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Macro Magic
One of our Christmas presents to each other with Christmas money we received from family was this beauty a 65mm macro lens. I had yet to play with it so I took it out in the backyard one day at lunch and shot some seedlings, garlic, and dill. It is pretty freakin’ amazing! I love using the reverse macro mounting technique and use it quite extensively, but this lens is crazy! The depth of field has a similar feeling to the reverse mounting, but it seems sometimes I can get more in focus in the whole frame with the macro lens. It will definitely be a working experiment!
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Austin
Austin needs a cool symbol like Portland has, PDX, which is their airport code. Why? Austin is what I feel like Portland would be, minus all the rainy weather. I guess Austin has SXSW and ACL, but they don’t quite flow into Austin itself. Austin is in general known to be weird, it’s a fairly liberal area in one of the most conservative states. It is definitely weird. And there is a lot of traffic. Not that the other major cities in Texas don’t have traffic, but there are no large loops or bypasses around downtown, you pretty much go straight through it. Anyway, we were there last week for…
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Proflic | January Wrap-Up
January started off with a bang and continued on quickly and seemed to escape from me fast. I was not prolific in the manner I was expecting. I have a small journal I keep with me to jot down to-do’s and ideas as they come to me, and I will just say that I probably gave myself too much to do for this month. Creatively I only accomplished one big thing, which was finishing up a baby blanket…well, really I restarted it and finished it. I cut my time short because the baby it was intended for came about three weeks early! The crochet took a lot out of me…
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Currently | Late January
+Chris pulled all of the beets, roasted them, and then turned them into pickles. Should be an interesting thing to try! +My parents came to visit this last weekend and brought their dogs. Isabelle, here, enjoyed sunning herself in the doorways when the sun came through. I think she enjoyed seeing me but she’s going blind, deaf and is getting old and I think she would have preferred to stay at home. My cats weren’t so keen on having the dogs back, but at least they were familiar with them and weren’t too upset about them. +Been wanting some Vibram Five Fingers for awhile. Found some on clearance at REI…
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Westcave Preserve | Part II
Did you miss the first post? Read Part I here Inside the cave, which really isn’t much of a cave, I couldn’t help but think it would make a great shelter. Which is probably what local tribes and other visitors, including animals, have done over the years. As you can see, someone named Nichols visited from Bastrop sometime in 1883. This reminded me of seeing William Clark’s signature at Pompey’s Pillar in Montana in 2008. This area is subject to flash flooding; several years ago they had some major flooding and had to sweep mud and debris out of the caves and do rehab on the trails before opening them…
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Westcave Preserve | Part I
Tucked away next to the Pedernales River just west of Austin, near the town of Bee Cave, is the Westcave Preserve. Westcave is a non-profit entity run in coordination with the Lower Colorado River Authority. Nearby there are two other beautiful parks, the Hamilton Pool Preserve and the Milton Reimers Ranch Park. One could spent an entire weekend exploring all three parks. The photo above is an overlook at Westcave peering down at the Pedernales River. The park is available to the public by tour only on weekends or with a school group during the week. But for $5 a person, we felt the tour price was well worth it!…
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The Galveston Seawall Cairns | Wordless Wednesday
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Winter Warmth
January has been unseasonably warm and I have nothing bad to say about that. Flip flops in January? Yes! The warmth has tinges of Florida in it and it makes me happy. December and part of November were so dark, dreary and rainy that it was really depressing for me. January has turned beautiful, with a few cold mornings here and there, the sun seems to shine its warmth and heat the day up. The light is changing too. The sun is moving northward again. I know because it had hidden itself behind the curtain in front of my desk at work and has now worked itself into blinding me…
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Adiantum capillus-veneris | Southern maidenhair fern
A few weekends ago, New Years Eve weekend to be exact, we stopped by Westcave Preserve on our way home. We’d been by there a year before but did not have time to go in. I will have more on Westcave itself in two later posts, but this one is specifically about the beautiful maidenhair fern. The fern grows in all sorts of rocky outcroppings, and other nooks and crannies along the creek at Westcave. The creek flows maybe a quarter of a mile before emptying into the Pedernales River. It really makes pathways it lines a magical place. The Texas Vascular Plant Checklist lists one other species for Texas,…
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A Cairn for Ashleigh
If you’ve only recently started reading my blog you might not know that I have a second niece. She was born two years ago today and unfortunately only lived for 104 days. She died when we were on the Appalachian Trail, so after we returned back to the trail from home after the funeral, cairns become something symbolic for me with her, Ashleigh. Typically cairns are used for marking a footpath or a particular place on a mountain but occasionally we’d come across great areas of them for no particular reason. The ones above, at Sunfish Pond in New Jersey, were simple and modest but they reminded me of her.…