not because we need to, but because we can and it would be too costly to find a different way.
How much nicer would it have been to preserve this area for kids to marvel at, safely, in times to come? No, that would cost too much. Can’t make enough of a profit with a non-producing pond. Sigh …
Oh well, best wishes to the heron and the finches as they move on to other areas. Too bad for the minnows, water spiders, tadpoles, and frogs. There’s money to be made.
I wonder if anyone else will miss it. Probably not.
Last night was a full moon, officially at 10:13 PM. Well, unfortunately, last night was almost fully cloudy! I did manage to sneak in a few shots after dark, about 9:40 or so. As it had been all day, it was cold and windy, so I just made a quick trip to the backyard with t-shirt and shorts. For some reason, I didn’t want to stay outside that long. Go figure!
I usually keep my camera on the daylight setting for white balance, which is equivalent to having daylight balanced film in it. I forgot to change it to auto white balance last night.
All images are time exposures of about 6 seconds. Here, in the first one, you can see a yellowish tint in the sky. It comes from the lights in the neighborhood, which the majority are tungsten. as you can see, from the blurs in the trees, it was really windy! The clouds have painted themselves as well because they were moving pretty fast.
The other shot is looking in the opposite direction, towards the moon. Not much of a yellow tint here because, for the most part, the moon’s light overpowers the light from the neighborhood.
By this time, the clouds had almost completely overtaken the moon and it was but a dot in the sky. After this, there were no more pictures to be had, unless you like to take pictures of solid cloud mass.
Well, maybe next month!
I simply love cold fronts! One moved into Charlotte yesterday afternoon and looks like it is here to stay for the weekend. The weather today has been cool, especially compared to yesterday’s “last gasp of summer”, where we hit about 90 degrees! Today’s high has been about 67 or so and windy; However, the clouds are wonderful and with the strong breeze, everything keeps changing. The sun is playing hide and seek behind the clouds and everything just looks lovely.
I’m thinking that today’s sunset should be pretty spectacular, as long as it doesn’t clould up all the way, which seems to happen near sunset on days like this. I think that when the heat of the sun disappears, the clouds don’t evaporate and cloudiness increases. Now, I need to think of a good place to shoot sunsets so that I don’t have to chase the light!
I do know of one place, on the south side of town, where I would be able to get a good shot of downtown, but it’s about a 40 minute drive from here and I think that the clouds are going to move in completely, so that would be a wasted move!
The photo is of a neighbor’s house. The perspective: Shot from my driveway. The cloud hanging above it was pretty cool.
