My blog is named for Mehitable Day, a woman buried in the 1800s behind the Maine farmhouse where I lived as a teenager. Whenever I'd have a day that was especially challenging, eventful, or just plain odd, I'd tell my friends, "I've just had the most Mehitable Day!" And so this blog is where I share the events, discoveries and random musings
of my Mehitable Days. :-)
My life has a superb cast but I can't figure out the plot. ~ Ashleigh Brilliant
Seems it was summer just yesterday! Or at least just last weekend….
But all good things must come to an end, and so the sun has set on another summer season. Literally. I took this series of sunset photos over the course of 15 minutes from the all-but-deserted Sheridan visitors center/rest area off I-90 last Friday evening. We'd gone there to use the free RV dump station after a weeklong camping trip in northern Montana (future post!), only to be thwarted by a new - and premature, IMO - "Dump Station Closed for the Season" sign and a winterized, waterless hose. Oh well, at least I'd thought to bring my camera since the views of the Big Horn Mountains from the visitors center seldom disappoint!
Going...
going...
gone.
But even more spectacularly than it set on the final weekday of summer, the sun rose on the first day of autumn. What an enthusiastic greeting for the new season! I took these straight-out-of-the-camera photos just 7 minutes apart. Amazing how much the sky can change in such a brief time...
06:45
06:47
06:52
That sunrise will be hard to top, but I'll give it my best from now till the winter solstice. :-) Meanwhile...
And happy spring to all you Southern Hemisphereans! :-)
Hulloooo again! It's been awhile, but after a perfect 2-week vacation in the beautiful Pacific Northwest, culminating in a very relaxing week on Whidbey Island, I still find that even after nearly a week back on Reality Street...
Just replace those palm trees with pine trees, and in spite of a pretty full schedule and no time spent sprawled in hammocks it sums up the mood of much of our vacation! Especially that week on Whidbey - island time really is delightfully slower and more mellow. (Unless you're talking about Manhatten Island!)
Anyway, I've somehow managed to combine indolence with frantic busyness since we returned home at 11:15pm last Saturday. It's not fair that modern life demands jumping back into chores, work, and responsibilities immediately following a vacation - there should be a mandatory decompression time! One in which people continue to prepare wonderful meals for you, if nothing else. :-)
After the cooler temps of Puget Sound, this heat is only making me feel more sluggish. Though despite our temps in the 90's, I realize we don't have it nearly as bad as those of you experiencing the same (or worse) sizzling temps with the added mugginess. There really is something to the "but it's a dry heat" caveat! Anyway, I think we can all agree that Tessa's got the right idea about how to spend the Dog Days of Summer...
But what about your trip photos, I egotistically imagine you asking? :-) Well, between the Rebel, Kodak and iPad, we took over 2000 photos and videos during our trip! So needless to say, I'm so overwhelmed and intimidated by the prospect of sorting, culling, editing, uploading, and selecting the most blogworthy ones that I've hardly touched them yet (plus, I need a way bigger chunk of free time than I've had the luxury of this week). And August is going to be a busy month with various appointments, a trip to Havre to see my Mom, and a week-long visit from BW's parents, so I don't know how much progress I'll make. But I promise to whittle away at the massive photo stack and publish posts as I'm able! We saw and did (and ate) so much, and it was all so beautiful and wonderful and interesting and fun (and delicious), that I'm looking very forward to sharing it all! I'd love to think I could get a post of the first leg of our trip published tomorrow in time for SkyWatch Friday, but again - stupid, tiresome Reality Street will likely cut a pot-holed swath through those fun plans! Meanwhile, stay cool if you're in the path of this US heat wave (and judging from this weather map, if you're in the US you likely are), and embrace that Island Time/Dog Days vibe as much as you can!
Today's the last day of school for the kiddos of Sheridan, and I thought this sunset over the elementary school across the street from our house symbolized the end of another school year rather prettily. (Funny, we moved into our new home on the first day of school last August, which I also commemorated with a sunset SkyWatch Friday post!) :-)
The view from my computer, looking out our study window...
And the views from our front porch...
Summer vacation is no reason to stop learning,
so enjoy a fun education about the world's skies at...
While recently checking and cleaning up some post drafts that I never got around to finishing or publishing, I found these photos I'd taken from the deck of our prior home in the mountains in Big Horn, WY one night in late June 2010. Why I never posted them I have no idea, except that I wasn't yet participating in SkyWatch Friday and we left on a 2-week Maine vacation three days after I took these. Anyway, these fell through the cracks and though it feels strange to post summer storm photos more than 2½ years old, I didn't want these to languish unshared any longer!
Though I may have forgotten about these photos, I remember the late-night storm itself very clearly. I perched my little point-and-shoot Kodak on the deck railing to hold it steady in the buffeting wind, used the night landscape setting, and then shot about 2,683 photos trying to capture the lightning illuminating the clouds. :-) The best photo op (though not the best photo) was the last one, when the clouds that had been hiding the full moon parted briefly, and I was able to capture the moon and the lightning and the clouds they both illuminated. I only wish a much better photographer with much better equipment had been there to truly capture this amazing storm...
This week has marked Sheridan's big annual shindig, when the rodeo and carnival come to town along with a crush of tourists, visiting family members and locals who moved away but return to town during this week like swallows to Capistrano or salmon to their spawning grounds. On Friday most businesses shut down early (if they opened at all), and Main Street is given over to events like a pancake breakfast, bed races (which are exactly what they sound like they'd be), and a parade, after which everyone heads to the bars, the carnival and/or the rodeo. Though we've attended in the past, for the last decade-plus we've avoided it like the plague. It's always hot (99ยบ was the high on Friday), crowded, noisy, and filled with a lot of animals being forced to do stuff in the heat and noise that I doubt they'd ever choose to do if given a choice. Which, of course, they aren't. Anyway, it's not our thing (though I admit to being slightly tempted by the carnival rides!), but that doesn't mean we didn't get our own little private parade sneak preview early Friday morning...
It began with BW running past me, hollering something unintelligible in his exuberance, as I sat at the computer. He was so excited he had a hard time expressing what he'd seen that had him so excited and that he wanted me to come see. (It didn't help that he didn't know the name of what he'd seen!) It turned out it was our somewhat distant neighbor Rich, riding by on his velocipede, all dressed up in period clothing! By the time I got outside to see him he was hurtling past, down the street and around the corner and out of sight, and it was too late to grab my camera and get a photo. But wouldn't that have been great? Augh, curses!! Anyway, here's a simulation of what we saw, though Rich's clothing was actually much cooler-looking (Rich is actually quite cool - he's also a hot air balloonist! And clearly born a century too late)...
But, as it turned out, all was not lost! For shortly after the missed velocipede photo op we took the dogs for a walk and got another parade preview, on a nice, quiet neighborhood street, when we came upon this 1925 Glacier National Park touring bus getting ready to head for the parade route...
The owner (whose name we weren't told) lives in Billings, MT and drives his restored Glacier Park bus in parades. So maybe this was one of the two that were in the 2009 Rose Bowl Parade!
(You can see a photo of it in Sheridan's parade, where it placed 3rd in the Novelty float category, by clicking here. It's a little more than halfway down the page).
If you've never visited Glacier National Park, I urge you to do so (soon, before its eponymous glaciers vanish completely!) Glacier is, in my opinion, the most beautiful of our national parks and well worth a visit. And guess what? You can even take a tour in one of the restored buses (1930's models), nicknamed "Jammers" back in the day because of the distinctive sound their original standard transmissions would make as the drivers jammed the gears going up and down the mountain roads. And a tour of beautiful Glacier Park in a Red Jammer is more fun than a hot, crowded parade any day! And probably safer and definitely easier than riding a velocipede. :-)
Meanwhile, as the heat drags on and there's not a glacier in sight, Tessa has been finding ways to stay cool. Like sleeping with her head in the communal water dish...
...forcing Willow to complain, "Mooommm! Tess is hogging the water dish again!"
After a little intervention by Mom, all is well...
Until Tess hogs the coveted space in front of the evaporative cooler...
I'm having to shoehorn this SkyWatch Friday post into a crazy day, but I couldn't bear to miss it because I've really been wanting to share these beautiful wild sunflowers(Helianthus annuus) thatI photographed during BW's vacation last week. They grow in great profusion all along a dirt road that climbs up to a couple of gravel pits, on property that is part of the ginormous ranch where we board Mocha. It's a great place to hike with our dogs and enjoy the views!
The view from halfway up the gravel pit road, with
Beaver Creek road and the Big Horn Mountains beyond.
The whole area is thick with sunflowers and thistle,
and the many birds and butterflies that dine on them.
Though the sunflowers were sparse in this shot,
I couldn't resist including one of the girls running to Daddy.
:-)
All the other sunflowers are keeping an eye on the storm,
while this one prima donna preens for the camera! ;-)
Trying out different theories about where the sun is hiding,
this group's got 3 of the 4 cardinal directions covered!
I love this friendly guy, who looks like he's waving!
Their bright yellow sure pops against those storm clouds.
I don't know what that ugly rusted culvert-thing is,
but I loved how this lone sunflower looked with it!
View more skies around the world at
Enjoy your weekend! (And a safe and happy Labor Day to my fellow Yanks!)
We've enjoyed such a wet, cool spring and early summer - wearing jackets in the mornings and evenings (and at times during the days), needing to run the pellet stove at times to take the chill off, still sleeping under blankets - the majority of days have been quite pleasant, and the landscape so green and lush. Of course we knew it couldn't last, but didn't think it would change so drastically and abruptly. We went from a high of 58ยบ at our house on Sunday to the 90's Tuesday and Wednesday. I had to run to town yesterday and at noon my car's thermometer read 99ยบ (at home an hour later, it read 89ยบ). Compared to much of the nation, sweltering under record-breaking 3-digit temperatures for a while now, that's no big deal. But that's awfully hot for June in these parts, and a 40 degree jump in 3 days doesn't give anyone time to acclimate! Fortunately it's cooled back off to the 70's now and is supposed to hover around the seasonably reasonable mid 70's/mid 80's for most of the holiday weekend (and beyond). But during yesterday's blistering afternoon when I started working on this post, I chose a few refreshing photos to share since I felt in serious need of someplacecool an' green an' shady...
I took this one on a walk with BW and the dogs last Saturday along the pretty dirt lane to the Bradford Brinton Memorial, and knew as soon as I saw it that it was a great SkyWatch Friday candidate. I love how the big, old cottonwood trees form a leafy canopy that shades the road, which is made even cooler by the creek that tumbles (or, in the case of this year's super-saturated spring, roars) alongside it...
For some great sky photos from around the world, visit...
Earlier that day we'd taken the girls to Kendrick Park in Sheridan. I took several fun photos of that day's outing that I'll share later, but for now this particular one is perfect for this post! I love these overgrown stone steps that lead to a shady little glen, and just beyond to a dirt trail that climbs a steep hill up to the junior high school above the park...
Some of you may have been expecting my next Colorado vacation post instead of this one, but this one's not completely unrelated, since I took this next photo in Boulder. :-) I loved this inviting picnic table behind a Chautauqua Park cottage, semi-secluded below the hiking trail, and couldn't resist snapping a photo...
If we'd had food with us, I doubt we could have resisted
"borrowing" this spot for a picnic in the shade.
Those two empty chairs were practically shouting our names!
As June gives way to July, here's wishing everyone in the northern hemisphere plenty of cool, green and shady spots to rest, relax, and refresh this summer!
Tess restores herself with shady solitude in the Faerie Glade
