tigertoy

I wanted to spend time outdoors today, so I headed over to Kickapoo (with a stop to vote on the way).  I was late getting started, but I was walking along the Emerald Pond trail by 2.  I was getting pretty hungry by the time I got to my favorite lunch spot, the pond at the end of the haul road.  After I ate, I settled down with my pad and tried to work on my outline/notes for my NaNoWriMo novel.  I was less prepared before November started than I'd had in mind, and I don't want to write beyond my outline.  I was working comfortably when I looked up and realized the sun was really low.  I looked at my watch and it was just after 4.  It was only then that I realized that I'd had a brain fart about time; between daylight wasting time and the turning year, the sun sets a bit before *5*, not 6.  So instead of getting to decide whether I would take a longer route back for variety, I had to hustle to get back to my car before sunset.

I took some pictures for you on the way out and a couple while I was at the pond.


I'd call this view iconic for the season.

( 11 more in here )

We had our coldest night yet this season Monday, well into the 20s.  It was a lovely, though chilly, day today, but more than a little bittersweet.  A few hardy flowers were left -- about the same as last week -- but the only representative of order Lepidoptera was an unassuming little brown moth.  No butterflies at all.  A fair number of crickety things were singing.  On the plus side, though, no mosquitoes.

The fall colors are still going strong; the rain this weekend doesn't seem to have stripped the trees.  I'm not sure if this is an unusually good year for fall colors or if I'm just noticing more than usual thanks to having the free time to get outside.

My plan for the day was to follow the Out and Back trail around and see if I could get my mental map straightened out.  I fairly definitely worked out that even though it seems familiar, the horse trail south of the haul road (which connects to the trail I found last week over Emerald Pond) is not actually part of the loop I've walked before.  I can't figure out why I'm so sure that I remember coming up that section of trail to return to the road; the trails just don't go that way.


Striking colors against a beautiful sky near the start of the Out and Back trail.

( click here for the rest of the day )

Some pictures from EFRC yesterday.


Tahoe and Rajah Girl are tigers I don't photograph so often.  They were posing nicely.

( more tigers inside, and lionesses, leopards, and a bobcat, oh my )

I went to Homer Lake today, armed with my trusty 75-300 lens and a plan to hike around the lake.  If I had stopped to listen before I left the house, I probably would have been able to hear the whine of the mosquito hordes from 10 miles away.  Luckily for you, dear viewers, I neglected that step, and more surprisingly, I was able to drag my shriveled blood drained carcass out of the Salt Fork bottomlands to bring you these pictures.

We may have our first frost this weekend.  Even if we don't, it will freeze soon, and the butterflies will be gone until next year, so today's post is dedicated to the insects I love.  Not so much to those that love me.  (Mmm, tastes like chicken!)


Some sort of fritillary.

( more pictures inside )

It might be considered rude to have two back-to-back posts with an uncut picture in each one.  ( so I'll cut the whole thing )

I got up late today and didn't get out of the house until 1, but I went to Kickapoo with my camera.  Today I only took the 17-85 lens; my back is bothering me a little and I didn't want to burden myself with extra lenses and I wanted to get some scenery pictures.  It was about as close to a perfect day as you could ask for: not a cloud in the sky, comfortably warm in the sun, a touch of autumn crispness in the air.  Insects were fairly active; some birds but not very many.  I went to the Out and Back area, but I went up the haul road to the overlook where I like to have lunch.  Between starting late and taking so many pictures, it was after 4 by the time I got there, and after I'd eaten and read for a bit, it was 5 by the time I left, so I only got into the woods north of the haul road very briefly.  I do hope to get in there when I have more time and with the sun higher in the sky, but for today almost all the shots are from the more open areas.

I hope this set will give you some appreciation for what we'll be losing if the governor is successful in his plan to close it down.


This opener is the only shot that's out of chronological order.  It's from the first, biggest prairie/meadow area.  I hope the view of the path will invite you to view the rest.

( many more pictures in here )

For your viewing pleasure, a pile of pictures from yesterday.

( Click for pictures )

Note: I hit post by mistake so you might have seen an incomplete version of this post a few minutes ago.

I finally got my butt off the chair around 4.  I decided to head over to the marsh area at Kennekuk with my flowers-n-bugs lens.  It was sunny, warm but not hot, generally a good time to go.  The first marsh is as low as I think I've ever seen it.  Very little bird life, by numbers or species, though quite a lot by total weight because the geese were having a convention at that first pond -- there were over 100 in that small area.  One mystery bird on the beaver pond; looking at the book, I guess it was a juvenile green heron (that somebody decided is supposed to be called a green-backed heron this week, but I don't see the point).  It was the size and configuration of a green heron but with a lot of white underneath, quite unlike an adult and even more than the book shows on a juvenile.  But since it seems unlikely that I've discovered a new species, that's probably what it was.  I took a lot of shots of flowers, with some efforts at composing artful shots, mostly just trying to capture the beauty of very small things, with little success; I need to both carry the tripod (which I sometimes do) and force myself to stop and use it (which I almost never do even when I carry the thing).  The depth of focus is just too damn short.  Butterflies seemed few until I got past the martin house, where there was a patch of flowers they liked.  I took a bunch of shots of closeups of butterflies which should be great.  I did not walk very far, but for some reason I felt tired and ready to go home anyway.

I tried hiking the Out and Back trail at Kickapoo.  I've been wanting to explore this area since last summer, but the signs for it warn that it's 7.5 miles and rugged, and I wanted to be sure that I had a day with decent weather and that I was in shape enough to be up to the challenge.  It turns out that I shouldn't have worried; the only thing that was challenging, at least where I got, was figuring out where the trail I was supposed to be following went.  In addition to the hiking trail, there are mountain bike trails and horse trails, and they cross each other as they wind through the area, and I lost the blazed hiking trail about 2.5 miles in and wandered on the trails I could find.  For as long as I was on it, the Out and Back trail was more level and easier walking than any of the other trails at Kickapoo, to say nothing of the Lake Mingo trail at Kennekuk.  Perhaps it suddenly got genuinely rugged around the next curve after I got confused and strayed -- but it seems unlikely.

Still, it was a very pleasant walk; there was an overlook over one of the former strip mine ponds that was so pretty that I ate my lunch there and then stayed another hour and read a book.  I'll definitely visit the area again, and probably intentionally follow the route that I took by accident today, minus a couple of places where I started down a path and then came back when I decided it was the wrong one.

I had the camera and macro lens.  There were many dragonflies, and I believe I got some good pictures of them, and of various other flowers and bugs.  There was a box tortoise on the path when I had about one mile to go, and I took a bunch of closeups.  Maybe I'll even start the process of getting the photos onto the computer, looking through them, and perhaps even posting some.  Unfortunately, I need to make dinner now and I need to be in bed in a couple of hours, so pictures tonight are about as likely as flying pigs.

I wrote a comment in pleonastic's LJ that I should actually make as an entry in my own blog.  I'd like to be able to actually capture all the trains of thought that this has set off in my mind, but to begin with I'll just repeat what I said in that comment.  Hopefully soonish I can expand on some of this.

Upthread from this comment I'd mentioned that there were some things holding me back as an on-line photographer.  I then expanded on that to say:

What's keeping me from posting pictures on a reasonable regular schedule is that it takes me so much time sitting in front of the computer before I can actually post something, and secondarily that it's such a chore.

I need:
(1) a reliable broadband Internet connection;
(2) a software solution to organizing pictures so that I can pull the memory cards from the cameras I used that day, stuff them in the card reader, and not have to use my brain at all to get the files copied
into the file structure *I* want them in;
(3) a software solution to organizing, uploading, and presenting as a web page the edited pictures I want from that day.

(2) and (3) are things I ought to be able to do for myself, but I'm so damn burned out on software and computers that I've made zero progress towards those goals in the more than 3 years I've known I need them.  I have a tremendous aversion to paying commercial software prices, but if there were a package that would just do what I wanted, I'd be willing to pay for it. What I'm not willing to do is to pay huge wads of money for something that I then have to deal with learning to use, hoping that I can actually get it to do what I really want.