Thursday Challenge: Blue

Thursday Challenge: Blue

Though not a Blue Moon, this just-past-full moon I spied early one morning recently was so pretty against the deep blue of the late summer sky that I had to grab my camera. My point-and-shoot has difficulty taking well-focused photos of the moon, but I like this capture nonetheless...

How about a little music to go with it? Here's "Blue" from Leann Rimes' album of the same name...



Music Playlist at MixPod.com

See more of the Blues at this week's Thursday Challenge

Thursday Challenge: Friends

This week's Thursday Challenge is

FRIENDS (Gatherings, Parties, Time Together, Sharing,...)

Friends come in all shapes, sizes, colors, creeds, and species! Here are some photos of friends, a couple from my archives and most fresh off my camera...

Some friends really stick their necks out, while others can act a bit snooty at times...

Jane Doe and Willow hang out on our front porch

Other friends are great at teamwork, dutifully staffing their posts and sharing the responsibility of keeping watch. (For what, exactly, only they know)...

Josie, Willow and Tess stand guard among the lupine,

perhaps watching for the Lupine Express!

And when one of them (we won't name names, but her initials are Tess) falls asleep on the job, the others cover for her...

Las Tres Amigas at Whitney Commons

Sometimes one friend inspires the other to stick with their exercise program by running circles around them...

Robyn's granddog Ani leads Willow a merry chase

Some friends work together to figure things out...

When brothers Val & Tino came to live with us in mid-Feb 2008,

they were baffled by the purpose of their exercise wheel!

But working together, they not only figured it out quickly,

they started inventing various games for it,

many of which they still play well into their golden years!

This theme gave me an opportunity to share additional photos that Andrea and Robyn emailed me recently of our fun little Vegan Meetup breakfast picnic...

Now I have proof I was actually there! :-)

Robyn, me and Ken (photo by Andrea)

Me, Andrea, Ken and Buffy (photo by Robyn)

And it also provides an opportunity to share some very recent photos of Mocha (and his pasture buddy "Prairie") in his wonderful new home!

Prairie and Mocha (wearing his fly mask) abandon

grazing along the lovely creek to come get some cookies!

Cookies eaten, the boys bid farewell.

As do I, till next week's challenge!

Visit this week's friendly Thursday Challenge!

Thursday Challenge: Empty

Just when I was starting to think the Thursday Challenge wasn't terribly challenging, up pops this week's prompt...

EMPTY (House, Room, Playground, Glass, Container, Chair,...)

I'm afraid the past several days have been too hectic for me to be very creative, or to keep my eyes peeled for artistic tableaus of empty chairs or containers. My first thought was to photograph an empty beer glass with nothing remaining in it but Belgian Lace. Goodness knows I had the props on hand, and the willingness (if not outright need) to use them!

But I kept pondering the prompt, and although my attention remained focused on beer, it turned to empty beer vessels of a more whimsical sort: this whirligig made out of empty Bud Light cans by a man in Saskatchewan, Canada, purchased from him by my mother at the Havre, Montana farmer's market last year, and then given to me to hang above our patio on summer days...

My mother had a silver one made of empty Coors cans hanging from her deck when I'd visited her last year. I found myself torn between admiring its clever engineering, craftsmanship and hypnotic multiple spinning parts, and thinking it was, well... tacky. There, I said it.
Mom apparently thought I'd be won over if I owned one of my own so she sent me this one, and her strategy has been surprisingly effective. So I decided to use it on Robyn, who is now the ambivalent owner of a green one made of Mountain Dew cans. (My mention of the raw materials used in the making of these three whirligigs should not construe that any of us drink nor condone these brands and/or types of carbonated beverages.) ;-)

While I won't attempt to convince you that a whirligig made of empty aluminum beverage containers is more fun than tacky by foisting one upon you, I can do the next best thing and share some video (and audio) of mine in action on a typically blustery Wyoming day...

Here's a little closeup action of its moving parts (over the wind and whirligig noise you can occasionally catch the sound of my bamboo chimes, too. But for the lack of tumbling tumbleweeds and other objects hurtling by (trash cans, patio furniture, compact cars...), you get the entire Wyoming Wind experience...

I'm only kidding a little bit about the wind here. Wyoming's vast, empty spaces are filled with it. (So maybe that means they're not really empty!) ;-)

WYOMING WIND SOCK

Strength of wind from chain angle

0º Broken - Notify Meteorologist

30º - Fresh Breeze

45º - Gentle Zephyr

60º - Hurricane in Area

75º - Beware of Low-Flying Trains

90º - Welcome to Big, Wonderful Wyoming

❍❍❍❍❍❍❍❍❍❍❍❍

Seeking Zen-like emptiness?

Visit this week's Thursday Challenge!

Thursday Challenge: Gardens

I was delighted to see this week's Thursday Challenge prompt, which provides a great opportunity to share a few photos of pretty flower gardens in Sheridan that I've taken this summer, some from our two favorite gardens in the US that I plucked from last year's Maine vacation archives, and one I just took yesterday of a cute little somebunny visiting our veggie garden!

Another example of plucking pretty things

to share with friends :-)

I hope you enjoy this variety of gardens from near and far, past and present!

This house's side yard on a side street deserves more than a sidelong glance! I especially love her raspberry bathtub with its matching petunias...

Another colorful side yard garden, between the house and driveway of one of my favorite cottages in Sheridan...

Remember the infamous "Garden Dummy" from my Yellow Challenge post? This is his side yard of pink peonies and cheerful daisies...

I hadn't realized all the flower gardens I'd admired

were in people's side yards till I did this post!

And now to Desert Island, Maine's Asticou Azalea Gardens, serenely beautiful even when past their blooming prime...

Asticou Pond

Asticou's Sand Garden

And from Asticou's neighbor Thuya Garden come these delicious dahlias...

And this just in from our organic veggie garden... see the baby bunny lurking behind the zucchini leaf?

Here's his mug shot :-)

The bunnies love to nibble the grass around the garden, and sprawl out in the cool shade inside the garden, but they leave the flowers and veggies alone. (And even if they didn't, we're casual with our fencing and happy to share with our wild, furry neighbors!)

For more tantalizing garden delights,

sample this week's Thursday Challenge!

Happy birthday wishes to AdventureJo! :-)

Thursday Challenge: Construction :-)

While Sheridan certainly isn't suffering from a shortage of perpetual and annoying road construction or the insanely frenzied building of hundreds of new houses (have they not heard about the glut of unsold homes on the market - ours included?!), I felt uninspired by this week's Thursday Challenge:

"CONSTRUCTION" (Business, Residential, Street, Bridge, Sidewalk, Lego Bricks,...)

Until, that is, I remembered having recently spotted and photographed a huge magpie nest, constructed in a dense thicket of hawthorns, while on a hike with the dogs. Now this is some construction I can get excited about! :-)

(click photos for larger versions)

It's hard to get a sense of scale from these photos, but the nest is at least 2½ feet (76 cm) high. And it was definitely occupied! In fact, it was its owner who drew my attention to it when s/he started yelling, "Get off my lawn!" (or the magpie equivalent thereof) at the dogs and me. :-)

This nest, which may or may not have been new since old nests are repaired and reused, was constructed in an old and very thick stand of huge hawthorn bushes. How the magpies manage to ferry sticks and mud to the construction site and build such a large nest in such a tight space without impaling themselves on the wicked thorns that surround it is amazing. But once done, they've got themselves an impenetrable fortress in what I'd call a seriously "gated community!" Click on this photo to get a good look at these fearsome, dagger-like thorns that surround it...

In case you're unfamiliar with the strikingly beautiful black-billed magpie, here is a photo I took several yeas ago of one flying through the ravine below our deck...

While there are many magpies and their nests around our place, I've never watched any engaged in the actual construction process. But I did find a fantastic blog with this post and its series of phenomenal photos of a pair of magpies building their nest, along with fascinating information about both the birds and their nest-building process...

Black-Billed Magpie Nesting Behavior

(It sometimes takes me a couple of tries to successfully get that blog post to come up, but it's worth the extra attempt!)

For more takes on this week's "Construction" theme, visit

Thursday Challenge

Thursday Challenge: Yellow

When I saw that this week's Thursday Challenge theme was going to be Yellow, I was tickled pink. So to speak. :-) Because there has been yellow in great profusion in my world lately, so I've been photographing it like a mad woman and now have a perfect excuse to share several of the results. (Because let's face it, I don't have the discipline to choose just one photo for these things!) ;-)

As always, you may click on any photo for a larger version...

Yellow on our patio...

Dahlia ("Goldalia Scarlet")

Calibrachoa (aka "Million Bells")

Pansy with a dragonfly friend :-)

Yellow in the wild...

Gaillardia pulchella ("Indian Blanket")

We spied this wildflower on one of our regular hikes near our property and don't recall ever seeing it before. I haven't been able to identify it in my Rocky Mountain wildflower field guide nor online. My closest guess is that it's a yellow sweet rocket, but I'm not terribly confident about that. Anyone know?

Mystery flower!

Yellow in our garden...

Zucchini blossoms

We had a cold, wet spring so our garden got a late start.

So we're just now getting our first zucchini blossoms!

Marigold

BW always wanted marigolds in our veggie garden,

so this year he finally planted 16 of them. :-)

More yellow goodies...

This photo is from the archives, appearing in my "Lemon Drops" post last year, but I just had to repost it again here. My cherished yellow birdbath is too perfect for this challenge! A little wren was using it the other day and kept perching on the back of the yellow bird. A shame my camera wasn't handy...

Sweet ceramic birdbath in our front flowerbed

This, as you can see from her license plate, is Dazy, my friend Robyn's cute VW bug...

Parked at Tumbleweed, scene of our Wednesday lunches.

This last photo of a pretty yellow rose bush has a funny story to go with it, and was going to be its own post till this challenge came along and I decided to include it here...

Yellow roses

BW and I were driving around one of Sheridan's pretty older neighborhoods recently when we passed this huge yellow rosebush in the corner of someone's back yard. I had BW stop so I could get a picture, and that's when we noticed a man working in his garden just a few feet away from the rosebush. Wearing old baggy blue jeans, a long-sleeved blue denim work shirt, gloves and a huge straw hat that hid most of his face, he was on his hands and knees in profile to me with his head down, apparently weeding. I rolled down my window and said, "Hi, would you mind if I photographed your rose bush?" No response. So I repeated, "Excuse me, may I take a photo of your roses?" Still no response. In fact, I could see no movement at all from him! It was just beginning to dawn on me that he might not be real when BW started laughing and said, "He's not a real person, he's a dummy made to look like a gardener!" No way, I said. Way, he replied. So, blogger wheels spinning, I excitedly told BW I wanted a picture of the "garden dummy" as well as the roses, asked him to back the Jeep up so it wouldn't appear in my photos, and got out of the car and walked back to the garden dummy to find the best angle. Imagine my surprise to find that the "dummy," though still kneeling with his head down, was now facing me! I was staring, agape, at the crown of his straw hat! He was still utterly motionless, and, wondering if it was an automated, high-tech scarecrow or if I was on Candid Camera, I mouthed to BW still sitting in the relocated Jeep, "It moved!" He started laughing again, the devil. I stood there staring at the "dummy," trying to figure out if it was alive or not, when I finally detected the faintest movement from his arms. So I again said, very loudly, "EXCUSE ME, CAN I PHOTOGRAPH YOUR ROSES?" And this time the "dummy" looked up and said, "What?" LOL! He was quite alive, thank you very much, and very hard of hearing. I honestly think he may have dozed off while weeding, changing positions between power naps! :-) I asked him about his roses, which he was happy to have me photograph (obviously, since here they are in living color), and he told me that his sister had transplanted the rosebush from Missouri, and that it was 50 years old.

When I returned to the car I asked BW if he had known all along that the "dummy" was a real person, and he swore then and he swears still that he was just as convinced as I was that he was nothing more than clothing and a hat stuffed with rags and posed convincingly to look like a gardener. Too funny!

Seeking still more extravaganzas of yellow?

Visit this week's collection of blogs at Thursday Challenge!

Thursday Challenge: Vehicles (more fun than you think!)

I don't usually take photos of vehicles but just lately I've accumulated quite a stash, starting with half a post's worth from our Colorado vacation last month and ending with some I took over the 4th of July weekend. As I was pondering the best way to share these latest photos, this week's Thursday Challenge rode to the rescue with the theme (what else?):

Vehicles!

Every 4th of July or thereabouts, Sheridan's Karz Club (classic and vintage car owners) hold their annual "Rod Run" car show. BW and I often go check out the entries, which come from as far away as Wisconsin and California to participate. This year we had other things demanding our attention and so arrived in Sheridan 90 minutes after the car show had ended and disbanded. Bummer! So we took the dogs to the park, a popular spot for cruising, hoping that some of the cars might drive by as a "consolation prize" while we sat in the shade of the trees. Sure enough, along came this beauty, driving slowly enough for me to snap a couple of photos (click any photo to see a larger version)...

Now that's what I call "Candy Apple Red!"

1940 Ford Super Deluxe Convertible

Turns out we got lucky, since the car that cruised through the park while we were lolling about with the dogs had won "Best in Show" at the Rod Run! Which is how I knew what kind of car it was. (Hey, BW's the motorhead, not me!) :-)

When we left the park and headed back to our car, we were treated to another consolation prize... sort of an impromptu, juvenile division "rod run"...

I love his serious, focused concentration & her stylin' pacifier!

This is a brother and sister who live in nearby house (right between two wonderful parks, not a bad deal!) It didn't take long for them to notice me taking photos, which seemed to delight them...

Of course I couldn't resist shooting some video as they drove back and forth in front of us. I love Bro's reaction when he has a little transmission trouble near the end of the video! LOL!

By the way, after I'd put away my camera Bro and Sis swapped vehicles, Sis operating the tractor while Bro rode in the pink Jeep. Wyoming's nickname may be "The Equality State," but I'm pretty sure Bro waited till he'd seen me put my camera away before agreeing to that trade! ;-)