A good day for attempts and failures...

First off, we are pretty cold right now. I mean the weather is always a great subject right? I can't recall any conversation lately that didn't start without the comment, "How 'bout this weather?"

Last Friday it was 42 F  and by Monday...the air temperature is -8 here and the wind chill is -25 F. Why not? It is weather after all. Tonight, we will get to -12 or so. Well, there we go. I've seen -20 F a few times, so I know what to expect. 

I am SO grateful that when we remodeled, we were able to reinsulate and upgrade the windows and heat.

There was a time in our little cottage when our doors were covered with frost on the inside and the windows all had plastic over them. Our hydrant outside that we had for watering our stock froze up. Running a hose from the bathroom wasn't an option. But I did carry lots of water that time.

The weather service has put out an 'Upcoming Extreme Cold Warning'. 

Today is Martin Luther King's Birthday and it is a Federal Holiday. I'm going to celebrate it and not the other thing. I may even watch the Puppy and Kittens! Being featured during that thing.

Or I may just shut everything down and work on something creative to keep my mind occupied since I can't go for a hike.

Yesterday I had the bright idea of building trees out of pipe cleaners for a spooky scene with my minifigures or something else. Being quiet in a small cottage requires me to do quiet things. I built some cool 'trees' and utterly failed at doing a good job of photographing a 'scene'.

Below is just after I 'failed' at getting what I wanted...

Failed again! It looks like she is getting attacked by octopi??

Some toy photographers draw out a scene and plan and plan...on how they are going to execute it. I don't. 

I wing it. Seriously.
I never quite know what I am doing until I arrive at something that makes me happy.

I fail a lot with the light with the scene, and with the ideas.

Then I tried this version and it looked awesome in the camera...

The processing afterwards was horrible. Dark, awful, full of all sorts of artifacts. 

So last night I thought I'd just delete it all and start again.

However...

This morning I decided to try something different. I dropped the file into ON1 and hit the button that I never use. The program then 'reads' the photo and adjusts it. Most of the time the AI adjustment sucks.

Then I scratched my head and added something called LUTS.

And I liked it.

The final:

Now this was what I was going for and by golly I'm going to keep it. Even the goofy Tree Monster turned out okay. Maybe it still looks like the minifig is getting attacked by an Octopus, but if one uses their imagination and it looks a little scary, I did my job.

In other news. 

I'm not going to get into the politics of things. But I will be following the news with the sound off so I can read it. During today's events I will be mostly offline and creating things indoors.

The mules are doing fine since they can get out of the breezes. Yesterday they took naps in an area close to the house. They looked like sleeping dragons.

They have heated water and plenty of hay and very fluffy insulating winter coats.

Little Richard is doing well also. He napped next to the shed yesterday the sun reflects its heat off the wooden siding and he was protected from the wind. 

It looks like another quiet day spent mostly indoors thinking of creative things to do.

Stay warm.

Rough Going Part 2

The place I went to is messy and not super photogenic in some terms. I know some folks might pass up taking shots of places like this, but...

this is nature. 

Trees fall, branches come down and life goes on.

This is on the east end of the narrow valley. Charlie and I admired the ice and then crossed the little stream and headed up over the top of the ice.

We followed what used to be an old riding trail and that is a well worn game trail now.

16 seconds of  a cell phone pano of this spot...with Charlie whining

for us to 'get moving'!!!
This could give you an idea what it was

like down in this narrow valley.

I was getting tired by the time we hit this 'Ice Cave'. I'd climbed into it two years ago and decided to follow Charlie as he was able to find the easiest way in and out.

The ice curtain wasn't huge, but the 'cave' was pretty large. 

Here I am looking down on the valley I just walked through.

We kept going over the dry runs and making detours to get around fallen trees and ravines that were too steep to climb through.

We eventually made it back to the bluffs above the river.

Charlie and I headed out towards the area where you can follow part of an old logging road... this photo you have seen before...

I don't normally follow this path but since it was an easier trail, we went with it. I had been gone almost too long from home.

However when we reached this valley I turned my head and saw some ice forming on the south facing hillside rocks. We had to check it out.

I realized that ice was forming all along in this valley too. Different from the other valley, but intriguing and exciting anyway!

This is a very narrow valley also with a stream that runs through it. The valley is so narrow that it rarely gets much sun except in the height of summer. 

Like I said before. If I'd had an entire day, I could have visited at least two more large 'Ice Caves' and another valley. Sigh. 

Rough Going but so amazing...Part 1

 

Heading out...Charlie in the lead! 

Even with those short legs, he loves to still go, go, go.

We got to the river and walked along its eastern bank under the bluffs. I was struck this time by the roots of the pines along this spot. 

They reminded me of Tree Ents from Lord of the Rings.

I swear, they were whispering when I took their photos. Or were they? Was it the Ents or was it the breeze in their boughs?

They do look as if they are marching down the slope towards me. 

I looked at these trees and decided that they were not Ents but Rock Grabbers. Yeah, it is crazy how my mind works. 

I mean their roots DO grab the rocks don't they? It is almost as if they are crushing the rocks slowly. Or are the rocks just putting up with the trees?

I get fascinated with things like this. The rocks, the bluffs, and the tree roots are just so incredible to see. 

There was more ice in this one spot when Charlie and I visited in December. It must have melted and is now rebuilding in this spot. 

See the where the trickle of water is coming right out of the rocks???

January 16th:

December 7th:

So I didn't expect to see much ice in the valley I wanted to hike through.

The tiny creek that meanders back and forth across this little valley was frozen in some spots with water trickling in spots over or under the ice.

In some spots so many trees have fallen over the past couple of winters, it made walking east in the valley difficult. I had to make several detours around downed trees and climb over many logs and branches.

But the effort was worth it. I can't think of another place as unique as this spot in the entire area.

One spot of the valley floor was entirely covered in Cinnamon Ferns. I do have to come back and visit this valley in each of the seasons!

Just the stream itself held my attention.

This trip I just followed the stream to the end of the valley.

The north facing hillside had several dry runs in it. Each had tiny ice falls and some had rock shelters with developing ice.

When I reached the end of the valley, I decided we'd climb the north facing hillside and explore the dry runs and make a large circle back to the original trail.

Well, maybe this will make it clearer. I didn't get a chance to explore the south facing portion of the valley which is littered with so many rock formations and shallow caves.

That's it for now. 

I don't want to overwhelm anyone with all of my icy adventures.

The rest of today will be doing all those mundane things to get ready for a few days of dangerous cold.

The World of Ice

 By now you know that I like winter. I like ice. I like being out in all weather except HOT & Humid. Winter often looks quite dull but with my curious mind I am always looking for something interesting.

I had to go get the Trail Cam SD cards so I made a longish hike out of it.

The first shot is a cell shot of a section of our creek that is freezing on top, trickling through below the ice. The wet looking spots is where the water is seeping to the surface to freeze.

Neat things happen in the ice as it forms around branches, leaves, and rocks. It looks like wild art.

Here some water seeps up and cuts across the ice making another strange looking formation. By this Saturday it should freeze hard again. We are due to be below zero without wind chill factor. 

Other curious and strange iced formations. No explanation, just fun shapes.

Then I always go to the Ice Wall. It looks totally solid but it isn't.

This is a rock wall that has moisture dripping from it all of the time. The water rolls out onto the ice and trickles down which keeps the wall growing.

In the summer, the wall is covered with Maiden Hair Ferns.

I am so fascinated by the sculpture the ice makes.

Further down the creek the water flows a bit faster due to the tiny warm springs along the way. These little creeks are the life blood of the valley. The animals come here to get their drinks of water. In some places there are worn paths to the open water.

I can't help myself when I see the frost on the moss and rocks in the creek. I have to grab a photo of it.

The ice bubbles I found the other day are gone. That section is now frozen solid and has a skiff of snow on top of it. The ice is frozen thick enough for coyotes to walk on it.

This weekend we are going in for another Artic Blast. So yesterday I took advantage of the milder weather and went wandering in different a patch of woods and found many surprises.

Charlie and I found some astounding sights. 

I'll share that later. Today I have to get things set up for another Deep Freeze.

That's the way it was...

My brother was so kind as to scan so many slides that my father had created over the years. I picked a few fun ones to highlight here.

The one below is from the early 1960's when we used to travel 'up' north to Grandma and Grandpa's house to celebrate Christmas or Thanksgiving.
Can you see why I like winter???

We spent summers in this tiny cottage which had two rooms and a bathroom. We had cold running water but no tub or shower. If I recall, the tiny house was built for my Grandmother's parents to live out their elder years. 

[I don't know the person on the bench with the dog...but that is the only shot I found of the little house]

My dad stayed in the 'city' working while we lived in the cottage all summer. He'd come up for his vacation and stay with us. I wonder how hard it was to not see his family for months on end. Mom would go to Grandpa's house for a weekly phone call from Dad [I think]. 

We spent a lot of time with our cousins whose father had horses. This is where we learned to ride and where we learned not to fear falling off. 

These two horses were my Uncle's best animals. The mother is on the right. She was named Babe. On the left was Dusty, her daughter. I'm in the front and my sister is behind me.

We were probably in the wooden round pen where Lyle trained horses.

We also spent quite a bit of time at my other Uncle's house. He was a dairy farmer among other things. The experiences of living two separate lives really shaped how I feel about city and rural living.

Our summer time did not include TV, phones, or obviously the internet. We played, we rode our bikes to the lake, went swimming, played cards, fought, and worked in the garden. We were kids. We rarely wore shoes in the summer. Shoes were saved for 'good' and for school when we were required to wear them.

Our lives were divided between the North Shore of Chicago and NW Wisconsin.

I may have mentioned somewhere before that I had an eye/vision issue. I still do, but here I am at 16 years old with my birthday gifts from mom. Just what I wanted! Once a Tomboy, always a Tomboy.

Since my eyes don't work together, I don't have normal depth perception like other people. I often had to wear an eye patch to try and make the weaker eye much stronger. I wore glasses since I was very young and by this age, I could see pretty well thanks to the efforts of my parents who paid for eye surgery when I was a little kid.

I learned a different way of telling distances from how things moved. Don't ask me how, but I was pretty good at softball!

In the mid 1960's my dad rented a house from a friend at work and our lives changed again. We stayed in a house on the Big Island of Hawaii in a place called Puako. We scrimped and saved each year for this opportunity. We got to spend up to a month on the island for several summers.

Below is a shot of myself and my sister sitting out on the lava flow watching the ocean and probably imagining things.

My mom loved fishing so she took up a part time job so we could charter a boat during our vacations. I don't know how many times we went out on the Spooky Luki, but eventually Zander Budge, the captain, did allow me to drive along the Kona Coast. I'm sure each of us took a turn in the calm waters we were in, but I recall this vividly. I loved being out on the ocean.

There was nothing quite like it.

What can I say? My parents were pretty awesome.

In 2001, I had the wonderful opportunity to go back to the Big Island with Dad for two weeks.

That trip was amazing. 

Photo of Dad in Kona in front of the King Kam Hotel.

And now? I'm still that adventurous kid at heart. 

Well...for as long as I can be....